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| author | Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> | 2025-10-15 04:45:12 -0700 |
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| committer | Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> | 2025-10-15 04:45:12 -0700 |
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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/14714-0.txt b/14714-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..72f411e --- /dev/null +++ b/14714-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7690 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14714 *** + + HALF PORTIONS + + BY + + EDNA FERBER + + + + GARDEN CITY NEW YORK + DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY + 1920 + + + + + + +CONTENTS PAGE + +I. THE MATERNAL FEMININE 3 +II. APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL 36 +III. OLD LADY MANDLE 76 +IV. YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH 113 +V. LONG DISTANCE 148 +VI. UN MORSO DOO PANG 157 +VII. ONE HUNDRED PER CENT 201 +VIII. FARMER IN THE DELL 230 +IX. THE DANCING GIRLS 280 + + + + +HALF PORTIONS + + + + +THE MATERNAL FEMININE + + +Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall +back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," +states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." +That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most +certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in +the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with +broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was +practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was +strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and +ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's +East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and +hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of +that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest +hats. + +The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women +of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married +sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces +and nephews. + +"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old +thing. And she's had so little in life, really." + +She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a +spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this +pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter, +to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips. +Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen +foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family. +Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their +husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It +was always the same. + +"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living +soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the +children--" + +There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of +to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each +other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a +confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes +of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk, +safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot +rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by +saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I +don't know why I'm telling you all this." + +But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little +heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that +she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life, +has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had +never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it +meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you +have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least +knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her +time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would +have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old +maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all +what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's +viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her +food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women +sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of +what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how +she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business. + +You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from +one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago +wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First +National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and +trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own +family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own +people. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, +and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate +disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks. + +"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora +confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had +made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to +everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train. +Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion. +You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour +car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was +getting along--she called him William--and if they were going to send +her west, and all about her. I _wish_ she wouldn't." + +Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. +You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator +starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof, +unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed +and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper +water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity +in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your +innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of +her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister +Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at +Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, +with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to +her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder. + +Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the +East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the +millinery business in Elm Street. + +"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and +all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now +that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats +of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is." + +H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are +made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the +Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth +Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little +natural bewilderment. + +The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the +original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an +unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree +in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front +porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From +May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing +the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, +accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak +of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace +Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in +Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, +the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) +Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose +never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, +purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that +vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet +shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there +is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than +to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. +Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only +her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and +as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was +that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a +photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish +mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of +its fragile reticence and grace. + +It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to +ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, +as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she +walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that +Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless +cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style +met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in +the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch. + +That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as +inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage +badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the +twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. +Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a +skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years +ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked +about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section +of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon. + +"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full +of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view." + +Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its +exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the +grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the +Chippewa _Eagle_. + +"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow +pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what +was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, +couldn't you die!" + +For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went +East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and +gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played +on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, +in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of +the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago: + + NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY. + H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES. + +Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, +which read: + + MISS SOPHY DECKER + Millinery + +Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had +always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional +hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself +in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat +trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little +bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, +awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still +stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, +came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy +cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five +years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the +old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and +transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of +green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, +and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her +spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, +and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the +superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her +city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases: + +"This is awfully good this year." + +"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the +style--the line--you're paying for, not the material." + +"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it. +Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on." + +When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the +mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it +in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated +eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, +slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples. +A little sigh of relieved suspense. + +"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because +you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have +a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I +proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this +needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it." + +And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat +against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist +and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out +of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you +bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something +more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her +admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow: + +"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. +You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat +and veil as soon's I get my hair combed." + +In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight +brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat +and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the +bedroom from the shoulders down. + +The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and +expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and +lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as +well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these +opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, +frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart +trade. + +"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. +They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell +them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, +or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to +cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it. +Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the +same idea." + +Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, +severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the +other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes. + +At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques +completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No +one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol. + +"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody +feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a +fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to +be there." + +The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a +treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of +satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make +her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of +the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little +scavenger. + +"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt +Sophy. "You must have barrels of it." + +Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I +keep it," she said. + +When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say +'Poor Sophy'?" + +"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and +has always worked." + +Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're +poor?" + +"Well--yes--" + +"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, +skinny and rather foreign looking. + +The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very +tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora +of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his +mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a +girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And +that's such hard work." + +Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still +coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to +baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her +admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her +selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen +years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great +deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or +twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the +beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. +It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had +taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, +unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features +seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large +white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of +those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a +telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's +large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating +strength, courage, and a great human understanding. + +From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have +chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a +lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or +her husband. They all hated it. + +"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had +stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as +an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children. +She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech, +but shockingly true. + +Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, +had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of +pillows. + +"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way +you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with +all that lovely colour!" + +Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me +credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my +blood is in my cheeks." + +Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary +for success in that direction. + +"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's +a profession in itself--being a wife and mother." + +She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's +land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear +he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity +and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of +beauty. + +"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence. +"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a +fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing." + +The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The +girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more +immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods; +irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited +following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid +bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any +one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would +have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a +giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection +unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having +her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a +prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not +a step. + +Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of +affairs, tried to stop it. + +"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, +bluntly, to her sister. + +"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. +"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the +world. That's the trouble. I love them too much." + +"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's +nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. +You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's +ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom +she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban +that Angie Hatton--" + +"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your +shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to +your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the +minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. +That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her +come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, +cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't +know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have +suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--" + +So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and +their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, +their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in +some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one. + +"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How +can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then." + +This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and +became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old +frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was +something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, +that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin +house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the +Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best +residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly +furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary +chill to your heart. + +The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and +snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not +unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam, +and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head +trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray +patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him +for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have +around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls +would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and +cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, +especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from +Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the +best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or +Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original +design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a +small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory +down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her +invaluable. + +The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very +black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark +line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but +when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by +a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low. +She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking +something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream +she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being +pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the +sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. +But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it. + +"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a +boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you +good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me +company." + +Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the +house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big +flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her +skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in +and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny +game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, +always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a +partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings. + +It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly +into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging +for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms +clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came +in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was +thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite +twenty-one. + +"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a +leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look +comic. + +"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're +going to be married." + +Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and +plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen--" she began. + +"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!" + +Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's +face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That +isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is +when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you. +Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother, +pretty near." + +"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk +that way--Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to +really--" + +"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and +old. + +And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the +idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?" + +Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a +capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back +but the boy did not. + +"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will +you promise me? Will you?" + +"Are you going to tell Father?" + +"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. +No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to--You're not a +bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him a +chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over +then." + +Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen. + +"Quick!" + +"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing. + +"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, +sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open +the olives with this fool can opener. I tried." + +There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; +what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just +hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three +days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew +that her prayers were answered. + +Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite +twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely." +She was almost hysterical. + +Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt +Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said +nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora +took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her +cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the +recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing +up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the +floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted +curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and +crafty look. + +"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My +nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or +other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more +economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he +do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--" + +H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at +the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her +teeth as though a knife had entered her heart. + +Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her +hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, +she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and +simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own +affairs, must have marked it. + +The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel +Oakley." + +Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had +been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and +Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his +strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding +his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had +had business relations as well as friendly ones. + +At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth +stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer +look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion +a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain. + +"When did he ask you?" + +"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will +be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France. +I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her +young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean." + +Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your +mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, +'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I _am_ so faint ... all of a +sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...." + +Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks +later. They had a regular pre-war wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and +all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The +girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile +twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever. + +"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of +milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt +who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I +can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!" + +Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl. + +"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't +want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for? +Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy." + +But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of +her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just +like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not +laugh. + +"Now look here, Delia. If you're--" + +But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's +all right," she said. + +Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she +said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for +you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty +close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. +It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby." + +"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been +wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, +anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't +it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm +lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing +like me." + +"But your mother--" + +"Mother doesn't know a thing." + +Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed +enough for two. + +When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face +drawn and queer, Sophy knew. + +"How much?" she said. + +"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that--" + +"I thought Oakley--Adele said--" + +"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's +this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got +scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash." + +"Speculating with it, were you?" + +"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals." + +"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me." + +"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, +and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the +money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that." + +Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the +children, anyway. They won't need it now." + +He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't +they?" + +"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream." + +"Eugene?" + +"Yes." + +"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and +presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this +money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand +these things but I can talk to you. It's like this--" + +"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it, +not for you, but for Flora, and Delia--and Eugene. Flora has lived such +a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you. +Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia +and Eugene are my children--were my children." + +When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was +getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said. + +"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's +lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats +and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother +suffers--poor Sophy." + +"Um," Baldwin grunted. + +When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War +Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora +had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they +thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything +to give comfort to the stricken two. + +"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit +there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel +something." + +"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy. + +"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!" + +This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have +to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the +printed page. You must not skip this. + + AMERICAN RED CROSS + (CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE) + + MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN: + + I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by + the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H. + Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last + hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm + sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who + was privileged to be with her boy at the last. + + Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed + from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not + receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special + hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked + this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us. + + Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who + examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as + he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a + few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and + strong as he was could not pull through. + + The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly + choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were + both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not + to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good + to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his + head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more + easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on + duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he + died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every + minute of that night and have never seen a finer character + than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had + several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each + one simply because of his great will power and fighting + spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, + "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll + only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during + the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he + could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I + had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness + even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was + going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all + his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He + seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in + bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll + fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually + thought we had won when on the third day.... + + But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been + the mother of such a son.... + + I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come + home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than + I can possibly write? + + MARIAN KING. + +It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped +for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in +the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora +and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then +Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. +Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning +a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat +quietly, waiting. + +There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora +broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she +spoke. + +"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I +do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor +Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the +married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, +Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know +how cruel life is." + +Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and +faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's +hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station. +Pretty good." + +Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced +her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood +a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older +women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, +quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into +her eyes straight and sure. + +"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very +proud woman." + + + + +APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL + + +Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She +started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar +in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for +House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five +years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five +years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled +up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of +What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone +through the ceremony twice a year. + +Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the +yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, +flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of +these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in +again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, +things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental +things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things +wrapped up in brown-paper parcels. + +And boxes--oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square +and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; +cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned +an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another +stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents +under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing +fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key +they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as +Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip +covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance. + +The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American +household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, +Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten +years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his +sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the +neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had +lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the +Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful +magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow +chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan. +You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves +the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too +tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded. + +Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, +ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a +palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and +slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, +were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at +Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless +heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of +citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and +to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's. + +Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and +Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up +above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the +afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster +place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen +closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, +as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be. + +That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically, +that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in +tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with +them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental +chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins +and closets for all your worries and confidences. + +But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every +woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I +only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it +weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago," +complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood +floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, +æsthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as +clearly as if a sociologist had charted it. + + * * * * * + +Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the +crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a +junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon +portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each +of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink +cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the +labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a +soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes +behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster +household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in +artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had +prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two +years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the +dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall. + +Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with +them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel +and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the +entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks +as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a +nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping +porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in +the attic. + +One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. +Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, +cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. +Brewster's _bête noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace. +"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: +"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn +mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know +what's got into her." + +By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin +September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of +the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly +again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you +understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little +necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might +have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and +left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, +no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that +it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this +relentless and expert crew. + +Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened +and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz' +Brewster?" + +"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home +with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie." + +Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the +funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _passé_ than a +last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the +tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the +plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had +worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these +were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed +by unbrightened by covetousness. + +The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and +the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic. +Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen +and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's +relations' latest flagrancy. + +"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I +says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I +guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and +much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the +second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same +footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard. + + * * * * * + +Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it +looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent +had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise. + +Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished: + +"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--" + +"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all +smudged, too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked +about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was +a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in +June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor +trips into the country. + +"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come +here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat +they're--why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just +got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father." + +Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping +a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot +your old friends, have you?" + +"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other +woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's +house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was +such a thing, I mean." + +"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely. + +Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor +clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, +crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included +and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the +kind. This is--this is an anachronism." + +"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be +cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned." + +They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended +the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting +each other. + +Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the +protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him. +You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz Merz; you know--boiled. Well, +you know what a despot she is." + +It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch +Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes +and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, +mother!" + +Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at +Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of +Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift +movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly +at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled +it through the open doorway. + +"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off +your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's +the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the +war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster. + +Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard. +"It's just that it seems so idiotic--your digging around in an attic in +this day and age! Why, it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much +more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an +attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this +huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just +you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent +anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?" + +"Why, no. I hate it." + +"Then why in the world--" + +"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in +New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your +room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming--the slip +covers--" + +"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She +succeeded in slurring it ludicrously. + +It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not +be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up +delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young +lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped +to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused +at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft +grays and blues. + +Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing +forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's +the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed. + +"I know it." + +The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the +situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable +streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up." + +"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to +meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I +didn't know there was any situation." + +"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of +mind." + +Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her +voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that +tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter." +She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on. +Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a +bath, won't you, dear?" + +"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled--honestly?--on a day like this?" + +"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly. + +Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of +Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz' +Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter +flannels!" + +"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young +fist down in the water--spat!--so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and +floor impartially. + +Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea +Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of +the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a +queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her +throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin +winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner +where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!" + +His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red. +He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was +pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long +minute--close. + +"Need a shave, dad." + +"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off. +"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?" + +"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio--you +know--plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for +you." + +Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a +little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated +porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I +thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows, +and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a +change." + +Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about +that. Mother needs--" + +Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an +all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?" +She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner +so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want +to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's +everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky. + +But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly +sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese +soufflé, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream. + +"But, mother, you shouldn't have--" feebly. + +"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just +wanted to tease you." + +Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But +two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him +go, a speculative look in her eyes. + +She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, +clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the +centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged, +trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern +deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; +the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's +Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs." + +"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval! +Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs +and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for +the bowl in the dining room. + +Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night, +there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's +volcanic remarks. + +Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to +have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September +before they began firing up for the winter. + +"I'll go down with you," said Pinky. + +"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust." + +But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed, +after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy." + +And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling +process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of +the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two +men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea +Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his +sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came +forward. + +She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you." + +"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred." + +"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well." + +He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked +at her. "Huh? What d'you mean--isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open. +His eyes looked suddenly strained. + +"This house--it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at +supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself--like +other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And +you're another." + +"Me?" feebly. + +"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that +it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something--I don't know +what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills +for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true. +Wasn't it? Wasn't it?" + +"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was +terribly disturbed, "About mother--you said--" + +"You and she ought to go away this winter--not just for a trip, but to +stay. You"--she drew a long breath and made the plunge--"you ought to +give up the house." + +"Give up--" + +"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to +New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few +days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little +apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it--two +rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse." + +Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great +furnace room. "Oh, but listen--" + +"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't +as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the +theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and +concerts." + +He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady +diet--Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a +business to--" + +"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole +thing--or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it +wants its way. + +He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her +a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you +don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she +hated it. I asked about the attic--the cleaning and all--and she said +she hated it." + +"Did she say that, Paula?" + +"Yes." + +He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked +pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to +himself, and thinking, thinking. + +Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, +through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's +bedroom door was open. + +A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the +plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in +the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?" + +"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the +bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. +Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face +and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. +Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't +well. He ought to go away." + +As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow. +As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked +suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father--but he isn't +sick. He--" + +"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That +furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred. +He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This +house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or +sell it, and come to New York?" + +"But we do. We did. Last winter--" + +"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little +two-room apartment in one of the new buildings--near my studio--and +relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a +rut--both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with +these Wisconsin winters--" + +"But California--we could go to California for--" + +"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled, +and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great +hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it." + +"Did he ever say so?" + +"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He--" + +Slow steps ascending the stairs--heavy, painful steps. The two women +listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words. +The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her +eyes anxious, tender. + +"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only--why, dad's +only fifty-eight." + +"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly. + +Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so +tired, aren't you?" + +Her father stood in the doorway. + +"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned +around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember." + +So Pinky went off to her own room (_sans_ slp cov) and slept soundly, +dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done. + + * * * * * + +Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform, +a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done. + +"_Au 'voir!_ The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love +it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your +minds, remember." + +And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New +Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a +studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady +who turned out to be from Des Moines. + +When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their +inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being +the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as +black diamonds and twice as costly. + +Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and +said: "How many rooms did you say?" + +"Two--and a kitchenette, of course." + +"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for +that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum." + +But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very +impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the +best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no +matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the +prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it +was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon. + +"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded +Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder +they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you +feel like a book agent." + +He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster, +soothingly. + +They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and +(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known +as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in +red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray. + +Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, _we've_ been very +comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager." + +"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster. + +"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good. +She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five. +She'll take two hundred." + +"You bet she will," growled Hosea. + +She answered the door--hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's +chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio +living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was +window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of +tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its +back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just +behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as +you've see it in the second-act library. + +Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty +ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he +remarked. + +But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was +saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You +see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six--eight, in fact." + +"Heaven forbid!" in fervent _sotto voce_ from Father Brewster. + +"It's an enormous saving in time and labour." + +"The--kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster. + +The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She +skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really +handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a +part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was +dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. +And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the +miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the +Brewster's Winnebago china closet. + +"Why, how--how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster. + +"Isn't it? So complete--and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks, +chops, everything right here. It's just play." + +A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the +tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are +the beds?" + +She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're +upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know." + +A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung +with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom--a +rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with +whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on +dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall. + +They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for +Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. + + * * * * * + +Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great +deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and +let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, _à la_ Juliet, +having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume +consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's +little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the +Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, +the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky +legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter. + +After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room +apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible +loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room +house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the +winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a +light-heartedness that neither of them felt. + +They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the +street noises of New York came up to them--a loose chain flapping +against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth +Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a +motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down. + +She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious +gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at +home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?" + +"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off." + +"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though. +Great!" + +"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily. + +They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in +Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more +doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had +learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain. +Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all +over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the +happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known +that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious +bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding. + +When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh, +take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster +used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can +start the eggs." + + * * * * * + +In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster +never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet +By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of +jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He +deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail +off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, +heavily, as though it were a physical weight. + +Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life! + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say. + +"Time of my life, father." + +She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which +no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less +frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. +Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for +her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, +slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture +those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she +had talked to five or six of them. + +She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he +confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or approximately; Michigan, and +Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one +New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em." + +"Which one?" + +"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the +blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, +but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place +in the country, in a house." + +A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to +talk to her, Hosey. Take me over." + +She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the +quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's +fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you +Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. +Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the +children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love +it--oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult." + +Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a +tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--" + +The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But +she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still +wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the +slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette." + +This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked +to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At +first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on +Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed +and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a +mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than +women. + +The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When +she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say: +"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. +Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me +show you our new taupes." + + * * * * * + +Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine +individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was +startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's +simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps +two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York. + +"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said. + +"Me? No." + +"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't." + +"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't +they? Most of 'em?" + +"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an' +around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they +come from. I dunno." + +Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. +He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, +buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, +with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white +linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his +square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his +baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he +thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed +that they did not. + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" + +"I should say I am, father." + +"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?" + +"It's play." + +She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen +pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: +apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; +sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, +that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one +combination kitchen-dining-and-living room. + +"Chops taste good, Hosey?" + +"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out +to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show." + +"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?" + +"It's the life, mother! It's the life!" + + * * * * * + +His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store +kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream +whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily +with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even +known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used +to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price +of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin +cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market +before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with +tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the +buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time. + +Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had +known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, +naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg +acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin +farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a +ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had +sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on +Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out +on the porch early, very early summer mornings. + +You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant +there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he +had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its +black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to +struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had +thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever. + +"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just +seemed to kind of pine away." + + * * * * * + +It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this +memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market. +Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of +eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness +over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway +he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face +was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung +loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out. + +"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--" + +He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into +the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A +great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick. + +The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The +glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have +gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged +corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be +sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, +fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim +little hall. + +A barked shin. A good, round oath. + +"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him +into the bright front room. + +"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the +door. What the--" + +"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I +didn't know--" + +Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up +at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her +head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves +were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a +promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house. + +"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to +get away from. If Pinky--" + +"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a +letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She +asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own +things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, +and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!" + +Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in +the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic +pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; +"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms." + +Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a +little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick, +Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman +with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came +to the door with her hat on, and yet--" + +Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he +said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go +home." + +Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?" + +"Now." + +"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--" + +"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this +make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's +go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe." + +In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The +Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene +Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of +daisies. + +At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head +out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?" + +They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. +Brewster leaned back without comment. + +Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug +Hengel. + +"Yep." + +"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long." + +"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon--the big piece. And +send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll +take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right." + +It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of +his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the +restaurant fare of the past six months. + + * * * * * + +All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with +an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as +they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very +still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. +The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then +Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain +with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He +took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide +and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief. + +"Welcome home! Home!" + +She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks! +Huge!" + +"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to +library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No +wonder it grins and throws out its arms." + +They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the +cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and +shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his +stubby black pipe. + +"Hosey!"--from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of +preserves when you come." + +"What?" + +"Can of preserves." + +"What kind?" + +"Any kind you like." + +"Can I have two kinds?" + +He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put +them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands +together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now. +That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does. +Is the house getting warmer?" + +He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was +back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out +the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the +tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why--" + +"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and +slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm +going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the +table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've +cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I +don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your +overalls. Come on." + +He cut into the steak--a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat +it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, +ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness +and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them. + +The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly. + +"Let me go, Milly." + +"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're--" + +He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She +says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. +She--Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time +for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning." + +Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, +Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight." + + + + +OLD LADY MANDLE + + +Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room +flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an +ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at +cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more +artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg +sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, +admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. +Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And +the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo. + +Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a +spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and +wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an +admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she +acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no +proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never +spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son +Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were +delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and +sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the +stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For +they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies +could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons +and their sons' wives. + +Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs. +Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row, +on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon +coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of +them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her +voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo. + +My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no +thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine +about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It +may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his +thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form +a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old +mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been +hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked +over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and +regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with +dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This +had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the +purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the +iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She +possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins +of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she +essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now! +None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night." + +When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her +two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first +and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of +lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her +friends. + +"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my +old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo." + +In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk +together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in +pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent +Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her +pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon +which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her +cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that +she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was +a spoiled old lady. + +At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her +neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box +in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old +frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No +fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds +that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long +hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and +soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed, +dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black +silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three +friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty +apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians, +guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and +craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink +scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, +for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared +clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's +exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were +worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They +were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, +scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at +bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle +triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three +was imitation. + +So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling +their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into +the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They +represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they +themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its +apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the +roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers +over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none +of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over +her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a +man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did +not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama, +undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they +derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the +modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that +this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on +four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired +four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path. + +Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They +seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, +and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her +voice was unctuous with pride. + +"My son's wife--" one of the three would begin. There was something +terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the +title. + +"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if +I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to +depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead." + +"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked +tones from Mrs. Mandle. + +"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than +nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see +enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it +all." + +A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do +you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?" + +More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an +Old People's Home as a refuge. Then: + +"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to +housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he +says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a +restaurant--well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You +couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'" + +Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll +marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly +streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always +grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a +marvel of perfection. + +Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries +late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, +either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in +his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait." + +"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a +trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let +a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them +like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time." + +The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her +fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she +made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son +Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I +won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I +guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I +said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he +laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass +me another, Ma'." + +"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser. + +"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud." + +"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a--" + +"He's just like a man of twenty-five--only worse." + +Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son +Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?" + +They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the +park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They +never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or +how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely +fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves. + +Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She +had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, +healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man +twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life +together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could +call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, +according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, +the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's +miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving +necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the +spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never +quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of +heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty +became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned +matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and +linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow. + +Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business. +He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, +documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when +a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was +none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for +masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, +stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way +they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched +against the father and daughter. + +It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in +a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when +the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping +Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real +estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, +clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands +more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a +black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down +figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of +terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of +the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a +curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching +the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she +found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's +sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the +wake of the devastating panic. + +Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a +household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen +he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a +stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a +boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and +responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From +his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material +values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never +attained her iron indomitability. + +It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most +modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and +take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china +houses. + +The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to +get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her." + +"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said. + +Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy--or +as happy as she knows how to be--she'll never come back. That's what I +want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along." + +They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of +economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the +acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the +impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, +long-suffering, subdued--and in need of a start. He was. They managed a +very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. +Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented +incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. +Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had +expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the +last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were +right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement +colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes. + +The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound +steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A +new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle. + +Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle +side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them +a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a +man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, +but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest +against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the +cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) +in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar +smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play +that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would +tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, +in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and +son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo +kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she +looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat +her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough +thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill +that her husband's withered kisses had never given her. + +Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a +comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit +of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady +Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend +freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his +savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a +time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She +and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. +When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma +Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch +of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his +money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household +capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to +protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony. + +"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst +tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than +the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!" + +She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next +day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo +spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand +and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed +contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo +regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, +articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with +age, shrewd though she naturally was. + +It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an +evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full +hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. +"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing +I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a +chicken." + +"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a +musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next +day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. +Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old +lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his +becoming what she called fast. + +"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman +like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a +dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick. + +So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South +Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life. + +And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does. + +Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might +have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She +remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken +admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of +business. + +"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like +it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at +rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss. +Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she +turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for +novelties." + +Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. +Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner. +Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal, +too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly +during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of +angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The +following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in +Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. +Usually he praised this dish, or that. + +"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?" + +"'S all right." And declined a second piece. + +The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped +his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before +her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said. + +Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?" + +"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about +her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll +love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. +Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look +so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?" + +"But who--?" + +"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and +strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home +an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--" + +Ad lib. + +They were married the following month. + +Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment +farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her +mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of +grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, +miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were +swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna, +with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her +gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the +afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat +Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never +failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day +scrubber. + +But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, +voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, +bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd +business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship. + +He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany +front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. +She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. +Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a +concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for +its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her +shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair +gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was +clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was +always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would +emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles +were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed +when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her +scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look +as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé. + +"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose +daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that +she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her +knowledge. + +"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right." + +He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove +it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in +a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her +own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom +reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a +fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and +on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that +its utilitarian dial was almost lost. + +It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and +she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes +up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean +things out on the bed--fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted +to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate +handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown--hot, +fagged, sticky--she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour +so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to +eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool, +interested, sweet-smelling. + +When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More +than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long +in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered +that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could +never resent it. + +Ma Mandle's reign was over. + +To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied +magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, +but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things +different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears +caught the familiar phrase. + +"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been +boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of +the way. Don't I know!" + +"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is +no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure +is welcome." + +But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow +pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew. +She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of +ashes. + +Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in +his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that +made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as +bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree +with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her +provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. +She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo +agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma +Mandle fought every ounce of it. + +"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I +never heard of such a thing. Fads!" + +But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental +relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He +only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother +had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, +tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed +miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a +certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf +clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just +the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it +the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among +a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying +up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, +crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he +would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. +Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she +had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face +and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but +she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the +pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote +corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about +not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at +breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the +milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that +had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to +say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now +it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and +Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines. + +If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life +of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told +you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she +would have denied it, furiously. But both were true. + +When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well. + +"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," +she would say, unreasonably. + +"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?" + +If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked. + +Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, +well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat +but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?" + +"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked +over." + +"Oh--to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy." + +In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the +marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said. +"This is your household now." + +But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen +table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a +head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump +chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with +meaning. + +Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of +her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the +fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and +she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the +result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon +parties at the homes of married women of her own age and +station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too +much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery +biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes +of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a +heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing. + +"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what +we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked +teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed +her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the +sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her +clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent +life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing +her face had not coarsened its texture. + +Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between +the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about +cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted +after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him +about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about +Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always +treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at +ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling +of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her +house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts +to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only +thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know +that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which +caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should +not do. + +Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the +theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became +marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man. + +"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say. + +"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some +night life." + +"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. +You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along." + +That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the +end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper +would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill +talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented +it. + +Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the +vaguely suspicious three. + +Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good +deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically +precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long +passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and +flowers. + +Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they +liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier +one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for +hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture +absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of +Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression. + +A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own +good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating +heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice +it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him +mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into +his ear. + +"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't +have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old +that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't +enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't +enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week." + +An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would +come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining +point, goaded by much repetition. + +The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a +simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from +mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a +time is all that any man can handle successfully. + +"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling. +Why can't you get along." + +One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a +decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black +lace." + +Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to +die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear +mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think +of me the way I was when I was alive." + +The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. +Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her +temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma +Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation, +denial; vituperation, retort. + +"You'll be happy when I'm gone." + +"If I am it's your fault." + +"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They +don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha--" + +"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever +saw." + +And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at +pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's +got into you two women?" + +It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house, +hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June +night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was +even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars +streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline +blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in +front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded +in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic +bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time, +with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She +came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and +agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this +you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How +right they were--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless. +Unconsidered. In the way. + +By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body +lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how +worried Hugo had looked.... + +Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward +home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted +scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely +fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in +duration. + +She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The +place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of +someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again. +The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She +crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs. + +"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it +wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd--" + +"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's +an old lady--" + +"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year +and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any +reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!" + +"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick." + +Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing +endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through +the tears. + +"No, I'm not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just +wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, +maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love +them too much we really harm them. I suppose--" + +"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?" + +"Yes." + +Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all +worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you +cry before." + +"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right. +I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past +and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to +her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, +maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you." + +Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband +belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by +accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and +deliberately." + +But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If +it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just +now, too, when you're so worried about business." + +"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got +to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the +French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year. +If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood +the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above +water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now." + +"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself +sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the +business--" + +"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see." + +The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out +alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd +better--" + +Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as +though she had just come in. + +"That you, Ma?" called Hugo. + +He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic +little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began +to worry about you." + +"I'm all right. I'm going to bed." + +He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going +over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma." + +Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed +behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled +bravely. + +"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off." + +But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, +you two." + +That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. +Something new, something gentle, something wise. + +She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and +hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into +bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had +lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be +seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to +crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would +express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could +not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her +mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child +to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life. +She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she +sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in +a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They +called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it +to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday +Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a +moth get into her husband's winter suit. + +"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never. +But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my +son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house." + +Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She +forgets. We all forget." + +It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from +the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. +Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare +feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a +line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. +With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's +pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the +light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again. + +She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the +blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her +head ... pounding.... + +At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was +his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he +whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully +by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful +awkwardness up the hall again. + +"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on +a scorcher like this." + +Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said. +She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper +pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read +it. + +"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than +half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder. + +"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in +the world." + +A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished +reading them. + + + + +YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH + + +When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi +Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the +personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in +newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short +story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised +as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and +been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the +background. You can't see the heavens for the stars. + +Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no +introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been +described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on +Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though +quoted, thus: + +"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a +genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, +artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very +force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the +eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a +comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to +a vice." + +Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine +diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, +"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--" + +That was Sid Hahn. + +I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his +likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the +theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and +top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black +cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone +interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew +all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those +middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or +something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the +profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his +having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, +indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally +controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing +in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It +had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized +in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, +at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, +producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy +with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid +Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever +said to himself in so many words: + +"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let +anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to +be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be +selfish." + +Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in +the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination +running through the whole fibre of his being could have been +crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that. + +By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than +Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them +even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood +behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But +taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of +the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world. + +He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early +love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved +what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as +though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. +Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by +people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular +east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with +make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play +with real ones, like God. But always kind. + +No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn +appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired +ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war +horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit +there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and +inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense +and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket +of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It +smells!" + +Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from +years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly +afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had +thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as +they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the +treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes. + +It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the +famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and +swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when +she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he +regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that +time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, +very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as +a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop +rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think +of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well." + +Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in +French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?" + +"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is +a woman-hater." + +"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!" + +"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. +They don't need to know a language to understand it." + +"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz +course, was it?" + +Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen +face. "No. I learned that in another school." + +Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might +almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin +Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to +Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a +tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be +said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre. + +He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed +him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs +suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of +office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very +firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, +how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those +expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring +precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable +high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, +while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high +note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it. + +"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer +office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling +and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a--a--" + +"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly. + +Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?" + +"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?" + +Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your +age, you are." + +"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly. + +There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He +probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he +whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, +too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from +another, and doesn't to this day. + +At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, +he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance +to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room +(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was +the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would +have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect +servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for +four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot +plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be +cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, +in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and +wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he +would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly +to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the +firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the +side of the piano (grand). + +His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing +of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the +office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn +called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie. +From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a +sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he +was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in +rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, +lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but +Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit +it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable. + +He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November +evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie +might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of +Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat +over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold +drizzle of the November evening. + +Hahn's apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth +Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to +which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's +errand. + +It was Saki--or Saki's equivalent--who opened the door. A white-coated, +soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. +Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly. + +"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it." + +"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly. + +"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?" + +"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders. + +"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want--" + +Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at +his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room +beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but +something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, +and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve. + +Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with +those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest +eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He +glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing +the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He +had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, +the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he +could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own +inability to reproduce it. + +The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie. + +"God, I wish I could play!" + +"Helps a lot." + +"You play?" + +"Yes." + +"What?" + +"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up." + +"Compose, you mean?" + +"Yes." + +"Play one of those." + +So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good +Night--Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even +published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for +Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the +success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was +sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky +Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long +been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam +and glow in the lamplight. + +When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're +you going to do with it?" + +"With what?" + +"With what you've got. You know." + +Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going +to--I'm going to do a lot with it." + +"Yeh, but how?" + +Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a +long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time. +And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to +be selfish ..." + +As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the +doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what +he had meant to say. + +"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I--" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was +too much. + +"Better." + +They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's +encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, +Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither of them +knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an +intoxicant and a stimulant. + +"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more. +More." + +"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then, +immediately, "No, of course not." + +"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a +baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't +the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a +baby--but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!" + +"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each +other, this ill-assorted pair. + +It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the +play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big +room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One +lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely. + +As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming +out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!" + +"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it." + +"That's what they all say"--grimly--"_after_ they've got it." + +The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was +now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into +earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!" + +"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you +know if you're right." + +In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his +official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort +of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the +theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this +no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. +There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, +for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when +she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power +to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which +gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the +ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority. + +When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on +one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped +down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign +stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise +rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on +the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in +tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely +repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, +perhaps, but characteristic. + + MR. SID. HAHN, + Hotel Savoy, + London, + England. + + It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of + a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to + five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical + creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful + investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any + is extinct. + + WALLIE. + +This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions, +went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised, +wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days +later. + +Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of +magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous +women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and +Cigány music, and cafés and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low +and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely +on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow). + +It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then +a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier. + +Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the +manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long +ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound. + +"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've +found something big!" + +Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good +as that." + +"Play! It isn't a play." + +"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned +good! You don't mean to tell me--" + +"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good--or will be when you get through +with it." + +"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with +two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk +hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a +boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe. + +"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!" + +"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?" + +"Her name's Mizzi." + +"Mizzi what?" + +"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She--" + +"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and +real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine." + +But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings." + +"Beautiful, is she?" + +"No, not particularly. No." + +"Wonderful voice, h'm?" + +"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful." + +Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill +circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry +bricks!" + +"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head +and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides--" + +But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If +I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway. +You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick." + +Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You +wait. You'll see." + +Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep +so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was +unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had +decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera), +it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the +negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first +train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you. +You've got to see her." + +Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs +along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the +royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the +monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve +and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed, +daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers +which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest +men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of +the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the +river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new +building being erected across the way. It was on this building that +Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier. + +The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a +million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells, +running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two +American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women +were employed was dreadful and incredible. + +Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a +little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After +they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before." + +By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an +indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled +him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he +met Mizzi. + +They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive. +Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks. + +"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question. + +Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of +the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking +stuff for them. The women do that." + +And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the +women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up +one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a +musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some +seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing +across the river. Their hands were purple. + +"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But +I know it, anyway." + +Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk +and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because +they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now. +With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But +then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a +personality when he saw it. + +Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called +it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very +straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach +held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a +little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a +pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit. + +"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie. + +Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture. +She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between +seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth +pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its +two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high +in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed +deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it. +Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just +accomplished the gymnastic feat. + +"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage +is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly." + +A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were +abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew +chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men +followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore +overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food--very +small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and +sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the +whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished. + +"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward +Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from +her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise, +over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks +red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic. + +She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book +things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and +white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the +neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear +voice. + +"What's that?" asked Hahn. + +"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't +speak German, did you know that? They hate it." + +The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves +comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of +anticipation. + +"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same +every day." + +Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of +the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of +the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like +this: + + A hundred geese in a row + Going into the coop. + At the head of the procession + A stick over his shoulder-- + +No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly +would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience +gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot +Time": + + + When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling, + All join round and sweetly you must sing + And when the words am through in the chorus all join in + There'll be a _hot time_ + In the _old town_ + To-night. + My + Ba- + By. + +And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still +think it's our national anthem. + +When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped +their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual +beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and +flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in +a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive +pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality +that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember. + +There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted +description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call +it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these +things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it +is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it. + +So now he said, quietly, "She's got it." + +"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne +ever had. A year of training and some clothes--" + +"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself." + +"I'm sorry," stiffly. + +But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I +like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out +anything?" + +"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. +Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's +Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody +knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible +language in the world--Hungarian. They'll stick a _b_ next to a _k_ and +follow it up with a _z_ and put an accent mark over the whole business +and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!" + +"What?" said Hahn, obligingly. + +"On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela +Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's--" + +"What's Gerbeaud's?" + +"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and +guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn't like our +pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous +stuff, this is!" + +After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All +right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. +Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?" + +"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside. +There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You +know--the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue. +There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in +that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of +the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I +waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her--I knew she couldn't +any more than knock me down--and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?' +She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an +Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I +had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she +opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice +of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an +imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of +stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then +they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up +dashed an equipage--you couldn't possibly call it anything less--with +flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside +the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old +frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and +her name is Josefa." + +"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I +don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And +what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?" + +"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the +Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot +of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice +a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always +manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and +see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I +couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just +this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and +she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she +said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh." + +"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously. + +And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know +it. + + * * * * * + +There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition +seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse, +cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman +of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic. +No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the +first--he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades. + +You know she wasn't--and isn't--a beauty, even in that portrait of her +by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on +either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose +very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then +there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for +it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for +pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest." + +While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged +woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook, +she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she +would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement +for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his +cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the +peasant women do it--the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife +cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she +would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing +the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent +figure. + +With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that +some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread +upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her +mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory. + +"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my +girl," Sid Hahn had said. + +She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest--I will not eat--I will not +sleep--I will not love--until I have it." + +Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity. + +"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought +of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had +hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them, +very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though +neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young +faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness. + +Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff--you know--complexes +and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know +to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which +they considered desirable. + +He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi, +remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He +watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on +his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his +own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving +himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world--the one thing he +wanted more than he had ever wanted anything. + +He decided that Destiny--a ponderous, slow-moving creature at +best--needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all +effective plans are. + +Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was +amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became +in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of +audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She +took it to her breast. She romped with it. + +He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for +Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office. + +"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some +little thing might be wrong--you know how they are. And all the rest +would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world--when they like +you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two +weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl +has got more real genius than any woman since--since Bernhardt in her +prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And +it'll _be_ acting." + +"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly. + +"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll +probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago +I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't +get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do +something for me?" + +"Sure." + +"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The +Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. +You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your +friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he +likes to hear you play." + +He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship +that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his +books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion. + +Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the +sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it. +Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the +Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as +any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish +comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal +though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi +stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, +just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a +scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the +steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a +rosy line of splendour. + +The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the +play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door +closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out +after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, +and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, +and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came +again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and +profitless, without nourishment or sweetness. + +The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, +without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New +York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his +round, ugly face in at the opening. + +"Let's surprise Wallie," he said. + +"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly. + +"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being +home for dinner. Unless you're too tired." + +"I'm not tired." + +The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a +quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, +lamp-lighted room. + +Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a +purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers' +windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather +distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They +said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face! + +"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!" + +"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello." + +Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi." + +"Hello," said Mizzi. + +"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn. + +They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again. + +Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly +together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on +the back. "How'd you like it--the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? +H'm?" + +"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice." + +"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure." + +"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently. + +"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English. + +At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you! +I'll--I'll be glad to take you." + +Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the +three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when +it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to +be home." + +Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go, +suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around. +Hahn--he had to stand on tiptoe to do it--kissed her once on the mouth, +hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie +about the red carpet," he said. + +"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets." + +Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left. +There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and +See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous. + +Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small, +very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the +piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing +the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a +little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it +atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white +keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked +up. His cheeks were wet with tears. + +"God! I wish I could play!" he said. + + + + +LONG DISTANCE + + +Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was +mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny +wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the +plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old. + +You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. +Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any +wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about +him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick +to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to +his task, his surroundings, and his attitude. + +Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that +of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working +position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous +perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which +are likely to trick you in an emergency. + +Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the +absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like +Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all +greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those +rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is +complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds +similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular +English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9. + +The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black +paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him +to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the +other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet +went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he +painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the +whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the +index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently +from his strong hands. + +"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said. + +Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell." + +Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden +chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter +bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, +with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as +A.E.F. and Co. 11. + +"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But +Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?" + +"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One." + +Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began +to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the +centuries-old English garden. + +It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can +appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days. + +Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men +whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could +shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his +pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was +his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's +gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any +passing petticoat that caught his fancy. + +Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, +protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the +law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of +their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street +below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" + +There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of +beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt +as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's +has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with +his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or +a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and +called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks +a little higher. + +But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on +the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down +from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia +Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, +except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more +remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to +be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. + +So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and +I'll be down." + +Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the +streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which +would make them border on the red. + +"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you +had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like +that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're +safe up there." + +The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs +were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine +of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and +stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One +ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he +said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish +heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. +Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing +slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet +straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes +wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her +hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And +as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, +looking after her. + +Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing +at the foot of the pole, waiting. + +They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet +Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot +somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that +same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's +costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) +you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began. + +Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet +was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever +indiscernible among its tender foliage. + +Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss +Kate, and the letter. + +His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war +surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine +of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing--they put it down +under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English +garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the +shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead +chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the +doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the +memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or +weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers--the fingers that +had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days. + +"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the +nerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it. Sometimes just a +word--the right word--will set the thing in motion again. Does he get +any letters?" + +"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet +about--about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that +his leg is healed and she wonders--" + +That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked +Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his +eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she +began to read: + + Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it + rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than + any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're + reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place + takes the prize. + + I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet + darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and + nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something + you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the + leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference + with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how + bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any + features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's + happened to the outside of you, they can't change your + insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that + day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece + of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to + be slapped, God bless the boy in you-- + +A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball +was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. + +"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice. + +Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy +and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood." + +"What'm I doin' with it?" + +"You've just finished painting it." + +Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, +struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement +he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a +little. + +"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, +beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--" + +But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. +She was registering joy--pure joy. + + + + +UN MORSO DOO PANG + + +When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, +in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that +Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a +casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as +unemotionally as a weather bulletin. + +Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert +heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the +Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her +hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where +shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no +answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky. + + * * * * * + +Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the +pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: +"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?" + +And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was +kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing +while my iron was on." + +At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink +georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to +texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so +reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very +brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve +the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top; +finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it. + +As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would +appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young +thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping +criticism. + +"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt +hem. + +Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that +lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I +just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto +and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting." + +Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River +Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at +the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp +and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch +factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing +this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as +unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose +family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy, +summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very +hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town +used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. +Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and +zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin--materials +that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for +party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were +showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that +was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to +Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her. + +Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen +door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, +following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, +caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a +water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth +curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement +department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the +corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was +shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the +room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman +thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could +stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not +be runnin' the streets every night." + +"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you." + +And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in +families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; +affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the +Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, +loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame +house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and +garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged +between her parents. + +Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's +evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin' +downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to +stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed +your hair." + +Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back +porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at +half-past six to go to work. + +Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the +limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. +She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some +errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of +half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a +damp tea towel. + +"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?" + +"No." + +"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't +you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, +h'm?" + +"What for?"--listlessly. + +"What for! What does anybody go out for!" + +"I don't know." + +If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might +have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong +upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy: +"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the +last fella left in the world." + +A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He +is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe +Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see +if I can't make a hit with one of them." + +She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie +Golden's world. + + * * * * * + +In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the +Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the +pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room +foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was +capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter +from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth +to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with +the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from +Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie +gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand +Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, +though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She +followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie +Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from +the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall +styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of +the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected +stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it. + +You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. +Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or +retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not +sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and +arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches +along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls +worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny +parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each +wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch +factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket +had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to +experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, +somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant. + +Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation +for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, +the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of +nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed +laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie +Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had +directed one of her sure shafts at him. + +Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew +it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence +and audacity saved her. + +"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll +find yourself looking for a job." + +"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a +form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type +of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, +ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through +the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, +Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, +certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady +worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, +regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side +of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite +drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like +an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate +mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was +said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort +of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, +it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without +retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy. + +When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs +something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he +ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs +is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' +as a relish." + +And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American +Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his +horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the +depot and the 7:50 train. + +I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness +of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard +her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow +uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there +was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was +anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous +foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was +light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the +asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir +caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid +necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay +colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for +me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the +tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!" + +That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins +of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and +Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it +was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's +drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went +through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from +Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length +of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached +it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick +looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An +air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner. +Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys. + +"Oh, how do!" + +"Good evening!" + +Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On +the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now +stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist. +On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly +lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a +neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You +took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now, +homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick +footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where +the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly +shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little +tingling thrill. + +"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way." + +At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order +to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of +Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they +reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in +retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they +lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss. + +Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at +factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the +Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and +assuming the managership of the office. + +"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old +Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I +step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get +there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will +you be glad, Tess? H'm?" + +Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more +tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job +that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and +all." + +But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp +tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad. + + * * * * * + +No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the +watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood--gone. At first she +hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe +me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose +already." + +"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the +top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' +bullets." + +There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's +big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck +was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid +him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in +their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and +their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In +their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their +young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters--black, yellow, +brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one +head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A +great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs: + +"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a +week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--" + +They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot +platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, +shouting. + +Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received +equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent +boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable +forms of cake. + +Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was +furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in +his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She +tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in +it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of +the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, +inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New +York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it +turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a +cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as +dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and +I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me +swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make +Hatton's place look sick." + +The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among +themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they +could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. +Well, I should say not! + +They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the +type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or +their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as +knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in +men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly +boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish +swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a +little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be +stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy." + +Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink +upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the +music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and +chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands +on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they +giggled and shrieked and ran. + +But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch +hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the +stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases +such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little +conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters +on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last +letter had contained the news of his sergeancy. + +Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in +Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed +looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which +she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were +those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red +triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. +They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere +in the East. These letters were not from him. + +Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop +on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue +shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, +veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, +your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that +complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not +belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No +matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and +pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled +and folded them was pure cerulean. + +Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to +their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' +bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of +starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing +it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might +have been invaluable. It never was asked. + + * * * * * + +Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he +was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care. + +"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes +lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather +ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to +be home, Chuck? Gee!" + +"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in +his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's +swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and +come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind +of--" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: +"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a +regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in +San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the +Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and +acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something +to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are +scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what +some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and +Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. +Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming to his subject, so that he +failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--"it's a joke compared +to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint." + +Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her +head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you +had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything. +You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd +probably be tickled to see you." + +He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't +mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near busted +out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in. +And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day--" + +"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't +a fool." She was perilously near to tears. + +"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--a guy's got +to--he's got no right to--" + +And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled +and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked +differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. +It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, +an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the +extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she +had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! +It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the +broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could +not have put it into words. + +They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of +the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with +little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression +indicative of extreme disgust. + +"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. +"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and +iron and so forth." + +"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often +walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had +never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse +and drifted down the lovely Fox River. + +"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do." + +"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do +it." + +Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing +looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever +against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as +he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red +skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a +minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the +throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in +strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness +surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have +fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! +Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." +She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. +I never did before." + +Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each +brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then +at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I +must have dreamed about this more'n a million times." + +"Have you, Chuck?" + +They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's +good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play +baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are +wonders!" + +"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about +something else?" + +He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or +why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission. + +"About--you." Tessie made it a caress. + +"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and +marchin' and readin' some--Oh, say, what d'you think?" + +"What?" + +"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the darnedest +language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a +piece of bread, you say like this: _Donnay ma un morso doo pang_. See?" + +"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration. + +And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He +knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I +don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?" + +It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her +grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in +France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just +as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it +sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he--he'd be a +different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, +French, girls, swell folks-- + +And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in +the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box." + +"Chocolate cake." + +"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this +morning." + +"Yes, you did!" + +"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the +way you talk." + +"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think." + +"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else." + +"Fried chicken!" + +"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily. + +"You asked me to, didn't you?" + +Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. + +Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden +among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say +they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and +Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not +just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I +suppose it looks like a shanty to you now." + +Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place." + +They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the +river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him--the breast of +the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, +juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a +double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, +but she was wise in feminine wiles. + +From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this +tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it +you get so you don't believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and +chocolate cake." + +"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't +eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken. + +Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie +pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back +again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. +And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand +on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their +kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, +they would have been something like this: + +"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had +you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our house, +with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the +parlour, and all the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get +it. What'll I do if I don't?" + +And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me +and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so +that if I come back--" + +Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French girls. +I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be +raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton +time you get back." + +And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. +I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their +jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a +fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and +fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. +Nix!" + +It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. +Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, +surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little +point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, +beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, +homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those +Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The +husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart +outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at +Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts +outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, +fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. +"Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess." + +"Tha' so? Mine, too. Well, how's everything?" + +Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and +that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available +by the more important sleeping bundle--two yards of goods; a spool of +100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten. + +There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, +felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she +envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty. + + * * * * * + +There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last +letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's +eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. +Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and châteaux. He and a +bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or +something--it was all one to Tessie--and what do you think? She had +kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France. + +The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch +factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied +with a new and more absorbing topic. + +"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?" + +"What about her?" + +"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being +Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being +the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home +and all to go to work in a Y.M.C.A. canteen for her country and bleeding +France." + +"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be +painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the +doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or +baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf +of bread decent. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust +her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over +there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, +and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to +set home and make the best of it. Or take what's left." She turned her +head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the +room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. "I guess when you can't +go after what you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice." + +All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious +Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, +pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing +hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two +inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless +little laugh. + +"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been +at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet." + +He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her +shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off. + + * * * * * + +That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to +Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to +exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in +a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. +Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home +and--and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for +Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless +it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. +But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge +the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' +France. Yeh! Joke! + +The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a +square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In +architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French +château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its +façade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed +magnificence. + +Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, +could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, +usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. +People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it +mattered whether anything happened to her or not! + +Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she +struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little +group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as +she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou +among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she looked straight +ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to +her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. +Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!" + +"Hello, yourself." + +"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink." + +"Think so?" + +She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have someone +following, someone walking home with you. What if he was old enough to +be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying +hair at the sides. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is. +And Nap Ballou told her. + +They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once +heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she +entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were +brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, +peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very much askew. + +"Where you been, Tessie?" + +"Oh, walkin'." + +"Who with?" + +"Cora." + +"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago." + +Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this +coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back." + +Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into +the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's +the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about +the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' +'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't +be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the +same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind +groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She +didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to +think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass +buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain +of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, +smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the +words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. +"What're you going to do--" She rolled over on one side and buried her +head in her arms. + + * * * * * + +There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the +old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest +bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. +But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world +about her. The Chippewa _Courier_ went into the newspaper pile behind +the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye. + +She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her +glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of +unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness. + +"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood +there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden +she ran to her pa--" + +"Both comin' at once, like that--" + +"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She--" + +Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her +and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this +picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I +come in in the middle of the reel, I guess." + +They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly +news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices +high with the note of hysteria. + +"Angie Hatton's beau was killed--" + +"They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet--" + +"The news come only last evenin' about eight--" + +"She won't see nobody but her pa--" + +Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house envying +Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, +and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic +reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one +to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the +luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted +commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in +that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, +bending over her on some pretence that deceived no one, spoke low-voiced +in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. +She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work. + +She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the +river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her +had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless +overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get." + +She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about the +girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. +She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid shoes, flimsy +blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the city +park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a tree +idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lack-lustre eyes. Silhouetted +there against the tender green of the pretty square he looked very old, +somehow, and different--much older than he looked in his shop clothes, +issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where he should have stuck +out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across +her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she had last seen him: +brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of flank. + +Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly: "Somebody +looks mighty sweet this afternoon." + +Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line +you like you stick to it, don't you?" + + * * * * * + +Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats +and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust +the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray in +the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her. + +"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and +turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie +felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a +little as she stepped into the boat. + +The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and +told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same +when he asked her. + +"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little +with the unwonted exercise. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly +to rowing. + +Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough, +considerin' the company." + +He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card. + +When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had +supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White +meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk." + +"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around +her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark so +early." + +"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking +sort of way, though he consumed very little food actually. + +"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, half-heartedly. She decided +that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she +hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white double +row ... + +"Well," she said, "let's be going." + +"No hurry," again. + +Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What +d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at her +own joke. + +"Yes." + +She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, I don't." + +He rose, too. "Why not?" + +"Because I don't, that's why." She stooped and began picking up the +remnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly and +thriftily in the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her. + +"Let me help," he said. And then his arm was about her and his face was +close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after a little +wordless struggle. And then she knew. Tessie's lips were not virgin. She +had been kissed before. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at +him furiously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had +worked in the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped +her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her. + +At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you--you +drunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll ..." + +The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. +With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand and +clawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His +hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed to her that +her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing +against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but the +broken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ran +on, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might have +happened ... to her, Tessie Golden ... that nobody could even talk fresh +to. She gave a little sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It +was growing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. +It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, +climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly for +support, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summer +cottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. A warm, +flickering light danced in the window. + +Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with a +little instinctive gesture, she patted her hair, tidied her blouse, and +walked uncertainly toward the house, up the steps to the door. She stood +there a moment, swaying slightly. Somebody'd be there. The light. The +woman who cooked for them or the man who took care of the place. +Somebody'd-- + +She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her way and +got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, louder now. +Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The +door opened wide. Old Man Hatton! + +She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his +glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, that his +face was so kindly. + +Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!" +she whimpered. "It's me!" + +He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside. + +"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid...." + +Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried +to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she +had planned to tell? + +"Who is it, dad? Who...?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared +at Angie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come in here." + +Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie +Hatton's expensive blouse. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no +surprise at the act. + +"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, dad. +And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you +know. Something...." + +Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. +Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her +eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped +little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head. + +"That's all right," Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after a +while." + +There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the +fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting +in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tearstained young ladies at +dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a +torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They +evinced no curiosity about this dishevelled creature who had flung +herself in upon their decent solitude. + +Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face and +opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a +quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, +some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked--well, Tessie put it to herself, +thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry no more--only +inside." + +And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never have +gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. +It's fierce. You get scared, sittin' home, waitin', and they're in +France and everywheres, learnin' French and everything, and meetin' +grand people and havin' a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said I +didn't care, I wasn't goin' to squat home all my life, waitin'...." + +Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down +at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and +thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These +things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now +was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no +questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted +with: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-room +foreman, eh?" + +Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. +"Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't +I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make no difference +who I went with, but it does." She looked down at her hands clasped so +tightly in her lap. + +"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference," Angie agreed, and looked up +at her father. + +At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all +kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home +he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He...." + +"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck +comes home...." + +Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'd +like to learn to swim--and row a boat--and play ball--like the rich +girls--like the girls that's makin' such a fuss over the soldiers." + +Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessie +brought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talk +French." + +Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked +at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd +found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just +one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for +them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you +need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you +say?" + +But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white +with earnestness. + +"C'n you speak French?" + +"Yes," Angie answered. + +"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French: +'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first." + +Angie Hatton said it correctly. + +"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?" + +Angie said it again. + +Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her +hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she +articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that +of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see. + + + + +ONE HUNDRED PER CENT + + +They had always had two morning papers--he his, she hers. The _Times_. +Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and +Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm +and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast +and the First Page simultaneously with no--"Just let me see the inside +sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning. + +In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman +for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal +of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished +between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the +depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which +seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of +a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste, +but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight +thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse +behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost +coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news +to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something +of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline +such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and +vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From +Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a +column or a page at a glance. + +Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, +his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the +next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or +coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest +is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page +and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, +Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that +clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew +away from the temple. + +"T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the +Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way +purposely." + +"Francis X--?" He was not a follower of the films. + +Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side +face." + +"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to +me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four. + +Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, +as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. +Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the +clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, +vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" +Emma knew he was pursuing the daily _schrecklichkeit_. + +Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, +the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, +pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon +it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest: + +"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who +aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the _Times_ +delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies +for it, mornings." + +It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, +its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes. + +"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him. + +"You take it, dear." + +"Oh, no! No." + +She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing +tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess. + +"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--" + +"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three +years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't +endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I +shall have to consider our marriage a failure." + +"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--" + +"I am. But there's something about having it read to you--" + +On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her +blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was +shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs +with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the +hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment--just the fraction +of a minute--when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. +Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. +They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper +fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, +apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned. + +Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a +moment--a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover. + +"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and +drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the +price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are +husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two +establishments." + +They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing +an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize +that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning +business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they +most treasured. + +Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the +Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, +and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits +about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of +family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense +that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor +Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory--it +seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, +Emma's interest in the business was unflagging. + +"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this +firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck +& Co." + +"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that +first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don't know +how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into +a Madam Chairman. You'll see." + +She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her. + +By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as +gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and +woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going +abroad. + +Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a +half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft +fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her +eyes. + +"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. +It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's +neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is." + +She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. +The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife +had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and +scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and +pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new +neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the +woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been +obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and +motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many +fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, +and said, "But it looks so--so lumpy around the neck." + +Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie +on--" + +"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar." + +"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but +the high, close-fitting collar." + +The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd +shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, +grumbling. + +Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. +At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had +telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. +People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick +of calling her by any other. + +With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her +attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma +McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those +Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could +cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm +going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished +service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that +hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six +o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for +their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't +blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, +I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...." + +By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts +herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, +initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. +November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them +seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma +now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, +lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she +herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and +bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail. + +She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found +her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week +to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the +autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to +the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, +and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about +this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, +that convinced and impressed you. + +"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma +remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond +pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. +"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method +could sell sandbags in the Sahara." + +Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw +each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, +espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the +street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure +swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him +so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant +attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the +street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert +recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block +ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his +stride, and touched his arm lightly. + +"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?" + +"Yes." + +"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck." + +Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand +on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve. + +"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, +young 'ooman." + +"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation +from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green +and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make +a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker." + +There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical +comedy, dear. These men are--Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you. +Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining +room. There are things at the office--" + +"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there +are two vice-commandants ready to snatch my shoulder-straps." + +"Emma! Emma!" + +At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone +wrong?" + +"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at +the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this +Serbian thing end? I'll call for you." + +"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, +dear." + +He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingué in the +blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent cocked hat. +The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely +smart affair of white silk, high-collared, stitched, expensively simple. +And yet he frowned as he looked. + +"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance. + +"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better +call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife +practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and +the funeral--The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into +the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes. + +But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told +me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, +where she can be bathed and massaged and fed with milk. And if Fisk +could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had +training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg." + +"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't +he?... I really must hurry, T.A." + +"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned +away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her +shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. +Emma's taxi crept into the stream. But uppermost in her mind was not the +thought of Serbians, uniforms, Fisk, or Ritz, but of her husband's right +hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into +a fist. + +She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers; but the +Serbians, despite their four tragic years, turned out to be as sprightly +as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the Fannings dropped +her at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she +doffed her warlike garments, her feminine canniness warned her that this +was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better. + +But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all Jock. + +A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been Grace Gait, one +of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the +profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office she had been +turning out compelling copy. They had been married four years. Now Jock +ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Raynor suite overlooking the +lake in the great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, "Eat +the crust, girlie. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly." + +Emma, uniformed for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter. Buck +listened in silence. + +"You wouldn't know Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody. And the queer +part of it is he doesn't know it. He tries to be cheerful, and I could +weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work +from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning, and from writing free full-page +national advertising copy to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke +fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought. But you +know I haven't been really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the +doctor says it will be another six months before I'm myself, really. If +I had only myself to think of--how simple! But two kiddies need such a +lot of things. I could get a job at Raynor's. They need writers. Jock +says, bitterly, that all the worth-while men have left. Don't think I'm +complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone +who understands often clears the way." + +"Well!" said Emma. + +And, "Well?" said T.A. + +She sat fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her. "Of +course, Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of +him. He'd be beautiful in khaki. But there's work to do right here. And +he ought to be willing to wait six months." + +"They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now." + +"Oh, come, T.A.! One man--" + +"Multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk. Just such another case. Look +at--" + +The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up +alertly. She glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little exclamation of +horror. + +"That's for me! I'm half an hour late! The first time, too." She was at +the telephone a second later, explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the +dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised +for flight. "Sorry, dear. But this morning was so important, and that +letter about Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier." + +"I'm afraid you are, Emma." + +She stared at that. "Why--! Oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, +dear--I'll call for you at the office to-night at five, and we'll walk +home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late--" + +She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a +long minute, staring down at the coffee cup whose contents he did not +mean to drink. The light from the window cameoed his fine profile. And +you saw that his jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away, in +Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't. + +Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules +would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a +thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois. + +And a thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three +hours later, was slamming down the two big windows of his office. From +up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk +march. And his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you +know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices--a +great gray shaft, towering even above its giant neighbours, its head in +the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until +very recently those windows of his office had been a source of joy and +inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below. The +tangle of I.C. tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond +that, as far as the eye could see. He had seen the changes the year had +brought. The lake dotted with sinister gray craft. Dog tents in Grant +Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms. Men--mere boys, most of +them--awkward in their workaday clothes of office and shop, drilling, +wheeling, marching at the noon hour. And parades, and parades, and +parades. At first Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff--heads of +departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys--would +suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the +street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, +bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its +white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six +contortionistic drum-major. + +By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor +windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from +the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh +parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note. + + "Where are _you_! (sounded the bugle) + Where are _you_? + Where are YOU?!!! + Where + are + you? + Where--are--you-u-u-u--" + +He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out +dictation in a loud, rasping voice. + +"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to +say--" + +_(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)_ + +"--all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and +will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office +think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising--" + +_(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)_ + +"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?" + +"Over th--I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new +record in soap advertising--'" + +"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl +stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in +the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and +swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp +Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab +world. + +"--and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been +sent out from the Raynor offices." + +The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or +breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her +foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left! +Left-right-left! + +Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much +of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by +heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, +thinking, planning; feeling his agony, and trying not to admit the +transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for +Chicago. + + * * * * * + +At five o'clock Emma left the war to its own devices and dropped in at +the loft building in which Featherlooms were born and grew up. Mike, the +elevator man, twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to +gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure. + +"Haven't seen you around fur many the day, Mis' Buck." + +"Been too busy, Mike." + +Mike turned back to face the door. "Well, 'tis a great responsibility, +runnin' this war, an' all." He stopped at the Featherloom floor and +opened the door with his grandest flourish. Emma glanced at him quickly. +His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little +jingling of buckles and strap hooks. + +The work day was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She +could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at +his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that +littered tables and chairs. At the window near the door Fisk, the +Western territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The +two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with +admiration. Into Fisk's face there flashed a look so nearly resembling +resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a +moment with the two. + +Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, "I'm more resigned to war this +minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began." + +Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His +face was unsmiling. "Like my uniform?" Emma asked; and wished, somehow, +that she hadn't. + +Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were +hard, resentful. Suddenly, "Like it! God! I wish I could wear one!" He +turned away, abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared +his throat, apologetically. + +Emma glanced down at her own trim self--at her stitched seams, her +tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands--and +suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. +Something--something-- + +She wheeled and made for Buck's office, her colour high. He looked up, +rose, offered her a chair. She felt strangely ill at ease there in the +office to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the +glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall smiled and nodded and +called through the open door: "My, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck." + +"Be with you in a minute, Emma," said T.A. And turned to his desk again. +She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. "Don't hurry." Out in +the showroom again she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was +ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and +night-gowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth and his +eyes squinted, half closed through the smoke. + +She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment +that lay under her hand. "Spring samples?" + +"Yes." + +"It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money, war or +no war." + +"'S right." + +"How's Gertie?" + +"Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl!--say, I knew what she was +when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long +enough. But I never really knew that kid until now, and we've been +married two years. You know what the last year has been for her; the +baby and all. And then losing him. And do you know what she says! That +if there was somebody who knew the Western territory and could cover it, +she'd get a job and send me to war. Yessir! That's Gert. We've been +married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time +she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was +away on my long spring trip she used to say it wasn't so bad being +alone, because there was always my home-coming to count on. How's that +for a wife!" + +"Gertie's splendid," agreed Emma. And wondered why it sounded so lame. + +"You don't know her. Why, when it comes to patriotism, she makes T.R. +look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, +she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war. Gert +says a travelling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife, +anyway; and that if I went it would only be like my long Western trip, +multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie." + +Emma was fingering the cotton-flannel garment on the table. + +Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. "Sorry I kept you waiting. +Three of the boys were called to-day. It crippled us pretty badly in the +shipping room. Ready?" + +"Yes. Good-night, Charley. Give my love to Gertie." + +"Thanks, Mrs. Buck." He picked up his cigar, took an apprehensive puff +and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar +now. + +Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth +Avenue. Flags of every nation, save one. Uniforms of every blue from +French to navy; of almost any shade save field green. Pongee-coloured +Englishmen, seeming seven feet high, to a man; aviators slim and +elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered +planes, with a notch for every Hun plane bagged. Slim girls, exotic as +the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior _élégants_. +Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war +accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. Buck +eyed them gravely, hat and arm describing parabolas with increasing +frequency as they approached Fiftieth Street, slackening as the +colourful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park +mists. + +Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose-pink. Head high, shoulders back, she +matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were +bright and very blue. + +"There's a beautiful one, T.A.! The Canadian officer with the limp. +They've all been gassed, and shot five times in the thigh and seven in +the shoulder, and yet look at 'em! What do you suppose they were when +they were new if they can look like that, damaged!" + +Buck cut a vicious little semi-circle in the air with his walking stick. + +"I know now how the father of the Gracchi felt, and why you never hear +him mentioned." + +"Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot." She did not intend her tone to be +smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have +seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense +his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay +between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New +York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, +Sr. + +"Tell me, Emma. Does this satisfy you--the work you're doing, I mean? Do +you think you're giving the best you've got?" + +"Well, of course I'd like to go to France--" + +"I didn't ask you what you'd like." + +"Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I don't know what you call giving the best +one has got. But you know I work from eight in the morning until +midnight, often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do +my work just as well. And I don't say, either, that it doesn't include a +lot of dashing up and down Fifth Avenue, and teaing at the Ritz, and +meeting magnificent Missions, and being cooed over by Lady Millionaires. +But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of +thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to +oblige." She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart +leather-bound notebook. + +"Spare me! I've had all the statistics I can stand for one day at the +office. I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't +realize--" + +They turned into their own street. "Realize what?" + +"Nothing. Nothing." + +Emma sighed a mock sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. +"Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. +That second window shade is crooked. Isn't it queer how maids never +do.... I'll tell you what I can realize, though. I realize that we're +going to have dinner at home, reg'lar old-fashioned befo'-de-war. And I +can bathe before dinner. There's richness." + +But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly +re-coifed, she again wore the blue uniform, with the service cap atop +her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with +a little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on +a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a +little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of +masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the +table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he +gripped it. + +"It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little +less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see +why you should make me feel like your orderly. It's like being married +to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of +time it takes to dine with your husband." + +It was the bitterest speech he had made to her in the years of their +married life. She flushed a little. "I thought you knew that I was going +out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the +understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30." + +He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the +chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored +self with a placidity that had in it, perhaps, a dash of malice. His +last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an +olive, and nibbled it, head on one side. + +"D'you know, T.A., what I think? H'm? I think you're jealous of your +wife's uniform." + +She had touched the match to the dynamite. + +He looked up. At the blaze in his eyes she shrank back a little. His +face was white. He was breathing quickly. + +"You're right! I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in +the army! I'm jealous of the mule drivers! Of the veterinarians. Of the +stokers in the transports. Men!" He doubled his hand into a fist. His +fine eyes glowed. "Men!" + +And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his hands. + +Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked +down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him. She got up +and came over to him. + +"Why, dear--dearest--I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I +thought you were happy. You--" + +"Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are +gritting our teeth and pretending." + +She put a hand on his shoulder. "But what do you want--what can you do +that--" + +He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. +His head came up. "They've offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a +fancy job. It has to do with merchandising. But I think you know they're +having a devil of a time with all the millions of bales of goods. They +need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes +enough. I know values. It would mean hard work--manual work lots of +times. No pay. And happiness. For me." There was a silence. It seemed to +fill the room, that silence. It filled the house. It roared and +thundered about Emma's ears, that silence. When finally she broke it: + +"Blind!" she said. "Blind! Deaf! Dumb! _And_ crazy." She laughed, and +two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge +uniform. "Oh, T.A.! Where have I been? How you must have despised me. +Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the Government three +strapping men. My uniform, that was keeping three man-size soldiers out +of khaki. You, Jock, and Fisk. Why didn't you tell me, dear! Why didn't +you tell me!" + +"I've tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask +you to go back to the factory." + +"Factory! Factory nothing! I'm going back on the road. I'm taking Fisk's +Western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I +ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisk's salary +until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one +so good. Grace can give the office a few hours a week. And we can +promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road." + +Buck was staring at her, dully. "Grace? Now wait a minute. You're +travelling too fast for a mere man." His hand was gripping hers, tight, +tight. + +Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a +chair around to his. They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth. + +"It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for +lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this: Jock gets a +commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York, and live +right here, with me, in this house. Fisk goes to war. Gertie gets well +and comes back to work for Featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. +Old Emmer takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country--on the +road." + +At that he got up and began pacing the room. "I can't have you do that, +dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me." + +"Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee." + +"Gad, Emma, you're glorious!" + +"Glorious nothing! I'm going to earn the living for three families for a +few months, until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about +that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the +road means these days. It isn't travelling. It's exploring. You never +know where you're going to land, or when, unless you're travelling in a +freight train. They're cock o' the walk now. I think I'll check myself +through as first-class freight. Or send my pack ahead, with natives on +foot, like an African explorer. But it'll be awfully good for me +character. And when I'm eating that criminal corn bread they serve on +dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth I'll remember +when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my +hand on the steering wheel along o' the nobility and gentry." + +"Listen, dear, I can't have you--" + +"Too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. +They'll wire back 'No!' but another fifty'll fetch 'em. After all, it +takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to +change eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but +filling." + +Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, +less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have +faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was +alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the +swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought +within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this +time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every +town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the +readjustment of this little family and business group was so +unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, +seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the +Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be +won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled. + +It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma's awakening +that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed +plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows +suitcase ("Can't count on trunks these days," she had said. "I'm not +taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist"). Buck, standing in the +doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his +khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: +"Can't I help, dear?" Or, "Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the +Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I'd like to know what +they had on you, Emma." + +And from Emma: "Yeh, ain't I noble!" Then, after a little pause: "This +house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it'll look like a Home for +Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be +the only male protector around the place. We'll make him captain of the +home guard." + +"Gertie was in to-day. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to +Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we +ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any +woman in the shop except you. She's down to ninety-eight pounds, poor +little girl, but every ounce of it's pure pluck, and she says she'll be +as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will." + +Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. +"Seventeen--eighteen--When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice +the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand +boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands +money that an operator used to brag about--nineteen--" + +Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was +rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes +closets. + +"All except you, Emma. You'll be working without a salary--working like +a man--like three men--" + +"Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I've got two service +buttons already," she glanced down at her blouse, "and Charley Fisk said +I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm +going to put 'em all on." + + * * * * * + +The day before Emma's departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, +bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the +spirit of the times in her eyes. + +"Jock!" she repeated, in answer to their questions. "My dears, he +doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He +thinks he'll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn't that be +glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss +with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even +listening. He couldn't wait until I had finished a sentence so that he +could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the +moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he +answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And +when I said, 'Dearest, isn't this hotel a _little_ like the place we +spent our honeymoon in--that porch, and all?' he said, 'See this feller +coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. +He's my Captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college +when I was a fresh.'" + +But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words. + +Emma's trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's +date for sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. "When I +went to school," she said, "I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian +War worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I +want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it'll be +over sooner; and because we've won." + +They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear +platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried frantically to +get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully. "Don't look so tragic about it," +she laughed. "It's like old times. These last three years have been a +dream--a delusion." + +He looked up at her, as she stood there in her blue suit, and white +blouse, and trim blue hat and crisp veil. "Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I +believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you, +when you came in off the road after father died and I had just taken +hold of the business." + +For answer she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized +"Silver Threads Among the Gold." The train moved away, gathered speed. +He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the +railing, as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would +allow. He was walking swiftly along with the train, as though +hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train +platform. The brave figure in khaki outside. The blue suddenly swam in a +haze before his eyes; the khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little +veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for Upper +Eleven. + +The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed +and unnoticing as she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her +newspaper suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained +self-control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white +coat that she desired Upper Eleven made up early. + +The White Coat had said, "Yas'm," and glanced up at her. Whereupon she +had said: + +"Why, William!" + +And he, "Well, fo' de lan'! 'F 'tain't Mis' McChesney! Well, mah sakes +alive, Mis' McChesney! Ah ain't seen yo' since yo' married. Ah done heah +yo' married yo' boss an' got a swell brownstone house, an' ev'thing +gran'--" + +"I've got everything, William, but a lower berth to Chicago. They swore +they couldn't give me anything but an upper." + +A speculative look crept into William's rolling eye. Emma recognized it. +Her hand reached toward her bag. Then it stopped. She smiled. "No. No, +William. Time was. But not these days. Four years ago I'd have slipped +you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower berth from +somewhere. But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, +and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift +stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, aged three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney, +aged six months. And I'll dispose my old bones in Upper Eleven." + +She went in to dinner. + +At eight-thirty a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear. + +"Ah got yo' made up, Mis' McChesney." + +"But this is my--" + +He beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar +result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He +stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower +which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman +agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The +key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it +with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain +with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used before +a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one +gray-black hand. Then he bowed like any courtier. + +Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. +Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him--at the wrinkled, +kindly, ape-like face, and he looked down at her. + +"William," she said, "war is a filthy, evil, vile thing, but it bears +wonderful white flowers." + +"Yas'm!" agreed William, genially, and smiled all over his rubbery, +gray-black countenance. "_Yas'm!_" + +And who shall say he did not understand? + + + + +FARMER IN THE DELL + + +Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve +tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the +stuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was +hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that +the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were +curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath +came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld +didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of +fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and +is taking it easy? + +If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell +whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To +do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light +meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his +wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him. + +When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty +daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully you must +be a natural-born loller to begin with, and revert. Bella Westerveld was +and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there +he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast +when he was lying so still. If It had been light, you could have seen +the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient +face. + +They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every +morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching +for the limp, drab, work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by +his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of +depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the +chair by the bed. He was taking it easy. + +Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the +instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the +bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the +feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very +quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the +cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the +old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the +ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But here, +in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of +Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar +noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, +there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the +city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had +gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his +wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his +case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the +flat next door must have heard her. + +"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around +like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there +if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day." + +Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be +appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed so +mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to +bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat +just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, +grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the +power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily +shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been +a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood +floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal +confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and +distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and +had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the +steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the +Mississippi rolling grandly by. + +Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he +really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's +matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who +released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had been until the winter +months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than +useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The +milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he +had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of +his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in +motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. +He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if +they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, +with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they +used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of +his hands and around the thumbs. + +"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She +gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring +tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up." + +He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted +Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated +and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The +reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly--while it +lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped +back into his old apathy. + +Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his +incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty +streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply +from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely +unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning +great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body +suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than +tragedy--waste. + +For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, +eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and +drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before +sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the +rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he +toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might +fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the +high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with +the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as +were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the +city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though +form and substance are the same. + +Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to +introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a +comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, +have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know +him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of +the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots. + +At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, +slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those +rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals +canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A +serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew +older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated +the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost +of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished. + + * * * * * + +The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds +of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had +married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost +entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of +those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, +then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, +majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical +Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their +relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his +face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for +clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring +flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the +drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men +are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He +seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed +that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a +saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock." + +At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run +faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the +rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at +arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. +The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength +which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to +their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick +of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about +to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing +had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. +There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he +had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going +down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He +had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very +different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He +had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a +tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and +the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never +so much as flicked a dandelion head with it. + +An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship. + +"Hello, Emma." + +"How do, Ben." + +"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf +at Aug Tietjens with five legs." + +"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, +though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking +up." + +Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two +would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of +embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was +no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the +minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty +on easy payments if--when--" + +Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a +fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man." + +Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine +and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes +would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for +her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her +butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, +twelve miles away, than did any in the district. She was not a pretty +girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at +twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well +for Ben Westerveld's future happiness. + +But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers's capable +hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was +the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that +cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from +any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being +a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that +day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the +present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty +miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a +step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded +her apprenticeship. + +"I'll get a beau," she said, "that'll take me driving and around. And +Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town." + + * * * * * + +The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road +toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was +behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could +have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that +later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and +dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought +or speech. + +He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher. He had heard of +her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not +at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history +of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. +That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact +that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip +in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben +Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column. + +He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his +embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his +dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded +forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with +natural canine curiosity. + +Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping +her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand +and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life +that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that +time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he would never have +forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, +quivering body. + +Bella screamed again. Still clinging to him, Ben was saying: "He won't +hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder +reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so +childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. +From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter +femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella the +experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a +queer, electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it +something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. +If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have +realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she +could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was +scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little. + +"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea." + +But Bella looked over her shoulders fearfully to where Dunder stood by +the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought +that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but +still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up +a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. "Go on +home!" he commanded, sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with +a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail +between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog. + +Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. + +"You're the new teacher, ain't you?" + +"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that +dog." + +"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt +nobody. He's pretty big." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben +Westerveld." + +"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed +shyness. + +"Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens that's enough +to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big." + +"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over +to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get +there. You were going the other way, weren't you?" + +"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you +company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden +masterfulness. + +They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one +another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. +The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if +they had been whisked away on a magic rug. + + * * * * * + +Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. She was +contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The +Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was +always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding +cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch +counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should +be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could +find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and +talk and colour. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she +always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or +with an armful of clean towels. + +Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself: "I want to marry Bella." +He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma +Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed +at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she +selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes +and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella +was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his +finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring +woman. But in the end they married. The neighbourhood was rocked with +surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the +dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and +women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends. + +Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of +pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too +honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally +truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this +slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He +had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing +was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. +He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of +fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of +skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line +from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary +of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitués of Old +Red Front Huckins's bar. + +They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered +in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, +eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the +Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was +too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward +to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, +his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the +county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her +plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm +all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather +have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here." + +Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as +slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin +coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears +she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get +away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube +like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by +her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an +over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty +she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They +moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older +boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. +Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father. +He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill +and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling +his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of +the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm +life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they +found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had +trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road +behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was +asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off +to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not +have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before +his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood +and the reins. + +That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife +together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her +hatred of the locality and the life. + +"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless +reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a +farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your +hand at Dike now for a change." + +Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at +him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come +honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was +a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, +stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had +come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by +thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until +help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the +reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained. + +Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The +boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you +might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs--great +black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; +speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich +patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious +pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a +fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's +opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, +was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter +disappointment of his married life. + +That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben +Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. The +stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat +and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five--a habit that +requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with +difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of +standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered +the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and +his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk +to say: "Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?" + +When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no +unpaid notes to his discredit. + +All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of +his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were +dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dike after +him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; +most of it was back-breaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was +his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he +never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that +he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning +ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said: + +"Well, I got my work cut out for me, an' I do it an' do it right." + +There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, +so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, +middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and +beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday +afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street +in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces. + +As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her +benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on +twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He +had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a +commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella +remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, +surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell +on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the +coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold. + +Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack, +like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and +crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, +and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street +just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you +downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, +after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a +terrible termagant. + + * * * * * + +When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't +dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long +years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But +wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike +with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest +training camp that was to fit them for France and war. + +Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. +Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When +the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how +the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue +shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step +began to lag a little. + +He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were +no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of +rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice +seemed never to stop its plaint. + +"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll +die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he +eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing +down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in +him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that +had made him master and superior in spite of everything. + + * * * * * + +In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma +Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years +ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and +was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, +and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, +never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person--a +sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with +honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow. + +"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. +"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't +make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out +the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it and glad. They +got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or +cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on +shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never +come b--" + +But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed +rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter. + + * * * * * + +They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben +Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to +camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun +County, in the spring, has much the beauty of California. There is a +peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben +Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly +dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, +though, as they do in a play. He dared not. + +They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella +was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past +thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the +movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the +cramped, unnatural mode of living necessitated by a four-room flat--all +these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been +bred in the midst of them. + +She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was +a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and +small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments +and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They +seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from +seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite +bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of +sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery +bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's +for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a +nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some +strange chemical process, to bring them together as well. + +"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. +"Do you want to come along, ma?" + +"What you got to get?" + +"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie." + +"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore." + +"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I +can do to tend to the house, without sewing." + +"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' +besides--" + +"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me." + +The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L +together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, +indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent +store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap +lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would +buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or +a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, +and this they would munch as they went. + +They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their +hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by +delicatessen. + +Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we +find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the +edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another +day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday--a little +feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had +been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be +Thursday. Not that it made any difference. + + * * * * * + +They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not +digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. +There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. +A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or +State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and +taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben +used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the +day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the +firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, +sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he +clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.--if he thought of how +the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and +opinion--he said nothing. + +Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of +the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He +tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and +scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave +him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy. + +"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you +want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and +grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm." + +His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her +that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate +little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to +gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil. + +On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away +one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the +place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful +tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding +forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He +talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy +man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the +street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat +did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of +wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world. + +"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about +917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win +the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say." + +"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is +that Farmer Ben was right. + +Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave +her many hours of unearned freedom for gadding and gossiping. + +"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got +to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting +if I take her along. Ma's goin' with me." + +He loved the feel of Pearlie's, small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. +He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big +brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her +tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender +offices. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and +that he pretended this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair +managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day +looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature +railway. + +They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade. + + * * * * * + +Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. +Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. +They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the +impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they +were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters +were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the +armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben +tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole +being revolted at the thought. + +He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths in their one-button suits and +striped shirts standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third, +spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing +labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and +terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the over-dressed, +scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's +heart. + +The lack of exercise and manual labour began to tell on Ben. He did not +grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his +frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. +Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city +pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by +accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as +a water-crazed traveller in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, +and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully. + +South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare +come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. +Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he +stumbled upon it and standing there felt at home in Chicago for the +first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in +overalls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He +hadn't seen men like that since he left the farm. The sight of them sent +a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he +ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His +fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly. + +At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry +seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar +things for which they had been starving. + +He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of +onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! + +The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure +orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The +cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages +glowed like jade. + +And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, +shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men +in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, +and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men jovial, good-natured, with +clear blue eyes and having about them some of the revivifying freshness +and wholesomeness of the products they handled. + +Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and +garlic and of the good earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, +washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt +strangely at peace. + +It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid +hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to +greet him friendlily: "H'are you!" they said, genially. "H'are you this +morning!" + +He was market-wise enough to know that some of these busy people were +commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It +was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in +front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. +Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing +boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain +blue skirt and a small black hat. + +He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the hat. A funny job +for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays! He turned sidewise +in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one +of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in white +apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving +a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!" + +Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, +tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was +the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank +curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those +intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of +them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so +surprising. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes +and serene brows. + +He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he +acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't +you?" + +She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the +roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: +"Why, Ben!" she said, quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though +she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--that capable, +reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and +significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers. + +"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to +be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been +dealing and smiled. + +"What am I doing here, Joe?" she said. + +Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street +at his own game, and makin' so much money that--" + +But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She +turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?" + +Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we're +livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here." + +She glanced at him, sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?" + +"Yes." + +"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it +briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her +alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a +wren--a business-like little wren--a very early wren that is highly +versed in the worm-catching way. + +At her next utterance he was startled but game. "Have you had your +lunch?" + +"Why, no; I--" + +"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a +bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee +and a sandwich, anyway." + +Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those +intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from +him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was +listening quietly and advising him. + +She interrogated him, gently. But something of his old masterfulness +came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the +rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all." + +So she told him, briefly. She was in the commission business. +Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the +Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, +but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know +that here was a woman of wealth and established commercial position. + +"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, +you must be anyway--it ain't that you look it--but--" He floundered, +stopped. + +She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And +I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My +children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not +going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in +his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first when the +children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything +else. It came natural to me. That's all." + +So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and +of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, +and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came +falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for +deception. When he had finished: + +"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm." + +"I can't. She--I can't." + +She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm." + +He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't." + +"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever +hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. +You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's +ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. +There isn't a bigger job in the world than that." + +For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own +inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go his +shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a +moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered. + +"Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the +way it turned out--but I always wanted to--" + +She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright +brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live +a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't +to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go +back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger +man-size job in the world. It's where you belong." + +Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And +so they parted, the two. + + * * * * * + +He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and +miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he +looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one. + +So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the +right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, +or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew. + +But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness +could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. +High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there +was Minnie's, too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy +Ed's, and-- + +At the other voice his hand trembled so that the key rattled in the +lock, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled +in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's. + +He must just have arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in +progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his +hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, +strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older. + +All this he saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's +two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying: "Hello, pop." + +Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others +were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and +marvelling, and asking questions. + +"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An' +he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that +you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more +here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out +to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!" + +But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike +spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped +way of uttering his words: + +"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about +an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little +dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I +never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep +that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta +the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was +the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of +new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds--womenfolks and +men about eighty years old--runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. +I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'." + +"Forget the farm," said Minnie. + +"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out +at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right." + +Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What +d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all--" + +Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're +livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more." + +Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A +stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made +old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered +mother. + +"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been +livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I--The streets here, +they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to +go back and be a farmer. I want--" + +And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--no, not a new, but +the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six +hundred acres of bounteous bottomland. + +"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got +another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm." + +Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not +agoin' back to the farm." + +But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' +back, Bella," he said, quietly. "An' things are goin' to be different. +You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you +can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' +back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a +bigger man-size job in the world." + + + + +THE DANCING GIRLS + + +When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform +with a background of assorted star-shells in full flower; a young man in +uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady (in uniform); a young man +in uniform crouching in a trench, dugout, or shell-hole, this happens: + +You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform; you jump +hurriedly over the picture; and you plunge into the next story, noting +that it is called "The Crimson Emerald" and that, judging from the +pictures, all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time. + +Chug Scaritt took his dose of war with the best of them, but this is of +Chug before and after taking. If, inadvertently, there should sound a +faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those +stylish dots ... indicative of what the early Victorian writers +conveniently called a drawn veil. + +Nothing could be fairer than that. + +Chug Scaritt was (and is) the proprietor and sole owner of the Elite +Garage, and he pronounced it with a long i. Automobile parties, touring +Wisconsin, used to mistake him for a handy man about the place and would +call to him, "Heh, boy! Come here and take a look at this engine. She +ain't hitting." When Chug finished with her she was hitting, all right. +A medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, +laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the +grease-grimed grotesquerie of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his +tight-fitting, belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat +russet shoes he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole +owner--much less the proprietor--of anything so successful and +established as the Elite Garage. + +In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin--or in any other sort of town, for +that matter--a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the +community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a +pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug +Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured +forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a pæan of sweetness +and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on +gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt +for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on +business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. Gurnee's electric. Chug +didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible he put his foot +down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was +something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to +thrive and flourish. It was like a combination newspaper office and +Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down but there might +generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running +board of an idle car a little group of slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced +young men in form-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly +virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been +picked before he was ripe. + +They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about +them; terse of speech, quick of eye, engine-wise, and, generally, +nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt. Not vicious. +Not even tough. Rather bored, though they didn't know it. In their +boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their +class in a town of Chippewa's size: cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap +talk. This last unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things +mechanical. Baseball, or a sweet-running engine brought out the best +that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the +dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went +by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency +of their skirts. At supper time they would growl to their surprised +sisters: + +"Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to +make a person sick." + +Chug Scaritt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was +his business responsibility on one side; his very early history on the +other. Once you learn the derivation of Chug's nickname you have that +history from the age of five to twenty-five, inclusive. + +Chug had been christened Floyd (she had got it out of a book) but it was +an appendix rather then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of +addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers. +Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking +in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to +that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed +over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky +named Fayette who--but that's another story. + +The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, +or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only +did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them +that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame +cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first +intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation +of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the +Junction. When Chug ran away--which was on an average of twice daily--he +was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about +the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, +would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe. + +He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your +pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug, +deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him +a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night, +before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at +variance with his easy-going nature. + +"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good +toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go +smashing--" + +The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted +tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been +some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had +merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been +too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, +nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his +investigating fingers. + +It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up +and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians +would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an +engine on a track, and his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng! +Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to +sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon). + +Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the +Chippewa _Eagle_. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it +he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that +its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover +has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about +Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed +that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving +mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its +way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not +more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. +True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old +wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced +every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, +hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went. + +He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of +mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to +its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a +monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or +screw in his grease-grimed fingers. + +Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or +a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more +than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his +nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across +a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. +There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a +garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out +of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned +beneficent. + +Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len +Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic. +Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men +who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a +spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on +endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of +dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, +neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity. + +"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big +concerns--" + +After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the +silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of +hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have +grown accustomed. + +Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always +earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work +in earnest. His mother took it hard. + +"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An +education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of +pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good +nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had +her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for +Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a +sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows, +embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling +every corner. + +Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He +don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare +quarrels between the two. "I never had none." + +The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering +it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was +working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send +him to college, next." + +"Well, if I do? Then what?" + +"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a +self-evident fact. + +That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the _Eagle_ and +inserted a neat ad. + + LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25 + CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST. + +For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing +the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against +the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains +as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or +his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore +sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy +treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands. + +Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and +deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle +handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat +paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching +frame. + +At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a +month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here +bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into +her." + +Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and +count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The +look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string. + +For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested +batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the +engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just +emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came +in, en route--a proud, glittering affair--he always managed to get a +chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so +jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an +electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles +possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable. +The least that they called them was juice-boxes. + +At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his +mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always +rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the +time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was +saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home +you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your +pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on +Sundays." + +"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. +Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, +and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over +my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em." + +"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug--those curtain frames." + +"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix +with the lace curtains for you." + +Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much +like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told +of his social side he may be misunderstood. + +Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music +has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: "What is this, +anyway--waltz or fox trot?" This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never +had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was +infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have +started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn't +look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, +but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to +be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second. + +When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky +car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your +view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, +differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the +evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug. + +He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's +amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its +thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple +that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban +lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, +its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it +was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need it would have put you down as +mad. + +Boiled down, Chug Scaritt's crying need was girls. At twenty-two or +three you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but +Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many +labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand. Its millionaires +had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social +functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; +and when it came to costume--diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large +feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers--you couldn't tell their +women from the city dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and +plough works. + +The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish +Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. +They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid +infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance. + +Chug Scaritt and boys of his kind were left high and dry. So, then, when +Chug went out with a girl it was likely to be by way of someone's +kitchen; or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper +and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in +front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had +been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In +Chippewa they did housework. Big, robust girls they were, miraculously +well dressed in good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for +the most part, with a scum over them; over-fond of coffee; and were +rather dull company. But they were good-natured, and hearty, and +generous. + +The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish +pallor due to lungs dust-choked from work in the rag room. That same +pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa. But they had a +rather appealing, wistful fragility. Their eyes generally looked too big +for their faces. They possessed, though, a certain vivacity and +diablerie that the big, slower-witted Swede girls lacked. + +When Chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little +choice. In the winter he often went up to Woodman's Hall. The dances at +Woodman's Hall were of the kind advertised at fifty cents a couple. +Extra lady, twenty-five cents. Ladies without gents, thirty-five cents. +Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he +escorted home one of the ladies-without-gents. It was not that he +begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went +to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and +out of sheer boredom. Once there he danced every dance and all the +encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to +cheek, in wordless rhythm. His arm about the ample waist of one of the +Swedish girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill +hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played +"Home Sweet Home." The conversation, if any, varied little. + +"The music's swell to-night," from the girl. + +"Yeh." + +"You're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with +you forever." This with a pressure of the girl's arm, and spoken with a +little accent, whether Swedish, Belgian, or Slavic. + +"They all say that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +He was very little stirred, really. + +"Yeh, you are. I wish you was. It makes no never minds to you who you're +dancing with, s'long's you're dancing." + +This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It +startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look +at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would +have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks +with a stolid persistence. + +"Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded. He was +rather surprised to find that this was so. + +"Wisht it was thirty." + +That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. +When Chug said, "Can I see you home?" he knew the answer before he put +the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of +time, waiting, when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you +when you failed to show up. Telephoned you when you were busy. Didn't +give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven eighths of it +herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl, with the physical +development of a woman and the mind of a child. There were dozens like +her in Chippewa. + +If the girls of his own class noticed him at all it was the more to +ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their +vision down Outagamie Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy +of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making +advances even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped +acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie +Hatton, Old Man Hatton's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa--so +rich that she drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind. + +You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were, take +them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you +danced with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what +you were going to say to them. + +Mrs. Scaritt suspected in a vague sort of way that Chug was "running +with the hired girls." The thought distressed her. She was too smart a +woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy. + +"Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I like to fuss +around for company." She was a wonderful cook, Mrs. Scaritt, and liked +to display her skill. + +"Who is there to bring?" + +"The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing +up for, evenings?" + +"Nobody." + +Mrs. Scaritt tried another tack. + +"I s'pose this house isn't good enough for 'em? Is that it?" + +"Good enough!" Chug laughed rather grimly. "I'd like to know what's the +matter with it!" + +There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as +spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching +days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house +by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt had rebelled. + +"I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to 'em. It's got so I can +tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven fifty-two goes by in +the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear +the 'leven-forty. Let's stay, Chug." + +So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a +convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by +the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric-lighted, with a +cement walk front and back and a porch with a wicker swing and flower +baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, +though she, in turn, served him meals that would have threatened the +waist-line of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for +instance (it sounds sickish, but wait!) which she baked in a deep pan, +and over which she poured a golden-brown custard all flecked with crusty +melted sugar. You took a bite and lo! it had vanished like a sweet +dewdrop, leaving in your mouth a taste as of nectar, and clover-honey, +and velvet cream. + +Mrs. Scaritt learned to gauge Chug's plans for the evening by his +ablutions. Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted +to a rite. In the old days Chug's father had always made a brief enough +business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the +kitchen sink or on the back-porch bench sufficed. The noises he made +were out of all proportion to the results obtained. His snufflings, and +snortings, and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he +emerged from them you were surprised to find that he had merely washed +his face. + +Chug had grease to fight. He had learned how in his first days at the +garage. His teacher had been old Rudie, a mechanic who had tinkered +around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about +them than their inventor. Soap and water alone were powerless against +the grease and carbon and dust that ground themselves into Chug's skin. +First, he lathered himself with warm, soapy water. Then, while arms, +neck, and face were still wet, he covered them with oil--preferably +lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust over all; great +handfuls of it. The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin +smooth and white. Old Rudie, while advocating this process, made little +use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method +of washing in gasoline guaranteed to take the varnish off a car fender. +It seemed to leave Rudie's tough hide undevastated. + +At twenty-four Chug Scaritt was an upstanding, level-headed, and +successful young fellow who worked hard all day and found himself +restless and almost irritable toward evening. He could stay home and +read, or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very +quiet. For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the +street corner, the Y.M.C.A. This last had proved a boon. The swimming +pool, the gym, the reading room, had given Chug many happy, healthful +hours. But, after all, there was something-- + +Chug didn't know it was girls--girls you could talk to, and be with, and +take around. But it was. After an hour in the pool, or around the +reading table, or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the +quiet street. He could go home. Or there was Wanda. If he went home he +found himself snapping rather irritably at his mother, for no reason at +all. Ashamed of doing it. Powerless, somehow, to stop. + +He took to driving in the evening: long drives along the country roads, +his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He +used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes +on the road; the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda +along, or one of the mill girls. But not often. They were disappointed +if you didn't drive with one arm around them. He liked being alone. It +soothed him. + +It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain +daughter of the Widow Weld. The Widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of +widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When +you met her together with her daughter Elizabeth you were supposed to +say, "Not mother and daughter! Surely not! Sisters, of course." +Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf-club dances on +Saturday night she would sit, unsought, against the wall while her +skittish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man +would cross the floor toward her and her heart would give a little leap, +but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced +much better than her mother--much better than most girls, for that +matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick +glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now +and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my +little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they +belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted +significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was +common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time +because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the +moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. +Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly +loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly +maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and +pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom +her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the +lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her +Machiavellian mother approved. + +"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after +a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy +and red-eyed old widower of that name. + +"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes." + +"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you." + +"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the +glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than +dance with him. Fat!" + +"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness. + +"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful +inside." + +"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly. + +Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been +unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that +of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle. + +When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the +middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and +the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road +toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His +thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected. + +"If I can rent Bergstrom's place next door when their lease is up I'll +knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in +'em.... Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next +week.... That was swell cake Ma had for supper.... What's that in the +road! What's!--" + +Jammed down the foot-brake. Jerked back the emergency. A girl standing +in the road. A dark mass in the ditch by the road-side. He was out of +his car. He recognized her as the Weld girl. + +"'S'matter?" + +"In the ditch. She's hurt. Quick!" + +"Whose car?" Chug was scrambling down the banks. + +"Hatton's. Angie Hatton's." + +"Gosh!" + +Over by the fence, where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found +sitting up, dizzily, and saying, "Betty! Betty!" in what she supposed +was a loud cry but which was really a whisper. + +"I'm all right, dear. I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you--" + +She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls +clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of +the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender. + +"You're a lucky bunch," said Chug. "Who was driving?" + +"I was," said Angie Hatton. + +"It wasn't her fault," the Weld girl put in, quickly. "We were coming +from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm-wagon coming +toward us. One of those big ones. The middle of the road. Perhaps he was +asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought he would, of course. At the last +minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep." + +"Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you both home in +twenty minutes. We'll have to leave five thousand dollars' worth of car +in the road till morning. It'll be all right." + +He did get them home in twenty minutes and the five thousand dollars' +worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. +Old Man Hatton himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following +day. Chug met him in overalls, smudge-faced as he was. Old Man Hatton +put out his hand. Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw. + +"That's all right," said Old Man Hatton, and grasped it firmly. "Want to +thank you." + +"That's all right," said Chug. "Didn't do a thing." + +"No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays--" He +looked around the garage. "Work here, I suppose?" + +"Yessir." + +"If there's anything I can do for you? Over at the mill." + +"Guess not," said Chug. + +"Treat you right here, do they?" + +"Fine." + +"Let's see. Who owns this place?" + +"I do." + +Old Man Hatton's face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles. He threw +back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "One on me. +Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one." + +Chug walked to the street with him. "Your daughter, she's got a lot of +nerve, all right. And that girl with her--Weld. Say, not a whimper out +of her and the blood running down her face. She all right?" + +"Cut her head a little. They're both all right. Angie wouldn't even stay +in bed. Well, as I say, if there's anything--?" + +Chug flushed a little. "Tell you what, Mr. Hatton. I'm working on a +thing that'll take the whine out of the Daker." + +Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things. The Daker +is the best car for the money in the world. Not much for looks but +everything in the engine. And everyone who has ever owned one knows that +its only fault is the way its engine moans. Daker owners hate that moan. +When you're going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a +banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked +over it. + +"Can't be done," said Old Man Hatton. + +"Another three months and I'll show you." + +"Hope you do, son. Hope you do." + +But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys +destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a +long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some +eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an +ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval +between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt.... + +No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way +it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city. No going into detail +concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. +These things were important and interesting. But perhaps not more +interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following +that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth +Weld, and saying, "Angie Hatton's a smooth little dancer, all right; but +she isn't in it with you." + +For Chippewa, somehow, had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, +cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, +figuratively, wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all +artificial social boundaries. Chug Scaritt, in uniform, must be kept +happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, fun, amusement, +entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall +in Elm Street, on what had been a vacant lot. And there, by day or by +night, were to be had music, and dancing, and hot cakes, and magazines, +and hot coffee, and ice cream and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight, +and slim, and young, and bright-eyed, and companionable. Girls like +Angie Hatton. Girls like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat +against the wall at the golf-club dances and prayed in her heart that +fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance. + +Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to +her, in a tactful aside, "My dear, you've danced three times this +evening with the Scaritt boy. You know that's against the rules." + +Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could +hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true +like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent +effort. She liked that, and understood. + +It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls +could understand like that. She talked to you, straight. Looked at you, +straight. Was interested in the things that interested you. No +waist-squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses. + +"I'm going to try to get over." + +"Say, you don't want to do that." + +"I certainly do. Why not?" + +"You're--why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're--" + +"I'm as old as you, or almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to +work in the canteens, and entertain the boys. If they'll take me. I'll +have to lie six months on my age." + +Rudie was in charge of the garage now. "That part of it's all right," +Chug confided to the Weld girl. "Only thing that worries me is Ma. She +hasn't peeped, hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum, all right." + +"I don't know your mother," said the Weld girl. + +"Thasso," absent-mindedly, from Chug. + +"I'd--like to." + +Chug woke up. "Why, say, that'd be fine! Listen, why don't you come for +Sunday dinner. I've got a hunch we'll shove off next week, and this'll +be my last meal away from camp. They haven't said so, but I don't +know--maybe you wouldn't want to, though. Maybe you--we live the other +side of the tracks--" + +"I'd love to," said the Weld girl. "If you think your mother would like +to have me." + +"Would she! And cook! Say!" + +The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all +right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went. + +It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized +that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of +shortcake he leaned back and said, "Death, where is thy sting?" But his +mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld +that it was plain food but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it. + +Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. "Mrs. Scaritt, it's the best dinner I've +ever eaten." + +Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: "Oh, now! You +folks up in the East End--" + +"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows +that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little +to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of +crackers-and-tea codfish, really." + +"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But +Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly +at each other. + +An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, +the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em +up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high +school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), +she went home, escorted by Chug. + +Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months +passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had +swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines. + +Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld +went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. +Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, +tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She +danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the +boards. She danced in hospitals, châteaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, +Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two +weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at +night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let +them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She +danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New +York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and +once with a general. But never a dance with Chug. + +Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. +She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to +look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor +toward her--her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl +next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the +taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her +mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in +thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish +note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, +shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the +wheezy breath, should ask her to dance. + +She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in +the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's +fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return. + +Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown +figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did +this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might +be said to have been alarmingly accelerated. + +Sometimes--though they did not know it--she and Chug were within a half +hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met. + +Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank +Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in +that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so. + +"It has been awful here," said the Widow Weld. "Nothing to do but sew at +the Red Cross shop; and no sugar or white bread." + +"It must have been," agreed Elizabeth. + +"They're giving a dance for you--and dinner--a week from Saturday, at +the golf club. In your honour." + +"Dance!" Elizabeth closed her eyes, faintly. Then, "Who is?" + +"Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it--that is, it was his idea. But the +club wanted to tender some fitting--" + +"I won't go." + +"Oh, yes, you will." + +Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask. + +"Have the boys come back?" + +"What boys?" + +"The--the boys." + +"Some of them. You know about dear Harry Hatton, of course. Croix de--" + +"What have they done with the Khaki Club, where they used to give the +dances?" + +"Closed. Long ago. There was some talk of keeping it open for a +community centre, or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you'll +have to have a dress for Saturday night, I wonder if that old chiffon, +with a new--" + + * * * * * + +Chug Scaritt came home in September. The First National Bank Building +seemed, somehow, to have shrunk. And his mother hadn't had all that gray +hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudie had +made out, all right, hadn't he? Good old scout. + +"The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. +Old Rudie was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you +to-night, Chug." + +"Where's this party? I don't want any party." + +"Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up +yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't--" + +"Don't they give dances any more at the Soldiers' Club down on Elm?" + +"Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they +called a community club. The _Eagle_ was boosting for a big new place. +What they called a Community Memorial Centre. But I don't know. It kind +of fell through, I guess." + +"I won't go," said Chug, suddenly. + +"Go where, Chug?" + +But instead of answering, Chug put his second question. + +"Have you seen--is that--I wonder if that Weld girl's back." + +"My, yes. Papers were full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance, and +all, at the Country Club. They say--" + +A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing +at Woodman's Hall. There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on +a georgette blouse and high-heeled shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled +up at him. Wanda had bad teeth--yellow, with a sort of scum over them. + +"I sure was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say. +Honest, I could dance with you all night." A little pressure of her arm. + +Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke. Dimly he +heard himself saying, "Oh, they all tell me that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +Then, suddenly, Chug stopped dancing. He stopped, and stepped back from +Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its +jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of +the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in +vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded +floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety +wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of +Chippewa's night. + + + THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14714 *** diff --git a/14714-h/14714-h.htm b/14714-h/14714-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f67f7a --- /dev/null +++ b/14714-h/14714-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,7786 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> + <head> + <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content= + "text/xml; charset=UTF-8"/> + + <title> + The Project Gutenberg eBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + p { margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + .poem span.i5 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + .poem span.i6 {display: block; margin-left: 3em;} + .poem span.i7 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + .poem span.i9 {display: block; margin-left: 5em;} + .poem span.i10 {display: block; margin-left: 6em;} + span.i5 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + span.i7 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + span.i10 {display: block; margin-left: 6em;} + + .letter {font-size: 90%; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;} + .smaller {font-size: 90%;} + .signature {text-align: right; margin-right: 10%;} + h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; + } + hr { width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + clear: both; + } + body{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + + table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;} + + .linenum {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */ + .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;} + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */ + .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em; + padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em; + float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em; + font-size: smaller; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;} + + .bb {border-bottom: solid 2px;} + .bl {border-left: solid 2px;} + .bt {border-top: solid 2px;} + .br {border-right: solid 2px;} + .bbox {border: solid 2px;} + + .center {text-align: center;} + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + + .figcenter {margin: auto; text-align: center;} + + .figleft {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: + 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;} + + .figright {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; + margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;} + + .footnotes {border: dashed 1px;} + .footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;} + .footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;} + .fnanchor {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;} + + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left; font-size:90%;} + .poem br {display: none;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem span {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> + </head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14714 ***</div> + +<!-- Page -3 --><h1>HALF PORTIONS</h1> + +<h3>BY</h3> + +<h2>EDNA FERBER</h2> + + +<p class="center">GARDEN CITY NEW YORK<br /> +DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY<br /> +1920 +<!-- Page -2 --></p> + +<p> </p> + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + +<!-- Page -1 --> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<p> </p> +<div class="center"> + <a href="#THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE"><b>THE MATERNAL FEMININE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL"><b>APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL</b></a><br /> + <a href="#OLD_LADY_MANDLE"><b>OLD LADY MANDLE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH"><b>YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH</b></a><br /> + <a href="#LONG_DISTANCE"><b>LONG DISTANCE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG"><b>UN MORSO DOO PANG</b></a><br /> + <a href="#ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT"><b>ONE HUNDRED PER CENT</b></a><br /> + <a href="#FARMER_IN_THE_DELL"><b>FARMER IN THE DELL</b></a><br /> + <a href="#THE_DANCING_GIRLS"><b>THE DANCING GIRLS</b></a><br /> + </div> + +<p> </p> + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE" id="THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE" />THE MATERNAL FEMININE</h2> + + +<p>Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall +back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," +states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." +That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most +certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in +the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with +broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was +practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was +strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and +ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's +East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and +hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of +that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest +hats.</p> + +<p>The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women +of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married +sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces +and nephews.</p> + +<p>"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old +thing. And she's had so little in life, really."</p> + +<p>She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing—Aunt Soph. Forever sending a +spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this +pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter, +to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips. +Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen +foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family. +Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their +husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It +was always the same.</p> + +<p>"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living +soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the +children—"</p> + +<p>There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of +to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each +other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a +confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes +of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk, +safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot +rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by +saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I +don't know why I'm telling you all this."</p> + +<p>But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"—they paid little +heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that +she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life, +has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had +never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it +meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you +have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least +knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her +time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would +have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old +maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all +what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's +viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her +food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women +sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of +what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how +she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.</p> + +<p>You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from +one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago +wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First +National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and +trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own +family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own +people. Her three married sisters—Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, +and Flora in Chippewa—regarded her with a rather affectionate +disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks.</p> + +<p>"I don't know. There's something—well—common about Sophy," Flora +confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had +made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to +everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train. +Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion. +You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour +car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was +getting along—she called him William—and if they were going to send +her west, and all about her. I <i>wish</i> she wouldn't."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. +You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator +starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks—all that aloof, +unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed +and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper +water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity +in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your +innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of +her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister +Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at +Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, +with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to +her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder.</p> + +<p>Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the +East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the +millinery business in Elm Street.</p> + +<p>"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and +all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now +that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats +of her aunt. Not that I—but you know how it is."</p> + +<p>H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are +made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the +Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth +Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little +natural bewilderment.</p> + +<p>The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the +original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an +unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree +in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front +porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From +May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing +the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, +accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak +of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace +Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in +Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, +the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) +Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose +never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, +purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that +vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet +shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there +is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than +to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. +Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only +her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and +as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was +that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a +photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish +mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of +its fragile reticence and grace.</p> + +<p>It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to +ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, +as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she +walked—rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that +Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless +cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style +met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in +the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.</p> + +<p>That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as +inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage +badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the +twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. +Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a +skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years +ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked +about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section +of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon.</p> + +<p>"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full +of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."</p> + +<p>Chippewa—or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its +exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the +grass evenings after supper—laughed as it read this interview in the +Chippewa <i>Eagle</i>.</p> + +<p>"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow +pasture, up the river. It's full of natural—wait a minute—what +was?—oh, yeh, here it is—hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, +couldn't you die!"</p> + +<p>For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went +East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and +gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played +on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, +in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of +the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:</p> + +<p class="center">NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY.<br /> +<span class="smaller">H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.</span> +</p> + +<p>Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, +which read:</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="smaller">MISS SOPHY DECKER<br /> +Millinery</span> +</p> + +<p>Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had +always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional +hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself +in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat +trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little +bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, +awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still +stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, +came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy +cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five +years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the +old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and +transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of +green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, +and the Chippewa <i>Eagle</i> ran a half column twice a year describing her +spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, +and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the +superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her +city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:</p> + +<p>"This is awfully good this year."</p> + +<p>"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the +style—the line—you're paying for, not the material."</p> + +<p>"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it. +Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."</p> + +<p>When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the +mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it +in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated +eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, +slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples. +A little sigh of relieved suspense.</p> + +<p>"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because +you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have +a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I +proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this +needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."</p> + +<p>And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat +against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist +and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out +of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you +bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something +more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her +admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:</p> + +<p>"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. +You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat +and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."</p> + +<p>In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight +brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat +and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the +bedroom from the shoulders down.</p> + +<p>The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and +expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and +lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as +well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these +opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, +frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart +trade.</p> + +<p>"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. +They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell +them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, +or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to +cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it. +Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the +same idea."</p> + +<p>Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, +severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the +other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.</p> + +<p>At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques +completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No +one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol.</p> + +<p>"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody +feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a +fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to +be there."</p> + +<p>The two Baldwin children—Adele and Eugene—found Aunt Sophy's shop a +treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of +satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make +her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of +the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little +scavenger.</p> + +<p>"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt +Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."</p> + +<p>Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I +keep it," she said.</p> + +<p>When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say +'Poor Sophy'?"</p> + +<p>"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and +has always worked."</p> + +<p>Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're +poor?"</p> + +<p>"Well—yes—"</p> + +<p>"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, +skinny and rather foreign looking.</p> + +<p>The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very +tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora +of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his +mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a +girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And +that's such hard work."</p> + +<p>Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still +coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to +baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her +admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her +selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen +years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great +deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or +twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the +beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. +It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had +taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, +unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features +seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large +white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of +those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a +telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's +large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating +strength, courage, and a great human understanding.</p> + +<p>From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have +chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a +lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or +her husband. They all hated it.</p> + +<p>"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had +stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as +an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children. +She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech, +but shockingly true.</p> + +<p>Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, +had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of +pillows.</p> + +<p>"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way +you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with +all that lovely colour!"</p> + +<p>Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me +credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my +blood is in my cheeks."</p> + +<p>Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary +for success in that direction.</p> + +<p>"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's +a profession in itself—being a wife and mother."</p> + +<p>She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's +land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear +he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity +and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of +beauty.</p> + +<p>"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence. +"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a +fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing."</p> + +<p>The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The +girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more +immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods; +irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited +following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid +bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any +one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would +have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a +giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection +unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having +her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a +prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not +a step.</p> + +<p>Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of +affairs, tried to stop it.</p> + +<p>"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, +bluntly, to her sister.</p> + +<p>"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. +"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the +world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."</p> + +<p>"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's +nervousness—your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. +You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's +ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom +she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban +that Angie Hatton—"</p> + +<p>"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your +shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to +your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the +minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. +That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her +come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, +cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't +know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have +suffered. If you had brought two children into the world—"</p> + +<p>So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and +their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, +their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in +some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.</p> + +<p>"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How +can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."</p> + +<p>This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and +became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house—the old +frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was +something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, +that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin +house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the +Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best +residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly +furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary +chill to your heart.</p> + +<p>The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and +snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not +unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam, +and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head +trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray +patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him +for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have +around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls +would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and +cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, +especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from +Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the +best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or +Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original +design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a +small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory +down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her +invaluable.</p> + +<p>The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very +black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark +line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but +when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by +a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low. +She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking +something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream +she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being +pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the +sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. +But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.</p> + +<p>"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a +boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you +good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me +company."</p> + +<p>Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the +house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big +flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her +skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in +and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny +game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, +always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a +partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.</p> + +<p>It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly +into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging +for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms +clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came +in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was +thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite +twenty-one.</p> + +<p>"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a +leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look +comic.</p> + +<p>"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're +going to be married."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and +plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen—" she began.</p> + +<p>"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"</p> + +<p>Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's +face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That +isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is +when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you. +Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother, +pretty near."</p> + +<p>"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk +that way—Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to +really—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and +old.</p> + +<p>And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the +idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand—a +capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back +but the boy did not.</p> + +<p>"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will +you promise me? Will you?"</p> + +<p>"Are you going to tell Father?"</p> + +<p>"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. +No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to—You're not a +bad girl. It's just—he's never had—at home they never gave him a +chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over +then."</p> + +<p>Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.</p> + +<p>"Quick!"</p> + +<p>"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.</p> + +<p>"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, +sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open +the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."</p> + +<p>There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; +what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just +hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three +days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew +that her prayers were answered.</p> + +<p>Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite +twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely." +She was almost hysterical.</p> + +<p>Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt +Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said +nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora +took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her +cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the +recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing +up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the +floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted +curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and +crafty look.</p> + +<p>"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My +nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or +other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more +economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he +do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children—"</p> + +<p>H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at +the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her +teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.</p> + +<p>Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her +hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, +she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and +simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own +affairs, must have marked it.</p> + +<p>The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel +Oakley."</p> + +<p>Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had +been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and +Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his +strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding +his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had +had business relations as well as friendly ones.</p> + +<p>At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth +stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer +look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion +a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain.</p> + +<p>"When did he ask you?"</p> + +<p>"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will +be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France. +I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her +young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean."</p> + +<p>Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your +mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, +'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I <i>am</i> so faint ... all of a +sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...."</p> + +<p>Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks +later. They had a regular pre-war wedding—veil, flowers, dinner, and +all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The +girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile +twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.</p> + +<p>"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of +milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt +who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I +can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl.</p> + +<p>"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't +want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for? +Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."</p> + +<p>But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of +her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just +like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not +laugh.</p> + +<p>"Now look here, Delia. If you're—"</p> + +<p>But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's +all right," she said.</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she +said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for +you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty +close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. +It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."</p> + +<p>"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been +wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, +anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't +it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm +lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing +like me."</p> + +<p>"But your mother—"</p> + +<p>"Mother doesn't know a thing."</p> + +<p>Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed +enough for two.</p> + +<p>When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face +drawn and queer, Sophy knew.</p> + +<p>"How much?" she said.</p> + +<p>"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that—"</p> + +<p>"I thought Oakley—Adele said—"</p> + +<p>"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's +this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got +scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."</p> + +<p>"Speculating with it, were you?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."</p> + +<p>"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."</p> + +<p>"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, +and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the +money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the +children, anyway. They won't need it now."</p> + +<p>He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't +they?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."</p> + +<p>"Eugene?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and +presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this +money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand +these things but I can talk to you. It's like this—"</p> + +<p>"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it, +not for you, but for Flora, and Delia—and Eugene. Flora has lived such +a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you. +Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia +and Eugene are my children—were my children."</p> + +<p>When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was +getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's +lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats +and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother +suffers—poor Sophy."</p> + +<p>"Um," Baldwin grunted.</p> + +<p>When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War +Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora +had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they +thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything +to give comfort to the stricken two.</p> + +<p>"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit +there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel +something."</p> + +<p>"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.</p> + +<p>"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!"</p> + +<p>This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have +to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the +printed page. You must not skip this.</p> + +<div class="letter"> +<p class="center"> +AMERICAN RED CROSS<br /> +(CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE)<br /> +</p> + +<p>MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:</p> + +<p> I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by + the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H. + Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last + hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm + sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who + was privileged to be with her boy at the last.</p> + +<p> Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed + from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not + receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special + hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked + this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.</p> + +<p> Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who + examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as + he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a + few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and + strong as he was could not pull through.</p> + +<p> The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly + choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were + both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not + to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good + to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his + head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more + easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on + duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he + died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every + minute of that night and have never seen a finer character + than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had + several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each + one simply because of his great will power and fighting + spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, + "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll + only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during + the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he + could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I + had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness + even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was + going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all + his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He + seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in + bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll + fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually + thought we had won when on the third day....</p> + +<p> But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been + the mother of such a son....</p> + +<p> I am a Wisconsin girl—Madison. When this is over and I come + home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than + I can possibly write?</p> + +<p> MARIAN KING.</p></div> + +<p>It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped +for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in +the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora +and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then +Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. +Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning +a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat +quietly, waiting.</p> + +<p>There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora +broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she +spoke.</p> + +<p>"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I +do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor +Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the +married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, +Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know +how cruel life is."</p> + +<p>Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and +faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's +hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station. +Pretty good."</p> + +<p>Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced +her, the four—Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood +a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older +women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, +quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into +her eyes straight and sure.</p> + +<p>"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very +proud woman."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL" id="APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL" />APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL</h2> + + +<p>Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She +started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar +in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for +House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five +years she had hated it—being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five +years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled +up—the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of +What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)—Mrs. Brewster had gone +through the ceremony twice a year.</p> + +<p>Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the +yard—everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, +flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of +these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in +again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, +things had piled up higher and higher—useless things, sentimental +things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things +wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.</p> + +<p>And boxes—oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square +and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; +cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned +an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another +stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents +under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing +fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key +they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as +Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip +covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance.</p> + +<p>The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American +household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, +Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten +years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his +sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the +neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had +lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the +Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful +magazine covers that stare up at you from your table—young lady, hollow +chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan. +You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves +the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too +tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.</p> + +<p>Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, +ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a +palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and +slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, +were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at +Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless +heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of +citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and +to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and +Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up +above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the +afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster +place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen +closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, +as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be.</p> + +<p>That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them—physically, +that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they—in +tolerance and understanding and humanness—until now, as you talked with +them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental +chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins +and closets for all your worries and confidences.</p> + +<p>But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every +woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I +only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it +weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago," +complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood +floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, +æsthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as +clearly as if a sociologist had charted it.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the +crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a +junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon +portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each +of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink +cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the +labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a +soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes +behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky—and in fact the entire Brewster +household—had thought these massive atrocities the last word in +artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had +prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two +years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the +dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.</p> + +<p>Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with +them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel +and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the +entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks +as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a +nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping +porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in +the attic.</p> + +<p>One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. +Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, +cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. +Brewster's <i>bête noir</i> and plaything, tyrant and slave—the furnace. +"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: +"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn +mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know +what's got into her."</p> + +<p>By noon of this particular September day—a blue-and-gold Wisconsin +September day—Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of +the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly +again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you +understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little +necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might +have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and +left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, +no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that +it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this +relentless and expert crew.</p> + +<p>Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened +and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz' +Brewster?"</p> + +<p>"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well—I don't know. You can take that home +with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."</p> + +<p>Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the +funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more <i>passé</i>than a +last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the +tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the +plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had +worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—well, these +were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed +by unbrightened by covetousness.</p> + +<p>The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and +the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic. +Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen +and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's +relations' latest flagrancy.</p> + +<p>"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I +says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to <i>that</i>,' s's he, 'I +guess I got some—'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and +much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the +second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same +footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it +looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent +had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.</p> + +<p>Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished:</p> + +<p>"Pinky! Why—my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you—"</p> + +<p>"No; I didn't. I just thought I—Don't look so dazed, mummy—You're all +smudged, too—what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked +about the attic. "Why, mother! You're—you're house cleaning!" There was +a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in +June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor +trips into the country.</p> + +<p>"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming—Come +here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat +they're—why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just +got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."</p> + +<p>Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping +a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot +your old friends, have you?"</p> + +<p>"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other +woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's +house cleaning—I'd forgotten all about house cleaning—that there was +such a thing, I mean."</p> + +<p>"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely.</p> + +<p>Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor +clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, +crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included +and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the +kind. This is—this is an anachronism."</p> + +<p>"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be +cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned."</p> + +<p>They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended +the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting +each other.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the +protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him. +You'll hate the dinner—built around Miz Merz; you know—boiled. Well, +you know what a despot she is."</p> + +<p>It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch +Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes +and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, +mother!"</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at +Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of +Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift +movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly +at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled +it through the open doorway.</p> + +<p>"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off +your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way—unless that's +the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the +war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard. +"It's just that it seems so idiotic—your digging around in an attic in +this day and age! Why, it's—it's—" Pinky could express herself much +more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an +attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before—this +huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just +you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent +anger. "Do you <i>like</i> cleaning the attic?"</p> + +<p>"Why, no. I hate it."</p> + +<p>"Then why in the world—"</p> + +<p>"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in +New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your +room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming—the slip +covers—"</p> + +<p>"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She +succeeded in slurring it ludicrously.</p> + +<p>It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not +be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up +delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young +lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped +to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused +at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft +grays and blues.</p> + +<p>Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing +forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's +the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed.</p> + +<p>"I know it."</p> + +<p>The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the +situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable +streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up."</p> + +<p>"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to +meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I +didn't know there was any situation."</p> + +<p>"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of +mind."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her +voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that +tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter." +She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on. +Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a +bath, won't you, dear?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled—honestly?—on a day like this?"</p> + +<p>"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly.</p> + +<p>Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of +Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz' +Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter +flannels!"</p> + +<p>"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young +fist down in the water—spat!—so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and +floor impartially.</p> + +<p>Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea +Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of +the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a +queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her +throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin +winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner +where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!"</p> + +<p>His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red. +He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was +pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long +minute—close.</p> + +<p>"Need a shave, dad."</p> + +<p>"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off. +"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?"</p> + +<p>"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio—you +know—plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for +you."</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a +little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated +porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I +thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows, +and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a +change."</p> + +<p>Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about +that. Mother needs—"</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an +all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?" +She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner +so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want +to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's +everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky.</p> + +<p>But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly +sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese +soufflé, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream.</p> + +<p>"But, mother, you shouldn't have—" feebly.</p> + +<p>"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just +wanted to tease you."</p> + +<p>Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But +two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him +go, a speculative look in her eyes.</p> + +<p>She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, +clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the +centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged, +trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern +deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; +the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's +Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs."</p> + +<p>"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval! +Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs +and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for +the bowl in the dining room.</p> + +<p>Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night, +there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's +volcanic remarks.</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to +have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September +before they began firing up for the winter.</p> + +<p>"I'll go down with you," said Pinky.</p> + +<p>"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust."</p> + +<p>But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed, +after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy."</p> + +<p>And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling +process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of +the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two +men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea +Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his +sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came +forward.</p> + +<p>She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you."</p> + +<p>"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred."</p> + +<p>"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well."</p> + +<p>He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked +at her. "Huh? What d'you mean—isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open. +His eyes looked suddenly strained.</p> + +<p>"This house—it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at +supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself—like +other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And +you're another."</p> + +<p>"Me?" feebly.</p> + +<p>"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that +it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something—I don't know +what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills +for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true. +Wasn't it? Wasn't it?"</p> + +<p>"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was +terribly disturbed, "About mother—you said—"</p> + +<p>"You and she ought to go away this winter—not just for a trip, but to +stay. You"—she drew a long breath and made the plunge—"you ought to +give up the house."</p> + +<p>"Give up—"</p> + +<p>"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to +New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few +days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little +apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it—two +rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse."</p> + +<p>Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great +furnace room. "Oh, but listen—"</p> + +<p>"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't +as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the +theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and +concerts."</p> + +<p>He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady +diet—Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a +business to—"</p> + +<p>"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole +thing—or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it +wants its way.</p> + +<p>He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her +a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you +don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she +hated it. I asked about the attic—the cleaning and all—and she said +she hated it."</p> + +<p>"Did she say that, Paula?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked +pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to +himself, and thinking, thinking.</p> + +<p>Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, +through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's +bedroom door was open.</p> + +<p>A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the +plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in +the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?"</p> + +<p>"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the +bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. +Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face +and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. +Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't +well. He ought to go away."</p> + +<p>As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow. +As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked +suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father—but he isn't +sick. He—"</p> + +<p>"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That +furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred. +He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This +house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or +sell it, and come to New York?"</p> + +<p>"But we do. We did. Last winter—"</p> + +<p>"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little +two-room apartment in one of the new buildings—near my studio—and +relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a +rut—both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with +these Wisconsin winters—"</p> + +<p>"But California—we could go to California for—"</p> + +<p>"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled, +and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great +hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it."</p> + +<p>"Did he ever say so?"</p> + +<p>"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He—"</p> + +<p>Slow steps ascending the stairs—heavy, painful steps. The two women +listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words. +The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her +eyes anxious, tender.</p> + +<p>"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only—why, dad's +only fifty-eight."</p> + +<p>"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly.</p> + +<p>Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so +tired, aren't you?"</p> + +<p>Her father stood in the doorway.</p> + +<p>"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned +around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember."</p> + +<p>So Pinky went off to her own room (<i>sans</i> slp cov) and slept soundly, +dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform, +a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done.</p> + +<p>"<i>Au 'voir!</i> The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love +it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your +minds, remember."</p> + +<p>And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New +Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a +studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady +who turned out to be from Des Moines.</p> + +<p>When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their +inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being +the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as +black diamonds and twice as costly.</p> + +<p>Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and +said: "How many rooms did you say?"</p> + +<p>"Two—and a kitchenette, of course."</p> + +<p>"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for +that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum."</p> + +<p>But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very +impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the +best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no +matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the +prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it +was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon.</p> + +<p>"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded +Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder +they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you +feel like a book agent."</p> + +<p>He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster, +soothingly.</p> + +<p>They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and +(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known +as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in +red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray.</p> + +<p>Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, <i>we've</i> been very +comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager."</p> + +<p>"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster.</p> + +<p>"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good. +She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five. +She'll take two hundred."</p> + +<p>"You bet she will," growled Hosea.</p> + +<p>She answered the door—hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's +chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio +living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was +window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of +tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its +back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just +behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as +you've see it in the second-act library.</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty +ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he +remarked.</p> + +<p>But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was +saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You +see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six—eight, in fact."</p> + +<p>"Heaven forbid!" in fervent <i>sotto voce</i> from Father Brewster.</p> + +<p>"It's an enormous saving in time and labour."</p> + +<p>"The—kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She +skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really +handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a +part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was +dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. +And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the +miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the +Brewster's Winnebago china closet.</p> + +<p>"Why, how—how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>"Isn't it? So complete—and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks, +chops, everything right here. It's just play."</p> + +<p>A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the +tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are +the beds?"</p> + +<p>She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're +upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know."</p> + +<p>A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung +with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom—a +rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with +whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on +dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall.</p> + +<p>They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for +Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great +deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and +let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, <i>à la</i> Juliet, +having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume +consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's +little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the +Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, +the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky +legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter.</p> + +<p>After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room +apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible +loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room +house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the +winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a +light-heartedness that neither of them felt.</p> + +<p>They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the +street noises of New York came up to them—a loose chain flapping +against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth +Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a +motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down.</p> + +<p>She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious +gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!</p> + +<p>He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at +home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!</p> + +<p>Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?"</p> + +<p>"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off."</p> + +<p>"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though. +Great!"</p> + +<p>"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily.</p> + +<p>They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in +Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more +doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had +learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain. +Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all +over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the +happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known +that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious +bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding.</p> + +<p>When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh, +take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster +used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can +start the eggs."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster +never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet +By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of +jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He +deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail +off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, +heavily, as though it were a physical weight.</p> + +<p>Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!</p> + +<p>"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say.</p> + +<p>"Time of my life, father."</p> + +<p>She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which +no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less +frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. +Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for +her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, +slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture +those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she +had talked to five or six of them.</p> + +<p>She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he +confided, "they're all from Wisconsin—or approximately; Michigan, and +Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one +New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em."</p> + +<p>"Which one?"</p> + +<p>"That kind of plain little one over there—sensible looking, with the +blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, +but she doesn't live here—that is, not in the city. Lives in some place +in the country, in a house."</p> + +<p>A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to +talk to her, Hosey. Take me over."</p> + +<p>She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the +quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's +fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you +Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. +Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say—live. And then the +children—it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love +it—oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a +tiny apartment, with a kitchenette—"</p> + +<p>The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But +she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still +wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the +slavery of it. That—that deceitful, lying kitchenette."</p> + +<p>This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to—really talked +to—since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At +first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on +Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed +and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a +mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than +women.</p> + +<p>The clerks in the shops, too—they were so remote, so contemptuous. When +she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say: +"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. +Let's see, you've had it two—three years this spring? My land! Let me +show you our new taupes."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine +individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was +startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's +simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two—perhaps +two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.</p> + +<p>"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said.</p> + +<p>"Me? No."</p> + +<p>"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't."</p> + +<p>"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't +they? Most of 'em?"</p> + +<p>"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West—Iowa an' Californy an' +around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they +come from. I dunno."</p> + +<p>Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. +He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, +buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, +with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white +linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his +square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his +baggy trousers. It was something inside him—something he lacked, he +thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed +that they did not.</p> + +<p>"Enjoying yourself, Milly?"</p> + +<p>"I should say I am, father."</p> + +<p>"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?"</p> + +<p>"It's play."</p> + +<p>She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen +pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: +apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; +sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, +that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one +combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.</p> + +<p>"Chops taste good, Hosey?"</p> + +<p>"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out +to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."</p> + +<p>"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"</p> + +<p>"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store +kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream +whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily +with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even +known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used +to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price +of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin +cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market +before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with +tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the +buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.</p> + +<p>Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had +known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, +naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg +acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin +farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a +ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had +sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on +Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out +on the porch early, very early summer mornings.</p> + +<p>You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant +there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he +had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its +black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to +struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had +thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.</p> + +<p>"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just +seemed to kind of pine away."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>It was one morning in April—one soft, golden April morning—when this +memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market. +Something about the place—the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of +eggs, the butter, the cheese—had brought such a surge of homesickness +over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway +he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face +was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung +loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.</p> + +<p>"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I—"</p> + +<p>He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into +the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A +great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.</p> + +<p>The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The +glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have +gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged +corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be +sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, +fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim +little hall.</p> + +<p>A barked shin. A good, round oath.</p> + +<p>"Hosey! What's the matter? What—" She came running to him. She led him +into the bright front room.</p> + +<p>"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the +door. What the—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I +didn't know—"</p> + +<p>Something in her voice—he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up +at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her +head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves +were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a +promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.</p> + +<p>"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to +get away from. If Pinky—"</p> + +<p>"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a +letter—a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She +asked if I'd go to the hall closet—the one she reserved for her own +things, you know—and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, +and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and—look!"</p> + +<p>Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in +the closet. Boxes—pasteboard boxes—each one bearing a cryptic +pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; +"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a +little air of defiance. "It—I don't know—it made me—not homesick, +Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but—well, I guess I'm not the only woman +with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman—she came +to the door with her hat on, and yet—"</p> + +<p>Truth—blinding, white-hot truth—burst in upon him. "Mother," he +said—and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert—"mother, let's go +home."</p> + +<p>Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?"</p> + +<p>"Now."</p> + +<p>"But, Hosey! Pinky—this flat—until June—"</p> + +<p>"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this—this +make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's +go home, mother. Let's go home—and breathe."</p> + +<p>In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April—snow or slush. The +Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene +Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of +daisies.</p> + +<p>At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head +out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?"</p> + +<p>They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. +Brewster leaned back without comment.</p> + +<p>Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug +Hengel.</p> + +<p>"Yep."</p> + +<p>"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long."</p> + +<p>"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon—the big piece. And +send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll +take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right."</p> + +<p>It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of +his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the +restaurant fare of the past six months.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with +an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as +they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very +still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. +The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then +Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain +with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He +took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide +and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief.</p> + +<p>"Welcome home! Home!"</p> + +<p>She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks! +Huge!"</p> + +<p>"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to +library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No +wonder it grins and throws out its arms."</p> + +<p>They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the +cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and +shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his +stubby black pipe.</p> + +<p>"Hosey!"—from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of +preserves when you come."</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"Can of preserves."</p> + +<p>"What kind?"</p> + +<p>"Any kind you like."</p> + +<p>"Can I have two kinds?"</p> + +<p>He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put +them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands +together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now. +That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does. +Is the house getting warmer?"</p> + +<p>He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was +back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out +the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the +tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why—"</p> + +<p>"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and +slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm +going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the +table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've +cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I +don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your +overalls. Come on."</p> + +<p>He cut into the steak—a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat +it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, +ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness +and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them.</p> + +<p>The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly.</p> + +<p>"Let me go, Milly."</p> + +<p>"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're—"</p> + +<p>He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She +says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. +She—Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time +for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, +Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="OLD_LADY_MANDLE" id="OLD_LADY_MANDLE" />OLD LADY MANDLE</h2> + + +<p>Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room +flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an +ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at +cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more +artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg +sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, +admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. +Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And +the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a +spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and +wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an +admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she +acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no +proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never +spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son +Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were +delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and +sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the +stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For +they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies +could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons +and their sons' wives.</p> + +<p>Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs. +Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row, +on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon +coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of +them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her +voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo.</p> + +<p>My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no +thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine +about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It +may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his +thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form +a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old +mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been +hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked +over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and +regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with +dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This +had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the +purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the +iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She +possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins +of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she +essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now! +None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night."</p> + +<p>When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her +two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first +and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of +lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her +friends.</p> + +<p>"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my +old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo."</p> + +<p>In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk +together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in +pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent +Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her +pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon +which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her +cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that +she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was +a spoiled old lady.</p> + +<p>At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her +neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box +in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old +frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No +fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds +that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long +hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and +soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed, +dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black +silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three +friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty +apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians, +guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and +craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink +scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, +for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared +clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's +exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were +worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They +were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, +scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at +bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle +triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three +was imitation.</p> + +<p>So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling +their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into +the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They +represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they +themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its +apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the +roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers +over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none +of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over +her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a +man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did +not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama, +undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they +derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the +modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that +this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on +four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired +four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path.</p> + +<p>Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They +seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, +and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her +voice was unctuous with pride.</p> + +<p>"My son's wife—" one of the three would begin. There was something +terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the +title.</p> + +<p>"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if +I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to +depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead."</p> + +<p>"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked +tones from Mrs. Mandle.</p> + +<p>"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than +nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see +enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it +all."</p> + +<p>A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do +you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?"</p> + +<p>More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an +Old People's Home as a refuge. Then:</p> + +<p>"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to +housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he +says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a +restaurant—well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You +couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'"</p> + +<p>Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll +marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly +streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always +grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a +marvel of perfection.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries +late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, +either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in +his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait."</p> + +<p>"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a +trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let +a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them +like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time."</p> + +<p>The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her +fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she +made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son +Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I +won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I +guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I +said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he +laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass +me another, Ma'."</p> + +<p>"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser.</p> + +<p>"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud."</p> + +<p>"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a—"</p> + +<p>"He's just like a man of twenty-five—only worse."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son +Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?"</p> + +<p>They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the +park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They +never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or +how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely +fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.</p> + +<p>Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She +had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, +healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man +twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life +together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could +call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, +according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, +the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's +miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving +necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the +spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never +quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of +heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty +became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned +matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and +linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.</p> + +<p>Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business. +He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, +documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when +a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was +none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for +masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, +stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way +they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched +against the father and daughter.</p> + +<p>It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in +a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when +the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping +Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real +estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, +clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands +more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a +black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down +figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of +terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of +the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a +curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching +the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she +found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's +sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the +wake of the devastating panic.</p> + +<p>Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a +household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen +he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a +stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a +boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and +responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From +his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material +values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never +attained her iron indomitability.</p> + +<p>It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most +modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and +take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china +houses.</p> + +<p>The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to +get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her."</p> + +<p>"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said.</p> + +<p>Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy—or +as happy as she knows how to be—she'll never come back. That's what I +want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along."</p> + +<p>They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of +economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the +acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the +impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, +long-suffering, subdued—and in need of a start. He was. They managed a +very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. +Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented +incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. +Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had +expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the +last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were +right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement +colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.</p> + +<p>The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound +steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A +new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.</p> + +<p>Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle +side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them +a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a +man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, +but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest +against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the +cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) +in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar +smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play +that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would +tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, +in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and +son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo +kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she +looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat +her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough +thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill +that her husband's withered kisses had never given her.</p> + +<p>Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a +comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit +of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady +Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend +freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his +savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a +time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She +and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. +When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma +Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch +of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his +money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household +capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to +protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony.</p> + +<p>"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst +tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than +the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!"</p> + +<p>She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next +day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo +spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand +and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed +contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo +regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, +articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with +age, shrewd though she naturally was.</p> + +<p>It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an +evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full +hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. +"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing +I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a +chicken."</p> + +<p>"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a +musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next +day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. +Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old +lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his +becoming what she called fast.</p> + +<p>"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman +like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a +dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick.</p> + +<p>So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South +Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life.</p> + +<p>And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does.</p> + +<p>Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might +have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She +remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken +admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of +business.</p> + +<p>"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like +it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at +rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss. +Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she +turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for +novelties."</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. +Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner. +Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal, +too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly +during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of +angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The +following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in +Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. +Usually he praised this dish, or that.</p> + +<p>"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?"</p> + +<p>"'S all right." And declined a second piece.</p> + +<p>The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped +his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before +her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?"</p> + +<p>"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about +her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll +love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. +Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look +so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?"</p> + +<p>"But who—?"</p> + +<p>"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and +strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home +an—'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says—"</p> + +<p>Ad lib.</p> + +<p>They were married the following month.</p> + +<p>Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment +farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her +mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of +grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, +miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were +swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna, +with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her +gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the +afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat +Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never +failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day +scrubber.</p> + +<p>But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, +voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, +bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd +business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship.</p> + +<p>He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany +front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. +She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. +Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a +concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for +its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her +shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair +gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was +clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was +always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would +emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles +were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed +when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her +scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look +as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé.</p> + +<p>"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose +daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that +she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her +knowledge.</p> + +<p>"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right."</p> + +<p>He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove +it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in +a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her +own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom +reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a +fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and +on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that +its utilitarian dial was almost lost.</p> + +<p>It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and +she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes +up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean +things out on the bed—fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted +to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate +handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown—hot, +fagged, sticky—she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour +so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to +eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool, +interested, sweet-smelling.</p> + +<p>When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More +than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long +in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered +that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could +never resent it.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle's reign was over.</p> + +<p>To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied +magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, +but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things +different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears +caught the familiar phrase.</p> + +<p>"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been +boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of +the way. Don't I know!"</p> + +<p>"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is +no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure +is welcome."</p> + +<p>But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow +pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew. +She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of +ashes.</p> + +<p>Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in +his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that +made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as +bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree +with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her +provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. +She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo +agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma +Mandle fought every ounce of it.</p> + +<p>"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I +never heard of such a thing. Fads!"</p> + +<p>But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental +relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He +only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother +had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, +tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed +miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a +certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf +clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just +the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it +the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among +a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying +up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, +crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he +would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. +Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she +had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face +and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but +she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the +pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote +corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about +not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at +breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the +milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that +had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to +say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now +it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and +Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines.</p> + +<p>If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life +of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told +you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she +would have denied it, furiously. But both were true.</p> + +<p>When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well.</p> + +<p>"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," +she would say, unreasonably.</p> + +<p>"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?"</p> + +<p>If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked.</p> + +<p>Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, +well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat +but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?"</p> + +<p>"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked +over."</p> + +<p>"Oh—to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy."</p> + +<p>In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the +marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said. +"This is your household now."</p> + +<p>But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen +table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a +head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump +chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with +meaning.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of +her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the +fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and +she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the +result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon +parties at the homes of married women of her own age and +station—pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too +much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery +biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes +of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a +heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing.</p> + +<p>"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what +we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked +teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed +her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the +sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her +clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent +life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing +her face had not coarsened its texture.</p> + +<p>Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between +the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about +cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted +after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him +about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about +Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always +treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at +ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling +of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her +house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts +to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only +thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know +that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which +caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should +not do.</p> + +<p>Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the +theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became +marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man.</p> + +<p>"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say.</p> + +<p>"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some +night life."</p> + +<p>"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. +You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along."</p> + +<p>That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the +end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper +would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill +talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented +it.</p> + +<p>Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the +vaguely suspicious three.</p> + +<p>Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good +deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically +precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long +passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and +flowers.</p> + +<p>Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they +liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier +one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for +hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture +absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of +Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression.</p> + +<p>A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own +good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating +heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice +it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him +mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into +his ear.</p> + +<p>"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't +have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old +that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't +enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't +enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week."</p> + +<p>An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would +come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining +point, goaded by much repetition.</p> + +<p>The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a +simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from +mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a +time is all that any man can handle successfully.</p> + +<p>"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling. +Why can't you get along."</p> + +<p>One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a +decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black +lace."</p> + +<p>Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to +die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear +mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think +of me the way I was when I was alive."</p> + +<p>The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. +Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her +temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma +Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation, +denial; vituperation, retort.</p> + +<p>"You'll be happy when I'm gone."</p> + +<p>"If I am it's your fault."</p> + +<p>"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They +don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha—"</p> + +<p>"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever +saw."</p> + +<p>And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at +pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's +got into you two women?"</p> + +<p>It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house, +hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June +night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was +even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars +streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline +blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in +front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded +in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic +bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time, +with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She +came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and +agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this +you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How +right they were—Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless. +Unconsidered. In the way.</p> + +<p>By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body +lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how +worried Hugo had looked....</p> + +<p>Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward +home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted +scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely +fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in +duration.</p> + +<p>She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The +place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of +someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again. +The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She +crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs.</p> + +<p>"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it +wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd—"</p> + +<p>"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's +an old lady—"</p> + +<p>"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year +and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any +reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!"</p> + +<p>"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick."</p> + +<p>Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing +endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through +the tears.</p> + +<p>"No, I'm not hysterical. I—it just struck me funny. I was just +wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, +maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love +them too much we really harm them. I suppose—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all +worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you +cry before."</p> + +<p>"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right. +I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past +and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to +her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, +maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you."</p> + +<p>Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband +belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by +accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and +deliberately."</p> + +<p>But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If +it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just +now, too, when you're so worried about business."</p> + +<p>"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got +to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the +French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year. +If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood +the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above +water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now."</p> + +<p>"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself +sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the +business—"</p> + +<p>"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see."</p> + +<p>The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out +alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd +better—"</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as +though she had just come in.</p> + +<p>"That you, Ma?" called Hugo.</p> + +<p>He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic +little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began +to worry about you."</p> + +<p>"I'm all right. I'm going to bed."</p> + +<p>He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going +over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma."</p> + +<p>Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed +behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled +bravely.</p> + +<p>"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off."</p> + +<p>But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, +you two."</p> + +<p>That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. +Something new, something gentle, something wise.</p> + +<p>She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and +hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into +bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had +lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be +seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to +crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would +express the meaning of life—this she had never tried to do. She could +not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her +mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child +to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life. +She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she +sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in +a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They +called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it +to-morrow—Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday +Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a +moth get into her husband's winter suit.</p> + +<p>"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never. +But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my +son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house."</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She +forgets. We all forget."</p> + +<p>It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from +the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. +Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare +feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a +line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. +With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's +pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the +light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again.</p> + +<p>She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the +blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her +head ... pounding....</p> + +<p>At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was +his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he +whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully +by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful +awkwardness up the hall again.</p> + +<p>"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on +a scorcher like this."</p> + +<p>Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said. +She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper +pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read +it.</p> + +<p>"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than +half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.</p> + +<p>"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in +the world."</p> + +<p>A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished +reading them.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH" id="YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH" />YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH</h2> + + +<p>When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi +Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the +personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in +newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short +story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised +as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and +been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the +background. You can't see the heavens for the stars.</p> + +<p>Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no +introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been +described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on +Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though +quoted, thus:</p> + +<p>"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a +genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, +artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very +force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the +eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a +comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to +a vice."</p> + +<p>Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine +diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, +"It's scarlet! No—it's blue! No—rose!—orange!—lilac!—no—"</p> + +<p>That was Sid Hahn.</p> + +<p>I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his +likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the +theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and +top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black +cigar—unlighted—in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone +interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew +all about Sid Hahn—and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those +middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or +something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the +profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his +having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, +indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally +controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing +in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It +had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized +in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, +at that time, at the zenith of his career—managing, writing, directing, +producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy +with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid +Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever +said to himself in so many words:</p> + +<p>"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let +anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to +be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be +selfish."</p> + +<p>Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in +the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination +running through the whole fibre of his being could have been +crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.</p> + +<p>By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than +Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them +even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood +behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But +taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of +the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.</p> + +<p>He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early +love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved +what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as +though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. +Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by +people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular +east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with +make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play +with real ones, like God. But always kind.</p> + +<p>No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn +appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired +ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war +horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit +there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and +inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense +and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket +of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It +smells!"</p> + +<p>Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from +years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly +afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had +thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as +they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the +treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.</p> + +<p>It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the +famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and +swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when +she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he +regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that +time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, +very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as +a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop +rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think +of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well."</p> + +<p>Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in +French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?"</p> + +<p>"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is +a woman-hater."</p> + +<p>"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!"</p> + +<p>"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. +They don't need to know a language to understand it."</p> + +<p>"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz +course, was it?"</p> + +<p>Wallie Ascher had grinned—that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen +face. "No. I learned that in another school."</p> + +<p>Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might +almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin +Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to +Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre—if having a +tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be +said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.</p> + +<p>He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed +him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs +suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of +office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very +firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, +how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those +expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring +precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable +high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up—up—up he would go, +while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high +note—took it easily, insouciantly—held it, trilled it, tossed it.</p> + +<p>"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap—Miss Feldman of the outer +office typewriter—"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling +and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a—a—"</p> + +<p>"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.</p> + +<p>Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?"</p> + +<p>Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your +age, you are."</p> + +<p>"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly.</p> + +<p>There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He +probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he +whistled—brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, +too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from +another, and doesn't to this day.</p> + +<p>At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, +he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance +to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room +(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was +the dream: By the time he was—well, long before he was thirty—he would +have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect +servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for +four—or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot +plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be +cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one—when, +in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and +wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he +would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly +to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the +firelight with just one lamp glowing softly—almost sombrely—at the +side of the piano (grand).</p> + +<p>His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing +of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the +office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn +called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie. +From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a +sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he +was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in +rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, +lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but +Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit +it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.</p> + +<p>He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November +evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie +might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of +Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat +over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold +drizzle of the November evening.</p> + +<p>Hahn's apartment—he lived alone—was in the early fifties, off Fifth +Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to +which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's +errand.</p> + +<p>It was Saki—or Saki's equivalent—who opened the door. A white-coated, +soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. +Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.</p> + +<p>"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it."</p> + +<p>"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly.</p> + +<p>"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?"</p> + +<p>"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders.</p> + +<p>"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want—"</p> + +<p>Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at +his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room +beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but +something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, +and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve.</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with +those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes—the kindest +eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He +glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing +the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He +had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, +the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he +could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own +inability to reproduce it.</p> + +<p>The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.</p> + +<p>"God, I wish I could play!"</p> + +<p>"Helps a lot."</p> + +<p>"You play?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up."</p> + +<p>"Compose, you mean?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Play one of those."</p> + +<p>So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good +Night—Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even +published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for +Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the +success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was +sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky +Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long +been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam +and glow in the lamplight.</p> + +<p>When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're +you going to do with it?"</p> + +<p>"With what?"</p> + +<p>"With what you've got. You know."</p> + +<p>Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going +to—I'm going to do a lot with it."</p> + +<p>"Yeh, but how?"</p> + +<p>Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a +long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time. +And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to +be selfish ..."</p> + +<p>As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the +doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what +he had meant to say.</p> + +<p>"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I—" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was +too much.</p> + +<p>"Better."</p> + +<p>They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's +encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, +Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music—neither of them +knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an +intoxicant and a stimulant.</p> + +<p>"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more. +More."</p> + +<p>"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then, +immediately, "No, of course not."</p> + +<p>"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a +baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't +the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a +baby—but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!"</p> + +<p>"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each +other, this ill-assorted pair.</p> + +<p>It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the +play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big +room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One +lamp glowed softly—almost sombrely.</p> + +<p>As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming +out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!"</p> + +<p>"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it."</p> + +<p>"That's what they all say"—grimly—"<i>after</i> they've got it."</p> + +<p>The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was +now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into +earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!"</p> + +<p>"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you +know if you're right."</p> + +<p>In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his +official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort +of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the +theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this +no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. +There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, +for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when +she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power +to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which +gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the +ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority.</p> + +<p>When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on +one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped +down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign +stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise +rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on +the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in +tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely +repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, +perhaps, but characteristic.</p> + +<div class="letter"><p>MR. SID. HAHN,<br /> + Hotel Savoy,<br /> + London,<br /> + England.</p> + +<p> It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of + a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to + five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical + creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful + investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any + is extinct.</p> + +<p class="signature">WALLIE.</p></div> + +<p>This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions, +went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised, +wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days +later.</p> + +<p>Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of +magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous +women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and +Cigány music, and cafés and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low +and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely +on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow).</p> + +<p>It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then +a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier.</p> + +<p>Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the +manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long +ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound.</p> + +<p>"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've +found something big!"</p> + +<p>Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good +as that."</p> + +<p>"Play! It isn't a play."</p> + +<p>"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned +good! You don't mean to tell me—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good—or will be when you get through +with it."</p> + +<p>"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with +two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk +hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a +boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe.</p> + +<p>"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?"</p> + +<p>"Her name's Mizzi."</p> + +<p>"Mizzi what?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She—"</p> + +<p>"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and +real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine."</p> + +<p>But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings."</p> + +<p>"Beautiful, is she?"</p> + +<p>"No, not particularly. No."</p> + +<p>"Wonderful voice, h'm?"</p> + +<p>"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful."</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill +circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry +bricks!"</p> + +<p>"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head +and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides—"</p> + +<p>But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If +I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway. +You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick."</p> + +<p>Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You +wait. You'll see."</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep +so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was +unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had +decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera), +it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the +negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first +train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you. +You've got to see her."</p> + +<p>Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs +along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the +royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the +monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve +and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed, +daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers +which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest +men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of +the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the +river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new +building being erected across the way. It was on this building that +Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier.</p> + +<p>The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a +million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells, +running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two +American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women +were employed was dreadful and incredible.</p> + +<p>Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a +little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After +they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before."</p> + +<p>By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an +indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled +him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he +met Mizzi.</p> + +<p>They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive. +Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question.</p> + +<p>Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of +the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking +stuff for them. The women do that."</p> + +<p>And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the +women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up +one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a +musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some +seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing +across the river. Their hands were purple.</p> + +<p>"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But +I know it, anyway."</p> + +<p>Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk +and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because +they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now. +With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But +then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a +personality when he saw it.</p> + +<p>Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called +it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very +straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach +held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a +little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a +pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit.</p> + +<p>"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie.</p> + +<p>Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture. +She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between +seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth +pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its +two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high +in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed +deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it. +Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just +accomplished the gymnastic feat.</p> + +<p>"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage +is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly."</p> + +<p>A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were +abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew +chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men +followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore +overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food—very +small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and +sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the +whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished.</p> + +<p>"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward +Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from +her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise, +over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks +red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic.</p> + +<p>She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book +things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and +white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the +neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear +voice.</p> + +<p>"What's that?" asked Hahn.</p> + +<p>"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't +speak German, did you know that? They hate it."</p> + +<p>The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves +comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of +anticipation.</p> + +<p>"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same +every day."</p> + +<p>Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of +the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of +the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like +this:</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span>A hundred geese in a row<br /></span> +<span>Going into the coop.<br /></span> +<span>At the head of the procession<br /></span> +<span>A stick over his shoulder—<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly +would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience +gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot +Time":</p> + + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span>When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling,<br /></span> +<span>All join round and sweetly you must sing<br /></span> +<span>And when the words am through in the chorus all join in<br /></span> +<span>There'll be a <i>hot time</i><br /></span> +<span>In the <i>old town</i><br /></span> +<span>To-night.<br /></span> +<span class="i6">My<br /></span> +<span class="i7">Ba-<br /></span> +<span class="i9">By.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still +think it's our national anthem.</p> + +<p>When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped +their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual +beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and +flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in +a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive +pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality +that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember.</p> + +<p>There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted +description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call +it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these +things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it +is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it.</p> + +<p>So now he said, quietly, "She's got it."</p> + +<p>"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne +ever had. A year of training and some clothes—"</p> + +<p>"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself."</p> + +<p>"I'm sorry," stiffly.</p> + +<p>But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I +like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out +anything?"</p> + +<p>"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. +Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's +Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father—nobody +knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible +language in the world—Hungarian. They'll stick a <i>b</i> next to a <i>k</i> and +follow it up with a <i>z</i> and put an accent mark over the whole business +and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!"</p> + +<p>"What?" said Hahn, obligingly.</p> + +<p>"On her way she had to cross the big square—the one they call Gisela +Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's—"</p> + +<p>"What's Gerbeaud's?"</p> + +<p>"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and +guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes—and say! It isn't like our +pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous +stuff, this is!"</p> + +<p>After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All +right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. +Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?"</p> + +<p>"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside. +There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You +know—the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue. +There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in +that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of +the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I +waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her—I knew she couldn't +any more than knock me down—and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?' +She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an +Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I +had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she +opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice +of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an +imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of +stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then +they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up +dashed an equipage—you couldn't possibly call it anything less—with +flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside +the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old +frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and +her name is Josefa."</p> + +<p>"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I +don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And +what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?"</p> + +<p>"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the +Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot +of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice +a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always +manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and +see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I +couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just +this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and +she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she +said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh."</p> + +<p>"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously.</p> + +<p>And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know +it.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition +seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse, +cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman +of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic. +No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the +first—he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades.</p> + +<p>You know she wasn't—and isn't—a beauty, even in that portrait of her +by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on +either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose +very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then +there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for +it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for +pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest."</p> + +<p>While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged +woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook, +she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she +would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement +for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his +cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the +peasant women do it—the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife +cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she +would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing +the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent +figure.</p> + +<p>With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that +some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread +upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her +mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory.</p> + +<p>"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my +girl," Sid Hahn had said.</p> + +<p>She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest—I will not eat—I will not +sleep—I will not love—until I have it."</p> + +<p>Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity.</p> + +<p>"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought +of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had +hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them, +very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though +neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young +faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness.</p> + +<p>Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff—you know—complexes +and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know +to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which +they considered desirable.</p> + +<p>He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi, +remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He +watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on +his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his +own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving +himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world—the one thing he +wanted more than he had ever wanted anything.</p> + +<p>He decided that Destiny—a ponderous, slow-moving creature at +best—needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all +effective plans are.</p> + +<p>Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was +amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became +in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of +audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She +took it to her breast. She romped with it.</p> + +<p>He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for +Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office.</p> + +<p>"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some +little thing might be wrong—you know how they are. And all the rest +would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world—when they like +you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two +weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl +has got more real genius than any woman since—since Bernhardt in her +prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And +it'll <i>be</i> acting."</p> + +<p>"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly.</p> + +<p>"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll +probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago +I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't +get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do +something for me?"</p> + +<p>"Sure."</p> + +<p>"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The +Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. +You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your +friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he +likes to hear you play."</p> + +<p>He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship +that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his +books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion.</p> + +<p>Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the +sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it. +Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the +Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as +any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish +comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal +though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi +stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, +just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a +scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the +steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a +rosy line of splendour.</p> + +<p>The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the +play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door +closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out +after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, +and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, +and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came +again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and +profitless, without nourishment or sweetness.</p> + +<p>The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, +without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New +York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his +round, ugly face in at the opening.</p> + +<p>"Let's surprise Wallie," he said.</p> + +<p>"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly.</p> + +<p>"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being +home for dinner. Unless you're too tired."</p> + +<p>"I'm not tired."</p> + +<p>The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a +quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, +lamp-lighted room.</p> + +<p>Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a +purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers' +windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather +distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They +said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face!</p> + +<p>"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!"</p> + +<p>"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello."</p> + +<p>Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi."</p> + +<p>"Hello," said Mizzi.</p> + +<p>"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn.</p> + +<p>They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again.</p> + +<p>Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly +together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on +the back. "How'd you like it—the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? +H'm?"</p> + +<p>"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice."</p> + +<p>"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure."</p> + +<p>"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently.</p> + +<p>"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English.</p> + +<p>At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you! +I'll—I'll be glad to take you."</p> + +<p>Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the +three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when +it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to +be home."</p> + +<p>Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go, +suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around. +Hahn—he had to stand on tiptoe to do it—kissed her once on the mouth, +hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie +about the red carpet," he said.</p> + +<p>"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets."</p> + +<p>Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left. +There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and +See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous.</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small, +very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the +piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing +the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a +little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it +atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white +keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked +up. His cheeks were wet with tears.</p> + +<p>"God! I wish I could play!" he said.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="LONG_DISTANCE" id="LONG_DISTANCE" />LONG DISTANCE</h2> + + +<p>Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was +mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny +wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the +plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old.</p> + +<p>You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. +Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any +wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about +him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick +to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to +his task, his surroundings, and his attitude.</p> + +<p>Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that +of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working +position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous +perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which +are likely to trick you in an emergency.</p> + +<p>Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the +absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like +Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all +greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those +rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is +complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds +similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular +English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9.</p> + +<p>The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black +paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him +to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the +other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet +went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he +painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the +whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the +index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently +from his strong hands.</p> + +<p>"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said.</p> + +<p>Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell."</p> + +<p>Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden +chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter +bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, +with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as +A.E.F. and Co. 11.</p> + +<p>"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But +Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?"</p> + +<p>"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One."</p> + +<p>Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began +to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the +centuries-old English garden.</p> + +<p>It marked an epoch in Chet's life—that letter. But before we can +appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days.</p> + +<p>Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men +whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could +shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his +pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was +his pleasure—and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's +gangs the world over—to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any +passing petticoat that caught his fancy.</p> + +<p>Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, +protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the +law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of +their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street +below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"</p> + +<p>There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of +beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt +as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's +has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with +his work—a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or +a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and +called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks +a little higher.</p> + +<p>But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on +the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down +from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia +Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, +except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more +remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to +be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't.</p> + +<p>So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and +I'll be down."</p> + +<p>Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the +streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which +would make them border on the red.</p> + +<p>"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you +had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like +that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're +safe up there."</p> + +<p>The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs +were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine +of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and +stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One +ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he +said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish +heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. +Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing +slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet +straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes +wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her +hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And +as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, +looking after her.</p> + +<p>Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing +at the foot of the pole, waiting.</p> + +<p>They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet +Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot +somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that +same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's +costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) +you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began.</p> + +<p>Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet +was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever +indiscernible among its tender foliage.</p> + +<p>Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss +Kate, and the letter.</p> + +<p>His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war +surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine +of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing—they put it down +under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English +garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the +shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead +chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the +doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the +memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or +weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers—the fingers that +had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days.</p> + +<p>"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the +nerve specialist. "Time may do it—but I doubt it. Sometimes just a +word—the right word—will set the thing in motion again. Does he get +any letters?"</p> + +<p>"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet +about—about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that +his leg is healed and she wonders—"</p> + +<p>That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked +Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his +eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she +began to read:</p> + +<div class="letter"><p>Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it + rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than + any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're + reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place + takes the prize.</p> + +<p> I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet + darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and + nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something + you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the + leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference + with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how + bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any + features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's + happened to the outside of you, they can't change your + insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that + day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece + of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to + be slapped, God bless the boy in you—</p></div> + +<p>A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball +was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand.</p> + +<p>"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.</p> + +<p>Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy +and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood."</p> + +<p>"What'm I doin' with it?"</p> + +<p>"You've just finished painting it."</p> + +<p>Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, +struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement +he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a +little.</p> + +<p>"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, +beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't—"</p> + +<p>But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. +She was registering joy—pure joy.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG" id="UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG" />UN MORSO DOO PANG</h2> + + +<p>When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, +in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that +Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a +casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as +unemotionally as a weather bulletin.</p> + +<p>Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert +heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the +Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her +hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where +shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no +answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the +pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: +"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?"</p> + +<p>And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was +kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing +while my iron was on."</p> + +<p>At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink +georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to +texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so +reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very +brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve +the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top; +finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it.</p> + +<p>As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would +appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young +thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping +criticism.</p> + +<p>"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt +hem.</p> + +<p>Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that +lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I +just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto +and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River +Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at +the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp +and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch +factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing +this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as +unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose +family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy, +summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very +hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town +used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. +Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and +zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin—materials +that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for +party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were +showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that +was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to +Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.</p> + +<p>Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen +door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, +following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, +caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a +water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth +curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement +department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the +corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was +shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the +room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman +thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could +stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not +be runnin' the streets every night."</p> + +<p>"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."</p> + +<p>And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in +families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; +affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the +Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, +loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame +house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and +garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged +between her parents.</p> + +<p>Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's +evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin' +downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to +stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed +your hair."</p> + +<p>Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back +porch—she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at +half-past six to go to work.</p> + +<p>Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the +limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. +She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some +errand or other—to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of +half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a +damp tea towel.</p> + +<p>"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"</p> + +<p>"No."</p> + +<p>"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't +you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, +h'm?"</p> + +<p>"What for?"—listlessly.</p> + +<p>"What for! What does anybody go out for!"</p> + +<p>"I don't know."</p> + +<p>If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might +have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong +upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy: +"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the +last fella left in the world."</p> + +<p>A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He +is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe +Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see +if I can't make a hit with one of them."</p> + +<p>She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie +Golden's world.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the +Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the +pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room +foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was +capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter +from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth +to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with +the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from +Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie +gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand +Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, +though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She +followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie +Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from +the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall +styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of +the last cry in Paris modes—and no model in Mattie's newly selected +stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.</p> + +<p>You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. +Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or +retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not +sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and +arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches +along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls +worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny +parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each +wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch +factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket +had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to +experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, +somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.</p> + +<p>Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation +for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, +the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of +nervous apprehension—a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed +laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie +Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had +directed one of her sure shafts at him.</p> + +<p>Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew +it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence +and audacity saved her.</p> + +<p>"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll +find yourself looking for a job."</p> + +<p>"Go on—fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"—a +form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type +of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, +ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through +the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, +Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, +certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady +worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, +regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side +of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite +drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like +an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate +mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was +said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort +of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, +it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without +retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.</p> + +<p>When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs +something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he +ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs +is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' +as a relish."</p> + +<p>And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American +Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his +horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the +depot and the 7:50 train.</p> + +<p>I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness +of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard +her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow +uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there +was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was +anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous +foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was +light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the +asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir +caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid +necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay +colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for +me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the +tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!"</p> + +<p>That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins +of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and +Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it +was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's +drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went +through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from +Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length +of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached +it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick +looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An +air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner. +Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys.</p> + +<p>"Oh, how do!"</p> + +<p>"Good evening!"</p> + +<p>Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On +the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now +stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist. +On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly +lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a +neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You +took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now, +homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick +footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where +the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly +shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little +tingling thrill.</p> + +<p>"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way."</p> + +<p>At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order +to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of +Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they +reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in +retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they +lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss.</p> + +<p>Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at +factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the +Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and +assuming the managership of the office.</p> + +<p>"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old +Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I +step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get +there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will +you be glad, Tess? H'm?"</p> + +<p>Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more +tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job +that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and +all."</p> + +<p>But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp +tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>No more of that now. Chuck—gone. Scotty—gone. All the boys at the +watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood—gone. At first she +hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe +me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose +already."</p> + +<p>"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the +top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' +bullets."</p> + +<p>There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's +big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck +was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid +him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in +their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and +their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In +their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their +young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters—black, yellow, +brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one +head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A +great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:</p> + +<p>"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a +week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo—"</p> + +<p>They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot +platform—high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, +shouting.</p> + +<p>Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received +equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent +boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable +forms of cake.</p> + +<p>Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was +furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in +his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She +tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in +it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of +the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, +inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New +York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it +turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a +cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as +dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and +I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me +swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make +Hatton's place look sick."</p> + +<p>The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among +themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they +could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. +Well, I should say not!</p> + +<p>They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the +type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or +their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as +knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in +men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly +boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish +swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a +little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be +stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."</p> + +<p>Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink +upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the +music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and +chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands +on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they +giggled and shrieked and ran.</p> + +<p>But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch +hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the +stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases +such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little +conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters +on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last +letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in +Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed +looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which +she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were +those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red +triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. +They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere +in the East. These letters were not from him.</p> + +<p>Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop +on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue +shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, +veiled, aproned—and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, +your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that +complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not +belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No +matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and +pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled +and folded them was pure cerulean.</p> + +<p>Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to +their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' +bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of +starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing +it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might +have been invaluable. It never was asked.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he +was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care.</p> + +<p>"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes +lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather +ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to +be home, Chuck? Gee!"</p> + +<p>"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in +his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's +swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and +come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know—kind +of—" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: +"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a +regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in +San Francisco and around there. Why, they was—were—enough to make the +Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and +acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something +to eat or drink. And the folks themselves—why, say! Here we are +scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what +some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and +Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. +Take Megan's store, too"—he was warming to his subject, so that he +failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face—"it's a joke compared +to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint."</p> + +<p>Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her +head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you +had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything. +You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd +probably be tickled to see you."</p> + +<p>He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't +mean—why, say—you don't suppose—why, believe me, I pretty near busted +out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in. +And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day—"</p> + +<p>"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't +a fool." She was perilously near to tears.</p> + +<p>"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew—if you knew—a guy's got +to—he's got no right to—"</p> + +<p>And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled +and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked +differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. +It was something else—an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, +an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the +extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she +had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! +It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the +broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could +not have put it into words.</p> + +<p>They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of +the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with +little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression +indicative of extreme disgust.</p> + +<p>"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. +"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains—sulphur and +iron and so forth."</p> + +<p>"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often +walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had +never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse +and drifted down the lovely Fox River.</p> + +<p>"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."</p> + +<p>"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do +it."</p> + +<p>Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing +looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever +against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as +he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red +skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a +minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the +throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in +strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness +surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have +fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! +Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." +She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. +I never did before."</p> + +<p>Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each +brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then +at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I +must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."</p> + +<p>"Have you, Chuck?"</p> + +<p>They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's +good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play +baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are +wonders!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about +something else?"</p> + +<p>He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or +why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.</p> + +<p>"About—you." Tessie made it a caress.</p> + +<p>"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and +marchin' and readin' some—Oh, say, what d'you think?"</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"They been learnin' us—teachin' us, I mean—French. It's the darnedest +language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a +piece of bread, you say like this: <i>Donnay ma un morso doo pang</i>. See?"</p> + +<p>"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration.</p> + +<p>And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He +knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I +don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?"</p> + +<p>It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her +grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in +France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just +as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it +sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he—he'd be a +different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, +French, girls, swell folks—</p> + +<p>And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in +the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box."</p> + +<p>"Chocolate cake."</p> + +<p>"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this +morning."</p> + +<p>"Yes, you did!"</p> + +<p>"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the +way you talk."</p> + +<p>"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think."</p> + +<p>"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else."</p> + +<p>"Fried chicken!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily.</p> + +<p>"You asked me to, didn't you?"</p> + +<p>Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty.</p> + +<p>Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden +among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say +they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and +Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not +just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I +suppose it looks like a shanty to you now."</p> + +<p>Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place."</p> + +<p>They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the +river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him—the breast of +the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, +juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a +double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, +but she was wise in feminine wiles.</p> + +<p>From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this +tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it +you get so you don't believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and +chocolate cake."</p> + +<p>"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't +eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken.</p> + +<p>Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie +pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back +again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. +And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand +on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their +kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, +they would have been something like this:</p> + +<p>"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had +you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our house, +with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the +parlour, and all the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get +it. What'll I do if I don't?"</p> + +<p>And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me +and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so +that if I come back—"</p> + +<p>Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French girls. +I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be +raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton +time you get back."</p> + +<p>And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. +I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their +jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a +fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and +fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. +Nix!"</p> + +<p>It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. +Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, +surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little +point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, +beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, +homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those +Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The +husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart +outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at +Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts +outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, +fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. +"Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess."</p> + +<p>"Tha' so? Mine, too. Well, how's everything?"</p> + +<p>Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and +that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available +by the more important sleeping bundle—two yards of goods; a spool of +100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten.</p> + +<p>There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, +felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she +envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last +letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's +eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. +Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and châteaux. He and a +bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or +something—it was all one to Tessie—and what do you think? She had +kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France.</p> + +<p>The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch +factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied +with a new and more absorbing topic.</p> + +<p>"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?"</p> + +<p>"What about her?"</p> + +<p>"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being +Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being +the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home +and all to go to work in a Y.M.C.A. canteen for her country and bleeding +France."</p> + +<p>"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be +painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the +doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or +baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf +of bread decent. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust +her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over +there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, +and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to +set home and make the best of it. Or take what's left." She turned her +head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the +room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. "I guess when you can't +go after what you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice."</p> + +<p>All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious +Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, +pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing +hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two +inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless +little laugh.</p> + +<p>"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been +at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet."</p> + +<p>He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her +shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to +Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to +exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in +a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. +Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home +and—and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for +Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless +it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. +But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge +the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' +France. Yeh! Joke!</p> + +<p>The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a +square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In +architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French +château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its +façade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed +magnificence.</p> + +<p>Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, +could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, +usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. +People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it +mattered whether anything happened to her or not!</p> + +<p>Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she +struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little +group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as +she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou +among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she looked straight +ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to +her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. +Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!"</p> + +<p>"Hello, yourself."</p> + +<p>"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink."</p> + +<p>"Think so?"</p> + +<p>She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have someone +following, someone walking home with you. What if he was old enough to +be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying +hair at the sides. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is. +And Nap Ballou told her.</p> + +<p>They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once +heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she +entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were +brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, +peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very much askew.</p> + +<p>"Where you been, Tessie?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, walkin'."</p> + +<p>"Who with?"</p> + +<p>"Cora."</p> + +<p>"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago."</p> + +<p>Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this +coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back."</p> + +<p>Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into +the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's +the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about +the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' +'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't +be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the +same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind +groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She +didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to +think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass +buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain +of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, +smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the +words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. +"What're you going to do—" She rolled over on one side and buried her +head in her arms.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the +old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest +bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. +But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world +about her. The Chippewa <i>Courier</i> went into the newspaper pile behind +the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye.</p> + +<p>She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her +glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of +unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.</p> + +<p>"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood +there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden +she ran to her pa—"</p> + +<p>"Both comin' at once, like that—"</p> + +<p>"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She—"</p> + +<p>Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her +and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this +picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I +come in in the middle of the reel, I guess."</p> + +<p>They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly +news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices +high with the note of hysteria.</p> + +<p>"Angie Hatton's beau was killed—"</p> + +<p>"They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet—"</p> + +<p>"The news come only last evenin' about eight—"</p> + +<p>"She won't see nobody but her pa—"</p> + +<p>Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house envying +Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, +and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic +reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one +to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the +luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted +commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in +that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, +bending over her on some pretence that deceived no one, spoke low-voiced +in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. +She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work.</p> + +<p>She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the +river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her +had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless +overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get."</p> + +<p>She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about the +girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. +She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid shoes, flimsy +blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the city +park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a tree +idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lack-lustre eyes. Silhouetted +there against the tender green of the pretty square he looked very old, +somehow, and different—much older than he looked in his shop clothes, +issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where he should have stuck +out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across +her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she had last seen him: +brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of flank.</p> + +<p>Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly: "Somebody +looks mighty sweet this afternoon."</p> + +<p>Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line +you like you stick to it, don't you?"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats +and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust +the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray in +the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her.</p> + +<p>"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and +turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie +felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a +little as she stepped into the boat.</p> + +<p>The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and +told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same +when he asked her.</p> + +<p>"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little +with the unwonted exercise. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly +to rowing.</p> + +<p>Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough, +considerin' the company."</p> + +<p>He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card.</p> + +<p>When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had +supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White +meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk."</p> + +<p>"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around +her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark so +early."</p> + +<p>"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking +sort of way, though he consumed very little food actually.</p> + +<p>"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, half-heartedly. She decided +that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she +hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white double +row ...</p> + +<p>"Well," she said, "let's be going."</p> + +<p>"No hurry," again.</p> + +<p>Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What +d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at her +own joke.</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, I don't."</p> + +<p>He rose, too. "Why not?"</p> + +<p>"Because I don't, that's why." She stooped and began picking up the +remnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly and +thriftily in the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her.</p> + +<p>"Let me help," he said. And then his arm was about her and his face was +close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after a little +wordless struggle. And then she knew. Tessie's lips were not virgin. She +had been kissed before. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at +him furiously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had +worked in the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped +her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her.</p> + +<p>At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you—you +drunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll ..."</p> + +<p>The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. +With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand and +clawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His +hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed to her that +her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing +against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but the +broken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ran +on, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might have +happened ... to her, Tessie Golden ... that nobody could even talk fresh +to. She gave a little sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It +was growing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. +It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, +climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly for +support, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summer +cottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. A warm, +flickering light danced in the window.</p> + +<p>Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with a +little instinctive gesture, she patted her hair, tidied her blouse, and +walked uncertainly toward the house, up the steps to the door. She stood +there a moment, swaying slightly. Somebody'd be there. The light. The +woman who cooked for them or the man who took care of the place. +Somebody'd—</p> + +<p>She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her way and +got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, louder now. +Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The +door opened wide. Old Man Hatton!</p> + +<p>She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his +glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, that his +face was so kindly.</p> + +<p>Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!" +she whimpered. "It's me!"</p> + +<p>He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside.</p> + +<p>"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid...."</p> + +<p>Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried +to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she +had planned to tell?</p> + +<p>"Who is it, dad? Who...?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared +at Angie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come in here."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie +Hatton's expensive blouse. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no +surprise at the act.</p> + +<p>"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, dad. +And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you +know. Something...."</p> + +<p>Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. +Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her +eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped +little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head.</p> + +<p>"That's all right," Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after a +while."</p> + +<p>There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the +fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting +in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tearstained young ladies at +dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a +torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They +evinced no curiosity about this dishevelled creature who had flung +herself in upon their decent solitude.</p> + +<p>Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face and +opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a +quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, +some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked—well, Tessie put it to herself, +thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry no more—only +inside."</p> + +<p>And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never have +gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. +It's fierce. You get scared, sittin' home, waitin', and they're in +France and everywheres, learnin' French and everything, and meetin' +grand people and havin' a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said I +didn't care, I wasn't goin' to squat home all my life, waitin'...."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down +at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and +thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These +things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now +was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no +questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted +with: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-room +foreman, eh?"</p> + +<p>Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. +"Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't +I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make no difference +who I went with, but it does." She looked down at her hands clasped so +tightly in her lap.</p> + +<p>"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference," Angie agreed, and looked up +at her father.</p> + +<p>At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all +kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home +he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He...."</p> + +<p>"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck +comes home...."</p> + +<p>Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'd +like to learn to swim—and row a boat—and play ball—like the rich +girls—like the girls that's makin' such a fuss over the soldiers."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessie +brought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talk +French."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked +at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd +found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just +one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for +them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you +need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you +say?"</p> + +<p>But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white +with earnestness.</p> + +<p>"C'n you speak French?"</p> + +<p>"Yes," Angie answered.</p> + +<p>"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French: +'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton said it correctly.</p> + +<p>"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?"</p> + +<p>Angie said it again.</p> + +<p>Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her +hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she +articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that +of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT" id="ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT" />ONE HUNDRED PER CENT</h2> + + +<p>They had always had two morning papers—he his, she hers. The <i>Times</i>. +Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and +Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm +and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast +and the First Page simultaneously with no—"Just let me see the inside +sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning.</p> + +<p>In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman +for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal +of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished +between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the +depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which +seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of +a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste, +but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight +thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse +behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost +coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news +to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something +of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline +such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and +vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From +Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a +column or a page at a glance.</p> + +<p>Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, +his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the +next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or +coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest +is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page +and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, +Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that +clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew +away from the temple.</p> + +<p>"T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the +Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way +purposely."</p> + +<p>"Francis X—?" He was not a follower of the films.</p> + +<p>Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side +face."</p> + +<p>"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to +me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four.</p> + +<p>Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, +as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. +Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the +clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, +vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" +Emma knew he was pursuing the daily <i>schrecklichkeit</i>.</p> + +<p>Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, +the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, +pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon +it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest:</p> + +<p>"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who +aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the <i>Times</i> +delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies +for it, mornings."</p> + +<p>It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, +its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes.</p> + +<p>"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him.</p> + +<p>"You take it, dear."</p> + +<p>"Oh, no! No."</p> + +<p>She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing +tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess.</p> + +<p>"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m—"</p> + +<p>"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three +years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't +endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I +shall have to consider our marriage a failure."</p> + +<p>"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be—"</p> + +<p>"I am. But there's something about having it read to you—"</p> + +<p>On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her +blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was +shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs +with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the +hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment—just the fraction +of a minute—when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. +Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. +They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper +fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, +apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned.</p> + +<p>Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a +moment—a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover.</p> + +<p>"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and +drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the +price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are +husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two +establishments."</p> + +<p>They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing +an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize +that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning +business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they +most treasured.</p> + +<p>Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the +Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, +and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits +about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of +family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense +that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor +Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory—it +seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, +Emma's interest in the business was unflagging.</p> + +<p>"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this +firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck +& Co."</p> + +<p>"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that +first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don't know +how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into +a Madam Chairman. You'll see."</p> + +<p>She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her.</p> + +<p>By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as +gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and +woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going +abroad.</p> + +<p>Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a +half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft +fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her +eyes.</p> + +<p>"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. +It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's +neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is."</p> + +<p>She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. +The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife +had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and +scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and +pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new +neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the +woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been +obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and +motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many +fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, +and said, "But it looks so—so lumpy around the neck."</p> + +<p>Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie +on—"</p> + +<p>"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar."</p> + +<p>"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but +the high, close-fitting collar."</p> + +<p>The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd +shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, +grumbling.</p> + +<p>Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. +At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had +telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. +People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick +of calling her by any other.</p> + +<p>With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her +attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma +McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those +Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could +cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm +going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished +service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that +hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six +o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for +their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't +blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, +I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...."</p> + +<p>By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts +herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, +initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. +November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them +seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma +now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, +lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she +herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and +bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail.</p> + +<p>She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found +her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week +to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the +autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to +the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, +and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about +this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, +that convinced and impressed you.</p> + +<p>"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma +remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond +pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. +"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method +could sell sandbags in the Sahara."</p> + +<p>Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw +each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, +espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the +street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure +swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him +so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant +attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the +street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert +recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block +ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his +stride, and touched his arm lightly.</p> + +<p>"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck."</p> + +<p>Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand +on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve.</p> + +<p>"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, +young 'ooman."</p> + +<p>"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation +from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green +and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make +a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker."</p> + +<p>There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical +comedy, dear. These men are—Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you. +Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining +room. There are things at the office—"</p> + +<p>"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there +are two vice-commandants ready to snatch my shoulder-straps."</p> + +<p>"Emma! Emma!"</p> + +<p>At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone +wrong?"</p> + +<p>"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at +the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this +Serbian thing end? I'll call for you."</p> + +<p>"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, +dear."</p> + +<p>He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingué in the +blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent cocked hat. +The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely +smart affair of white silk, high-collared, stitched, expensively simple. +And yet he frowned as he looked.</p> + +<p>"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance.</p> + +<p>"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better +call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife +practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and +the funeral—The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into +the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes.</p> + +<p>But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told +me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, +where she can be bathed and massaged and fed with milk. And if Fisk +could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had +training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg."</p> + +<p>"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't +he?... I really must hurry, T.A."</p> + +<p>"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned +away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her +shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. +Emma's taxi crept into the stream. But uppermost in her mind was not the +thought of Serbians, uniforms, Fisk, or Ritz, but of her husband's right +hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into +a fist.</p> + +<p>She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers; but the +Serbians, despite their four tragic years, turned out to be as sprightly +as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the Fannings dropped +her at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she +doffed her warlike garments, her feminine canniness warned her that this +was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better.</p> + +<p>But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all Jock.</p> + +<p>A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been Grace Gait, one +of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the +profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office she had been +turning out compelling copy. They had been married four years. Now Jock +ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Raynor suite overlooking the +lake in the great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, "Eat +the crust, girlie. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly."</p> + +<p>Emma, uniformed for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter. Buck +listened in silence.</p> + +<p>"You wouldn't know Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody. And the queer +part of it is he doesn't know it. He tries to be cheerful, and I could +weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work +from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning, and from writing free full-page +national advertising copy to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke +fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought. But you +know I haven't been really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the +doctor says it will be another six months before I'm myself, really. If +I had only myself to think of—how simple! But two kiddies need such a +lot of things. I could get a job at Raynor's. They need writers. Jock +says, bitterly, that all the worth-while men have left. Don't think I'm +complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone +who understands often clears the way."</p> + +<p>"Well!" said Emma.</p> + +<p>And, "Well?" said T.A.</p> + +<p>She sat fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her. "Of +course, Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of +him. He'd be beautiful in khaki. But there's work to do right here. And +he ought to be willing to wait six months."</p> + +<p>"They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now."</p> + +<p>"Oh, come, T.A.! One man—"</p> + +<p>"Multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk. Just such another case. Look +at—"</p> + +<p>The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up +alertly. She glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little exclamation of +horror.</p> + +<p>"That's for me! I'm half an hour late! The first time, too." She was at +the telephone a second later, explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the +dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised +for flight. "Sorry, dear. But this morning was so important, and that +letter about Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier."</p> + +<p>"I'm afraid you are, Emma."</p> + +<p>She stared at that. "Why—! Oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, +dear—I'll call for you at the office to-night at five, and we'll walk +home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late—"</p> + +<p>She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a +long minute, staring down at the coffee cup whose contents he did not +mean to drink. The light from the window cameoed his fine profile. And +you saw that his jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away, in +Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't.</p> + +<p>Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules +would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a +thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois.</p> + +<p>And a thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three +hours later, was slamming down the two big windows of his office. From +up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk +march. And his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you +know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices—a +great gray shaft, towering even above its giant neighbours, its head in +the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until +very recently those windows of his office had been a source of joy and +inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below. The +tangle of I.C. tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond +that, as far as the eye could see. He had seen the changes the year had +brought. The lake dotted with sinister gray craft. Dog tents in Grant +Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms. Men—mere boys, most of +them—awkward in their workaday clothes of office and shop, drilling, +wheeling, marching at the noon hour. And parades, and parades, and +parades. At first Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff—heads of +departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys—would +suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the +street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, +bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its +white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six +contortionistic drum-major.</p> + +<p>By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor +windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from +the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh +parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"> +"Where are <i>you</i>! (sounded the bugle)<br /> +Where are <i>you</i>?<br /> +Where are YOU?!!!<br /> +<span class="i5">Where<br /></span> +<span class="i7">are<br /></span> +<span class="i10">you?<br /></span> +Where—are—you-u-u-u—"<br /> +</div> + +<p>He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out +dictation in a loud, rasping voice.</p> + +<p>"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to +say—"</p> + +<p><i>(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)</i></p> + +<p>"—all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and +will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office +think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising—"</p> + +<p><i>(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)</i></p> + +<p>"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?"</p> + +<p>"Over th—I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new +record in soap advertising—'"</p> + +<p>"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl +stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in +the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and +swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp +Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab +world.</p> + +<p>"—and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been +sent out from the Raynor offices."</p> + +<p>The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or +breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her +foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left! +Left-right-left!</p> + +<p>Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much +of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by +heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, +thinking, planning; feeling his agony, and trying not to admit the +transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for +Chicago.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>At five o'clock Emma left the war to its own devices and dropped in at +the loft building in which Featherlooms were born and grew up. Mike, the +elevator man, twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to +gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure.</p> + +<p>"Haven't seen you around fur many the day, Mis' Buck."</p> + +<p>"Been too busy, Mike."</p> + +<p>Mike turned back to face the door. "Well, 'tis a great responsibility, +runnin' this war, an' all." He stopped at the Featherloom floor and +opened the door with his grandest flourish. Emma glanced at him quickly. +His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little +jingling of buckles and strap hooks.</p> + +<p>The work day was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She +could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at +his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that +littered tables and chairs. At the window near the door Fisk, the +Western territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The +two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with +admiration. Into Fisk's face there flashed a look so nearly resembling +resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a +moment with the two.</p> + +<p>Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, "I'm more resigned to war this +minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began."</p> + +<p>Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His +face was unsmiling. "Like my uniform?" Emma asked; and wished, somehow, +that she hadn't.</p> + +<p>Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were +hard, resentful. Suddenly, "Like it! God! I wish I could wear one!" He +turned away, abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared +his throat, apologetically.</p> + +<p>Emma glanced down at her own trim self—at her stitched seams, her +tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands—and +suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. +Something—something—</p> + +<p>She wheeled and made for Buck's office, her colour high. He looked up, +rose, offered her a chair. She felt strangely ill at ease there in the +office to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the +glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall smiled and nodded and +called through the open door: "My, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck."</p> + +<p>"Be with you in a minute, Emma," said T.A. And turned to his desk again. +She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. "Don't hurry." Out in +the showroom again she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was +ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and +night-gowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth and his +eyes squinted, half closed through the smoke.</p> + +<p>She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment +that lay under her hand. "Spring samples?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money, war or +no war."</p> + +<p>"'S right."</p> + +<p>"How's Gertie?"</p> + +<p>"Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl!—say, I knew what she was +when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long +enough. But I never really knew that kid until now, and we've been +married two years. You know what the last year has been for her; the +baby and all. And then losing him. And do you know what she says! That +if there was somebody who knew the Western territory and could cover it, +she'd get a job and send me to war. Yessir! That's Gert. We've been +married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time +she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was +away on my long spring trip she used to say it wasn't so bad being +alone, because there was always my home-coming to count on. How's that +for a wife!"</p> + +<p>"Gertie's splendid," agreed Emma. And wondered why it sounded so lame.</p> + +<p>"You don't know her. Why, when it comes to patriotism, she makes T.R. +look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, +she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war. Gert +says a travelling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife, +anyway; and that if I went it would only be like my long Western trip, +multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie."</p> + +<p>Emma was fingering the cotton-flannel garment on the table.</p> + +<p>Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. "Sorry I kept you waiting. +Three of the boys were called to-day. It crippled us pretty badly in the +shipping room. Ready?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. Good-night, Charley. Give my love to Gertie."</p> + +<p>"Thanks, Mrs. Buck." He picked up his cigar, took an apprehensive puff +and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar +now.</p> + +<p>Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth +Avenue. Flags of every nation, save one. Uniforms of every blue from +French to navy; of almost any shade save field green. Pongee-coloured +Englishmen, seeming seven feet high, to a man; aviators slim and +elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered +planes, with a notch for every Hun plane bagged. Slim girls, exotic as +the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior <i>élégants</i>. +Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war +accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. Buck +eyed them gravely, hat and arm describing parabolas with increasing +frequency as they approached Fiftieth Street, slackening as the +colourful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park +mists.</p> + +<p>Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose-pink. Head high, shoulders back, she +matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were +bright and very blue.</p> + +<p>"There's a beautiful one, T.A.! The Canadian officer with the limp. +They've all been gassed, and shot five times in the thigh and seven in +the shoulder, and yet look at 'em! What do you suppose they were when +they were new if they can look like that, damaged!"</p> + +<p>Buck cut a vicious little semi-circle in the air with his walking stick.</p> + +<p>"I know now how the father of the Gracchi felt, and why you never hear +him mentioned."</p> + +<p>"Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot." She did not intend her tone to be +smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have +seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense +his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay +between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New +York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, +Sr.</p> + +<p>"Tell me, Emma. Does this satisfy you—the work you're doing, I mean? Do +you think you're giving the best you've got?"</p> + +<p>"Well, of course I'd like to go to France—"</p> + +<p>"I didn't ask you what you'd like."</p> + +<p>"Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I don't know what you call giving the best +one has got. But you know I work from eight in the morning until +midnight, often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do +my work just as well. And I don't say, either, that it doesn't include a +lot of dashing up and down Fifth Avenue, and teaing at the Ritz, and +meeting magnificent Missions, and being cooed over by Lady Millionaires. +But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of +thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to +oblige." She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart +leather-bound notebook.</p> + +<p>"Spare me! I've had all the statistics I can stand for one day at the +office. I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't +realize—"</p> + +<p>They turned into their own street. "Realize what?"</p> + +<p>"Nothing. Nothing."</p> + +<p>Emma sighed a mock sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. +"Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. +That second window shade is crooked. Isn't it queer how maids never +do.... I'll tell you what I can realize, though. I realize that we're +going to have dinner at home, reg'lar old-fashioned befo'-de-war. And I +can bathe before dinner. There's richness."</p> + +<p>But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly +re-coifed, she again wore the blue uniform, with the service cap atop +her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with +a little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on +a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a +little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of +masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the +table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he +gripped it.</p> + +<p>"It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little +less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see +why you should make me feel like your orderly. It's like being married +to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of +time it takes to dine with your husband."</p> + +<p>It was the bitterest speech he had made to her in the years of their +married life. She flushed a little. "I thought you knew that I was going +out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the +understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30."</p> + +<p>He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the +chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored +self with a placidity that had in it, perhaps, a dash of malice. His +last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an +olive, and nibbled it, head on one side.</p> + +<p>"D'you know, T.A., what I think? H'm? I think you're jealous of your +wife's uniform."</p> + +<p>She had touched the match to the dynamite.</p> + +<p>He looked up. At the blaze in his eyes she shrank back a little. His +face was white. He was breathing quickly.</p> + +<p>"You're right! I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in +the army! I'm jealous of the mule drivers! Of the veterinarians. Of the +stokers in the transports. Men!" He doubled his hand into a fist. His +fine eyes glowed. "Men!"</p> + +<p>And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his hands.</p> + +<p>Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked +down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him. She got up +and came over to him.</p> + +<p>"Why, dear—dearest—I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I +thought you were happy. You—"</p> + +<p>"Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are +gritting our teeth and pretending."</p> + +<p>She put a hand on his shoulder. "But what do you want—what can you do +that—"</p> + +<p>He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. +His head came up. "They've offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a +fancy job. It has to do with merchandising. But I think you know they're +having a devil of a time with all the millions of bales of goods. They +need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes +enough. I know values. It would mean hard work—manual work lots of +times. No pay. And happiness. For me." There was a silence. It seemed to +fill the room, that silence. It filled the house. It roared and +thundered about Emma's ears, that silence. When finally she broke it:</p> + +<p>"Blind!" she said. "Blind! Deaf! Dumb! <i>And</i> crazy." She laughed, and +two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge +uniform. "Oh, T.A.! Where have I been? How you must have despised me. +Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the Government three +strapping men. My uniform, that was keeping three man-size soldiers out +of khaki. You, Jock, and Fisk. Why didn't you tell me, dear! Why didn't +you tell me!"</p> + +<p>"I've tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask +you to go back to the factory."</p> + +<p>"Factory! Factory nothing! I'm going back on the road. I'm taking Fisk's +Western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I +ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisk's salary +until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one +so good. Grace can give the office a few hours a week. And we can +promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road."</p> + +<p>Buck was staring at her, dully. "Grace? Now wait a minute. You're +travelling too fast for a mere man." His hand was gripping hers, tight, +tight.</p> + +<p>Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a +chair around to his. They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth.</p> + +<p>"It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for +lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this: Jock gets a +commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York, and live +right here, with me, in this house. Fisk goes to war. Gertie gets well +and comes back to work for Featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. +Old Emmer takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country—on the +road."</p> + +<p>At that he got up and began pacing the room. "I can't have you do that, +dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me."</p> + +<p>"Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee."</p> + +<p>"Gad, Emma, you're glorious!"</p> + +<p>"Glorious nothing! I'm going to earn the living for three families for a +few months, until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about +that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the +road means these days. It isn't travelling. It's exploring. You never +know where you're going to land, or when, unless you're travelling in a +freight train. They're cock o' the walk now. I think I'll check myself +through as first-class freight. Or send my pack ahead, with natives on +foot, like an African explorer. But it'll be awfully good for me +character. And when I'm eating that criminal corn bread they serve on +dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth I'll remember +when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my +hand on the steering wheel along o' the nobility and gentry."</p> + +<p>"Listen, dear, I can't have you—"</p> + +<p>"Too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. +They'll wire back 'No!' but another fifty'll fetch 'em. After all, it +takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to +change eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but +filling."</p> + +<p>Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, +less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have +faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was +alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the +swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought +within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this +time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every +town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the +readjustment of this little family and business group was so +unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, +seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the +Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be +won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled.</p> + +<p>It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma's awakening +that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed +plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows +suitcase ("Can't count on trunks these days," she had said. "I'm not +taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist"). Buck, standing in the +doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his +khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: +"Can't I help, dear?" Or, "Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the +Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I'd like to know what +they had on you, Emma."</p> + +<p>And from Emma: "Yeh, ain't I noble!" Then, after a little pause: "This +house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it'll look like a Home for +Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be +the only male protector around the place. We'll make him captain of the +home guard."</p> + +<p>"Gertie was in to-day. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to +Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we +ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any +woman in the shop except you. She's down to ninety-eight pounds, poor +little girl, but every ounce of it's pure pluck, and she says she'll be +as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will."</p> + +<p>Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. +"Seventeen—eighteen—When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice +the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand +boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands +money that an operator used to brag about—nineteen—"</p> + +<p>Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was +rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes +closets.</p> + +<p>"All except you, Emma. You'll be working without a salary—working like +a man—like three men—"</p> + +<p>"Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I've got two service +buttons already," she glanced down at her blouse, "and Charley Fisk said +I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm +going to put 'em all on."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The day before Emma's departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, +bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the +spirit of the times in her eyes.</p> + +<p>"Jock!" she repeated, in answer to their questions. "My dears, he +doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He +thinks he'll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn't that be +glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss +with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even +listening. He couldn't wait until I had finished a sentence so that he +could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the +moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he +answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And +when I said, 'Dearest, isn't this hotel a <i>little</i> like the place we +spent our honeymoon in—that porch, and all?' he said, 'See this feller +coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. +He's my Captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college +when I was a fresh.'"</p> + +<p>But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words.</p> + +<p>Emma's trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's +date for sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. "When I +went to school," she said, "I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian +War worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I +want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it'll be +over sooner; and because we've won."</p> + +<p>They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear +platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried frantically to +get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully. "Don't look so tragic about it," +she laughed. "It's like old times. These last three years have been a +dream—a delusion."</p> + +<p>He looked up at her, as she stood there in her blue suit, and white +blouse, and trim blue hat and crisp veil. "Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I +believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you, +when you came in off the road after father died and I had just taken +hold of the business."</p> + +<p>For answer she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized +"Silver Threads Among the Gold." The train moved away, gathered speed. +He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the +railing, as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would +allow. He was walking swiftly along with the train, as though +hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train +platform. The brave figure in khaki outside. The blue suddenly swam in a +haze before his eyes; the khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little +veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for Upper +Eleven.</p> + +<p>The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed +and unnoticing as she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her +newspaper suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained +self-control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white +coat that she desired Upper Eleven made up early.</p> + +<p>The White Coat had said, "Yas'm," and glanced up at her. Whereupon she +had said:</p> + +<p>"Why, William!"</p> + +<p>And he, "Well, fo' de lan'! 'F 'tain't Mis' McChesney! Well, mah sakes +alive, Mis' McChesney! Ah ain't seen yo' since yo' married. Ah done heah +yo' married yo' boss an' got a swell brownstone house, an' ev'thing +gran'—"</p> + +<p>"I've got everything, William, but a lower berth to Chicago. They swore +they couldn't give me anything but an upper."</p> + +<p>A speculative look crept into William's rolling eye. Emma recognized it. +Her hand reached toward her bag. Then it stopped. She smiled. "No. No, +William. Time was. But not these days. Four years ago I'd have slipped +you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower berth from +somewhere. But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, +and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift +stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, aged three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney, +aged six months. And I'll dispose my old bones in Upper Eleven."</p> + +<p>She went in to dinner.</p> + +<p>At eight-thirty a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear.</p> + +<p>"Ah got yo' made up, Mis' McChesney."</p> + +<p>"But this is my—"</p> + +<p>He beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar +result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He +stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower +which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman +agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The +key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it +with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain +with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used before +a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one +gray-black hand. Then he bowed like any courtier.</p> + +<p>Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. +Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him—at the wrinkled, +kindly, ape-like face, and he looked down at her.</p> + +<p>"William," she said, "war is a filthy, evil, vile thing, but it bears +wonderful white flowers."</p> + +<p>"Yas'm!" agreed William, genially, and smiled all over his rubbery, +gray-black countenance. "<i>Yas'm!</i>"</p> + +<p>And who shall say he did not understand?</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="FARMER_IN_THE_DELL" id="FARMER_IN_THE_DELL" />FARMER IN THE DELL</h2> + + +<p>Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve +tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the +stuffy room—there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was +hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that +the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were +curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath +came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld +didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of +fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and +is taking it easy?</p> + +<p>If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell +whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To +do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light +meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his +wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.</p> + +<p>When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty +daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully you must +be a natural-born loller to begin with, and revert. Bella Westerveld was +and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there +he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast +when he was lying so still. If It had been light, you could have seen +the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient +face.</p> + +<p>They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every +morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching +for the limp, drab, work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by +his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of +depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the +chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.</p> + +<p>Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the +instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the +bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the +feeling—an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very +quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the +cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the +old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the +ghostly light—these things he had never needed. He had known. But here, +in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of +Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar +noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, +there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the +city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had +gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his +wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his +case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the +flat next door must have heard her.</p> + +<p>"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around +like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there +if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."</p> + +<p>Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be +appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech—she who had seemed so +mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to +bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat +just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, +grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the +power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily +shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been +a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood +floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal +confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and +distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and +had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the +steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the +Mississippi rolling grandly by.</p> + +<p>Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he +really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's +matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who +released Ben Westerveld from durance vile—or had been until the winter +months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than +useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The +milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he +had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of +his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in +motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. +He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if +they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, +with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they +used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of +his hands and around the thumbs.</p> + +<p>"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She +gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring +tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."</p> + +<p>He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted +Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated +and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The +reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly—while it +lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped +back into his old apathy.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his +incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty +streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply +from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely +unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning +great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body +suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than +tragedy—waste.</p> + +<p>For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, +eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and +drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before +sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the +rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he +toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might +fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the +high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with +the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as +were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the +city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though +form and substance are the same.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to +introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a +comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, +have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know +him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of +the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots.</p> + +<p>At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, +slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those +rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals +canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A +serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew +older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated +the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost +of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds +of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had +married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost +entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of +those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, +then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, +majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical +Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their +relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his +face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for +clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring +flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the +drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men +are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He +seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed +that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a +saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."</p> + +<p>At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run +faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the +rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at +arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. +The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength +which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to +their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick +of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about +to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing +had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. +There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he +had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going +down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He +had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very +different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He +had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a +tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and +the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never +so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.</p> + +<p>An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.</p> + +<p>"Hello, Emma."</p> + +<p>"How do, Ben."</p> + +<p>"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf +at Aug Tietjens with five legs."</p> + +<p>"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, +though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking +up."</p> + +<p>Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two +would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of +embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was +no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the +minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty +on easy payments if—when—"</p> + +<p>Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a +fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."</p> + +<p>Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine +and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes +would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for +her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her +butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, +twelve miles away, than did any in the district. She was not a pretty +girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at +twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well +for Ben Westerveld's future happiness.</p> + +<p>But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers's capable +hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was +the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that +cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from +any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being +a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that +day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the +present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty +miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a +step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded +her apprenticeship.</p> + +<p>"I'll get a beau," she said, "that'll take me driving and around. And +Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road +toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was +behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could +have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that +later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and +dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought +or speech.</p> + +<p>He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher. He had heard of +her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not +at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history +of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. +That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact +that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip +in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben +Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column.</p> + +<p>He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his +embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his +dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded +forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with +natural canine curiosity.</p> + +<p>Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping +her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand +and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life +that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that +time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he would never have +forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, +quivering body.</p> + +<p>Bella screamed again. Still clinging to him, Ben was saying: "He won't +hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder +reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so +childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. +From—well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter +femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella the +experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a +queer, electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it +something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. +If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have +realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she +could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was +scared!" She stepped away from him a little—very little.</p> + +<p>"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."</p> + +<p>But Bella looked over her shoulders fearfully to where Dunder stood by +the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought +that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but +still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up +a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. "Go on +home!" he commanded, sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with +a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail +between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog.</p> + +<p>Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her.</p> + +<p>"You're the new teacher, ain't you?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that +dog."</p> + +<p>"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt +nobody. He's pretty big." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben +Westerveld."</p> + +<p>"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed +shyness.</p> + +<p>"Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens that's enough +to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big."</p> + +<p>"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over +to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get +there. You were going the other way, weren't you?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you +company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden +masterfulness.</p> + +<p>They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one +another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. +The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if +they had been whisked away on a magic rug.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. She was +contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The +Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was +always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding +cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch +counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should +be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could +find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and +talk and colour. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she +always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or +with an armful of clean towels.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself: "I want to marry Bella." +He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma +Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed +at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she +selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes +and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella +was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his +finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring +woman. But in the end they married. The neighbourhood was rocked with +surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the +dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and +women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends.</p> + +<p>Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of +pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too +honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally +truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this +slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He +had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing +was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. +He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of +fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of +skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line +from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary +of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitués of Old +Red Front Huckins's bar.</p> + +<p>They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered +in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, +eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the +Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was +too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward +to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, +his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the +county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her +plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm +all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather +have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."</p> + +<p>Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as +slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin +coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears +she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get +away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube +like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by +her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an +over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty +she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They +moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older +boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. +Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father. +He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill +and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling +his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of +the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm +life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they +found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had +trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road +behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was +asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off +to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not +have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before +his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood +and the reins.</p> + +<p>That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife +together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her +hatred of the locality and the life.</p> + +<p>"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless +reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a +farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your +hand at Dike now for a change."</p> + +<p>Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at +him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come +honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was +a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, +stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had +come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by +thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until +help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the +reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained.</p> + +<p>Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The +boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you +might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs—great +black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; +speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich +patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious +pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a +fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's +opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, +was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter +disappointment of his married life.</p> + +<p>That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben +Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step—for his years. The +stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat +and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five—a habit that +requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with +difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of +standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered +the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and +his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk +to say: "Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"</p> + +<p>When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no +unpaid notes to his discredit.</p> + +<p>All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of +his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were +dependent on him for their future well-being—on him and on Dike after +him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; +most of it was back-breaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was +his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he +never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that +he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning +ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said:</p> + +<p>"Well, I got my work cut out for me, an' I do it an' do it right."</p> + +<p>There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, +so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, +middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and +beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday +afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street +in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces.</p> + +<p>As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her +benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on +twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He +had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a +commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella +remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, +surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell +on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the +coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.</p> + +<p>Minnie was living in Chicago now—a good-natured creature, but slack, +like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and +crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, +and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street +just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you +downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, +after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a +terrible termagant.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't +dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long +years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But +wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike +with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest +training camp that was to fit them for France and war.</p> + +<p>Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. +Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When +the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how +the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue +shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step +began to lag a little.</p> + +<p>He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were +no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of +rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice +seemed never to stop its plaint.</p> + +<p>"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll +die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he +eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing +down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in +him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that +had made him master and superior in spite of everything.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma +Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years +ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and +was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, +and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, +never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person—a +sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with +honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.</p> + +<p>"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. +"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't +make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out +the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it and glad. They +got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or +cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on +shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never +come b—"</p> + +<p>But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed +rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben +Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to +camp was stamped there again—indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun +County, in the spring, has much the beauty of California. There is a +peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben +Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly +dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, +though, as they do in a play. He dared not.</p> + +<p>They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella +was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past +thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the +movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the +cramped, unnatural mode of living necessitated by a four-room flat—all +these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been +bred in the midst of them.</p> + +<p>She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was +a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and +small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments +and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They +seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from +seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite +bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of +sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery +bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's +for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a +nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some +strange chemical process, to bring them together as well.</p> + +<p>"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. +"Do you want to come along, ma?"</p> + +<p>"What you got to get?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie."</p> + +<p>"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore."</p> + +<p>"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I +can do to tend to the house, without sewing."</p> + +<p>"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' +besides—"</p> + +<p>"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me."</p> + +<p>The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L +together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, +indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent +store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap +lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would +buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or +a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, +and this they would munch as they went.</p> + +<p>They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their +hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by +delicatessen.</p> + +<p>Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we +find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the +edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another +day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was—yesterday—a little +feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had +been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be +Thursday. Not that it made any difference.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not +digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. +There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. +A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or +State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and +taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben +used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the +day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the +firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, +sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he +clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.—if he thought of how +the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and +opinion—he said nothing.</p> + +<p>Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of +the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He +tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and +scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave +him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.</p> + +<p>"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you +want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and +grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm."</p> + +<p>His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her +that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate +little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to +gardening—he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.</p> + +<p>On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away +one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the +place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful +tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding +forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He +talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy +man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the +street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat +did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of +wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.</p> + +<p>"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about +917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win +the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say."</p> + +<p>"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is +that Farmer Ben was right.</p> + +<p>Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave +her many hours of unearned freedom for gadding and gossiping.</p> + +<p>"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got +to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting +if I take her along. Ma's goin' with me."</p> + +<p>He loved the feel of Pearlie's, small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. +He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big +brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her +tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender +offices. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and +that he pretended this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair +managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day +looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature +railway.</p> + +<p>They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. +Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. +They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the +impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they +were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters +were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the +armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben +tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole +being revolted at the thought.</p> + +<p>He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths in their one-button suits and +striped shirts standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third, +spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing +labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and +terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the over-dressed, +scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's +heart.</p> + +<p>The lack of exercise and manual labour began to tell on Ben. He did not +grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his +frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. +Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city +pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by +accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as +a water-crazed traveller in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, +and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.</p> + +<p>South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare +come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. +Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he +stumbled upon it and standing there felt at home in Chicago for the +first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in +overalls and carrying whips in their hands—wagon whips, actually. He +hadn't seen men like that since he left the farm. The sight of them sent +a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he +ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His +fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly.</p> + +<p>At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry +seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar +things for which they had been starving.</p> + +<p>He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of +onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables!</p> + +<p>The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure +orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The +cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages +glowed like jade.</p> + +<p>And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, +shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men +in overalls—worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, +and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men jovial, good-natured, with +clear blue eyes and having about them some of the revivifying freshness +and wholesomeness of the products they handled.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and +garlic and of the good earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, +washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt +strangely at peace.</p> + +<p>It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid +hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to +greet him friendlily: "H'are you!" they said, genially. "H'are you this +morning!"</p> + +<p>He was market-wise enough to know that some of these busy people were +commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It +was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in +front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. +Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing +boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain +blue skirt and a small black hat.</p> + +<p>He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the hat. A funny job +for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays! He turned sidewise +in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one +of the men—a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in white +apron—laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving +a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!"</p> + +<p>Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, +tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was +the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank +curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those +intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of +them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so +surprising. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes +and serene brows.</p> + +<p>He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he +acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't +you?"</p> + +<p>She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the +roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: +"Why, Ben!" she said, quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though +she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand—that capable, +reassuring hand—and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and +significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers.</p> + +<p>"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to +be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been +dealing and smiled.</p> + +<p>"What am I doing here, Joe?" she said.</p> + +<p>Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street +at his own game, and makin' so much money that—"</p> + +<p>But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She +turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?"</p> + +<p>Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm—we're +livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here."</p> + +<p>She glanced at him, sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it +briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her +alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a +wren—a business-like little wren—a very early wren that is highly +versed in the worm-catching way.</p> + +<p>At her next utterance he was startled but game. "Have you had your +lunch?"</p> + +<p>"Why, no; I—"</p> + +<p>"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a +bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee +and a sandwich, anyway."</p> + +<p>Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those +intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from +him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was +listening quietly and advising him.</p> + +<p>She interrogated him, gently. But something of his old masterfulness +came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the +rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all."</p> + +<p>So she told him, briefly. She was in the commission business. +Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the +Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, +but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know +that here was a woman of wealth and established commercial position.</p> + +<p>"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, +you must be anyway—it ain't that you look it—but—" He floundered, +stopped.</p> + +<p>She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And +I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My +children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not +going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in +his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first when the +children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything +else. It came natural to me. That's all."</p> + +<p>So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and +of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, +and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came +falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for +deception. When he had finished:</p> + +<p>"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm."</p> + +<p>"I can't. She—I can't."</p> + +<p>She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm."</p> + +<p>He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't."</p> + +<p>"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever +hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. +You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's +ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. +There isn't a bigger job in the world than that."</p> + +<p>For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own +inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go his +shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a +moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered.</p> + +<p>"Emma—I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the +way it turned out—but I always wanted to—"</p> + +<p>She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright +brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live +a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't +to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go +back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger +man-size job in the world. It's where you belong."</p> + +<p>Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And +so they parted, the two.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and +miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he +looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.</p> + +<p>So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the +right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, +or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.</p> + +<p>But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness +could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. +High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there +was Minnie's, too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy +Ed's, and—</p> + +<p>At the other voice his hand trembled so that the key rattled in the +lock, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled +in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's.</p> + +<p>He must just have arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in +progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his +hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, +strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older.</p> + +<p>All this he saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's +two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying: "Hello, pop."</p> + +<p>Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others +were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and +marvelling, and asking questions.</p> + +<p>"He come in to—what's that place, Dike?—Hoboken—yesterday only. An' +he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that +you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more +here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out +to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!"</p> + +<p>But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike +spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped +way of uttering his words:</p> + +<p>"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about +an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little +dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I +never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep +that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta +the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was +the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of +new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds—womenfolks and +men about eighty years old—runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. +I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'."</p> + +<p>"Forget the farm," said Minnie.</p> + +<p>"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out +at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right."</p> + +<p>Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What +d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all—"</p> + +<p>Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're +livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more."</p> + +<p>Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A +stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made +old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered +mother.</p> + +<p>"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been +livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I—The streets here, +they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to +go back and be a farmer. I want—"</p> + +<p>And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld—no, not a new, but +the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six +hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.</p> + +<p>"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got +another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm."</p> + +<p>Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not +agoin' back to the farm."</p> + +<p>But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' +back, Bella," he said, quietly. "An' things are goin' to be different. +You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you +can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' +back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a +bigger man-size job in the world."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="THE_DANCING_GIRLS" id="THE_DANCING_GIRLS" />THE DANCING GIRLS</h2> + + +<p>When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform +with a background of assorted star-shells in full flower; a young man in +uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady (in uniform); a young man +in uniform crouching in a trench, dugout, or shell-hole, this happens:</p> + +<p>You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform; you jump +hurriedly over the picture; and you plunge into the next story, noting +that it is called "The Crimson Emerald" and that, judging from the +pictures, all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt took his dose of war with the best of them, but this is of +Chug before and after taking. If, inadvertently, there should sound a +faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those +stylish dots ... indicative of what the early Victorian writers +conveniently called a drawn veil.</p> + +<p>Nothing could be fairer than that.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt was (and is) the proprietor and sole owner of the Elite +Garage, and he pronounced it with a long i. Automobile parties, touring +Wisconsin, used to mistake him for a handy man about the place and would +call to him, "Heh, boy! Come here and take a look at this engine. She +ain't hitting." When Chug finished with her she was hitting, all right. +A medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, +laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the +grease-grimed grotesquerie of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his +tight-fitting, belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat +russet shoes he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole +owner—much less the proprietor—of anything so successful and +established as the Elite Garage.</p> + +<p>In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin—or in any other sort of town, for +that matter—a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the +community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a +pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug +Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured +forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a pæan of sweetness +and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on +gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt +for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on +business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. Gurnee's electric. Chug +didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible he put his foot +down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was +something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to +thrive and flourish. It was like a combination newspaper office and +Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down but there might +generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running +board of an idle car a little group of slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced +young men in form-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly +virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been +picked before he was ripe.</p> + +<p>They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about +them; terse of speech, quick of eye, engine-wise, and, generally, +nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt. Not vicious. +Not even tough. Rather bored, though they didn't know it. In their +boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their +class in a town of Chippewa's size: cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap +talk. This last unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things +mechanical. Baseball, or a sweet-running engine brought out the best +that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the +dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went +by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency +of their skirts. At supper time they would growl to their surprised +sisters:</p> + +<p>"Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to +make a person sick."</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was +his business responsibility on one side; his very early history on the +other. Once you learn the derivation of Chug's nickname you have that +history from the age of five to twenty-five, inclusive.</p> + +<p>Chug had been christened Floyd (she had got it out of a book) but it was +an appendix rather then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of +addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers. +Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking +in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to +that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed +over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky +named Fayette who—but that's another story.</p> + +<p>The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, +or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only +did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them +that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame +cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first +intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation +of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the +Junction. When Chug ran away—which was on an average of twice daily—he +was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about +the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, +would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe.</p> + +<p>He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your +pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug, +deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him +a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night, +before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at +variance with his easy-going nature.</p> + +<p>"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good +toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go +smashing—"</p> + +<p>The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted +tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been +some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had +merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been +too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, +nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his +investigating fingers.</p> + +<p>It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up +and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians +would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an +engine on a track, and his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng! +Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to +sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon).</p> + +<p>Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the +Chippewa <i>Eagle</i>. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it +he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that +its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover +has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about +Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed +that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving +mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its +way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not +more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. +True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old +wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced +every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, +hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went.</p> + +<p>He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of +mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to +its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a +monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or +screw in his grease-grimed fingers.</p> + +<p>Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or +a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more +than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his +nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across +a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. +There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a +garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out +of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned +beneficent.</p> + +<p>Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len +Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic. +Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men +who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a +spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on +endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of +dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, +neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity.</p> + +<p>"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big +concerns—"</p> + +<p>After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the +silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of +hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have +grown accustomed.</p> + +<p>Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always +earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work +in earnest. His mother took it hard.</p> + +<p>"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An +education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of +pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good +nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had +her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for +Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a +sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows, +embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling +every corner.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He +don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare +quarrels between the two. "I never had none."</p> + +<p>The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering +it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was +working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send +him to college, next."</p> + +<p>"Well, if I do? Then what?"</p> + +<p>"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a +self-evident fact.</p> + +<p>That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the <i>Eagle</i> and +inserted a neat ad.</p> + +<div class="center"><span class="smaller">LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25<br /> + CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST.</span></div> + +<p>For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing +the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against +the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains +as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or +his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore +sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy +treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands.</p> + +<p>Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and +deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle +handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat +paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching +frame.</p> + +<p>At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a +month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here +bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into +her."</p> + +<p>Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and +count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The +look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string.</p> + +<p>For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested +batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the +engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just +emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came +in, en route—a proud, glittering affair—he always managed to get a +chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so +jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an +electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles +possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable. +The least that they called them was juice-boxes.</p> + +<p>At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his +mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always +rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the +time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was +saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home +you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your +pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on +Sundays."</p> + +<p>"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. +Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, +and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over +my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em."</p> + +<p>"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug—those curtain frames."</p> + +<p>"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix +with the lace curtains for you."</p> + +<p>Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much +like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told +of his social side he may be misunderstood.</p> + +<p>Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music +has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: "What is this, +anyway—waltz or fox trot?" This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never +had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was +infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have +started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn't +look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, +but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to +be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second.</p> + +<p>When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky +car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your +view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, +differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the +evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug.</p> + +<p>He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's +amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its +thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple +that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban +lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, +its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it +was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need it would have put you down as +mad.</p> + +<p>Boiled down, Chug Scaritt's crying need was girls. At twenty-two or +three you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but +Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many +labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand. Its millionaires +had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social +functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; +and when it came to costume—diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large +feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers—you couldn't tell their +women from the city dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and +plough works.</p> + +<p>The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish +Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. +They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid +infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt and boys of his kind were left high and dry. So, then, when +Chug went out with a girl it was likely to be by way of someone's +kitchen; or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper +and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in +front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had +been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In +Chippewa they did housework. Big, robust girls they were, miraculously +well dressed in good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for +the most part, with a scum over them; over-fond of coffee; and were +rather dull company. But they were good-natured, and hearty, and +generous.</p> + +<p>The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish +pallor due to lungs dust-choked from work in the rag room. That same +pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa. But they had a +rather appealing, wistful fragility. Their eyes generally looked too big +for their faces. They possessed, though, a certain vivacity and +diablerie that the big, slower-witted Swede girls lacked.</p> + +<p>When Chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little +choice. In the winter he often went up to Woodman's Hall. The dances at +Woodman's Hall were of the kind advertised at fifty cents a couple. +Extra lady, twenty-five cents. Ladies without gents, thirty-five cents. +Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he +escorted home one of the ladies-without-gents. It was not that he +begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went +to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and +out of sheer boredom. Once there he danced every dance and all the +encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to +cheek, in wordless rhythm. His arm about the ample waist of one of the +Swedish girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill +hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played +"Home Sweet Home." The conversation, if any, varied little.</p> + +<p>"The music's swell to-night," from the girl.</p> + +<p>"Yeh."</p> + +<p>"You're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with +you forever." This with a pressure of the girl's arm, and spoken with a +little accent, whether Swedish, Belgian, or Slavic.</p> + +<p>"They all say that."</p> + +<p>"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!"</p> + +<p>"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry.</p> + +<p>He was very little stirred, really.</p> + +<p>"Yeh, you are. I wish you was. It makes no never minds to you who you're +dancing with, s'long's you're dancing."</p> + +<p>This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It +startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look +at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would +have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks +with a stolid persistence.</p> + +<p>"Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded. He was +rather surprised to find that this was so.</p> + +<p>"Wisht it was thirty."</p> + +<p>That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. +When Chug said, "Can I see you home?" he knew the answer before he put +the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of +time, waiting, when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you +when you failed to show up. Telephoned you when you were busy. Didn't +give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven eighths of it +herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl, with the physical +development of a woman and the mind of a child. There were dozens like +her in Chippewa.</p> + +<p>If the girls of his own class noticed him at all it was the more to +ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their +vision down Outagamie Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy +of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making +advances even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped +acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie +Hatton, Old Man Hatton's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa—so +rich that she drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind.</p> + +<p>You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were, take +them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you +danced with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what +you were going to say to them.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt suspected in a vague sort of way that Chug was "running +with the hired girls." The thought distressed her. She was too smart a +woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy.</p> + +<p>"Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I like to fuss +around for company." She was a wonderful cook, Mrs. Scaritt, and liked +to display her skill.</p> + +<p>"Who is there to bring?"</p> + +<p>"The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing +up for, evenings?"</p> + +<p>"Nobody."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt tried another tack.</p> + +<p>"I s'pose this house isn't good enough for 'em? Is that it?"</p> + +<p>"Good enough!" Chug laughed rather grimly. "I'd like to know what's the +matter with it!"</p> + +<p>There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as +spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching +days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house +by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt had rebelled.</p> + +<p>"I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to 'em. It's got so I can +tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven fifty-two goes by in +the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear +the 'leven-forty. Let's stay, Chug."</p> + +<p>So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a +convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by +the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric-lighted, with a +cement walk front and back and a porch with a wicker swing and flower +baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, +though she, in turn, served him meals that would have threatened the +waist-line of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for +instance (it sounds sickish, but wait!) which she baked in a deep pan, +and over which she poured a golden-brown custard all flecked with crusty +melted sugar. You took a bite and lo! it had vanished like a sweet +dewdrop, leaving in your mouth a taste as of nectar, and clover-honey, +and velvet cream.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt learned to gauge Chug's plans for the evening by his +ablutions. Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted +to a rite. In the old days Chug's father had always made a brief enough +business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the +kitchen sink or on the back-porch bench sufficed. The noises he made +were out of all proportion to the results obtained. His snufflings, and +snortings, and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he +emerged from them you were surprised to find that he had merely washed +his face.</p> + +<p>Chug had grease to fight. He had learned how in his first days at the +garage. His teacher had been old Rudie, a mechanic who had tinkered +around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about +them than their inventor. Soap and water alone were powerless against +the grease and carbon and dust that ground themselves into Chug's skin. +First, he lathered himself with warm, soapy water. Then, while arms, +neck, and face were still wet, he covered them with oil—preferably +lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust over all; great +handfuls of it. The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin +smooth and white. Old Rudie, while advocating this process, made little +use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method +of washing in gasoline guaranteed to take the varnish off a car fender. +It seemed to leave Rudie's tough hide undevastated.</p> + +<p>At twenty-four Chug Scaritt was an upstanding, level-headed, and +successful young fellow who worked hard all day and found himself +restless and almost irritable toward evening. He could stay home and +read, or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very +quiet. For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the +street corner, the Y.M.C.A. This last had proved a boon. The swimming +pool, the gym, the reading room, had given Chug many happy, healthful +hours. But, after all, there was something—</p> + +<p>Chug didn't know it was girls—girls you could talk to, and be with, and +take around. But it was. After an hour in the pool, or around the +reading table, or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the +quiet street. He could go home. Or there was Wanda. If he went home he +found himself snapping rather irritably at his mother, for no reason at +all. Ashamed of doing it. Powerless, somehow, to stop.</p> + +<p>He took to driving in the evening: long drives along the country roads, +his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He +used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes +on the road; the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda +along, or one of the mill girls. But not often. They were disappointed +if you didn't drive with one arm around them. He liked being alone. It +soothed him.</p> + +<p>It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain +daughter of the Widow Weld. The Widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of +widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When +you met her together with her daughter Elizabeth you were supposed to +say, "Not mother and daughter! Surely not! Sisters, of course." +Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf-club dances on +Saturday night she would sit, unsought, against the wall while her +skittish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man +would cross the floor toward her and her heart would give a little leap, +but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced +much better than her mother—much better than most girls, for that +matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick +glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now +and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my +little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they +belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted +significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was +common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time +because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the +moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. +Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly +loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly +maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and +pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom +her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the +lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her +Machiavellian mother approved.</p> + +<p>"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after +a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy +and red-eyed old widower of that name.</p> + +<p>"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes."</p> + +<p>"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you."</p> + +<p>"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the +glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than +dance with him. Fat!"</p> + +<p>"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness.</p> + +<p>"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful +inside."</p> + +<p>"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly.</p> + +<p>Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been +unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that +of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle.</p> + +<p>When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the +middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and +the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road +toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His +thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected.</p> + +<p>"If I can rent Bergstrom's place next door when their lease is up I'll +knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in +'em.... Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next +week.... That was swell cake Ma had for supper.... What's that in the +road! What's!—"</p> + +<p>Jammed down the foot-brake. Jerked back the emergency. A girl standing +in the road. A dark mass in the ditch by the road-side. He was out of +his car. He recognized her as the Weld girl.</p> + +<p>"'S'matter?"</p> + +<p>"In the ditch. She's hurt. Quick!"</p> + +<p>"Whose car?" Chug was scrambling down the banks.</p> + +<p>"Hatton's. Angie Hatton's."</p> + +<p>"Gosh!"</p> + +<p>Over by the fence, where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found +sitting up, dizzily, and saying, "Betty! Betty!" in what she supposed +was a loud cry but which was really a whisper.</p> + +<p>"I'm all right, dear. I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you—"</p> + +<p>She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls +clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of +the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender.</p> + +<p>"You're a lucky bunch," said Chug. "Who was driving?"</p> + +<p>"I was," said Angie Hatton.</p> + +<p>"It wasn't her fault," the Weld girl put in, quickly. "We were coming +from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm-wagon coming +toward us. One of those big ones. The middle of the road. Perhaps he was +asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought he would, of course. At the last +minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep."</p> + +<p>"Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you both home in +twenty minutes. We'll have to leave five thousand dollars' worth of car +in the road till morning. It'll be all right."</p> + +<p>He did get them home in twenty minutes and the five thousand dollars' +worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. +Old Man Hatton himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following +day. Chug met him in overalls, smudge-faced as he was. Old Man Hatton +put out his hand. Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw.</p> + +<p>"That's all right," said Old Man Hatton, and grasped it firmly. "Want to +thank you."</p> + +<p>"That's all right," said Chug. "Didn't do a thing."</p> + +<p>"No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays—" He +looked around the garage. "Work here, I suppose?"</p> + +<p>"Yessir."</p> + +<p>"If there's anything I can do for you? Over at the mill."</p> + +<p>"Guess not," said Chug.</p> + +<p>"Treat you right here, do they?"</p> + +<p>"Fine."</p> + +<p>"Let's see. Who owns this place?"</p> + +<p>"I do."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton's face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles. He threw +back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "One on me. +Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one."</p> + +<p>Chug walked to the street with him. "Your daughter, she's got a lot of +nerve, all right. And that girl with her—Weld. Say, not a whimper out +of her and the blood running down her face. She all right?"</p> + +<p>"Cut her head a little. They're both all right. Angie wouldn't even stay +in bed. Well, as I say, if there's anything—?"</p> + +<p>Chug flushed a little. "Tell you what, Mr. Hatton. I'm working on a +thing that'll take the whine out of the Daker."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things. The Daker +is the best car for the money in the world. Not much for looks but +everything in the engine. And everyone who has ever owned one knows that +its only fault is the way its engine moans. Daker owners hate that moan. +When you're going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a +banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked +over it.</p> + +<p>"Can't be done," said Old Man Hatton.</p> + +<p>"Another three months and I'll show you."</p> + +<p>"Hope you do, son. Hope you do."</p> + +<p>But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys +destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a +long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some +eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an +ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval +between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt....</p> + +<p>No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way +it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city. No going into detail +concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. +These things were important and interesting. But perhaps not more +interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following +that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth +Weld, and saying, "Angie Hatton's a smooth little dancer, all right; but +she isn't in it with you."</p> + +<p>For Chippewa, somehow, had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, +cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, +figuratively, wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all +artificial social boundaries. Chug Scaritt, in uniform, must be kept +happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, fun, amusement, +entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall +in Elm Street, on what had been a vacant lot. And there, by day or by +night, were to be had music, and dancing, and hot cakes, and magazines, +and hot coffee, and ice cream and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight, +and slim, and young, and bright-eyed, and companionable. Girls like +Angie Hatton. Girls like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat +against the wall at the golf-club dances and prayed in her heart that +fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance.</p> + +<p>Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to +her, in a tactful aside, "My dear, you've danced three times this +evening with the Scaritt boy. You know that's against the rules."</p> + +<p>Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could +hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true +like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent +effort. She liked that, and understood.</p> + +<p>It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls +could understand like that. She talked to you, straight. Looked at you, +straight. Was interested in the things that interested you. No +waist-squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses.</p> + +<p>"I'm going to try to get over."</p> + +<p>"Say, you don't want to do that."</p> + +<p>"I certainly do. Why not?"</p> + +<p>"You're—why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're—"</p> + +<p>"I'm as old as you, or almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to +work in the canteens, and entertain the boys. If they'll take me. I'll +have to lie six months on my age."</p> + +<p>Rudie was in charge of the garage now. "That part of it's all right," +Chug confided to the Weld girl. "Only thing that worries me is Ma. She +hasn't peeped, hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum, all right."</p> + +<p>"I don't know your mother," said the Weld girl.</p> + +<p>"Thasso," absent-mindedly, from Chug.</p> + +<p>"I'd—like to."</p> + +<p>Chug woke up. "Why, say, that'd be fine! Listen, why don't you come for +Sunday dinner. I've got a hunch we'll shove off next week, and this'll +be my last meal away from camp. They haven't said so, but I don't +know—maybe you wouldn't want to, though. Maybe you—we live the other +side of the tracks—"</p> + +<p>"I'd love to," said the Weld girl. "If you think your mother would like +to have me."</p> + +<p>"Would she! And cook! Say!"</p> + +<p>The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all +right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went.</p> + +<p>It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized +that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of +shortcake he leaned back and said, "Death, where is thy sting?" But his +mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld +that it was plain food but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. "Mrs. Scaritt, it's the best dinner I've +ever eaten."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: "Oh, now! You +folks up in the East End—"</p> + +<p>"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows +that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little +to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of +crackers-and-tea codfish, really."</p> + +<p>"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But +Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly +at each other.</p> + +<p>An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, +the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em +up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high +school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), +she went home, escorted by Chug.</p> + +<p>Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months +passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had +swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld +went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. +Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, +tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She +danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the +boards. She danced in hospitals, châteaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, +Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two +weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at +night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let +them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She +danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New +York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and +once with a general. But never a dance with Chug.</p> + +<p>Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. +She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to +look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor +toward her—her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl +next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the +taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her +mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in +thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish +note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, +shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the +wheezy breath, should ask her to dance.</p> + +<p>She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in +the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's +fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return.</p> + +<p>Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown +figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did +this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might +be said to have been alarmingly accelerated.</p> + +<p>Sometimes—though they did not know it—she and Chug were within a half +hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank +Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in +that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so.</p> + +<p>"It has been awful here," said the Widow Weld. "Nothing to do but sew at +the Red Cross shop; and no sugar or white bread."</p> + +<p>"It must have been," agreed Elizabeth.</p> + +<p>"They're giving a dance for you—and dinner—a week from Saturday, at +the golf club. In your honour."</p> + +<p>"Dance!" Elizabeth closed her eyes, faintly. Then, "Who is?"</p> + +<p>"Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it—that is, it was his idea. But the +club wanted to tender some fitting—"</p> + +<p>"I won't go."</p> + +<p>"Oh, yes, you will."</p> + +<p>Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask.</p> + +<p>"Have the boys come back?"</p> + +<p>"What boys?"</p> + +<p>"The—the boys."</p> + +<p>"Some of them. You know about dear Harry Hatton, of course. Croix de—"</p> + +<p>"What have they done with the Khaki Club, where they used to give the +dances?"</p> + +<p>"Closed. Long ago. There was some talk of keeping it open for a +community centre, or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you'll +have to have a dress for Saturday night, I wonder if that old chiffon, +with a new—"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Chug Scaritt came home in September. The First National Bank Building +seemed, somehow, to have shrunk. And his mother hadn't had all that gray +hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudie had +made out, all right, hadn't he? Good old scout.</p> + +<p>"The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. +Old Rudie was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you +to-night, Chug."</p> + +<p>"Where's this party? I don't want any party."</p> + +<p>"Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up +yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't—"</p> + +<p>"Don't they give dances any more at the Soldiers' Club down on Elm?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they +called a community club. The <i>Eagle</i> was boosting for a big new place. +What they called a Community Memorial Centre. But I don't know. It kind +of fell through, I guess."</p> + +<p>"I won't go," said Chug, suddenly.</p> + +<p>"Go where, Chug?"</p> + +<p>But instead of answering, Chug put his second question.</p> + +<p>"Have you seen—is that—I wonder if that Weld girl's back."</p> + +<p>"My, yes. Papers were full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance, and +all, at the Country Club. They say—"</p> + +<p>A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing +at Woodman's Hall. There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on +a georgette blouse and high-heeled shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled +up at him. Wanda had bad teeth—yellow, with a sort of scum over them.</p> + +<p>"I sure was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say. +Honest, I could dance with you all night." A little pressure of her arm.</p> + +<p>Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke. Dimly he +heard himself saying, "Oh, they all tell me that."</p> + +<p>"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!"</p> + +<p>"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry.</p> + +<p>Then, suddenly, Chug stopped dancing. He stopped, and stepped back from +Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its +jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of +the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in +vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded +floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety +wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of +Chippewa's night.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<div class="center"><span class="smaller">THE END</span></div> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14714 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..929dead --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #14714 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14714) diff --git a/old/14714-8.txt b/old/14714-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dbeb96d --- /dev/null +++ b/old/14714-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,8084 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Half Portions + +Author: Edna Ferber + +Release Date: January 17, 2005 [EBook #14714] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + + + + + HALF PORTIONS + + BY + + EDNA FERBER + + + + GARDEN CITY NEW YORK + DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY + 1920 + + + + + + +CONTENTS PAGE + +I. THE MATERNAL FEMININE 3 +II. APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL 36 +III. OLD LADY MANDLE 76 +IV. YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH 113 +V. LONG DISTANCE 148 +VI. UN MORSO DOO PANG 157 +VII. ONE HUNDRED PER CENT 201 +VIII. FARMER IN THE DELL 230 +IX. THE DANCING GIRLS 280 + + + + +HALF PORTIONS + + + + +THE MATERNAL FEMININE + + +Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall +back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," +states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." +That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most +certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in +the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with +broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was +practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was +strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and +ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's +East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and +hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of +that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest +hats. + +The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women +of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married +sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces +and nephews. + +"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old +thing. And she's had so little in life, really." + +She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a +spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this +pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter, +to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips. +Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen +foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family. +Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their +husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It +was always the same. + +"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living +soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the +children--" + +There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of +to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each +other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a +confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes +of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk, +safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot +rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by +saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I +don't know why I'm telling you all this." + +But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little +heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that +she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life, +has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had +never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it +meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you +have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least +knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her +time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would +have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old +maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all +what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's +viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her +food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women +sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of +what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how +she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business. + +You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from +one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago +wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First +National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and +trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own +family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own +people. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, +and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate +disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks. + +"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora +confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had +made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to +everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train. +Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion. +You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour +car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was +getting along--she called him William--and if they were going to send +her west, and all about her. I _wish_ she wouldn't." + +Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. +You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator +starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof, +unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed +and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper +water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity +in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your +innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of +her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister +Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at +Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, +with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to +her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder. + +Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the +East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the +millinery business in Elm Street. + +"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and +all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now +that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats +of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is." + +H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are +made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the +Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth +Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little +natural bewilderment. + +The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the +original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an +unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree +in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front +porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From +May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing +the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, +accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak +of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace +Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in +Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, +the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) +Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose +never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, +purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that +vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet +shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there +is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than +to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. +Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only +her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and +as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was +that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a +photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish +mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of +its fragile reticence and grace. + +It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to +ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, +as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she +walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that +Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless +cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style +met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in +the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch. + +That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as +inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage +badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the +twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. +Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a +skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years +ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked +about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section +of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon. + +"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full +of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view." + +Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its +exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the +grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the +Chippewa _Eagle_. + +"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow +pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what +was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, +couldn't you die!" + +For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went +East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and +gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played +on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, +in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of +the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago: + + NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY. + H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES. + +Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, +which read: + + MISS SOPHY DECKER + Millinery + +Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had +always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional +hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself +in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat +trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little +bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, +awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still +stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, +came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy +cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five +years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the +old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and +transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of +green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, +and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her +spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, +and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the +superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her +city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases: + +"This is awfully good this year." + +"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the +style--the line--you're paying for, not the material." + +"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it. +Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on." + +When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the +mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it +in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated +eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, +slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples. +A little sigh of relieved suspense. + +"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because +you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have +a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I +proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this +needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it." + +And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat +against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist +and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out +of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you +bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something +more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her +admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow: + +"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. +You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat +and veil as soon's I get my hair combed." + +In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight +brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat +and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the +bedroom from the shoulders down. + +The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and +expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and +lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as +well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these +opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, +frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart +trade. + +"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. +They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell +them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, +or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to +cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it. +Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the +same idea." + +Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, +severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the +other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes. + +At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques +completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No +one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol. + +"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody +feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a +fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to +be there." + +The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a +treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of +satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make +her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of +the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little +scavenger. + +"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt +Sophy. "You must have barrels of it." + +Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I +keep it," she said. + +When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say +'Poor Sophy'?" + +"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and +has always worked." + +Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're +poor?" + +"Well--yes--" + +"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, +skinny and rather foreign looking. + +The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very +tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora +of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his +mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a +girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And +that's such hard work." + +Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still +coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to +baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her +admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her +selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen +years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great +deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or +twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the +beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. +It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had +taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, +unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features +seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large +white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of +those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a +telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's +large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating +strength, courage, and a great human understanding. + +From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have +chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a +lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or +her husband. They all hated it. + +"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had +stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as +an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children. +She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech, +but shockingly true. + +Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, +had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of +pillows. + +"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way +you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with +all that lovely colour!" + +Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me +credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my +blood is in my cheeks." + +Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary +for success in that direction. + +"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's +a profession in itself--being a wife and mother." + +She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's +land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear +he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity +and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of +beauty. + +"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence. +"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a +fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing." + +The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The +girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more +immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods; +irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited +following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid +bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any +one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would +have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a +giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection +unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having +her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a +prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not +a step. + +Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of +affairs, tried to stop it. + +"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, +bluntly, to her sister. + +"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. +"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the +world. That's the trouble. I love them too much." + +"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's +nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. +You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's +ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom +she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban +that Angie Hatton--" + +"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your +shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to +your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the +minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. +That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her +come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, +cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't +know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have +suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--" + +So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and +their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, +their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in +some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one. + +"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How +can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then." + +This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and +became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old +frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was +something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, +that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin +house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the +Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best +residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly +furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary +chill to your heart. + +The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and +snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not +unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam, +and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head +trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray +patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him +for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have +around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls +would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and +cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, +especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from +Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the +best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or +Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original +design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a +small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory +down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her +invaluable. + +The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very +black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark +line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but +when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by +a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low. +She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking +something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream +she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being +pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the +sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. +But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it. + +"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a +boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you +good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me +company." + +Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the +house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big +flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her +skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in +and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny +game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, +always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a +partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings. + +It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly +into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging +for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms +clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came +in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was +thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite +twenty-one. + +"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a +leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look +comic. + +"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're +going to be married." + +Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and +plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen--" she began. + +"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!" + +Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's +face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That +isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is +when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you. +Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother, +pretty near." + +"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk +that way--Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to +really--" + +"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and +old. + +And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the +idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?" + +Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a +capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back +but the boy did not. + +"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will +you promise me? Will you?" + +"Are you going to tell Father?" + +"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. +No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to--You're not a +bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him a +chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over +then." + +Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen. + +"Quick!" + +"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing. + +"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, +sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open +the olives with this fool can opener. I tried." + +There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; +what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just +hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three +days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew +that her prayers were answered. + +Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite +twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely." +She was almost hysterical. + +Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt +Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said +nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora +took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her +cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the +recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing +up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the +floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted +curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and +crafty look. + +"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My +nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or +other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more +economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he +do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--" + +H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at +the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her +teeth as though a knife had entered her heart. + +Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her +hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, +she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and +simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own +affairs, must have marked it. + +The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel +Oakley." + +Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had +been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and +Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his +strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding +his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had +had business relations as well as friendly ones. + +At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth +stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer +look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion +a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain. + +"When did he ask you?" + +"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will +be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France. +I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her +young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean." + +Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your +mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, +'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I _am_ so faint ... all of a +sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...." + +Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks +later. They had a regular pre-war wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and +all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The +girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile +twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever. + +"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of +milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt +who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I +can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!" + +Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl. + +"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't +want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for? +Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy." + +But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of +her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just +like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not +laugh. + +"Now look here, Delia. If you're--" + +But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's +all right," she said. + +Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she +said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for +you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty +close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. +It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby." + +"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been +wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, +anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't +it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm +lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing +like me." + +"But your mother--" + +"Mother doesn't know a thing." + +Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed +enough for two. + +When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face +drawn and queer, Sophy knew. + +"How much?" she said. + +"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that--" + +"I thought Oakley--Adele said--" + +"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's +this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got +scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash." + +"Speculating with it, were you?" + +"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals." + +"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me." + +"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, +and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the +money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that." + +Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the +children, anyway. They won't need it now." + +He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't +they?" + +"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream." + +"Eugene?" + +"Yes." + +"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and +presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this +money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand +these things but I can talk to you. It's like this--" + +"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it, +not for you, but for Flora, and Delia--and Eugene. Flora has lived such +a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you. +Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia +and Eugene are my children--were my children." + +When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was +getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said. + +"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's +lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats +and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother +suffers--poor Sophy." + +"Um," Baldwin grunted. + +When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War +Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora +had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they +thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything +to give comfort to the stricken two. + +"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit +there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel +something." + +"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy. + +"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!" + +This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have +to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the +printed page. You must not skip this. + + AMERICAN RED CROSS + (CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE) + + MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN: + + I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by + the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H. + Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last + hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm + sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who + was privileged to be with her boy at the last. + + Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed + from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not + receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special + hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked + this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us. + + Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who + examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as + he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a + few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and + strong as he was could not pull through. + + The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly + choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were + both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not + to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good + to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his + head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more + easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on + duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he + died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every + minute of that night and have never seen a finer character + than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had + several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each + one simply because of his great will power and fighting + spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, + "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll + only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during + the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he + could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I + had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness + even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was + going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all + his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He + seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in + bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll + fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually + thought we had won when on the third day.... + + But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been + the mother of such a son.... + + I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come + home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than + I can possibly write? + + MARIAN KING. + +It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped +for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in +the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora +and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then +Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. +Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning +a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat +quietly, waiting. + +There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora +broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she +spoke. + +"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I +do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor +Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the +married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, +Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know +how cruel life is." + +Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and +faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's +hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station. +Pretty good." + +Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced +her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood +a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older +women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, +quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into +her eyes straight and sure. + +"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very +proud woman." + + + + +APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL + + +Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She +started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar +in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for +House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five +years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five +years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled +up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of +What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone +through the ceremony twice a year. + +Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the +yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, +flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of +these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in +again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, +things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental +things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things +wrapped up in brown-paper parcels. + +And boxes--oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square +and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; +cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned +an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another +stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents +under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing +fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key +they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as +Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip +covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance. + +The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American +household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, +Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten +years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his +sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the +neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had +lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the +Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful +magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow +chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan. +You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves +the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too +tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded. + +Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, +ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a +palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and +slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, +were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at +Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless +heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of +citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and +to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's. + +Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and +Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up +above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the +afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster +place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen +closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, +as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be. + +That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically, +that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in +tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with +them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental +chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins +and closets for all your worries and confidences. + +But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every +woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I +only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it +weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago," +complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood +floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, +æsthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as +clearly as if a sociologist had charted it. + + * * * * * + +Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the +crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a +junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon +portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each +of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink +cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the +labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a +soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes +behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster +household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in +artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had +prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two +years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the +dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall. + +Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with +them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel +and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the +entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks +as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a +nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping +porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in +the attic. + +One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. +Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, +cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. +Brewster's _bête noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace. +"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: +"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn +mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know +what's got into her." + +By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin +September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of +the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly +again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you +understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little +necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might +have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and +left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, +no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that +it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this +relentless and expert crew. + +Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened +and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz' +Brewster?" + +"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home +with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie." + +Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the +funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _passé_ than a +last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the +tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the +plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had +worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these +were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed +by unbrightened by covetousness. + +The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and +the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic. +Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen +and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's +relations' latest flagrancy. + +"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I +says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I +guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and +much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the +second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same +footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard. + + * * * * * + +Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it +looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent +had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise. + +Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished: + +"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--" + +"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all +smudged, too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked +about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was +a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in +June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor +trips into the country. + +"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come +here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat +they're--why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just +got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father." + +Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping +a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot +your old friends, have you?" + +"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other +woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's +house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was +such a thing, I mean." + +"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely. + +Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor +clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, +crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included +and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the +kind. This is--this is an anachronism." + +"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be +cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned." + +They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended +the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting +each other. + +Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the +protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him. +You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz Merz; you know--boiled. Well, +you know what a despot she is." + +It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch +Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes +and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, +mother!" + +Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at +Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of +Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift +movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly +at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled +it through the open doorway. + +"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off +your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's +the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the +war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster. + +Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard. +"It's just that it seems so idiotic--your digging around in an attic in +this day and age! Why, it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much +more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an +attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this +huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just +you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent +anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?" + +"Why, no. I hate it." + +"Then why in the world--" + +"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in +New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your +room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming--the slip +covers--" + +"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She +succeeded in slurring it ludicrously. + +It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not +be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up +delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young +lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped +to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused +at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft +grays and blues. + +Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing +forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's +the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed. + +"I know it." + +The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the +situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable +streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up." + +"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to +meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I +didn't know there was any situation." + +"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of +mind." + +Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her +voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that +tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter." +She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on. +Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a +bath, won't you, dear?" + +"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled--honestly?--on a day like this?" + +"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly. + +Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of +Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz' +Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter +flannels!" + +"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young +fist down in the water--spat!--so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and +floor impartially. + +Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea +Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of +the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a +queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her +throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin +winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner +where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!" + +His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red. +He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was +pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long +minute--close. + +"Need a shave, dad." + +"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off. +"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?" + +"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio--you +know--plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for +you." + +Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a +little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated +porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I +thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows, +and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a +change." + +Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about +that. Mother needs--" + +Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an +all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?" +She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner +so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want +to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's +everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky. + +But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly +sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese +soufflé, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream. + +"But, mother, you shouldn't have--" feebly. + +"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just +wanted to tease you." + +Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But +two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him +go, a speculative look in her eyes. + +She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, +clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the +centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged, +trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern +deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; +the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's +Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs." + +"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval! +Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs +and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for +the bowl in the dining room. + +Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night, +there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's +volcanic remarks. + +Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to +have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September +before they began firing up for the winter. + +"I'll go down with you," said Pinky. + +"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust." + +But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed, +after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy." + +And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling +process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of +the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two +men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea +Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his +sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came +forward. + +She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you." + +"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred." + +"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well." + +He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked +at her. "Huh? What d'you mean--isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open. +His eyes looked suddenly strained. + +"This house--it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at +supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself--like +other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And +you're another." + +"Me?" feebly. + +"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that +it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something--I don't know +what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills +for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true. +Wasn't it? Wasn't it?" + +"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was +terribly disturbed, "About mother--you said--" + +"You and she ought to go away this winter--not just for a trip, but to +stay. You"--she drew a long breath and made the plunge--"you ought to +give up the house." + +"Give up--" + +"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to +New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few +days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little +apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it--two +rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse." + +Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great +furnace room. "Oh, but listen--" + +"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't +as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the +theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and +concerts." + +He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady +diet--Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a +business to--" + +"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole +thing--or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it +wants its way. + +He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her +a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you +don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she +hated it. I asked about the attic--the cleaning and all--and she said +she hated it." + +"Did she say that, Paula?" + +"Yes." + +He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked +pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to +himself, and thinking, thinking. + +Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, +through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's +bedroom door was open. + +A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the +plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in +the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?" + +"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the +bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. +Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face +and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. +Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't +well. He ought to go away." + +As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow. +As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked +suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father--but he isn't +sick. He--" + +"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That +furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred. +He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This +house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or +sell it, and come to New York?" + +"But we do. We did. Last winter--" + +"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little +two-room apartment in one of the new buildings--near my studio--and +relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a +rut--both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with +these Wisconsin winters--" + +"But California--we could go to California for--" + +"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled, +and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great +hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it." + +"Did he ever say so?" + +"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He--" + +Slow steps ascending the stairs--heavy, painful steps. The two women +listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words. +The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her +eyes anxious, tender. + +"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only--why, dad's +only fifty-eight." + +"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly. + +Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so +tired, aren't you?" + +Her father stood in the doorway. + +"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned +around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember." + +So Pinky went off to her own room (_sans_ slp cov) and slept soundly, +dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done. + + * * * * * + +Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform, +a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done. + +"_Au 'voir!_ The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love +it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your +minds, remember." + +And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New +Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a +studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady +who turned out to be from Des Moines. + +When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their +inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being +the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as +black diamonds and twice as costly. + +Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and +said: "How many rooms did you say?" + +"Two--and a kitchenette, of course." + +"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for +that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum." + +But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very +impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the +best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no +matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the +prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it +was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon. + +"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded +Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder +they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you +feel like a book agent." + +He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster, +soothingly. + +They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and +(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known +as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in +red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray. + +Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, _we've_ been very +comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager." + +"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster. + +"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good. +She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five. +She'll take two hundred." + +"You bet she will," growled Hosea. + +She answered the door--hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's +chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio +living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was +window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of +tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its +back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just +behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as +you've see it in the second-act library. + +Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty +ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he +remarked. + +But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was +saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You +see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six--eight, in fact." + +"Heaven forbid!" in fervent _sotto voce_ from Father Brewster. + +"It's an enormous saving in time and labour." + +"The--kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster. + +The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She +skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really +handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a +part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was +dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. +And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the +miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the +Brewster's Winnebago china closet. + +"Why, how--how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster. + +"Isn't it? So complete--and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks, +chops, everything right here. It's just play." + +A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the +tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are +the beds?" + +She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're +upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know." + +A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung +with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom--a +rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with +whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on +dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall. + +They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for +Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. + + * * * * * + +Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great +deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and +let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, _à la_ Juliet, +having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume +consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's +little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the +Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, +the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky +legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter. + +After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room +apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible +loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room +house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the +winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a +light-heartedness that neither of them felt. + +They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the +street noises of New York came up to them--a loose chain flapping +against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth +Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a +motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down. + +She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious +gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at +home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?" + +"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off." + +"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though. +Great!" + +"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily. + +They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in +Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more +doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had +learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain. +Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all +over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the +happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known +that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious +bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding. + +When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh, +take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster +used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can +start the eggs." + + * * * * * + +In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster +never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet +By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of +jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He +deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail +off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, +heavily, as though it were a physical weight. + +Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life! + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say. + +"Time of my life, father." + +She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which +no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less +frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. +Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for +her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, +slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture +those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she +had talked to five or six of them. + +She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he +confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or approximately; Michigan, and +Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one +New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em." + +"Which one?" + +"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the +blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, +but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place +in the country, in a house." + +A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to +talk to her, Hosey. Take me over." + +She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the +quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's +fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you +Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. +Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the +children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love +it--oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult." + +Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a +tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--" + +The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But +she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still +wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the +slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette." + +This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked +to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At +first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on +Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed +and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a +mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than +women. + +The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When +she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say: +"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. +Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me +show you our new taupes." + + * * * * * + +Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine +individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was +startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's +simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps +two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York. + +"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said. + +"Me? No." + +"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't." + +"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't +they? Most of 'em?" + +"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an' +around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they +come from. I dunno." + +Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. +He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, +buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, +with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white +linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his +square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his +baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he +thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed +that they did not. + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" + +"I should say I am, father." + +"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?" + +"It's play." + +She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen +pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: +apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; +sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, +that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one +combination kitchen-dining-and-living room. + +"Chops taste good, Hosey?" + +"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out +to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show." + +"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?" + +"It's the life, mother! It's the life!" + + * * * * * + +His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store +kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream +whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily +with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even +known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used +to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price +of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin +cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market +before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with +tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the +buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time. + +Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had +known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, +naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg +acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin +farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a +ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had +sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on +Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out +on the porch early, very early summer mornings. + +You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant +there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he +had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its +black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to +struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had +thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever. + +"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just +seemed to kind of pine away." + + * * * * * + +It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this +memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market. +Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of +eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness +over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway +he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face +was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung +loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out. + +"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--" + +He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into +the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A +great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick. + +The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The +glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have +gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged +corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be +sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, +fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim +little hall. + +A barked shin. A good, round oath. + +"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him +into the bright front room. + +"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the +door. What the--" + +"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I +didn't know--" + +Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up +at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her +head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves +were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a +promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house. + +"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to +get away from. If Pinky--" + +"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a +letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She +asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own +things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, +and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!" + +Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in +the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic +pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; +"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms." + +Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a +little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick, +Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman +with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came +to the door with her hat on, and yet--" + +Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he +said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go +home." + +Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?" + +"Now." + +"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--" + +"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this +make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's +go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe." + +In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The +Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene +Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of +daisies. + +At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head +out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?" + +They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. +Brewster leaned back without comment. + +Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug +Hengel. + +"Yep." + +"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long." + +"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon--the big piece. And +send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll +take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right." + +It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of +his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the +restaurant fare of the past six months. + + * * * * * + +All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with +an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as +they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very +still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. +The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then +Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain +with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He +took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide +and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief. + +"Welcome home! Home!" + +She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks! +Huge!" + +"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to +library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No +wonder it grins and throws out its arms." + +They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the +cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and +shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his +stubby black pipe. + +"Hosey!"--from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of +preserves when you come." + +"What?" + +"Can of preserves." + +"What kind?" + +"Any kind you like." + +"Can I have two kinds?" + +He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put +them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands +together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now. +That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does. +Is the house getting warmer?" + +He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was +back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out +the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the +tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why--" + +"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and +slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm +going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the +table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've +cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I +don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your +overalls. Come on." + +He cut into the steak--a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat +it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, +ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness +and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them. + +The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly. + +"Let me go, Milly." + +"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're--" + +He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She +says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. +She--Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time +for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning." + +Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, +Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight." + + + + +OLD LADY MANDLE + + +Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room +flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an +ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at +cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more +artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg +sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, +admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. +Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And +the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo. + +Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a +spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and +wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an +admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she +acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no +proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never +spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son +Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were +delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and +sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the +stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For +they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies +could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons +and their sons' wives. + +Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs. +Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row, +on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon +coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of +them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her +voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo. + +My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no +thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine +about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It +may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his +thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form +a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old +mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been +hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked +over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and +regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with +dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This +had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the +purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the +iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She +possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins +of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she +essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now! +None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night." + +When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her +two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first +and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of +lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her +friends. + +"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my +old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo." + +In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk +together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in +pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent +Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her +pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon +which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her +cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that +she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was +a spoiled old lady. + +At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her +neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box +in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old +frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No +fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds +that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long +hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and +soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed, +dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black +silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three +friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty +apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians, +guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and +craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink +scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, +for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared +clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's +exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were +worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They +were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, +scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at +bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle +triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three +was imitation. + +So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling +their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into +the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They +represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they +themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its +apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the +roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers +over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none +of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over +her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a +man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did +not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama, +undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they +derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the +modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that +this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on +four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired +four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path. + +Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They +seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, +and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her +voice was unctuous with pride. + +"My son's wife--" one of the three would begin. There was something +terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the +title. + +"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if +I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to +depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead." + +"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked +tones from Mrs. Mandle. + +"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than +nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see +enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it +all." + +A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do +you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?" + +More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an +Old People's Home as a refuge. Then: + +"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to +housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he +says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a +restaurant--well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You +couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'" + +Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll +marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly +streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always +grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a +marvel of perfection. + +Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries +late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, +either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in +his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait." + +"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a +trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let +a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them +like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time." + +The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her +fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she +made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son +Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I +won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I +guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I +said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he +laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass +me another, Ma'." + +"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser. + +"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud." + +"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a--" + +"He's just like a man of twenty-five--only worse." + +Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son +Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?" + +They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the +park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They +never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or +how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely +fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves. + +Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She +had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, +healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man +twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life +together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could +call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, +according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, +the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's +miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving +necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the +spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never +quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of +heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty +became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned +matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and +linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow. + +Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business. +He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, +documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when +a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was +none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for +masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, +stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way +they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched +against the father and daughter. + +It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in +a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when +the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping +Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real +estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, +clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands +more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a +black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down +figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of +terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of +the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a +curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching +the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she +found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's +sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the +wake of the devastating panic. + +Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a +household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen +he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a +stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a +boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and +responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From +his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material +values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never +attained her iron indomitability. + +It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most +modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and +take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china +houses. + +The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to +get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her." + +"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said. + +Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy--or +as happy as she knows how to be--she'll never come back. That's what I +want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along." + +They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of +economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the +acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the +impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, +long-suffering, subdued--and in need of a start. He was. They managed a +very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. +Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented +incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. +Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had +expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the +last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were +right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement +colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes. + +The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound +steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A +new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle. + +Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle +side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them +a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a +man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, +but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest +against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the +cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) +in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar +smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play +that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would +tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, +in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and +son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo +kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she +looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat +her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough +thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill +that her husband's withered kisses had never given her. + +Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a +comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit +of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady +Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend +freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his +savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a +time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She +and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. +When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma +Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch +of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his +money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household +capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to +protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony. + +"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst +tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than +the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!" + +She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next +day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo +spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand +and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed +contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo +regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, +articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with +age, shrewd though she naturally was. + +It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an +evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full +hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. +"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing +I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a +chicken." + +"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a +musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next +day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. +Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old +lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his +becoming what she called fast. + +"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman +like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a +dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick. + +So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South +Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life. + +And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does. + +Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might +have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She +remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken +admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of +business. + +"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like +it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at +rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss. +Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she +turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for +novelties." + +Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. +Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner. +Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal, +too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly +during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of +angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The +following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in +Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. +Usually he praised this dish, or that. + +"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?" + +"'S all right." And declined a second piece. + +The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped +his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before +her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said. + +Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?" + +"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about +her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll +love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. +Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look +so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?" + +"But who--?" + +"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and +strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home +an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--" + +Ad lib. + +They were married the following month. + +Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment +farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her +mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of +grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, +miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were +swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna, +with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her +gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the +afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat +Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never +failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day +scrubber. + +But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, +voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, +bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd +business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship. + +He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany +front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. +She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. +Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a +concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for +its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her +shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair +gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was +clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was +always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would +emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles +were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed +when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her +scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look +as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé. + +"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose +daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that +she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her +knowledge. + +"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right." + +He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove +it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in +a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her +own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom +reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a +fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and +on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that +its utilitarian dial was almost lost. + +It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and +she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes +up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean +things out on the bed--fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted +to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate +handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown--hot, +fagged, sticky--she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour +so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to +eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool, +interested, sweet-smelling. + +When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More +than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long +in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered +that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could +never resent it. + +Ma Mandle's reign was over. + +To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied +magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, +but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things +different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears +caught the familiar phrase. + +"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been +boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of +the way. Don't I know!" + +"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is +no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure +is welcome." + +But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow +pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew. +She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of +ashes. + +Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in +his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that +made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as +bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree +with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her +provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. +She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo +agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma +Mandle fought every ounce of it. + +"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I +never heard of such a thing. Fads!" + +But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental +relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He +only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother +had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, +tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed +miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a +certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf +clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just +the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it +the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among +a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying +up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, +crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he +would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. +Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she +had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face +and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but +she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the +pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote +corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about +not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at +breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the +milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that +had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to +say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now +it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and +Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines. + +If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life +of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told +you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she +would have denied it, furiously. But both were true. + +When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well. + +"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," +she would say, unreasonably. + +"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?" + +If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked. + +Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, +well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat +but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?" + +"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked +over." + +"Oh--to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy." + +In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the +marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said. +"This is your household now." + +But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen +table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a +head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump +chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with +meaning. + +Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of +her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the +fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and +she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the +result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon +parties at the homes of married women of her own age and +station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too +much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery +biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes +of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a +heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing. + +"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what +we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked +teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed +her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the +sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her +clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent +life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing +her face had not coarsened its texture. + +Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between +the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about +cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted +after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him +about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about +Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always +treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at +ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling +of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her +house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts +to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only +thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know +that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which +caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should +not do. + +Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the +theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became +marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man. + +"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say. + +"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some +night life." + +"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. +You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along." + +That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the +end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper +would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill +talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented +it. + +Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the +vaguely suspicious three. + +Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good +deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically +precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long +passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and +flowers. + +Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they +liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier +one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for +hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture +absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of +Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression. + +A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own +good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating +heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice +it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him +mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into +his ear. + +"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't +have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old +that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't +enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't +enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week." + +An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would +come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining +point, goaded by much repetition. + +The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a +simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from +mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a +time is all that any man can handle successfully. + +"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling. +Why can't you get along." + +One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a +decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black +lace." + +Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to +die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear +mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think +of me the way I was when I was alive." + +The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. +Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her +temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma +Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation, +denial; vituperation, retort. + +"You'll be happy when I'm gone." + +"If I am it's your fault." + +"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They +don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha--" + +"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever +saw." + +And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at +pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's +got into you two women?" + +It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house, +hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June +night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was +even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars +streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline +blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in +front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded +in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic +bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time, +with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She +came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and +agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this +you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How +right they were--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless. +Unconsidered. In the way. + +By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body +lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how +worried Hugo had looked.... + +Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward +home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted +scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely +fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in +duration. + +She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The +place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of +someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again. +The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She +crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs. + +"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it +wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd--" + +"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's +an old lady--" + +"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year +and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any +reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!" + +"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick." + +Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing +endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through +the tears. + +"No, I'm not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just +wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, +maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love +them too much we really harm them. I suppose--" + +"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?" + +"Yes." + +Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all +worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you +cry before." + +"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right. +I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past +and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to +her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, +maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you." + +Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband +belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by +accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and +deliberately." + +But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If +it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just +now, too, when you're so worried about business." + +"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got +to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the +French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year. +If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood +the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above +water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now." + +"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself +sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the +business--" + +"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see." + +The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out +alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd +better--" + +Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as +though she had just come in. + +"That you, Ma?" called Hugo. + +He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic +little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began +to worry about you." + +"I'm all right. I'm going to bed." + +He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going +over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma." + +Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed +behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled +bravely. + +"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off." + +But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, +you two." + +That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. +Something new, something gentle, something wise. + +She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and +hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into +bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had +lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be +seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to +crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would +express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could +not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her +mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child +to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life. +She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she +sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in +a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They +called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it +to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday +Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a +moth get into her husband's winter suit. + +"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never. +But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my +son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house." + +Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She +forgets. We all forget." + +It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from +the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. +Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare +feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a +line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. +With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's +pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the +light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again. + +She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the +blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her +head ... pounding.... + +At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was +his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he +whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully +by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful +awkwardness up the hall again. + +"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on +a scorcher like this." + +Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said. +She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper +pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read +it. + +"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than +half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder. + +"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in +the world." + +A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished +reading them. + + + + +YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH + + +When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi +Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the +personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in +newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short +story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised +as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and +been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the +background. You can't see the heavens for the stars. + +Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no +introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been +described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on +Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though +quoted, thus: + +"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a +genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, +artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very +force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the +eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a +comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to +a vice." + +Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine +diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, +"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--" + +That was Sid Hahn. + +I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his +likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the +theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and +top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black +cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone +interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew +all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those +middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or +something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the +profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his +having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, +indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally +controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing +in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It +had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized +in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, +at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, +producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy +with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid +Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever +said to himself in so many words: + +"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let +anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to +be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be +selfish." + +Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in +the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination +running through the whole fibre of his being could have been +crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that. + +By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than +Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them +even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood +behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But +taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of +the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world. + +He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early +love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved +what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as +though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. +Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by +people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular +east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with +make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play +with real ones, like God. But always kind. + +No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn +appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired +ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war +horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit +there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and +inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense +and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket +of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It +smells!" + +Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from +years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly +afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had +thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as +they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the +treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes. + +It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the +famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and +swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when +she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he +regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that +time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, +very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as +a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop +rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think +of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well." + +Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in +French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?" + +"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is +a woman-hater." + +"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!" + +"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. +They don't need to know a language to understand it." + +"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz +course, was it?" + +Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen +face. "No. I learned that in another school." + +Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might +almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin +Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to +Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a +tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be +said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre. + +He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed +him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs +suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of +office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very +firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, +how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those +expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring +precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable +high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, +while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high +note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it. + +"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer +office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling +and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a--a--" + +"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly. + +Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?" + +"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?" + +Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your +age, you are." + +"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly. + +There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He +probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he +whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, +too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from +another, and doesn't to this day. + +At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, +he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance +to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room +(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was +the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would +have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect +servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for +four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot +plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be +cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, +in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and +wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he +would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly +to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the +firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the +side of the piano (grand). + +His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing +of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the +office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn +called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie. +From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a +sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he +was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in +rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, +lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but +Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit +it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable. + +He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November +evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie +might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of +Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat +over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold +drizzle of the November evening. + +Hahn's apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth +Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to +which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's +errand. + +It was Saki--or Saki's equivalent--who opened the door. A white-coated, +soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. +Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly. + +"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it." + +"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly. + +"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?" + +"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders. + +"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want--" + +Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at +his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room +beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but +something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, +and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve. + +Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with +those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest +eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He +glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing +the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He +had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, +the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he +could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own +inability to reproduce it. + +The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie. + +"God, I wish I could play!" + +"Helps a lot." + +"You play?" + +"Yes." + +"What?" + +"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up." + +"Compose, you mean?" + +"Yes." + +"Play one of those." + +So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good +Night--Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even +published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for +Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the +success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was +sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky +Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long +been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam +and glow in the lamplight. + +When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're +you going to do with it?" + +"With what?" + +"With what you've got. You know." + +Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going +to--I'm going to do a lot with it." + +"Yeh, but how?" + +Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a +long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time. +And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to +be selfish ..." + +As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the +doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what +he had meant to say. + +"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I--" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was +too much. + +"Better." + +They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's +encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, +Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither of them +knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an +intoxicant and a stimulant. + +"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more. +More." + +"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then, +immediately, "No, of course not." + +"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a +baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't +the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a +baby--but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!" + +"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each +other, this ill-assorted pair. + +It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the +play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big +room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One +lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely. + +As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming +out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!" + +"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it." + +"That's what they all say"--grimly--"_after_ they've got it." + +The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was +now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into +earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!" + +"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you +know if you're right." + +In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his +official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort +of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the +theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this +no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. +There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, +for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when +she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power +to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which +gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the +ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority. + +When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on +one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped +down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign +stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise +rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on +the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in +tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely +repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, +perhaps, but characteristic. + + MR. SID. HAHN, + Hotel Savoy, + London, + England. + + It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of + a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to + five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical + creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful + investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any + is extinct. + + WALLIE. + +This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions, +went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised, +wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days +later. + +Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of +magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous +women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and +Cigány music, and cafés and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low +and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely +on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow). + +It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then +a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier. + +Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the +manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long +ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound. + +"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've +found something big!" + +Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good +as that." + +"Play! It isn't a play." + +"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned +good! You don't mean to tell me--" + +"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good--or will be when you get through +with it." + +"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with +two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk +hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a +boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe. + +"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!" + +"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?" + +"Her name's Mizzi." + +"Mizzi what?" + +"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She--" + +"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and +real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine." + +But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings." + +"Beautiful, is she?" + +"No, not particularly. No." + +"Wonderful voice, h'm?" + +"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful." + +Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill +circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry +bricks!" + +"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head +and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides--" + +But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If +I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway. +You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick." + +Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You +wait. You'll see." + +Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep +so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was +unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had +decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera), +it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the +negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first +train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you. +You've got to see her." + +Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs +along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the +royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the +monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve +and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed, +daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers +which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest +men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of +the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the +river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new +building being erected across the way. It was on this building that +Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier. + +The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a +million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells, +running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two +American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women +were employed was dreadful and incredible. + +Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a +little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After +they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before." + +By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an +indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled +him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he +met Mizzi. + +They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive. +Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks. + +"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question. + +Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of +the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking +stuff for them. The women do that." + +And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the +women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up +one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a +musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some +seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing +across the river. Their hands were purple. + +"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But +I know it, anyway." + +Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk +and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because +they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now. +With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But +then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a +personality when he saw it. + +Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called +it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very +straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach +held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a +little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a +pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit. + +"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie. + +Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture. +She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between +seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth +pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its +two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high +in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed +deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it. +Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just +accomplished the gymnastic feat. + +"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage +is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly." + +A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were +abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew +chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men +followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore +overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food--very +small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and +sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the +whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished. + +"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward +Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from +her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise, +over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks +red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic. + +She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book +things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and +white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the +neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear +voice. + +"What's that?" asked Hahn. + +"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't +speak German, did you know that? They hate it." + +The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves +comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of +anticipation. + +"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same +every day." + +Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of +the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of +the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like +this: + + A hundred geese in a row + Going into the coop. + At the head of the procession + A stick over his shoulder-- + +No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly +would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience +gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot +Time": + + + When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling, + All join round and sweetly you must sing + And when the words am through in the chorus all join in + There'll be a _hot time_ + In the _old town_ + To-night. + My + Ba- + By. + +And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still +think it's our national anthem. + +When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped +their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual +beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and +flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in +a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive +pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality +that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember. + +There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted +description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call +it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these +things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it +is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it. + +So now he said, quietly, "She's got it." + +"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne +ever had. A year of training and some clothes--" + +"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself." + +"I'm sorry," stiffly. + +But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I +like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out +anything?" + +"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. +Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's +Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody +knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible +language in the world--Hungarian. They'll stick a _b_ next to a _k_ and +follow it up with a _z_ and put an accent mark over the whole business +and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!" + +"What?" said Hahn, obligingly. + +"On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela +Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's--" + +"What's Gerbeaud's?" + +"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and +guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn't like our +pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous +stuff, this is!" + +After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All +right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. +Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?" + +"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside. +There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You +know--the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue. +There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in +that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of +the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I +waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her--I knew she couldn't +any more than knock me down--and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?' +She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an +Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I +had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she +opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice +of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an +imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of +stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then +they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up +dashed an equipage--you couldn't possibly call it anything less--with +flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside +the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old +frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and +her name is Josefa." + +"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I +don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And +what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?" + +"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the +Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot +of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice +a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always +manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and +see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I +couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just +this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and +she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she +said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh." + +"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously. + +And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know +it. + + * * * * * + +There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition +seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse, +cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman +of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic. +No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the +first--he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades. + +You know she wasn't--and isn't--a beauty, even in that portrait of her +by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on +either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose +very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then +there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for +it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for +pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest." + +While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged +woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook, +she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she +would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement +for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his +cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the +peasant women do it--the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife +cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she +would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing +the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent +figure. + +With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that +some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread +upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her +mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory. + +"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my +girl," Sid Hahn had said. + +She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest--I will not eat--I will not +sleep--I will not love--until I have it." + +Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity. + +"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought +of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had +hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them, +very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though +neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young +faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness. + +Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff--you know--complexes +and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know +to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which +they considered desirable. + +He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi, +remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He +watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on +his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his +own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving +himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world--the one thing he +wanted more than he had ever wanted anything. + +He decided that Destiny--a ponderous, slow-moving creature at +best--needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all +effective plans are. + +Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was +amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became +in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of +audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She +took it to her breast. She romped with it. + +He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for +Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office. + +"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some +little thing might be wrong--you know how they are. And all the rest +would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world--when they like +you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two +weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl +has got more real genius than any woman since--since Bernhardt in her +prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And +it'll _be_ acting." + +"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly. + +"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll +probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago +I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't +get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do +something for me?" + +"Sure." + +"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The +Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. +You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your +friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he +likes to hear you play." + +He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship +that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his +books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion. + +Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the +sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it. +Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the +Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as +any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish +comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal +though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi +stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, +just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a +scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the +steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a +rosy line of splendour. + +The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the +play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door +closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out +after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, +and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, +and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came +again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and +profitless, without nourishment or sweetness. + +The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, +without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New +York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his +round, ugly face in at the opening. + +"Let's surprise Wallie," he said. + +"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly. + +"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being +home for dinner. Unless you're too tired." + +"I'm not tired." + +The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a +quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, +lamp-lighted room. + +Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a +purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers' +windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather +distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They +said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face! + +"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!" + +"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello." + +Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi." + +"Hello," said Mizzi. + +"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn. + +They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again. + +Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly +together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on +the back. "How'd you like it--the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? +H'm?" + +"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice." + +"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure." + +"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently. + +"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English. + +At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you! +I'll--I'll be glad to take you." + +Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the +three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when +it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to +be home." + +Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go, +suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around. +Hahn--he had to stand on tiptoe to do it--kissed her once on the mouth, +hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie +about the red carpet," he said. + +"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets." + +Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left. +There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and +See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous. + +Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small, +very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the +piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing +the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a +little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it +atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white +keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked +up. His cheeks were wet with tears. + +"God! I wish I could play!" he said. + + + + +LONG DISTANCE + + +Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was +mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny +wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the +plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old. + +You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. +Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any +wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about +him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick +to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to +his task, his surroundings, and his attitude. + +Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that +of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working +position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous +perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which +are likely to trick you in an emergency. + +Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the +absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like +Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all +greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those +rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is +complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds +similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular +English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9. + +The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black +paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him +to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the +other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet +went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he +painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the +whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the +index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently +from his strong hands. + +"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said. + +Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell." + +Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden +chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter +bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, +with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as +A.E.F. and Co. 11. + +"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But +Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?" + +"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One." + +Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began +to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the +centuries-old English garden. + +It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can +appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days. + +Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men +whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could +shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his +pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was +his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's +gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any +passing petticoat that caught his fancy. + +Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, +protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the +law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of +their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street +below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" + +There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of +beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt +as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's +has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with +his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or +a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and +called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks +a little higher. + +But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on +the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down +from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia +Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, +except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more +remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to +be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. + +So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and +I'll be down." + +Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the +streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which +would make them border on the red. + +"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you +had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like +that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're +safe up there." + +The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs +were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine +of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and +stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One +ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he +said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish +heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. +Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing +slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet +straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes +wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her +hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And +as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, +looking after her. + +Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing +at the foot of the pole, waiting. + +They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet +Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot +somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that +same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's +costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) +you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began. + +Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet +was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever +indiscernible among its tender foliage. + +Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss +Kate, and the letter. + +His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war +surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine +of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing--they put it down +under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English +garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the +shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead +chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the +doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the +memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or +weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers--the fingers that +had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days. + +"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the +nerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it. Sometimes just a +word--the right word--will set the thing in motion again. Does he get +any letters?" + +"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet +about--about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that +his leg is healed and she wonders--" + +That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked +Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his +eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she +began to read: + + Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it + rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than + any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're + reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place + takes the prize. + + I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet + darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and + nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something + you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the + leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference + with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how + bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any + features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's + happened to the outside of you, they can't change your + insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that + day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece + of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to + be slapped, God bless the boy in you-- + +A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball +was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. + +"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice. + +Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy +and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood." + +"What'm I doin' with it?" + +"You've just finished painting it." + +Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, +struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement +he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a +little. + +"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, +beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--" + +But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. +She was registering joy--pure joy. + + + + +UN MORSO DOO PANG + + +When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, +in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that +Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a +casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as +unemotionally as a weather bulletin. + +Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert +heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the +Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her +hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where +shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no +answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky. + + * * * * * + +Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the +pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: +"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?" + +And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was +kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing +while my iron was on." + +At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink +georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to +texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so +reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very +brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve +the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top; +finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it. + +As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would +appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young +thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping +criticism. + +"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt +hem. + +Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that +lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I +just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto +and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting." + +Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River +Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at +the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp +and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch +factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing +this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as +unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose +family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy, +summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very +hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town +used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. +Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and +zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin--materials +that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for +party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were +showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that +was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to +Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her. + +Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen +door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, +following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, +caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a +water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth +curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement +department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the +corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was +shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the +room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman +thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could +stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not +be runnin' the streets every night." + +"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you." + +And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in +families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; +affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the +Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, +loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame +house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and +garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged +between her parents. + +Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's +evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin' +downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to +stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed +your hair." + +Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back +porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at +half-past six to go to work. + +Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the +limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. +She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some +errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of +half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a +damp tea towel. + +"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?" + +"No." + +"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't +you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, +h'm?" + +"What for?"--listlessly. + +"What for! What does anybody go out for!" + +"I don't know." + +If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might +have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong +upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy: +"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the +last fella left in the world." + +A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He +is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe +Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see +if I can't make a hit with one of them." + +She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie +Golden's world. + + * * * * * + +In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the +Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the +pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room +foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was +capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter +from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth +to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with +the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from +Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie +gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand +Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, +though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She +followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie +Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from +the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall +styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of +the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected +stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it. + +You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. +Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or +retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not +sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and +arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches +along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls +worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny +parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each +wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch +factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket +had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to +experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, +somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant. + +Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation +for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, +the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of +nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed +laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie +Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had +directed one of her sure shafts at him. + +Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew +it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence +and audacity saved her. + +"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll +find yourself looking for a job." + +"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a +form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type +of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, +ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through +the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, +Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, +certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady +worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, +regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side +of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite +drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like +an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate +mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was +said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort +of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, +it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without +retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy. + +When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs +something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he +ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs +is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' +as a relish." + +And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American +Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his +horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the +depot and the 7:50 train. + +I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness +of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard +her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow +uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there +was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was +anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous +foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was +light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the +asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir +caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid +necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay +colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for +me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the +tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!" + +That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins +of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and +Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it +was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's +drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went +through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from +Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length +of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached +it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick +looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An +air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner. +Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys. + +"Oh, how do!" + +"Good evening!" + +Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On +the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now +stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist. +On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly +lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a +neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You +took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now, +homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick +footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where +the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly +shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little +tingling thrill. + +"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way." + +At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order +to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of +Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they +reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in +retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they +lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss. + +Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at +factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the +Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and +assuming the managership of the office. + +"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old +Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I +step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get +there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will +you be glad, Tess? H'm?" + +Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more +tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job +that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and +all." + +But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp +tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad. + + * * * * * + +No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the +watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood--gone. At first she +hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe +me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose +already." + +"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the +top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' +bullets." + +There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's +big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck +was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid +him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in +their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and +their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In +their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their +young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters--black, yellow, +brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one +head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A +great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs: + +"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a +week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--" + +They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot +platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, +shouting. + +Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received +equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent +boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable +forms of cake. + +Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was +furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in +his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She +tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in +it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of +the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, +inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New +York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it +turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a +cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as +dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and +I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me +swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make +Hatton's place look sick." + +The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among +themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they +could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. +Well, I should say not! + +They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the +type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or +their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as +knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in +men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly +boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish +swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a +little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be +stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy." + +Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink +upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the +music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and +chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands +on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they +giggled and shrieked and ran. + +But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch +hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the +stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases +such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little +conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters +on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last +letter had contained the news of his sergeancy. + +Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in +Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed +looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which +she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were +those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red +triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. +They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere +in the East. These letters were not from him. + +Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop +on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue +shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, +veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, +your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that +complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not +belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No +matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and +pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled +and folded them was pure cerulean. + +Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to +their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' +bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of +starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing +it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might +have been invaluable. It never was asked. + + * * * * * + +Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he +was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care. + +"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes +lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather +ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to +be home, Chuck? Gee!" + +"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in +his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's +swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and +come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind +of--" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: +"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a +regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in +San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the +Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and +acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something +to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are +scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what +some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and +Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. +Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming to his subject, so that he +failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--"it's a joke compared +to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint." + +Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her +head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you +had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything. +You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd +probably be tickled to see you." + +He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't +mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near busted +out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in. +And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day--" + +"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't +a fool." She was perilously near to tears. + +"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--a guy's got +to--he's got no right to--" + +And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled +and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked +differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. +It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, +an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the +extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she +had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! +It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the +broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could +not have put it into words. + +They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of +the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with +little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression +indicative of extreme disgust. + +"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. +"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and +iron and so forth." + +"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often +walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had +never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse +and drifted down the lovely Fox River. + +"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do." + +"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do +it." + +Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing +looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever +against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as +he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red +skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a +minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the +throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in +strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness +surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have +fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! +Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." +She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. +I never did before." + +Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each +brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then +at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I +must have dreamed about this more'n a million times." + +"Have you, Chuck?" + +They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's +good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play +baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are +wonders!" + +"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about +something else?" + +He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or +why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission. + +"About--you." Tessie made it a caress. + +"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and +marchin' and readin' some--Oh, say, what d'you think?" + +"What?" + +"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the darnedest +language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a +piece of bread, you say like this: _Donnay ma un morso doo pang_. See?" + +"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration. + +And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He +knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I +don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?" + +It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her +grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in +France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just +as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it +sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he--he'd be a +different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, +French, girls, swell folks-- + +And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in +the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box." + +"Chocolate cake." + +"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this +morning." + +"Yes, you did!" + +"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the +way you talk." + +"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think." + +"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else." + +"Fried chicken!" + +"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily. + +"You asked me to, didn't you?" + +Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. + +Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden +among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say +they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and +Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not +just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I +suppose it looks like a shanty to you now." + +Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place." + +They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the +river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him--the breast of +the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, +juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a +double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, +but she was wise in feminine wiles. + +From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this +tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it +you get so you don't believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and +chocolate cake." + +"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't +eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken. + +Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie +pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back +again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. +And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand +on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their +kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, +they would have been something like this: + +"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had +you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our house, +with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the +parlour, and all the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get +it. What'll I do if I don't?" + +And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me +and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so +that if I come back--" + +Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French girls. +I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be +raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton +time you get back." + +And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. +I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their +jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a +fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and +fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. +Nix!" + +It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. +Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, +surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little +point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, +beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, +homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those +Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The +husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart +outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at +Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts +outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, +fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. +"Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess." + +"Tha' so? Mine, too. Well, how's everything?" + +Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and +that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available +by the more important sleeping bundle--two yards of goods; a spool of +100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten. + +There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, +felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she +envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty. + + * * * * * + +There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last +letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's +eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. +Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and châteaux. He and a +bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or +something--it was all one to Tessie--and what do you think? She had +kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France. + +The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch +factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied +with a new and more absorbing topic. + +"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?" + +"What about her?" + +"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being +Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being +the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home +and all to go to work in a Y.M.C.A. canteen for her country and bleeding +France." + +"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be +painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the +doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or +baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf +of bread decent. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust +her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over +there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, +and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to +set home and make the best of it. Or take what's left." She turned her +head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the +room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. "I guess when you can't +go after what you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice." + +All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious +Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, +pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing +hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two +inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless +little laugh. + +"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been +at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet." + +He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her +shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off. + + * * * * * + +That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to +Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to +exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in +a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. +Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home +and--and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for +Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless +it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. +But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge +the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' +France. Yeh! Joke! + +The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a +square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In +architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French +château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its +façade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed +magnificence. + +Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, +could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, +usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. +People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it +mattered whether anything happened to her or not! + +Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she +struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little +group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as +she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou +among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she looked straight +ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to +her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. +Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!" + +"Hello, yourself." + +"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink." + +"Think so?" + +She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have someone +following, someone walking home with you. What if he was old enough to +be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying +hair at the sides. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is. +And Nap Ballou told her. + +They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once +heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she +entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were +brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, +peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very much askew. + +"Where you been, Tessie?" + +"Oh, walkin'." + +"Who with?" + +"Cora." + +"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago." + +Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this +coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back." + +Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into +the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's +the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about +the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' +'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't +be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the +same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind +groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She +didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to +think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass +buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain +of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, +smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the +words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. +"What're you going to do--" She rolled over on one side and buried her +head in her arms. + + * * * * * + +There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the +old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest +bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. +But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world +about her. The Chippewa _Courier_ went into the newspaper pile behind +the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye. + +She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her +glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of +unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness. + +"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood +there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden +she ran to her pa--" + +"Both comin' at once, like that--" + +"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She--" + +Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her +and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this +picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I +come in in the middle of the reel, I guess." + +They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly +news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices +high with the note of hysteria. + +"Angie Hatton's beau was killed--" + +"They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet--" + +"The news come only last evenin' about eight--" + +"She won't see nobody but her pa--" + +Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house envying +Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, +and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic +reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one +to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the +luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted +commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in +that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, +bending over her on some pretence that deceived no one, spoke low-voiced +in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. +She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work. + +She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the +river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her +had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless +overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get." + +She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about the +girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. +She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid shoes, flimsy +blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the city +park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a tree +idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lack-lustre eyes. Silhouetted +there against the tender green of the pretty square he looked very old, +somehow, and different--much older than he looked in his shop clothes, +issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where he should have stuck +out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across +her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she had last seen him: +brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of flank. + +Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly: "Somebody +looks mighty sweet this afternoon." + +Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line +you like you stick to it, don't you?" + + * * * * * + +Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats +and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust +the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray in +the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her. + +"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and +turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie +felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a +little as she stepped into the boat. + +The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and +told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same +when he asked her. + +"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little +with the unwonted exercise. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly +to rowing. + +Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough, +considerin' the company." + +He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card. + +When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had +supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White +meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk." + +"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around +her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark so +early." + +"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking +sort of way, though he consumed very little food actually. + +"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, half-heartedly. She decided +that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she +hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white double +row ... + +"Well," she said, "let's be going." + +"No hurry," again. + +Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What +d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at her +own joke. + +"Yes." + +She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, I don't." + +He rose, too. "Why not?" + +"Because I don't, that's why." She stooped and began picking up the +remnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly and +thriftily in the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her. + +"Let me help," he said. And then his arm was about her and his face was +close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after a little +wordless struggle. And then she knew. Tessie's lips were not virgin. She +had been kissed before. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at +him furiously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had +worked in the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped +her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her. + +At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you--you +drunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll ..." + +The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. +With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand and +clawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His +hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed to her that +her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing +against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but the +broken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ran +on, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might have +happened ... to her, Tessie Golden ... that nobody could even talk fresh +to. She gave a little sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It +was growing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. +It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, +climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly for +support, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summer +cottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. A warm, +flickering light danced in the window. + +Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with a +little instinctive gesture, she patted her hair, tidied her blouse, and +walked uncertainly toward the house, up the steps to the door. She stood +there a moment, swaying slightly. Somebody'd be there. The light. The +woman who cooked for them or the man who took care of the place. +Somebody'd-- + +She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her way and +got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, louder now. +Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The +door opened wide. Old Man Hatton! + +She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his +glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, that his +face was so kindly. + +Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!" +she whimpered. "It's me!" + +He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside. + +"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid...." + +Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried +to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she +had planned to tell? + +"Who is it, dad? Who...?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared +at Angie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come in here." + +Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie +Hatton's expensive blouse. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no +surprise at the act. + +"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, dad. +And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you +know. Something...." + +Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. +Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her +eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped +little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head. + +"That's all right," Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after a +while." + +There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the +fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting +in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tearstained young ladies at +dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a +torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They +evinced no curiosity about this dishevelled creature who had flung +herself in upon their decent solitude. + +Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face and +opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a +quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, +some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked--well, Tessie put it to herself, +thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry no more--only +inside." + +And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never have +gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. +It's fierce. You get scared, sittin' home, waitin', and they're in +France and everywheres, learnin' French and everything, and meetin' +grand people and havin' a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said I +didn't care, I wasn't goin' to squat home all my life, waitin'...." + +Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down +at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and +thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These +things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now +was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no +questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted +with: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-room +foreman, eh?" + +Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. +"Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't +I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make no difference +who I went with, but it does." She looked down at her hands clasped so +tightly in her lap. + +"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference," Angie agreed, and looked up +at her father. + +At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all +kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home +he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He...." + +"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck +comes home...." + +Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'd +like to learn to swim--and row a boat--and play ball--like the rich +girls--like the girls that's makin' such a fuss over the soldiers." + +Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessie +brought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talk +French." + +Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked +at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd +found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just +one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for +them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you +need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you +say?" + +But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white +with earnestness. + +"C'n you speak French?" + +"Yes," Angie answered. + +"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French: +'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first." + +Angie Hatton said it correctly. + +"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?" + +Angie said it again. + +Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her +hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she +articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that +of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see. + + + + +ONE HUNDRED PER CENT + + +They had always had two morning papers--he his, she hers. The _Times_. +Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and +Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm +and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast +and the First Page simultaneously with no--"Just let me see the inside +sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning. + +In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman +for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal +of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished +between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the +depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which +seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of +a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste, +but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight +thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse +behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost +coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news +to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something +of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline +such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and +vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From +Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a +column or a page at a glance. + +Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, +his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the +next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or +coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest +is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page +and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, +Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that +clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew +away from the temple. + +"T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the +Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way +purposely." + +"Francis X--?" He was not a follower of the films. + +Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side +face." + +"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to +me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four. + +Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, +as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. +Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the +clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, +vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" +Emma knew he was pursuing the daily _schrecklichkeit_. + +Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, +the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, +pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon +it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest: + +"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who +aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the _Times_ +delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies +for it, mornings." + +It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, +its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes. + +"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him. + +"You take it, dear." + +"Oh, no! No." + +She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing +tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess. + +"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--" + +"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three +years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't +endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I +shall have to consider our marriage a failure." + +"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--" + +"I am. But there's something about having it read to you--" + +On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her +blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was +shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs +with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the +hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment--just the fraction +of a minute--when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. +Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. +They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper +fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, +apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned. + +Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a +moment--a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover. + +"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and +drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the +price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are +husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two +establishments." + +They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing +an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize +that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning +business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they +most treasured. + +Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the +Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, +and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits +about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of +family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense +that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor +Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory--it +seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, +Emma's interest in the business was unflagging. + +"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this +firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck +& Co." + +"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that +first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don't know +how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into +a Madam Chairman. You'll see." + +She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her. + +By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as +gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and +woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going +abroad. + +Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a +half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft +fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her +eyes. + +"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. +It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's +neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is." + +She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. +The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife +had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and +scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and +pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new +neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the +woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been +obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and +motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many +fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, +and said, "But it looks so--so lumpy around the neck." + +Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie +on--" + +"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar." + +"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but +the high, close-fitting collar." + +The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd +shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, +grumbling. + +Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. +At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had +telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. +People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick +of calling her by any other. + +With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her +attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma +McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those +Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could +cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm +going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished +service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that +hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six +o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for +their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't +blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, +I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...." + +By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts +herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, +initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. +November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them +seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma +now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, +lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she +herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and +bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail. + +She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found +her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week +to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the +autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to +the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, +and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about +this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, +that convinced and impressed you. + +"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma +remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond +pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. +"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method +could sell sandbags in the Sahara." + +Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw +each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, +espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the +street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure +swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him +so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant +attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the +street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert +recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block +ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his +stride, and touched his arm lightly. + +"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?" + +"Yes." + +"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck." + +Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand +on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve. + +"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, +young 'ooman." + +"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation +from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green +and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make +a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker." + +There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical +comedy, dear. These men are--Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you. +Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining +room. There are things at the office--" + +"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there +are two vice-commandants ready to snatch my shoulder-straps." + +"Emma! Emma!" + +At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone +wrong?" + +"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at +the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this +Serbian thing end? I'll call for you." + +"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, +dear." + +He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingué in the +blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent cocked hat. +The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely +smart affair of white silk, high-collared, stitched, expensively simple. +And yet he frowned as he looked. + +"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance. + +"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better +call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife +practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and +the funeral--The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into +the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes. + +But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told +me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, +where she can be bathed and massaged and fed with milk. And if Fisk +could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had +training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg." + +"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't +he?... I really must hurry, T.A." + +"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned +away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her +shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. +Emma's taxi crept into the stream. But uppermost in her mind was not the +thought of Serbians, uniforms, Fisk, or Ritz, but of her husband's right +hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into +a fist. + +She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers; but the +Serbians, despite their four tragic years, turned out to be as sprightly +as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the Fannings dropped +her at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she +doffed her warlike garments, her feminine canniness warned her that this +was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better. + +But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all Jock. + +A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been Grace Gait, one +of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the +profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office she had been +turning out compelling copy. They had been married four years. Now Jock +ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Raynor suite overlooking the +lake in the great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, "Eat +the crust, girlie. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly." + +Emma, uniformed for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter. Buck +listened in silence. + +"You wouldn't know Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody. And the queer +part of it is he doesn't know it. He tries to be cheerful, and I could +weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work +from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning, and from writing free full-page +national advertising copy to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke +fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought. But you +know I haven't been really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the +doctor says it will be another six months before I'm myself, really. If +I had only myself to think of--how simple! But two kiddies need such a +lot of things. I could get a job at Raynor's. They need writers. Jock +says, bitterly, that all the worth-while men have left. Don't think I'm +complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone +who understands often clears the way." + +"Well!" said Emma. + +And, "Well?" said T.A. + +She sat fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her. "Of +course, Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of +him. He'd be beautiful in khaki. But there's work to do right here. And +he ought to be willing to wait six months." + +"They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now." + +"Oh, come, T.A.! One man--" + +"Multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk. Just such another case. Look +at--" + +The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up +alertly. She glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little exclamation of +horror. + +"That's for me! I'm half an hour late! The first time, too." She was at +the telephone a second later, explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the +dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised +for flight. "Sorry, dear. But this morning was so important, and that +letter about Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier." + +"I'm afraid you are, Emma." + +She stared at that. "Why--! Oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, +dear--I'll call for you at the office to-night at five, and we'll walk +home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late--" + +She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a +long minute, staring down at the coffee cup whose contents he did not +mean to drink. The light from the window cameoed his fine profile. And +you saw that his jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away, in +Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't. + +Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules +would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a +thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois. + +And a thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three +hours later, was slamming down the two big windows of his office. From +up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk +march. And his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you +know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices--a +great gray shaft, towering even above its giant neighbours, its head in +the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until +very recently those windows of his office had been a source of joy and +inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below. The +tangle of I.C. tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond +that, as far as the eye could see. He had seen the changes the year had +brought. The lake dotted with sinister gray craft. Dog tents in Grant +Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms. Men--mere boys, most of +them--awkward in their workaday clothes of office and shop, drilling, +wheeling, marching at the noon hour. And parades, and parades, and +parades. At first Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff--heads of +departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys--would +suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the +street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, +bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its +white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six +contortionistic drum-major. + +By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor +windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from +the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh +parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note. + + "Where are _you_! (sounded the bugle) + Where are _you_? + Where are YOU?!!! + Where + are + you? + Where--are--you-u-u-u--" + +He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out +dictation in a loud, rasping voice. + +"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to +say--" + +_(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)_ + +"--all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and +will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office +think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising--" + +_(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)_ + +"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?" + +"Over th--I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new +record in soap advertising--'" + +"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl +stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in +the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and +swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp +Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab +world. + +"--and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been +sent out from the Raynor offices." + +The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or +breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her +foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left! +Left-right-left! + +Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much +of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by +heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, +thinking, planning; feeling his agony, and trying not to admit the +transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for +Chicago. + + * * * * * + +At five o'clock Emma left the war to its own devices and dropped in at +the loft building in which Featherlooms were born and grew up. Mike, the +elevator man, twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to +gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure. + +"Haven't seen you around fur many the day, Mis' Buck." + +"Been too busy, Mike." + +Mike turned back to face the door. "Well, 'tis a great responsibility, +runnin' this war, an' all." He stopped at the Featherloom floor and +opened the door with his grandest flourish. Emma glanced at him quickly. +His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little +jingling of buckles and strap hooks. + +The work day was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She +could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at +his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that +littered tables and chairs. At the window near the door Fisk, the +Western territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The +two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with +admiration. Into Fisk's face there flashed a look so nearly resembling +resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a +moment with the two. + +Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, "I'm more resigned to war this +minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began." + +Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His +face was unsmiling. "Like my uniform?" Emma asked; and wished, somehow, +that she hadn't. + +Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were +hard, resentful. Suddenly, "Like it! God! I wish I could wear one!" He +turned away, abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared +his throat, apologetically. + +Emma glanced down at her own trim self--at her stitched seams, her +tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands--and +suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. +Something--something-- + +She wheeled and made for Buck's office, her colour high. He looked up, +rose, offered her a chair. She felt strangely ill at ease there in the +office to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the +glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall smiled and nodded and +called through the open door: "My, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck." + +"Be with you in a minute, Emma," said T.A. And turned to his desk again. +She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. "Don't hurry." Out in +the showroom again she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was +ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and +night-gowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth and his +eyes squinted, half closed through the smoke. + +She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment +that lay under her hand. "Spring samples?" + +"Yes." + +"It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money, war or +no war." + +"'S right." + +"How's Gertie?" + +"Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl!--say, I knew what she was +when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long +enough. But I never really knew that kid until now, and we've been +married two years. You know what the last year has been for her; the +baby and all. And then losing him. And do you know what she says! That +if there was somebody who knew the Western territory and could cover it, +she'd get a job and send me to war. Yessir! That's Gert. We've been +married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time +she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was +away on my long spring trip she used to say it wasn't so bad being +alone, because there was always my home-coming to count on. How's that +for a wife!" + +"Gertie's splendid," agreed Emma. And wondered why it sounded so lame. + +"You don't know her. Why, when it comes to patriotism, she makes T.R. +look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, +she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war. Gert +says a travelling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife, +anyway; and that if I went it would only be like my long Western trip, +multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie." + +Emma was fingering the cotton-flannel garment on the table. + +Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. "Sorry I kept you waiting. +Three of the boys were called to-day. It crippled us pretty badly in the +shipping room. Ready?" + +"Yes. Good-night, Charley. Give my love to Gertie." + +"Thanks, Mrs. Buck." He picked up his cigar, took an apprehensive puff +and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar +now. + +Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth +Avenue. Flags of every nation, save one. Uniforms of every blue from +French to navy; of almost any shade save field green. Pongee-coloured +Englishmen, seeming seven feet high, to a man; aviators slim and +elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered +planes, with a notch for every Hun plane bagged. Slim girls, exotic as +the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior _élégants_. +Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war +accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. Buck +eyed them gravely, hat and arm describing parabolas with increasing +frequency as they approached Fiftieth Street, slackening as the +colourful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park +mists. + +Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose-pink. Head high, shoulders back, she +matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were +bright and very blue. + +"There's a beautiful one, T.A.! The Canadian officer with the limp. +They've all been gassed, and shot five times in the thigh and seven in +the shoulder, and yet look at 'em! What do you suppose they were when +they were new if they can look like that, damaged!" + +Buck cut a vicious little semi-circle in the air with his walking stick. + +"I know now how the father of the Gracchi felt, and why you never hear +him mentioned." + +"Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot." She did not intend her tone to be +smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have +seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense +his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay +between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New +York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, +Sr. + +"Tell me, Emma. Does this satisfy you--the work you're doing, I mean? Do +you think you're giving the best you've got?" + +"Well, of course I'd like to go to France--" + +"I didn't ask you what you'd like." + +"Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I don't know what you call giving the best +one has got. But you know I work from eight in the morning until +midnight, often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do +my work just as well. And I don't say, either, that it doesn't include a +lot of dashing up and down Fifth Avenue, and teaing at the Ritz, and +meeting magnificent Missions, and being cooed over by Lady Millionaires. +But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of +thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to +oblige." She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart +leather-bound notebook. + +"Spare me! I've had all the statistics I can stand for one day at the +office. I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't +realize--" + +They turned into their own street. "Realize what?" + +"Nothing. Nothing." + +Emma sighed a mock sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. +"Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. +That second window shade is crooked. Isn't it queer how maids never +do.... I'll tell you what I can realize, though. I realize that we're +going to have dinner at home, reg'lar old-fashioned befo'-de-war. And I +can bathe before dinner. There's richness." + +But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly +re-coifed, she again wore the blue uniform, with the service cap atop +her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with +a little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on +a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a +little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of +masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the +table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he +gripped it. + +"It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little +less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see +why you should make me feel like your orderly. It's like being married +to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of +time it takes to dine with your husband." + +It was the bitterest speech he had made to her in the years of their +married life. She flushed a little. "I thought you knew that I was going +out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the +understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30." + +He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the +chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored +self with a placidity that had in it, perhaps, a dash of malice. His +last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an +olive, and nibbled it, head on one side. + +"D'you know, T.A., what I think? H'm? I think you're jealous of your +wife's uniform." + +She had touched the match to the dynamite. + +He looked up. At the blaze in his eyes she shrank back a little. His +face was white. He was breathing quickly. + +"You're right! I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in +the army! I'm jealous of the mule drivers! Of the veterinarians. Of the +stokers in the transports. Men!" He doubled his hand into a fist. His +fine eyes glowed. "Men!" + +And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his hands. + +Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked +down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him. She got up +and came over to him. + +"Why, dear--dearest--I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I +thought you were happy. You--" + +"Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are +gritting our teeth and pretending." + +She put a hand on his shoulder. "But what do you want--what can you do +that--" + +He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. +His head came up. "They've offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a +fancy job. It has to do with merchandising. But I think you know they're +having a devil of a time with all the millions of bales of goods. They +need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes +enough. I know values. It would mean hard work--manual work lots of +times. No pay. And happiness. For me." There was a silence. It seemed to +fill the room, that silence. It filled the house. It roared and +thundered about Emma's ears, that silence. When finally she broke it: + +"Blind!" she said. "Blind! Deaf! Dumb! _And_ crazy." She laughed, and +two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge +uniform. "Oh, T.A.! Where have I been? How you must have despised me. +Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the Government three +strapping men. My uniform, that was keeping three man-size soldiers out +of khaki. You, Jock, and Fisk. Why didn't you tell me, dear! Why didn't +you tell me!" + +"I've tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask +you to go back to the factory." + +"Factory! Factory nothing! I'm going back on the road. I'm taking Fisk's +Western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I +ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisk's salary +until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one +so good. Grace can give the office a few hours a week. And we can +promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road." + +Buck was staring at her, dully. "Grace? Now wait a minute. You're +travelling too fast for a mere man." His hand was gripping hers, tight, +tight. + +Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a +chair around to his. They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth. + +"It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for +lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this: Jock gets a +commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York, and live +right here, with me, in this house. Fisk goes to war. Gertie gets well +and comes back to work for Featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. +Old Emmer takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country--on the +road." + +At that he got up and began pacing the room. "I can't have you do that, +dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me." + +"Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee." + +"Gad, Emma, you're glorious!" + +"Glorious nothing! I'm going to earn the living for three families for a +few months, until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about +that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the +road means these days. It isn't travelling. It's exploring. You never +know where you're going to land, or when, unless you're travelling in a +freight train. They're cock o' the walk now. I think I'll check myself +through as first-class freight. Or send my pack ahead, with natives on +foot, like an African explorer. But it'll be awfully good for me +character. And when I'm eating that criminal corn bread they serve on +dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth I'll remember +when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my +hand on the steering wheel along o' the nobility and gentry." + +"Listen, dear, I can't have you--" + +"Too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. +They'll wire back 'No!' but another fifty'll fetch 'em. After all, it +takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to +change eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but +filling." + +Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, +less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have +faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was +alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the +swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought +within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this +time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every +town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the +readjustment of this little family and business group was so +unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, +seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the +Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be +won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled. + +It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma's awakening +that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed +plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows +suitcase ("Can't count on trunks these days," she had said. "I'm not +taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist"). Buck, standing in the +doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his +khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: +"Can't I help, dear?" Or, "Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the +Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I'd like to know what +they had on you, Emma." + +And from Emma: "Yeh, ain't I noble!" Then, after a little pause: "This +house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it'll look like a Home for +Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be +the only male protector around the place. We'll make him captain of the +home guard." + +"Gertie was in to-day. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to +Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we +ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any +woman in the shop except you. She's down to ninety-eight pounds, poor +little girl, but every ounce of it's pure pluck, and she says she'll be +as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will." + +Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. +"Seventeen--eighteen--When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice +the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand +boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands +money that an operator used to brag about--nineteen--" + +Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was +rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes +closets. + +"All except you, Emma. You'll be working without a salary--working like +a man--like three men--" + +"Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I've got two service +buttons already," she glanced down at her blouse, "and Charley Fisk said +I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm +going to put 'em all on." + + * * * * * + +The day before Emma's departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, +bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the +spirit of the times in her eyes. + +"Jock!" she repeated, in answer to their questions. "My dears, he +doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He +thinks he'll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn't that be +glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss +with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even +listening. He couldn't wait until I had finished a sentence so that he +could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the +moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he +answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And +when I said, 'Dearest, isn't this hotel a _little_ like the place we +spent our honeymoon in--that porch, and all?' he said, 'See this feller +coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. +He's my Captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college +when I was a fresh.'" + +But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words. + +Emma's trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's +date for sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. "When I +went to school," she said, "I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian +War worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I +want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it'll be +over sooner; and because we've won." + +They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear +platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried frantically to +get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully. "Don't look so tragic about it," +she laughed. "It's like old times. These last three years have been a +dream--a delusion." + +He looked up at her, as she stood there in her blue suit, and white +blouse, and trim blue hat and crisp veil. "Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I +believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you, +when you came in off the road after father died and I had just taken +hold of the business." + +For answer she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized +"Silver Threads Among the Gold." The train moved away, gathered speed. +He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the +railing, as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would +allow. He was walking swiftly along with the train, as though +hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train +platform. The brave figure in khaki outside. The blue suddenly swam in a +haze before his eyes; the khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little +veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for Upper +Eleven. + +The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed +and unnoticing as she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her +newspaper suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained +self-control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white +coat that she desired Upper Eleven made up early. + +The White Coat had said, "Yas'm," and glanced up at her. Whereupon she +had said: + +"Why, William!" + +And he, "Well, fo' de lan'! 'F 'tain't Mis' McChesney! Well, mah sakes +alive, Mis' McChesney! Ah ain't seen yo' since yo' married. Ah done heah +yo' married yo' boss an' got a swell brownstone house, an' ev'thing +gran'--" + +"I've got everything, William, but a lower berth to Chicago. They swore +they couldn't give me anything but an upper." + +A speculative look crept into William's rolling eye. Emma recognized it. +Her hand reached toward her bag. Then it stopped. She smiled. "No. No, +William. Time was. But not these days. Four years ago I'd have slipped +you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower berth from +somewhere. But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, +and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift +stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, aged three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney, +aged six months. And I'll dispose my old bones in Upper Eleven." + +She went in to dinner. + +At eight-thirty a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear. + +"Ah got yo' made up, Mis' McChesney." + +"But this is my--" + +He beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar +result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He +stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower +which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman +agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The +key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it +with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain +with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used before +a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one +gray-black hand. Then he bowed like any courtier. + +Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. +Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him--at the wrinkled, +kindly, ape-like face, and he looked down at her. + +"William," she said, "war is a filthy, evil, vile thing, but it bears +wonderful white flowers." + +"Yas'm!" agreed William, genially, and smiled all over his rubbery, +gray-black countenance. "_Yas'm!_" + +And who shall say he did not understand? + + + + +FARMER IN THE DELL + + +Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve +tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the +stuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was +hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that +the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were +curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath +came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld +didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of +fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and +is taking it easy? + +If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell +whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To +do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light +meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his +wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him. + +When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty +daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully you must +be a natural-born loller to begin with, and revert. Bella Westerveld was +and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there +he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast +when he was lying so still. If It had been light, you could have seen +the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient +face. + +They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every +morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching +for the limp, drab, work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by +his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of +depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the +chair by the bed. He was taking it easy. + +Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the +instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the +bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the +feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very +quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the +cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the +old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the +ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But here, +in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of +Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar +noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, +there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the +city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had +gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his +wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his +case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the +flat next door must have heard her. + +"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around +like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there +if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day." + +Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be +appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed so +mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to +bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat +just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, +grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the +power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily +shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been +a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood +floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal +confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and +distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and +had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the +steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the +Mississippi rolling grandly by. + +Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he +really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's +matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who +released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had been until the winter +months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than +useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The +milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he +had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of +his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in +motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. +He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if +they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, +with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they +used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of +his hands and around the thumbs. + +"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She +gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring +tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up." + +He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted +Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated +and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The +reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly--while it +lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped +back into his old apathy. + +Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his +incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty +streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply +from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely +unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning +great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body +suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than +tragedy--waste. + +For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, +eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and +drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before +sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the +rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he +toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might +fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the +high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with +the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as +were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the +city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though +form and substance are the same. + +Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to +introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a +comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, +have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know +him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of +the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots. + +At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, +slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those +rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals +canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A +serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew +older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated +the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost +of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished. + + * * * * * + +The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds +of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had +married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost +entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of +those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, +then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, +majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical +Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their +relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his +face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for +clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring +flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the +drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men +are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He +seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed +that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a +saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock." + +At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run +faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the +rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at +arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. +The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength +which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to +their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick +of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about +to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing +had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. +There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he +had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going +down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He +had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very +different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He +had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a +tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and +the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never +so much as flicked a dandelion head with it. + +An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship. + +"Hello, Emma." + +"How do, Ben." + +"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf +at Aug Tietjens with five legs." + +"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, +though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking +up." + +Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two +would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of +embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was +no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the +minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty +on easy payments if--when--" + +Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a +fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man." + +Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine +and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes +would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for +her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her +butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, +twelve miles away, than did any in the district. She was not a pretty +girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at +twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well +for Ben Westerveld's future happiness. + +But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers's capable +hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was +the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that +cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from +any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being +a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that +day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the +present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty +miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a +step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded +her apprenticeship. + +"I'll get a beau," she said, "that'll take me driving and around. And +Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town." + + * * * * * + +The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road +toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was +behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could +have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that +later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and +dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought +or speech. + +He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher. He had heard of +her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not +at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history +of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. +That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact +that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip +in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben +Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column. + +He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his +embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his +dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded +forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with +natural canine curiosity. + +Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping +her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand +and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life +that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that +time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he would never have +forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, +quivering body. + +Bella screamed again. Still clinging to him, Ben was saying: "He won't +hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder +reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so +childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. +From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter +femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella the +experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a +queer, electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it +something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. +If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have +realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she +could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was +scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little. + +"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea." + +But Bella looked over her shoulders fearfully to where Dunder stood by +the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought +that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but +still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up +a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. "Go on +home!" he commanded, sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with +a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail +between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog. + +Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. + +"You're the new teacher, ain't you?" + +"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that +dog." + +"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt +nobody. He's pretty big." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben +Westerveld." + +"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed +shyness. + +"Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens that's enough +to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big." + +"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over +to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get +there. You were going the other way, weren't you?" + +"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you +company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden +masterfulness. + +They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one +another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. +The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if +they had been whisked away on a magic rug. + + * * * * * + +Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. She was +contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The +Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was +always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding +cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch +counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should +be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could +find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and +talk and colour. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she +always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or +with an armful of clean towels. + +Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself: "I want to marry Bella." +He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma +Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed +at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she +selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes +and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella +was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his +finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring +woman. But in the end they married. The neighbourhood was rocked with +surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the +dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and +women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends. + +Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of +pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too +honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally +truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this +slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He +had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing +was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. +He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of +fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of +skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line +from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary +of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitués of Old +Red Front Huckins's bar. + +They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered +in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, +eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the +Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was +too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward +to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, +his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the +county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her +plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm +all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather +have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here." + +Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as +slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin +coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears +she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get +away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube +like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by +her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an +over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty +she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They +moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older +boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. +Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father. +He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill +and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling +his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of +the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm +life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they +found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had +trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road +behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was +asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off +to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not +have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before +his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood +and the reins. + +That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife +together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her +hatred of the locality and the life. + +"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless +reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a +farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your +hand at Dike now for a change." + +Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at +him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come +honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was +a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, +stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had +come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by +thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until +help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the +reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained. + +Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The +boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you +might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs--great +black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; +speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich +patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious +pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a +fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's +opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, +was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter +disappointment of his married life. + +That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben +Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. The +stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat +and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five--a habit that +requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with +difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of +standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered +the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and +his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk +to say: "Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?" + +When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no +unpaid notes to his discredit. + +All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of +his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were +dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dike after +him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; +most of it was back-breaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was +his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he +never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that +he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning +ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said: + +"Well, I got my work cut out for me, an' I do it an' do it right." + +There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, +so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, +middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and +beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday +afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street +in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces. + +As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her +benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on +twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He +had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a +commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella +remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, +surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell +on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the +coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold. + +Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack, +like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and +crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, +and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street +just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you +downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, +after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a +terrible termagant. + + * * * * * + +When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't +dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long +years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But +wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike +with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest +training camp that was to fit them for France and war. + +Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. +Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When +the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how +the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue +shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step +began to lag a little. + +He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were +no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of +rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice +seemed never to stop its plaint. + +"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll +die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he +eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing +down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in +him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that +had made him master and superior in spite of everything. + + * * * * * + +In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma +Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years +ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and +was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, +and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, +never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person--a +sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with +honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow. + +"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. +"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't +make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out +the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it and glad. They +got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or +cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on +shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never +come b--" + +But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed +rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter. + + * * * * * + +They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben +Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to +camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun +County, in the spring, has much the beauty of California. There is a +peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben +Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly +dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, +though, as they do in a play. He dared not. + +They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella +was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past +thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the +movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the +cramped, unnatural mode of living necessitated by a four-room flat--all +these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been +bred in the midst of them. + +She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was +a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and +small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments +and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They +seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from +seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite +bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of +sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery +bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's +for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a +nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some +strange chemical process, to bring them together as well. + +"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. +"Do you want to come along, ma?" + +"What you got to get?" + +"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie." + +"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore." + +"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I +can do to tend to the house, without sewing." + +"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' +besides--" + +"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me." + +The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L +together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, +indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent +store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap +lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would +buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or +a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, +and this they would munch as they went. + +They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their +hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by +delicatessen. + +Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we +find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the +edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another +day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday--a little +feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had +been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be +Thursday. Not that it made any difference. + + * * * * * + +They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not +digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. +There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. +A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or +State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and +taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben +used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the +day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the +firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, +sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he +clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.--if he thought of how +the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and +opinion--he said nothing. + +Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of +the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He +tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and +scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave +him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy. + +"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you +want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and +grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm." + +His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her +that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate +little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to +gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil. + +On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away +one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the +place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful +tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding +forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He +talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy +man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the +street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat +did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of +wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world. + +"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about +917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win +the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say." + +"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is +that Farmer Ben was right. + +Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave +her many hours of unearned freedom for gadding and gossiping. + +"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got +to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting +if I take her along. Ma's goin' with me." + +He loved the feel of Pearlie's, small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. +He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big +brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her +tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender +offices. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and +that he pretended this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair +managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day +looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature +railway. + +They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade. + + * * * * * + +Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. +Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. +They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the +impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they +were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters +were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the +armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben +tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole +being revolted at the thought. + +He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths in their one-button suits and +striped shirts standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third, +spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing +labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and +terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the over-dressed, +scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's +heart. + +The lack of exercise and manual labour began to tell on Ben. He did not +grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his +frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. +Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city +pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by +accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as +a water-crazed traveller in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, +and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully. + +South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare +come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. +Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he +stumbled upon it and standing there felt at home in Chicago for the +first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in +overalls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He +hadn't seen men like that since he left the farm. The sight of them sent +a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he +ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His +fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly. + +At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry +seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar +things for which they had been starving. + +He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of +onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! + +The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure +orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The +cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages +glowed like jade. + +And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, +shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men +in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, +and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men jovial, good-natured, with +clear blue eyes and having about them some of the revivifying freshness +and wholesomeness of the products they handled. + +Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and +garlic and of the good earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, +washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt +strangely at peace. + +It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid +hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to +greet him friendlily: "H'are you!" they said, genially. "H'are you this +morning!" + +He was market-wise enough to know that some of these busy people were +commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It +was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in +front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. +Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing +boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain +blue skirt and a small black hat. + +He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the hat. A funny job +for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays! He turned sidewise +in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one +of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in white +apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving +a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!" + +Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, +tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was +the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank +curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those +intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of +them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so +surprising. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes +and serene brows. + +He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he +acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't +you?" + +She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the +roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: +"Why, Ben!" she said, quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though +she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--that capable, +reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and +significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers. + +"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to +be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been +dealing and smiled. + +"What am I doing here, Joe?" she said. + +Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street +at his own game, and makin' so much money that--" + +But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She +turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?" + +Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we're +livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here." + +She glanced at him, sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?" + +"Yes." + +"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it +briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her +alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a +wren--a business-like little wren--a very early wren that is highly +versed in the worm-catching way. + +At her next utterance he was startled but game. "Have you had your +lunch?" + +"Why, no; I--" + +"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a +bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee +and a sandwich, anyway." + +Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those +intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from +him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was +listening quietly and advising him. + +She interrogated him, gently. But something of his old masterfulness +came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the +rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all." + +So she told him, briefly. She was in the commission business. +Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the +Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, +but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know +that here was a woman of wealth and established commercial position. + +"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, +you must be anyway--it ain't that you look it--but--" He floundered, +stopped. + +She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And +I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My +children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not +going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in +his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first when the +children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything +else. It came natural to me. That's all." + +So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and +of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, +and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came +falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for +deception. When he had finished: + +"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm." + +"I can't. She--I can't." + +She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm." + +He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't." + +"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever +hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. +You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's +ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. +There isn't a bigger job in the world than that." + +For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own +inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go his +shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a +moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered. + +"Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the +way it turned out--but I always wanted to--" + +She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright +brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live +a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't +to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go +back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger +man-size job in the world. It's where you belong." + +Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And +so they parted, the two. + + * * * * * + +He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and +miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he +looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one. + +So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the +right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, +or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew. + +But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness +could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. +High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there +was Minnie's, too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy +Ed's, and-- + +At the other voice his hand trembled so that the key rattled in the +lock, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled +in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's. + +He must just have arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in +progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his +hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, +strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older. + +All this he saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's +two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying: "Hello, pop." + +Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others +were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and +marvelling, and asking questions. + +"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An' +he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that +you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more +here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out +to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!" + +But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike +spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped +way of uttering his words: + +"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about +an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little +dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I +never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep +that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta +the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was +the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of +new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds--womenfolks and +men about eighty years old--runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. +I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'." + +"Forget the farm," said Minnie. + +"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out +at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right." + +Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What +d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all--" + +Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're +livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more." + +Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A +stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made +old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered +mother. + +"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been +livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I--The streets here, +they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to +go back and be a farmer. I want--" + +And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--no, not a new, but +the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six +hundred acres of bounteous bottomland. + +"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got +another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm." + +Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not +agoin' back to the farm." + +But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' +back, Bella," he said, quietly. "An' things are goin' to be different. +You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you +can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' +back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a +bigger man-size job in the world." + + + + +THE DANCING GIRLS + + +When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform +with a background of assorted star-shells in full flower; a young man in +uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady (in uniform); a young man +in uniform crouching in a trench, dugout, or shell-hole, this happens: + +You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform; you jump +hurriedly over the picture; and you plunge into the next story, noting +that it is called "The Crimson Emerald" and that, judging from the +pictures, all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time. + +Chug Scaritt took his dose of war with the best of them, but this is of +Chug before and after taking. If, inadvertently, there should sound a +faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those +stylish dots ... indicative of what the early Victorian writers +conveniently called a drawn veil. + +Nothing could be fairer than that. + +Chug Scaritt was (and is) the proprietor and sole owner of the Elite +Garage, and he pronounced it with a long i. Automobile parties, touring +Wisconsin, used to mistake him for a handy man about the place and would +call to him, "Heh, boy! Come here and take a look at this engine. She +ain't hitting." When Chug finished with her she was hitting, all right. +A medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, +laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the +grease-grimed grotesquerie of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his +tight-fitting, belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat +russet shoes he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole +owner--much less the proprietor--of anything so successful and +established as the Elite Garage. + +In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin--or in any other sort of town, for +that matter--a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the +community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a +pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug +Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured +forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a pæan of sweetness +and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on +gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt +for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on +business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. Gurnee's electric. Chug +didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible he put his foot +down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was +something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to +thrive and flourish. It was like a combination newspaper office and +Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down but there might +generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running +board of an idle car a little group of slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced +young men in form-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly +virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been +picked before he was ripe. + +They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about +them; terse of speech, quick of eye, engine-wise, and, generally, +nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt. Not vicious. +Not even tough. Rather bored, though they didn't know it. In their +boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their +class in a town of Chippewa's size: cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap +talk. This last unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things +mechanical. Baseball, or a sweet-running engine brought out the best +that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the +dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went +by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency +of their skirts. At supper time they would growl to their surprised +sisters: + +"Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to +make a person sick." + +Chug Scaritt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was +his business responsibility on one side; his very early history on the +other. Once you learn the derivation of Chug's nickname you have that +history from the age of five to twenty-five, inclusive. + +Chug had been christened Floyd (she had got it out of a book) but it was +an appendix rather then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of +addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers. +Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking +in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to +that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed +over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky +named Fayette who--but that's another story. + +The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, +or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only +did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them +that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame +cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first +intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation +of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the +Junction. When Chug ran away--which was on an average of twice daily--he +was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about +the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, +would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe. + +He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your +pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug, +deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him +a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night, +before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at +variance with his easy-going nature. + +"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good +toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go +smashing--" + +The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted +tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been +some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had +merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been +too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, +nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his +investigating fingers. + +It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up +and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians +would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an +engine on a track, and his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng! +Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to +sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon). + +Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the +Chippewa _Eagle_. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it +he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that +its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover +has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about +Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed +that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving +mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its +way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not +more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. +True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old +wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced +every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, +hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went. + +He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of +mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to +its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a +monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or +screw in his grease-grimed fingers. + +Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or +a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more +than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his +nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across +a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. +There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a +garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out +of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned +beneficent. + +Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len +Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic. +Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men +who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a +spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on +endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of +dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, +neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity. + +"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big +concerns--" + +After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the +silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of +hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have +grown accustomed. + +Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always +earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work +in earnest. His mother took it hard. + +"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An +education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of +pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good +nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had +her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for +Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a +sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows, +embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling +every corner. + +Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He +don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare +quarrels between the two. "I never had none." + +The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering +it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was +working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send +him to college, next." + +"Well, if I do? Then what?" + +"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a +self-evident fact. + +That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the _Eagle_ and +inserted a neat ad. + + LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25 + CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST. + +For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing +the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against +the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains +as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or +his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore +sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy +treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands. + +Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and +deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle +handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat +paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching +frame. + +At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a +month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here +bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into +her." + +Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and +count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The +look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string. + +For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested +batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the +engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just +emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came +in, en route--a proud, glittering affair--he always managed to get a +chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so +jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an +electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles +possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable. +The least that they called them was juice-boxes. + +At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his +mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always +rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the +time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was +saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home +you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your +pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on +Sundays." + +"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. +Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, +and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over +my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em." + +"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug--those curtain frames." + +"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix +with the lace curtains for you." + +Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much +like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told +of his social side he may be misunderstood. + +Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music +has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: "What is this, +anyway--waltz or fox trot?" This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never +had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was +infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have +started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn't +look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, +but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to +be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second. + +When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky +car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your +view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, +differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the +evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug. + +He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's +amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its +thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple +that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban +lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, +its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it +was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need it would have put you down as +mad. + +Boiled down, Chug Scaritt's crying need was girls. At twenty-two or +three you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but +Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many +labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand. Its millionaires +had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social +functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; +and when it came to costume--diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large +feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers--you couldn't tell their +women from the city dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and +plough works. + +The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish +Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. +They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid +infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance. + +Chug Scaritt and boys of his kind were left high and dry. So, then, when +Chug went out with a girl it was likely to be by way of someone's +kitchen; or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper +and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in +front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had +been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In +Chippewa they did housework. Big, robust girls they were, miraculously +well dressed in good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for +the most part, with a scum over them; over-fond of coffee; and were +rather dull company. But they were good-natured, and hearty, and +generous. + +The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish +pallor due to lungs dust-choked from work in the rag room. That same +pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa. But they had a +rather appealing, wistful fragility. Their eyes generally looked too big +for their faces. They possessed, though, a certain vivacity and +diablerie that the big, slower-witted Swede girls lacked. + +When Chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little +choice. In the winter he often went up to Woodman's Hall. The dances at +Woodman's Hall were of the kind advertised at fifty cents a couple. +Extra lady, twenty-five cents. Ladies without gents, thirty-five cents. +Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he +escorted home one of the ladies-without-gents. It was not that he +begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went +to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and +out of sheer boredom. Once there he danced every dance and all the +encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to +cheek, in wordless rhythm. His arm about the ample waist of one of the +Swedish girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill +hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played +"Home Sweet Home." The conversation, if any, varied little. + +"The music's swell to-night," from the girl. + +"Yeh." + +"You're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with +you forever." This with a pressure of the girl's arm, and spoken with a +little accent, whether Swedish, Belgian, or Slavic. + +"They all say that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +He was very little stirred, really. + +"Yeh, you are. I wish you was. It makes no never minds to you who you're +dancing with, s'long's you're dancing." + +This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It +startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look +at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would +have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks +with a stolid persistence. + +"Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded. He was +rather surprised to find that this was so. + +"Wisht it was thirty." + +That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. +When Chug said, "Can I see you home?" he knew the answer before he put +the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of +time, waiting, when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you +when you failed to show up. Telephoned you when you were busy. Didn't +give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven eighths of it +herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl, with the physical +development of a woman and the mind of a child. There were dozens like +her in Chippewa. + +If the girls of his own class noticed him at all it was the more to +ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their +vision down Outagamie Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy +of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making +advances even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped +acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie +Hatton, Old Man Hatton's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa--so +rich that she drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind. + +You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were, take +them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you +danced with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what +you were going to say to them. + +Mrs. Scaritt suspected in a vague sort of way that Chug was "running +with the hired girls." The thought distressed her. She was too smart a +woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy. + +"Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I like to fuss +around for company." She was a wonderful cook, Mrs. Scaritt, and liked +to display her skill. + +"Who is there to bring?" + +"The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing +up for, evenings?" + +"Nobody." + +Mrs. Scaritt tried another tack. + +"I s'pose this house isn't good enough for 'em? Is that it?" + +"Good enough!" Chug laughed rather grimly. "I'd like to know what's the +matter with it!" + +There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as +spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching +days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house +by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt had rebelled. + +"I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to 'em. It's got so I can +tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven fifty-two goes by in +the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear +the 'leven-forty. Let's stay, Chug." + +So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a +convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by +the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric-lighted, with a +cement walk front and back and a porch with a wicker swing and flower +baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, +though she, in turn, served him meals that would have threatened the +waist-line of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for +instance (it sounds sickish, but wait!) which she baked in a deep pan, +and over which she poured a golden-brown custard all flecked with crusty +melted sugar. You took a bite and lo! it had vanished like a sweet +dewdrop, leaving in your mouth a taste as of nectar, and clover-honey, +and velvet cream. + +Mrs. Scaritt learned to gauge Chug's plans for the evening by his +ablutions. Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted +to a rite. In the old days Chug's father had always made a brief enough +business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the +kitchen sink or on the back-porch bench sufficed. The noises he made +were out of all proportion to the results obtained. His snufflings, and +snortings, and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he +emerged from them you were surprised to find that he had merely washed +his face. + +Chug had grease to fight. He had learned how in his first days at the +garage. His teacher had been old Rudie, a mechanic who had tinkered +around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about +them than their inventor. Soap and water alone were powerless against +the grease and carbon and dust that ground themselves into Chug's skin. +First, he lathered himself with warm, soapy water. Then, while arms, +neck, and face were still wet, he covered them with oil--preferably +lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust over all; great +handfuls of it. The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin +smooth and white. Old Rudie, while advocating this process, made little +use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method +of washing in gasoline guaranteed to take the varnish off a car fender. +It seemed to leave Rudie's tough hide undevastated. + +At twenty-four Chug Scaritt was an upstanding, level-headed, and +successful young fellow who worked hard all day and found himself +restless and almost irritable toward evening. He could stay home and +read, or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very +quiet. For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the +street corner, the Y.M.C.A. This last had proved a boon. The swimming +pool, the gym, the reading room, had given Chug many happy, healthful +hours. But, after all, there was something-- + +Chug didn't know it was girls--girls you could talk to, and be with, and +take around. But it was. After an hour in the pool, or around the +reading table, or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the +quiet street. He could go home. Or there was Wanda. If he went home he +found himself snapping rather irritably at his mother, for no reason at +all. Ashamed of doing it. Powerless, somehow, to stop. + +He took to driving in the evening: long drives along the country roads, +his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He +used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes +on the road; the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda +along, or one of the mill girls. But not often. They were disappointed +if you didn't drive with one arm around them. He liked being alone. It +soothed him. + +It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain +daughter of the Widow Weld. The Widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of +widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When +you met her together with her daughter Elizabeth you were supposed to +say, "Not mother and daughter! Surely not! Sisters, of course." +Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf-club dances on +Saturday night she would sit, unsought, against the wall while her +skittish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man +would cross the floor toward her and her heart would give a little leap, +but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced +much better than her mother--much better than most girls, for that +matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick +glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now +and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my +little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they +belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted +significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was +common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time +because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the +moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. +Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly +loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly +maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and +pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom +her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the +lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her +Machiavellian mother approved. + +"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after +a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy +and red-eyed old widower of that name. + +"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes." + +"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you." + +"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the +glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than +dance with him. Fat!" + +"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness. + +"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful +inside." + +"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly. + +Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been +unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that +of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle. + +When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the +middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and +the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road +toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His +thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected. + +"If I can rent Bergstrom's place next door when their lease is up I'll +knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in +'em.... Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next +week.... That was swell cake Ma had for supper.... What's that in the +road! What's!--" + +Jammed down the foot-brake. Jerked back the emergency. A girl standing +in the road. A dark mass in the ditch by the road-side. He was out of +his car. He recognized her as the Weld girl. + +"'S'matter?" + +"In the ditch. She's hurt. Quick!" + +"Whose car?" Chug was scrambling down the banks. + +"Hatton's. Angie Hatton's." + +"Gosh!" + +Over by the fence, where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found +sitting up, dizzily, and saying, "Betty! Betty!" in what she supposed +was a loud cry but which was really a whisper. + +"I'm all right, dear. I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you--" + +She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls +clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of +the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender. + +"You're a lucky bunch," said Chug. "Who was driving?" + +"I was," said Angie Hatton. + +"It wasn't her fault," the Weld girl put in, quickly. "We were coming +from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm-wagon coming +toward us. One of those big ones. The middle of the road. Perhaps he was +asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought he would, of course. At the last +minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep." + +"Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you both home in +twenty minutes. We'll have to leave five thousand dollars' worth of car +in the road till morning. It'll be all right." + +He did get them home in twenty minutes and the five thousand dollars' +worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. +Old Man Hatton himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following +day. Chug met him in overalls, smudge-faced as he was. Old Man Hatton +put out his hand. Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw. + +"That's all right," said Old Man Hatton, and grasped it firmly. "Want to +thank you." + +"That's all right," said Chug. "Didn't do a thing." + +"No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays--" He +looked around the garage. "Work here, I suppose?" + +"Yessir." + +"If there's anything I can do for you? Over at the mill." + +"Guess not," said Chug. + +"Treat you right here, do they?" + +"Fine." + +"Let's see. Who owns this place?" + +"I do." + +Old Man Hatton's face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles. He threw +back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "One on me. +Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one." + +Chug walked to the street with him. "Your daughter, she's got a lot of +nerve, all right. And that girl with her--Weld. Say, not a whimper out +of her and the blood running down her face. She all right?" + +"Cut her head a little. They're both all right. Angie wouldn't even stay +in bed. Well, as I say, if there's anything--?" + +Chug flushed a little. "Tell you what, Mr. Hatton. I'm working on a +thing that'll take the whine out of the Daker." + +Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things. The Daker +is the best car for the money in the world. Not much for looks but +everything in the engine. And everyone who has ever owned one knows that +its only fault is the way its engine moans. Daker owners hate that moan. +When you're going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a +banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked +over it. + +"Can't be done," said Old Man Hatton. + +"Another three months and I'll show you." + +"Hope you do, son. Hope you do." + +But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys +destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a +long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some +eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an +ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval +between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt.... + +No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way +it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city. No going into detail +concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. +These things were important and interesting. But perhaps not more +interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following +that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth +Weld, and saying, "Angie Hatton's a smooth little dancer, all right; but +she isn't in it with you." + +For Chippewa, somehow, had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, +cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, +figuratively, wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all +artificial social boundaries. Chug Scaritt, in uniform, must be kept +happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, fun, amusement, +entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall +in Elm Street, on what had been a vacant lot. And there, by day or by +night, were to be had music, and dancing, and hot cakes, and magazines, +and hot coffee, and ice cream and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight, +and slim, and young, and bright-eyed, and companionable. Girls like +Angie Hatton. Girls like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat +against the wall at the golf-club dances and prayed in her heart that +fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance. + +Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to +her, in a tactful aside, "My dear, you've danced three times this +evening with the Scaritt boy. You know that's against the rules." + +Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could +hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true +like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent +effort. She liked that, and understood. + +It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls +could understand like that. She talked to you, straight. Looked at you, +straight. Was interested in the things that interested you. No +waist-squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses. + +"I'm going to try to get over." + +"Say, you don't want to do that." + +"I certainly do. Why not?" + +"You're--why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're--" + +"I'm as old as you, or almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to +work in the canteens, and entertain the boys. If they'll take me. I'll +have to lie six months on my age." + +Rudie was in charge of the garage now. "That part of it's all right," +Chug confided to the Weld girl. "Only thing that worries me is Ma. She +hasn't peeped, hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum, all right." + +"I don't know your mother," said the Weld girl. + +"Thasso," absent-mindedly, from Chug. + +"I'd--like to." + +Chug woke up. "Why, say, that'd be fine! Listen, why don't you come for +Sunday dinner. I've got a hunch we'll shove off next week, and this'll +be my last meal away from camp. They haven't said so, but I don't +know--maybe you wouldn't want to, though. Maybe you--we live the other +side of the tracks--" + +"I'd love to," said the Weld girl. "If you think your mother would like +to have me." + +"Would she! And cook! Say!" + +The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all +right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went. + +It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized +that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of +shortcake he leaned back and said, "Death, where is thy sting?" But his +mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld +that it was plain food but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it. + +Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. "Mrs. Scaritt, it's the best dinner I've +ever eaten." + +Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: "Oh, now! You +folks up in the East End--" + +"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows +that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little +to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of +crackers-and-tea codfish, really." + +"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But +Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly +at each other. + +An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, +the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em +up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high +school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), +she went home, escorted by Chug. + +Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months +passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had +swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines. + +Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld +went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. +Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, +tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She +danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the +boards. She danced in hospitals, châteaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, +Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two +weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at +night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let +them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She +danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New +York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and +once with a general. But never a dance with Chug. + +Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. +She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to +look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor +toward her--her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl +next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the +taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her +mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in +thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish +note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, +shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the +wheezy breath, should ask her to dance. + +She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in +the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's +fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return. + +Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown +figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did +this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might +be said to have been alarmingly accelerated. + +Sometimes--though they did not know it--she and Chug were within a half +hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met. + +Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank +Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in +that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so. + +"It has been awful here," said the Widow Weld. "Nothing to do but sew at +the Red Cross shop; and no sugar or white bread." + +"It must have been," agreed Elizabeth. + +"They're giving a dance for you--and dinner--a week from Saturday, at +the golf club. In your honour." + +"Dance!" Elizabeth closed her eyes, faintly. Then, "Who is?" + +"Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it--that is, it was his idea. But the +club wanted to tender some fitting--" + +"I won't go." + +"Oh, yes, you will." + +Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask. + +"Have the boys come back?" + +"What boys?" + +"The--the boys." + +"Some of them. You know about dear Harry Hatton, of course. Croix de--" + +"What have they done with the Khaki Club, where they used to give the +dances?" + +"Closed. Long ago. There was some talk of keeping it open for a +community centre, or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you'll +have to have a dress for Saturday night, I wonder if that old chiffon, +with a new--" + + * * * * * + +Chug Scaritt came home in September. The First National Bank Building +seemed, somehow, to have shrunk. And his mother hadn't had all that gray +hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudie had +made out, all right, hadn't he? Good old scout. + +"The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. +Old Rudie was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you +to-night, Chug." + +"Where's this party? I don't want any party." + +"Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up +yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't--" + +"Don't they give dances any more at the Soldiers' Club down on Elm?" + +"Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they +called a community club. The _Eagle_ was boosting for a big new place. +What they called a Community Memorial Centre. But I don't know. It kind +of fell through, I guess." + +"I won't go," said Chug, suddenly. + +"Go where, Chug?" + +But instead of answering, Chug put his second question. + +"Have you seen--is that--I wonder if that Weld girl's back." + +"My, yes. Papers were full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance, and +all, at the Country Club. They say--" + +A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing +at Woodman's Hall. There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on +a georgette blouse and high-heeled shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled +up at him. Wanda had bad teeth--yellow, with a sort of scum over them. + +"I sure was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say. +Honest, I could dance with you all night." A little pressure of her arm. + +Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke. Dimly he +heard himself saying, "Oh, they all tell me that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +Then, suddenly, Chug stopped dancing. He stopped, and stepped back from +Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its +jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of +the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in +vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded +floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety +wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of +Chippewa's night. + + + THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + +***** This file should be named 14714-8.txt or 14714-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/7/1/14714/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Half Portions + +Author: Edna Ferber + +Release Date: January 17, 2005 [EBook #14714] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + + + + + +</pre> + +<!-- Page -3 --><h1>HALF PORTIONS</h1> + +<h3>BY</h3> + +<h2>EDNA FERBER</h2> + + +<p class="center">GARDEN CITY NEW YORK<br /> +DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY<br /> +1920 +<!-- Page -2 --></p> + +<p> </p> + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + +<!-- Page -1 --> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<p> </p> +<div class="center"> + <a href="#THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE"><b>THE MATERNAL FEMININE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL"><b>APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL</b></a><br /> + <a href="#OLD_LADY_MANDLE"><b>OLD LADY MANDLE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH"><b>YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH</b></a><br /> + <a href="#LONG_DISTANCE"><b>LONG DISTANCE</b></a><br /> + <a href="#UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG"><b>UN MORSO DOO PANG</b></a><br /> + <a href="#ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT"><b>ONE HUNDRED PER CENT</b></a><br /> + <a href="#FARMER_IN_THE_DELL"><b>FARMER IN THE DELL</b></a><br /> + <a href="#THE_DANCING_GIRLS"><b>THE DANCING GIRLS</b></a><br /> + </div> + +<p> </p> + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE" id="THE_MATERNAL_FEMININE" />THE MATERNAL FEMININE</h2> + + +<p>Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall +back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," +states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." +That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most +certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in +the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with +broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was +practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was +strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and +ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's +East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and +hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of +that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest +hats.</p> + +<p>The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women +of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married +sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces +and nephews.</p> + +<p>"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old +thing. And she's had so little in life, really."</p> + +<p>She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing—Aunt Soph. Forever sending a +spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this +pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter, +to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips. +Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen +foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family. +Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their +husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It +was always the same.</p> + +<p>"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living +soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the +children—"</p> + +<p>There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of +to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each +other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a +confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes +of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk, +safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot +rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by +saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I +don't know why I'm telling you all this."</p> + +<p>But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"—they paid little +heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that +she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life, +has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had +never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it +meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you +have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least +knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her +time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would +have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old +maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all +what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's +viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her +food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women +sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of +what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how +she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.</p> + +<p>You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from +one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago +wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First +National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and +trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own +family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own +people. Her three married sisters—Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, +and Flora in Chippewa—regarded her with a rather affectionate +disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks.</p> + +<p>"I don't know. There's something—well—common about Sophy," Flora +confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had +made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to +everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train. +Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion. +You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour +car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was +getting along—she called him William—and if they were going to send +her west, and all about her. I <i>wish</i> she wouldn't."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. +You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator +starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks—all that aloof, +unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed +and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper +water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity +in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your +innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of +her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister +Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at +Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, +with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to +her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder.</p> + +<p>Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the +East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the +millinery business in Elm Street.</p> + +<p>"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and +all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now +that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats +of her aunt. Not that I—but you know how it is."</p> + +<p>H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are +made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the +Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth +Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little +natural bewilderment.</p> + +<p>The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the +original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an +unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree +in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front +porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From +May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing +the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, +accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak +of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace +Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in +Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, +the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) +Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose +never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, +purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that +vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet +shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there +is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than +to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. +Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only +her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and +as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was +that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a +photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish +mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of +its fragile reticence and grace.</p> + +<p>It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to +ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, +as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she +walked—rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that +Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless +cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style +met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in +the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.</p> + +<p>That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as +inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage +badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the +twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. +Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a +skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years +ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked +about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section +of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon.</p> + +<p>"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full +of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."</p> + +<p>Chippewa—or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its +exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the +grass evenings after supper—laughed as it read this interview in the +Chippewa <i>Eagle</i>.</p> + +<p>"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow +pasture, up the river. It's full of natural—wait a minute—what +was?—oh, yeh, here it is—hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, +couldn't you die!"</p> + +<p>For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went +East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and +gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played +on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, +in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of +the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:</p> + +<p class="center">NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY.<br /> +<span class="smaller">H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.</span> +</p> + +<p>Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, +which read:</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="smaller">MISS SOPHY DECKER<br /> +Millinery</span> +</p> + +<p>Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had +always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional +hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself +in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat +trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little +bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, +awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still +stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, +came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy +cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five +years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the +old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and +transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of +green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, +and the Chippewa <i>Eagle</i> ran a half column twice a year describing her +spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, +and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the +superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her +city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:</p> + +<p>"This is awfully good this year."</p> + +<p>"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the +style—the line—you're paying for, not the material."</p> + +<p>"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it. +Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."</p> + +<p>When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the +mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it +in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated +eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, +slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples. +A little sigh of relieved suspense.</p> + +<p>"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because +you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have +a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I +proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this +needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."</p> + +<p>And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat +against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist +and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out +of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you +bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something +more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her +admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:</p> + +<p>"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. +You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat +and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."</p> + +<p>In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight +brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat +and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the +bedroom from the shoulders down.</p> + +<p>The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and +expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and +lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as +well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these +opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, +frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart +trade.</p> + +<p>"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. +They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell +them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, +or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to +cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it. +Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the +same idea."</p> + +<p>Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, +severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the +other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.</p> + +<p>At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques +completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No +one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol.</p> + +<p>"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody +feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a +fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to +be there."</p> + +<p>The two Baldwin children—Adele and Eugene—found Aunt Sophy's shop a +treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of +satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make +her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of +the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little +scavenger.</p> + +<p>"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt +Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."</p> + +<p>Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I +keep it," she said.</p> + +<p>When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say +'Poor Sophy'?"</p> + +<p>"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and +has always worked."</p> + +<p>Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're +poor?"</p> + +<p>"Well—yes—"</p> + +<p>"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, +skinny and rather foreign looking.</p> + +<p>The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very +tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora +of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his +mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a +girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And +that's such hard work."</p> + +<p>Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still +coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to +baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her +admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her +selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen +years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great +deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or +twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the +beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. +It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had +taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, +unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features +seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large +white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of +those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a +telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's +large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating +strength, courage, and a great human understanding.</p> + +<p>From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have +chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a +lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or +her husband. They all hated it.</p> + +<p>"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had +stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as +an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children. +She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech, +but shockingly true.</p> + +<p>Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, +had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of +pillows.</p> + +<p>"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way +you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with +all that lovely colour!"</p> + +<p>Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me +credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my +blood is in my cheeks."</p> + +<p>Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary +for success in that direction.</p> + +<p>"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's +a profession in itself—being a wife and mother."</p> + +<p>She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's +land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear +he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity +and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of +beauty.</p> + +<p>"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence. +"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a +fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing."</p> + +<p>The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The +girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more +immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods; +irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited +following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid +bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any +one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would +have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a +giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection +unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having +her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a +prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not +a step.</p> + +<p>Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of +affairs, tried to stop it.</p> + +<p>"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, +bluntly, to her sister.</p> + +<p>"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. +"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the +world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."</p> + +<p>"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's +nervousness—your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. +You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's +ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom +she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban +that Angie Hatton—"</p> + +<p>"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your +shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to +your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the +minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. +That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her +come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, +cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't +know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have +suffered. If you had brought two children into the world—"</p> + +<p>So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and +their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, +their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in +some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.</p> + +<p>"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How +can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."</p> + +<p>This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and +became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house—the old +frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was +something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, +that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin +house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the +Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best +residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly +furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary +chill to your heart.</p> + +<p>The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and +snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not +unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam, +and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head +trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray +patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him +for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have +around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls +would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and +cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, +especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from +Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the +best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or +Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original +design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a +small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory +down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her +invaluable.</p> + +<p>The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very +black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark +line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but +when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by +a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low. +She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking +something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream +she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being +pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the +sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. +But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.</p> + +<p>"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a +boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you +good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me +company."</p> + +<p>Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the +house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big +flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her +skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in +and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny +game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, +always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a +partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.</p> + +<p>It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly +into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging +for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms +clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came +in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was +thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite +twenty-one.</p> + +<p>"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a +leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look +comic.</p> + +<p>"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're +going to be married."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and +plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen—" she began.</p> + +<p>"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"</p> + +<p>Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's +face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That +isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is +when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you. +Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother, +pretty near."</p> + +<p>"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk +that way—Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to +really—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and +old.</p> + +<p>And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the +idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand—a +capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back +but the boy did not.</p> + +<p>"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will +you promise me? Will you?"</p> + +<p>"Are you going to tell Father?"</p> + +<p>"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. +No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to—You're not a +bad girl. It's just—he's never had—at home they never gave him a +chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over +then."</p> + +<p>Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.</p> + +<p>"Quick!"</p> + +<p>"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.</p> + +<p>"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, +sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open +the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."</p> + +<p>There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; +what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just +hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three +days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew +that her prayers were answered.</p> + +<p>Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite +twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely." +She was almost hysterical.</p> + +<p>Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt +Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said +nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora +took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her +cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the +recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing +up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the +floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted +curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and +crafty look.</p> + +<p>"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My +nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or +other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more +economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he +do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children—"</p> + +<p>H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at +the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her +teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.</p> + +<p>Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her +hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, +she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and +simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own +affairs, must have marked it.</p> + +<p>The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel +Oakley."</p> + +<p>Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had +been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and +Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his +strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding +his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had +had business relations as well as friendly ones.</p> + +<p>At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth +stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer +look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion +a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain.</p> + +<p>"When did he ask you?"</p> + +<p>"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will +be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France. +I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her +young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean."</p> + +<p>Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your +mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, +'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I <i>am</i> so faint ... all of a +sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...."</p> + +<p>Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks +later. They had a regular pre-war wedding—veil, flowers, dinner, and +all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The +girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile +twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.</p> + +<p>"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of +milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt +who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I +can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl.</p> + +<p>"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't +want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for? +Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."</p> + +<p>But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of +her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just +like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not +laugh.</p> + +<p>"Now look here, Delia. If you're—"</p> + +<p>But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's +all right," she said.</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she +said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for +you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty +close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. +It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."</p> + +<p>"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been +wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, +anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't +it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm +lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing +like me."</p> + +<p>"But your mother—"</p> + +<p>"Mother doesn't know a thing."</p> + +<p>Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed +enough for two.</p> + +<p>When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face +drawn and queer, Sophy knew.</p> + +<p>"How much?" she said.</p> + +<p>"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that—"</p> + +<p>"I thought Oakley—Adele said—"</p> + +<p>"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's +this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got +scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."</p> + +<p>"Speculating with it, were you?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."</p> + +<p>"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."</p> + +<p>"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, +and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the +money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."</p> + +<p>Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the +children, anyway. They won't need it now."</p> + +<p>He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't +they?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."</p> + +<p>"Eugene?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and +presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this +money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand +these things but I can talk to you. It's like this—"</p> + +<p>"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it, +not for you, but for Flora, and Delia—and Eugene. Flora has lived such +a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you. +Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia +and Eugene are my children—were my children."</p> + +<p>When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was +getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.</p> + +<p>"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's +lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats +and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother +suffers—poor Sophy."</p> + +<p>"Um," Baldwin grunted.</p> + +<p>When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War +Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora +had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they +thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything +to give comfort to the stricken two.</p> + +<p>"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit +there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel +something."</p> + +<p>"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.</p> + +<p>"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!"</p> + +<p>This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have +to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the +printed page. You must not skip this.</p> + +<div class="letter"> +<p class="center"> +AMERICAN RED CROSS<br /> +(CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE)<br /> +</p> + +<p>MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:</p> + +<p> I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by + the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H. + Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last + hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm + sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who + was privileged to be with her boy at the last.</p> + +<p> Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed + from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not + receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special + hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked + this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.</p> + +<p> Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who + examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as + he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a + few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and + strong as he was could not pull through.</p> + +<p> The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly + choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were + both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not + to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good + to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his + head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more + easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on + duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he + died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every + minute of that night and have never seen a finer character + than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had + several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each + one simply because of his great will power and fighting + spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, + "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll + only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during + the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he + could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I + had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness + even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was + going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all + his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He + seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in + bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll + fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually + thought we had won when on the third day....</p> + +<p> But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been + the mother of such a son....</p> + +<p> I am a Wisconsin girl—Madison. When this is over and I come + home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than + I can possibly write?</p> + +<p> MARIAN KING.</p></div> + +<p>It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped +for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in +the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora +and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then +Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. +Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning +a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat +quietly, waiting.</p> + +<p>There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora +broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she +spoke.</p> + +<p>"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I +do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor +Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the +married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, +Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know +how cruel life is."</p> + +<p>Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and +faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's +hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station. +Pretty good."</p> + +<p>Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced +her, the four—Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood +a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older +women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, +quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into +her eyes straight and sure.</p> + +<p>"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very +proud woman."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL" id="APRIL_25TH_AS_USUAL" />APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL</h2> + + +<p>Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She +started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar +in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for +House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five +years she had hated it—being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five +years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled +up—the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of +What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)—Mrs. Brewster had gone +through the ceremony twice a year.</p> + +<p>Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the +yard—everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, +flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of +these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in +again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, +things had piled up higher and higher—useless things, sentimental +things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things +wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.</p> + +<p>And boxes—oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square +and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; +cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned +an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another +stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents +under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing +fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key +they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as +Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip +covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance.</p> + +<p>The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American +household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, +Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten +years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his +sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the +neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had +lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the +Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful +magazine covers that stare up at you from your table—young lady, hollow +chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan. +You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves +the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too +tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.</p> + +<p>Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, +ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a +palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and +slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, +were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at +Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless +heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of +citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and +to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and +Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up +above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the +afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster +place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen +closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, +as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be.</p> + +<p>That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them—physically, +that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they—in +tolerance and understanding and humanness—until now, as you talked with +them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental +chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins +and closets for all your worries and confidences.</p> + +<p>But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every +woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I +only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it +weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago," +complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood +floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, +æsthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as +clearly as if a sociologist had charted it.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the +crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a +junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon +portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each +of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink +cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the +labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a +soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes +behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky—and in fact the entire Brewster +household—had thought these massive atrocities the last word in +artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had +prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two +years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the +dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.</p> + +<p>Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with +them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel +and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the +entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks +as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a +nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping +porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in +the attic.</p> + +<p>One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. +Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, +cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. +Brewster's <i>bête noir</i> and plaything, tyrant and slave—the furnace. +"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: +"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn +mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know +what's got into her."</p> + +<p>By noon of this particular September day—a blue-and-gold Wisconsin +September day—Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of +the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly +again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you +understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little +necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might +have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and +left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, +no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that +it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this +relentless and expert crew.</p> + +<p>Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened +and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz' +Brewster?"</p> + +<p>"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well—I don't know. You can take that home +with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."</p> + +<p>Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the +funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more <i>passé</i>than a +last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the +tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the +plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had +worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—well, these +were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed +by unbrightened by covetousness.</p> + +<p>The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and +the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic. +Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen +and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's +relations' latest flagrancy.</p> + +<p>"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I +says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to <i>that</i>,' s's he, 'I +guess I got some—'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and +much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the +second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same +footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it +looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent +had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.</p> + +<p>Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished:</p> + +<p>"Pinky! Why—my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you—"</p> + +<p>"No; I didn't. I just thought I—Don't look so dazed, mummy—You're all +smudged, too—what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked +about the attic. "Why, mother! You're—you're house cleaning!" There was +a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in +June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor +trips into the country.</p> + +<p>"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming—Come +here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat +they're—why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just +got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."</p> + +<p>Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping +a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot +your old friends, have you?"</p> + +<p>"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other +woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's +house cleaning—I'd forgotten all about house cleaning—that there was +such a thing, I mean."</p> + +<p>"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely.</p> + +<p>Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor +clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, +crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included +and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the +kind. This is—this is an anachronism."</p> + +<p>"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be +cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned."</p> + +<p>They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended +the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting +each other.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the +protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him. +You'll hate the dinner—built around Miz Merz; you know—boiled. Well, +you know what a despot she is."</p> + +<p>It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch +Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes +and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, +mother!"</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at +Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of +Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift +movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly +at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled +it through the open doorway.</p> + +<p>"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off +your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way—unless that's +the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the +war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard. +"It's just that it seems so idiotic—your digging around in an attic in +this day and age! Why, it's—it's—" Pinky could express herself much +more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an +attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before—this +huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just +you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent +anger. "Do you <i>like</i> cleaning the attic?"</p> + +<p>"Why, no. I hate it."</p> + +<p>"Then why in the world—"</p> + +<p>"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in +New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your +room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming—the slip +covers—"</p> + +<p>"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She +succeeded in slurring it ludicrously.</p> + +<p>It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not +be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up +delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young +lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped +to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused +at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft +grays and blues.</p> + +<p>Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing +forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's +the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed.</p> + +<p>"I know it."</p> + +<p>The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the +situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable +streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up."</p> + +<p>"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to +meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I +didn't know there was any situation."</p> + +<p>"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of +mind."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her +voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that +tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter." +She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on. +Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a +bath, won't you, dear?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled—honestly?—on a day like this?"</p> + +<p>"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly.</p> + +<p>Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of +Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz' +Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter +flannels!"</p> + +<p>"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young +fist down in the water—spat!—so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and +floor impartially.</p> + +<p>Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea +Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of +the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a +queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her +throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin +winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner +where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!"</p> + +<p>His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red. +He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was +pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long +minute—close.</p> + +<p>"Need a shave, dad."</p> + +<p>"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off. +"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?"</p> + +<p>"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio—you +know—plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for +you."</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a +little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated +porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I +thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows, +and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a +change."</p> + +<p>Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about +that. Mother needs—"</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an +all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?" +She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner +so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want +to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's +everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky.</p> + +<p>But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly +sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese +soufflé, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream.</p> + +<p>"But, mother, you shouldn't have—" feebly.</p> + +<p>"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just +wanted to tease you."</p> + +<p>Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But +two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him +go, a speculative look in her eyes.</p> + +<p>She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, +clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the +centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged, +trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern +deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; +the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's +Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs."</p> + +<p>"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval! +Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs +and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for +the bowl in the dining room.</p> + +<p>Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night, +there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's +volcanic remarks.</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to +have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September +before they began firing up for the winter.</p> + +<p>"I'll go down with you," said Pinky.</p> + +<p>"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust."</p> + +<p>But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed, +after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy."</p> + +<p>And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling +process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of +the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two +men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea +Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his +sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came +forward.</p> + +<p>She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you."</p> + +<p>"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred."</p> + +<p>"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well."</p> + +<p>He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked +at her. "Huh? What d'you mean—isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open. +His eyes looked suddenly strained.</p> + +<p>"This house—it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at +supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself—like +other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And +you're another."</p> + +<p>"Me?" feebly.</p> + +<p>"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that +it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something—I don't know +what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills +for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true. +Wasn't it? Wasn't it?"</p> + +<p>"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was +terribly disturbed, "About mother—you said—"</p> + +<p>"You and she ought to go away this winter—not just for a trip, but to +stay. You"—she drew a long breath and made the plunge—"you ought to +give up the house."</p> + +<p>"Give up—"</p> + +<p>"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to +New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few +days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little +apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it—two +rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse."</p> + +<p>Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great +furnace room. "Oh, but listen—"</p> + +<p>"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't +as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the +theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and +concerts."</p> + +<p>He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady +diet—Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a +business to—"</p> + +<p>"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole +thing—or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it +wants its way.</p> + +<p>He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her +a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you +don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she +hated it. I asked about the attic—the cleaning and all—and she said +she hated it."</p> + +<p>"Did she say that, Paula?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked +pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to +himself, and thinking, thinking.</p> + +<p>Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, +through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's +bedroom door was open.</p> + +<p>A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the +plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in +the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?"</p> + +<p>"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the +bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. +Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face +and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. +Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't +well. He ought to go away."</p> + +<p>As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow. +As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked +suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father—but he isn't +sick. He—"</p> + +<p>"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That +furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred. +He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This +house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or +sell it, and come to New York?"</p> + +<p>"But we do. We did. Last winter—"</p> + +<p>"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little +two-room apartment in one of the new buildings—near my studio—and +relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a +rut—both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with +these Wisconsin winters—"</p> + +<p>"But California—we could go to California for—"</p> + +<p>"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled, +and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great +hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it."</p> + +<p>"Did he ever say so?"</p> + +<p>"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He—"</p> + +<p>Slow steps ascending the stairs—heavy, painful steps. The two women +listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words. +The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her +eyes anxious, tender.</p> + +<p>"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only—why, dad's +only fifty-eight."</p> + +<p>"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly.</p> + +<p>Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so +tired, aren't you?"</p> + +<p>Her father stood in the doorway.</p> + +<p>"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned +around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember."</p> + +<p>So Pinky went off to her own room (<i>sans</i> slp cov) and slept soundly, +dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform, +a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done.</p> + +<p>"<i>Au 'voir!</i> The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love +it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your +minds, remember."</p> + +<p>And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New +Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a +studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady +who turned out to be from Des Moines.</p> + +<p>When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their +inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being +the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as +black diamonds and twice as costly.</p> + +<p>Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and +said: "How many rooms did you say?"</p> + +<p>"Two—and a kitchenette, of course."</p> + +<p>"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for +that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum."</p> + +<p>But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very +impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the +best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no +matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the +prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it +was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon.</p> + +<p>"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded +Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder +they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you +feel like a book agent."</p> + +<p>He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster, +soothingly.</p> + +<p>They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and +(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known +as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in +red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray.</p> + +<p>Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, <i>we've</i> been very +comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager."</p> + +<p>"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster.</p> + +<p>"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good. +She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five. +She'll take two hundred."</p> + +<p>"You bet she will," growled Hosea.</p> + +<p>She answered the door—hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's +chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio +living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was +window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of +tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its +back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just +behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as +you've see it in the second-act library.</p> + +<p>Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty +ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he +remarked.</p> + +<p>But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was +saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You +see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six—eight, in fact."</p> + +<p>"Heaven forbid!" in fervent <i>sotto voce</i> from Father Brewster.</p> + +<p>"It's an enormous saving in time and labour."</p> + +<p>"The—kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She +skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really +handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a +part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was +dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. +And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the +miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the +Brewster's Winnebago china closet.</p> + +<p>"Why, how—how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster.</p> + +<p>"Isn't it? So complete—and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks, +chops, everything right here. It's just play."</p> + +<p>A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the +tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are +the beds?"</p> + +<p>She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're +upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know."</p> + +<p>A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung +with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom—a +rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with +whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on +dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall.</p> + +<p>They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for +Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great +deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and +let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, <i>à la</i> Juliet, +having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume +consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's +little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the +Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, +the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky +legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter.</p> + +<p>After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room +apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible +loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room +house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the +winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a +light-heartedness that neither of them felt.</p> + +<p>They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the +street noises of New York came up to them—a loose chain flapping +against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth +Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a +motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down.</p> + +<p>She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious +gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!</p> + +<p>He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at +home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!</p> + +<p>Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?"</p> + +<p>"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off."</p> + +<p>"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though. +Great!"</p> + +<p>"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily.</p> + +<p>They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in +Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more +doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had +learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain. +Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all +over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the +happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known +that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious +bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding.</p> + +<p>When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh, +take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster +used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can +start the eggs."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster +never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet +By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of +jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He +deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail +off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, +heavily, as though it were a physical weight.</p> + +<p>Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!</p> + +<p>"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say.</p> + +<p>"Time of my life, father."</p> + +<p>She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which +no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less +frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. +Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for +her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, +slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture +those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she +had talked to five or six of them.</p> + +<p>She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he +confided, "they're all from Wisconsin—or approximately; Michigan, and +Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one +New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em."</p> + +<p>"Which one?"</p> + +<p>"That kind of plain little one over there—sensible looking, with the +blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, +but she doesn't live here—that is, not in the city. Lives in some place +in the country, in a house."</p> + +<p>A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to +talk to her, Hosey. Take me over."</p> + +<p>She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the +quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's +fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you +Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. +Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say—live. And then the +children—it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love +it—oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a +tiny apartment, with a kitchenette—"</p> + +<p>The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But +she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still +wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the +slavery of it. That—that deceitful, lying kitchenette."</p> + +<p>This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to—really talked +to—since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At +first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on +Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed +and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a +mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than +women.</p> + +<p>The clerks in the shops, too—they were so remote, so contemptuous. When +she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say: +"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. +Let's see, you've had it two—three years this spring? My land! Let me +show you our new taupes."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine +individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was +startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's +simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two—perhaps +two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.</p> + +<p>"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said.</p> + +<p>"Me? No."</p> + +<p>"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't."</p> + +<p>"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't +they? Most of 'em?"</p> + +<p>"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West—Iowa an' Californy an' +around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they +come from. I dunno."</p> + +<p>Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. +He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, +buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, +with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white +linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his +square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his +baggy trousers. It was something inside him—something he lacked, he +thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed +that they did not.</p> + +<p>"Enjoying yourself, Milly?"</p> + +<p>"I should say I am, father."</p> + +<p>"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?"</p> + +<p>"It's play."</p> + +<p>She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen +pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: +apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; +sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, +that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one +combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.</p> + +<p>"Chops taste good, Hosey?"</p> + +<p>"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out +to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."</p> + +<p>"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"</p> + +<p>"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store +kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream +whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily +with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even +known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used +to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price +of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin +cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market +before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with +tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the +buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.</p> + +<p>Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had +known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, +naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg +acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin +farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a +ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had +sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on +Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out +on the porch early, very early summer mornings.</p> + +<p>You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant +there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he +had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its +black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to +struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had +thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.</p> + +<p>"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just +seemed to kind of pine away."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>It was one morning in April—one soft, golden April morning—when this +memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market. +Something about the place—the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of +eggs, the butter, the cheese—had brought such a surge of homesickness +over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway +he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face +was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung +loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.</p> + +<p>"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I—"</p> + +<p>He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into +the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A +great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.</p> + +<p>The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The +glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have +gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged +corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be +sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, +fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim +little hall.</p> + +<p>A barked shin. A good, round oath.</p> + +<p>"Hosey! What's the matter? What—" She came running to him. She led him +into the bright front room.</p> + +<p>"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the +door. What the—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I +didn't know—"</p> + +<p>Something in her voice—he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up +at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her +head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves +were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a +promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.</p> + +<p>"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to +get away from. If Pinky—"</p> + +<p>"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a +letter—a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She +asked if I'd go to the hall closet—the one she reserved for her own +things, you know—and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, +and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and—look!"</p> + +<p>Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in +the closet. Boxes—pasteboard boxes—each one bearing a cryptic +pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; +"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a +little air of defiance. "It—I don't know—it made me—not homesick, +Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but—well, I guess I'm not the only woman +with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman—she came +to the door with her hat on, and yet—"</p> + +<p>Truth—blinding, white-hot truth—burst in upon him. "Mother," he +said—and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert—"mother, let's go +home."</p> + +<p>Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?"</p> + +<p>"Now."</p> + +<p>"But, Hosey! Pinky—this flat—until June—"</p> + +<p>"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this—this +make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's +go home, mother. Let's go home—and breathe."</p> + +<p>In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April—snow or slush. The +Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene +Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of +daisies.</p> + +<p>At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head +out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?"</p> + +<p>They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. +Brewster leaned back without comment.</p> + +<p>Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug +Hengel.</p> + +<p>"Yep."</p> + +<p>"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long."</p> + +<p>"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon—the big piece. And +send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll +take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right."</p> + +<p>It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of +his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the +restaurant fare of the past six months.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with +an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as +they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very +still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. +The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then +Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain +with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He +took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide +and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief.</p> + +<p>"Welcome home! Home!"</p> + +<p>She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks! +Huge!"</p> + +<p>"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to +library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No +wonder it grins and throws out its arms."</p> + +<p>They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the +cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and +shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his +stubby black pipe.</p> + +<p>"Hosey!"—from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of +preserves when you come."</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"Can of preserves."</p> + +<p>"What kind?"</p> + +<p>"Any kind you like."</p> + +<p>"Can I have two kinds?"</p> + +<p>He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put +them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands +together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now. +That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does. +Is the house getting warmer?"</p> + +<p>He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was +back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out +the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the +tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why—"</p> + +<p>"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and +slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm +going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the +table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've +cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I +don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your +overalls. Come on."</p> + +<p>He cut into the steak—a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat +it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, +ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness +and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them.</p> + +<p>The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly.</p> + +<p>"Let me go, Milly."</p> + +<p>"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're—"</p> + +<p>He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She +says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. +She—Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time +for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, +Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="OLD_LADY_MANDLE" id="OLD_LADY_MANDLE" />OLD LADY MANDLE</h2> + + +<p>Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room +flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an +ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at +cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more +artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg +sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, +admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. +Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And +the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a +spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and +wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an +admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she +acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no +proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never +spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son +Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were +delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and +sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the +stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For +they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies +could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons +and their sons' wives.</p> + +<p>Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs. +Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row, +on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon +coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of +them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her +voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo.</p> + +<p>My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no +thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine +about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It +may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his +thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form +a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old +mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been +hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked +over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and +regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with +dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This +had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the +purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the +iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She +possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins +of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she +essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now! +None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night."</p> + +<p>When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her +two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first +and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of +lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her +friends.</p> + +<p>"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my +old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo."</p> + +<p>In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk +together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in +pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent +Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her +pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon +which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her +cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that +she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was +a spoiled old lady.</p> + +<p>At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her +neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box +in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old +frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No +fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds +that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long +hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and +soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed, +dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black +silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three +friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty +apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians, +guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and +craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink +scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, +for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared +clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's +exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were +worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They +were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, +scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at +bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle +triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three +was imitation.</p> + +<p>So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling +their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into +the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They +represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they +themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its +apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the +roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers +over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none +of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over +her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a +man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did +not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama, +undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they +derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the +modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that +this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on +four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired +four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path.</p> + +<p>Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They +seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, +and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her +voice was unctuous with pride.</p> + +<p>"My son's wife—" one of the three would begin. There was something +terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the +title.</p> + +<p>"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if +I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to +depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead."</p> + +<p>"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked +tones from Mrs. Mandle.</p> + +<p>"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than +nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see +enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it +all."</p> + +<p>A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do +you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?"</p> + +<p>More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an +Old People's Home as a refuge. Then:</p> + +<p>"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to +housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he +says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a +restaurant—well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You +couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'"</p> + +<p>Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll +marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly +streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always +grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a +marvel of perfection.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries +late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, +either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in +his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait."</p> + +<p>"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a +trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let +a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them +like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time."</p> + +<p>The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her +fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she +made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son +Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I +won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I +guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I +said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he +laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass +me another, Ma'."</p> + +<p>"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser.</p> + +<p>"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud."</p> + +<p>"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a—"</p> + +<p>"He's just like a man of twenty-five—only worse."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son +Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?"</p> + +<p>They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the +park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They +never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or +how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely +fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.</p> + +<p>Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She +had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, +healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man +twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life +together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could +call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, +according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, +the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's +miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving +necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the +spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never +quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of +heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty +became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned +matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and +linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.</p> + +<p>Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business. +He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, +documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when +a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was +none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for +masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, +stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way +they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched +against the father and daughter.</p> + +<p>It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in +a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when +the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping +Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real +estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, +clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands +more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a +black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down +figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of +terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of +the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a +curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching +the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she +found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's +sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the +wake of the devastating panic.</p> + +<p>Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a +household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen +he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a +stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a +boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and +responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From +his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material +values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never +attained her iron indomitability.</p> + +<p>It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most +modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and +take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china +houses.</p> + +<p>The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to +get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her."</p> + +<p>"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said.</p> + +<p>Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy—or +as happy as she knows how to be—she'll never come back. That's what I +want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along."</p> + +<p>They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of +economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the +acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the +impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, +long-suffering, subdued—and in need of a start. He was. They managed a +very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. +Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented +incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. +Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had +expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the +last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were +right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement +colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.</p> + +<p>The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound +steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A +new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.</p> + +<p>Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle +side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them +a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a +man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, +but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest +against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the +cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) +in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar +smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play +that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would +tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, +in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and +son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo +kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she +looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat +her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough +thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill +that her husband's withered kisses had never given her.</p> + +<p>Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a +comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit +of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady +Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend +freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his +savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a +time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She +and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. +When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma +Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch +of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his +money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household +capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to +protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony.</p> + +<p>"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst +tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than +the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!"</p> + +<p>She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next +day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo +spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand +and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed +contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo +regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, +articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with +age, shrewd though she naturally was.</p> + +<p>It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an +evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full +hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. +"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing +I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a +chicken."</p> + +<p>"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a +musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next +day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. +Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old +lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his +becoming what she called fast.</p> + +<p>"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman +like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a +dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick.</p> + +<p>So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South +Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life.</p> + +<p>And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does.</p> + +<p>Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might +have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She +remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken +admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of +business.</p> + +<p>"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like +it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at +rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss. +Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she +turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for +novelties."</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. +Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner. +Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal, +too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly +during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of +angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The +following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in +Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. +Usually he praised this dish, or that.</p> + +<p>"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?"</p> + +<p>"'S all right." And declined a second piece.</p> + +<p>The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped +his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before +her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?"</p> + +<p>"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about +her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll +love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. +Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look +so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?"</p> + +<p>"But who—?"</p> + +<p>"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and +strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home +an—'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says—"</p> + +<p>Ad lib.</p> + +<p>They were married the following month.</p> + +<p>Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment +farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her +mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of +grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, +miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were +swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna, +with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her +gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the +afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat +Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never +failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day +scrubber.</p> + +<p>But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, +voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, +bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd +business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship.</p> + +<p>He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany +front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. +She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. +Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a +concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for +its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her +shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair +gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was +clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was +always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would +emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles +were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed +when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her +scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look +as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé.</p> + +<p>"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose +daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that +she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her +knowledge.</p> + +<p>"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right."</p> + +<p>He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove +it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in +a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her +own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom +reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a +fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and +on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that +its utilitarian dial was almost lost.</p> + +<p>It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and +she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes +up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean +things out on the bed—fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted +to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate +handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown—hot, +fagged, sticky—she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour +so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to +eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool, +interested, sweet-smelling.</p> + +<p>When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More +than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long +in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered +that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could +never resent it.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle's reign was over.</p> + +<p>To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied +magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, +but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things +different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears +caught the familiar phrase.</p> + +<p>"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been +boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of +the way. Don't I know!"</p> + +<p>"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is +no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure +is welcome."</p> + +<p>But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow +pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew. +She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of +ashes.</p> + +<p>Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in +his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that +made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as +bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree +with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her +provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. +She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo +agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma +Mandle fought every ounce of it.</p> + +<p>"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I +never heard of such a thing. Fads!"</p> + +<p>But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental +relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He +only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother +had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, +tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed +miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a +certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf +clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just +the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it +the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among +a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying +up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, +crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he +would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. +Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she +had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face +and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but +she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the +pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote +corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about +not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at +breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the +milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that +had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to +say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now +it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and +Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines.</p> + +<p>If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life +of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told +you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she +would have denied it, furiously. But both were true.</p> + +<p>When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well.</p> + +<p>"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," +she would say, unreasonably.</p> + +<p>"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?"</p> + +<p>If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked.</p> + +<p>Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, +well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat +but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?"</p> + +<p>"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked +over."</p> + +<p>"Oh—to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy."</p> + +<p>In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the +marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said. +"This is your household now."</p> + +<p>But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen +table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a +head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump +chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with +meaning.</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of +her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the +fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and +she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the +result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon +parties at the homes of married women of her own age and +station—pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too +much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery +biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes +of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a +heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing.</p> + +<p>"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what +we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked +teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed +her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the +sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her +clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent +life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing +her face had not coarsened its texture.</p> + +<p>Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between +the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about +cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted +after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him +about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about +Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always +treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at +ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling +of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her +house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts +to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only +thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know +that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which +caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should +not do.</p> + +<p>Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the +theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became +marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man.</p> + +<p>"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say.</p> + +<p>"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some +night life."</p> + +<p>"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. +You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along."</p> + +<p>That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the +end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper +would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill +talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented +it.</p> + +<p>Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the +vaguely suspicious three.</p> + +<p>Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good +deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically +precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long +passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and +flowers.</p> + +<p>Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they +liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier +one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for +hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture +absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of +Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression.</p> + +<p>A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own +good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating +heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice +it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him +mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into +his ear.</p> + +<p>"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't +have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old +that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't +enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't +enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week."</p> + +<p>An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would +come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining +point, goaded by much repetition.</p> + +<p>The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a +simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from +mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a +time is all that any man can handle successfully.</p> + +<p>"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling. +Why can't you get along."</p> + +<p>One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a +decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black +lace."</p> + +<p>Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to +die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear +mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think +of me the way I was when I was alive."</p> + +<p>The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. +Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her +temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma +Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation, +denial; vituperation, retort.</p> + +<p>"You'll be happy when I'm gone."</p> + +<p>"If I am it's your fault."</p> + +<p>"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They +don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha—"</p> + +<p>"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever +saw."</p> + +<p>And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at +pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's +got into you two women?"</p> + +<p>It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house, +hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June +night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was +even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars +streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline +blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in +front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded +in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic +bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time, +with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She +came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and +agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this +you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How +right they were—Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless. +Unconsidered. In the way.</p> + +<p>By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body +lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how +worried Hugo had looked....</p> + +<p>Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward +home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted +scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely +fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in +duration.</p> + +<p>She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The +place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of +someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again. +The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She +crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs.</p> + +<p>"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it +wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd—"</p> + +<p>"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's +an old lady—"</p> + +<p>"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year +and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any +reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!"</p> + +<p>"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick."</p> + +<p>Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing +endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through +the tears.</p> + +<p>"No, I'm not hysterical. I—it just struck me funny. I was just +wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, +maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love +them too much we really harm them. I suppose—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all +worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you +cry before."</p> + +<p>"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right. +I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past +and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to +her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, +maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you."</p> + +<p>Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband +belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by +accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and +deliberately."</p> + +<p>But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If +it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just +now, too, when you're so worried about business."</p> + +<p>"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got +to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the +French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year. +If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood +the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above +water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now."</p> + +<p>"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself +sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the +business—"</p> + +<p>"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see."</p> + +<p>The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out +alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd +better—"</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as +though she had just come in.</p> + +<p>"That you, Ma?" called Hugo.</p> + +<p>He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic +little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began +to worry about you."</p> + +<p>"I'm all right. I'm going to bed."</p> + +<p>He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going +over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma."</p> + +<p>Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed +behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled +bravely.</p> + +<p>"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off."</p> + +<p>But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, +you two."</p> + +<p>That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. +Something new, something gentle, something wise.</p> + +<p>She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and +hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into +bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had +lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be +seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to +crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would +express the meaning of life—this she had never tried to do. She could +not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her +mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child +to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life. +She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she +sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in +a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They +called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it +to-morrow—Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday +Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a +moth get into her husband's winter suit.</p> + +<p>"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never. +But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my +son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house."</p> + +<p>Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She +forgets. We all forget."</p> + +<p>It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from +the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. +Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare +feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a +line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. +With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's +pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the +light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again.</p> + +<p>She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the +blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her +head ... pounding....</p> + +<p>At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was +his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he +whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully +by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful +awkwardness up the hall again.</p> + +<p>"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on +a scorcher like this."</p> + +<p>Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said. +She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper +pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read +it.</p> + +<p>"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than +half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.</p> + +<p>"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in +the world."</p> + +<p>A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished +reading them.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH" id="YOUVE_GOT_TO_BE_SELFISH" />YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH</h2> + + +<p>When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi +Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the +personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in +newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short +story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised +as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and +been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the +background. You can't see the heavens for the stars.</p> + +<p>Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no +introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been +described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on +Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though +quoted, thus:</p> + +<p>"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a +genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, +artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very +force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the +eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a +comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to +a vice."</p> + +<p>Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine +diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, +"It's scarlet! No—it's blue! No—rose!—orange!—lilac!—no—"</p> + +<p>That was Sid Hahn.</p> + +<p>I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his +likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the +theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and +top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black +cigar—unlighted—in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone +interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew +all about Sid Hahn—and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those +middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or +something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the +profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his +having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, +indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally +controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing +in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It +had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized +in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, +at that time, at the zenith of his career—managing, writing, directing, +producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy +with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid +Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever +said to himself in so many words:</p> + +<p>"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let +anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to +be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be +selfish."</p> + +<p>Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in +the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination +running through the whole fibre of his being could have been +crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.</p> + +<p>By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than +Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them +even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood +behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But +taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of +the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.</p> + +<p>He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early +love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved +what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as +though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. +Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by +people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular +east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with +make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play +with real ones, like God. But always kind.</p> + +<p>No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn +appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired +ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war +horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit +there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and +inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense +and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket +of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It +smells!"</p> + +<p>Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from +years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly +afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had +thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as +they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the +treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.</p> + +<p>It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the +famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and +swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when +she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he +regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that +time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, +very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as +a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop +rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think +of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well."</p> + +<p>Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in +French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?"</p> + +<p>"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is +a woman-hater."</p> + +<p>"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!"</p> + +<p>"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. +They don't need to know a language to understand it."</p> + +<p>"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz +course, was it?"</p> + +<p>Wallie Ascher had grinned—that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen +face. "No. I learned that in another school."</p> + +<p>Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might +almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin +Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to +Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre—if having a +tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be +said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.</p> + +<p>He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed +him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs +suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of +office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very +firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, +how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those +expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring +precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable +high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up—up—up he would go, +while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high +note—took it easily, insouciantly—held it, trilled it, tossed it.</p> + +<p>"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap—Miss Feldman of the outer +office typewriter—"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling +and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a—a—"</p> + +<p>"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.</p> + +<p>Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?"</p> + +<p>Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your +age, you are."</p> + +<p>"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly.</p> + +<p>There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He +probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he +whistled—brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, +too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from +another, and doesn't to this day.</p> + +<p>At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, +he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance +to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room +(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was +the dream: By the time he was—well, long before he was thirty—he would +have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect +servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for +four—or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot +plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be +cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one—when, +in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and +wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he +would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly +to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the +firelight with just one lamp glowing softly—almost sombrely—at the +side of the piano (grand).</p> + +<p>His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing +of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the +office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn +called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie. +From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a +sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he +was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in +rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, +lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but +Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit +it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.</p> + +<p>He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November +evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie +might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of +Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat +over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold +drizzle of the November evening.</p> + +<p>Hahn's apartment—he lived alone—was in the early fifties, off Fifth +Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to +which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's +errand.</p> + +<p>It was Saki—or Saki's equivalent—who opened the door. A white-coated, +soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. +Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.</p> + +<p>"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it."</p> + +<p>"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly.</p> + +<p>"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?"</p> + +<p>"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders.</p> + +<p>"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want—"</p> + +<p>Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at +his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room +beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but +something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, +and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve.</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with +those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes—the kindest +eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He +glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing +the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He +had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, +the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he +could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own +inability to reproduce it.</p> + +<p>The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.</p> + +<p>"God, I wish I could play!"</p> + +<p>"Helps a lot."</p> + +<p>"You play?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up."</p> + +<p>"Compose, you mean?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Play one of those."</p> + +<p>So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good +Night—Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even +published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for +Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the +success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was +sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky +Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long +been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam +and glow in the lamplight.</p> + +<p>When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're +you going to do with it?"</p> + +<p>"With what?"</p> + +<p>"With what you've got. You know."</p> + +<p>Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going +to—I'm going to do a lot with it."</p> + +<p>"Yeh, but how?"</p> + +<p>Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a +long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time. +And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to +be selfish ..."</p> + +<p>As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the +doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what +he had meant to say.</p> + +<p>"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I—" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was +too much.</p> + +<p>"Better."</p> + +<p>They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's +encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, +Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music—neither of them +knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an +intoxicant and a stimulant.</p> + +<p>"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more. +More."</p> + +<p>"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then, +immediately, "No, of course not."</p> + +<p>"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a +baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't +the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a +baby—but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!"</p> + +<p>"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each +other, this ill-assorted pair.</p> + +<p>It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the +play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big +room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One +lamp glowed softly—almost sombrely.</p> + +<p>As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming +out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!"</p> + +<p>"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it."</p> + +<p>"That's what they all say"—grimly—"<i>after</i> they've got it."</p> + +<p>The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was +now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into +earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!"</p> + +<p>"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you +know if you're right."</p> + +<p>In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his +official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort +of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the +theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this +no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. +There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, +for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when +she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power +to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which +gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the +ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority.</p> + +<p>When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on +one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped +down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign +stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise +rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on +the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in +tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely +repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, +perhaps, but characteristic.</p> + +<div class="letter"><p>MR. SID. HAHN,<br /> + Hotel Savoy,<br /> + London,<br /> + England.</p> + +<p> It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of + a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to + five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical + creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful + investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any + is extinct.</p> + +<p class="signature">WALLIE.</p></div> + +<p>This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions, +went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised, +wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days +later.</p> + +<p>Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of +magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous +women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and +Cigány music, and cafés and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low +and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely +on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow).</p> + +<p>It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then +a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier.</p> + +<p>Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the +manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long +ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound.</p> + +<p>"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've +found something big!"</p> + +<p>Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good +as that."</p> + +<p>"Play! It isn't a play."</p> + +<p>"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned +good! You don't mean to tell me—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good—or will be when you get through +with it."</p> + +<p>"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with +two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk +hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a +boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe.</p> + +<p>"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?"</p> + +<p>"Her name's Mizzi."</p> + +<p>"Mizzi what?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She—"</p> + +<p>"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and +real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine."</p> + +<p>But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings."</p> + +<p>"Beautiful, is she?"</p> + +<p>"No, not particularly. No."</p> + +<p>"Wonderful voice, h'm?"</p> + +<p>"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful."</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill +circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry +bricks!"</p> + +<p>"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head +and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides—"</p> + +<p>But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If +I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway. +You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick."</p> + +<p>Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You +wait. You'll see."</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep +so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was +unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had +decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera), +it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the +negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first +train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you. +You've got to see her."</p> + +<p>Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs +along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the +royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the +monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve +and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed, +daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers +which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest +men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of +the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the +river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new +building being erected across the way. It was on this building that +Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier.</p> + +<p>The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a +million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells, +running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two +American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women +were employed was dreadful and incredible.</p> + +<p>Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a +little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After +they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before."</p> + +<p>By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an +indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled +him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he +met Mizzi.</p> + +<p>They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive. +Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question.</p> + +<p>Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of +the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking +stuff for them. The women do that."</p> + +<p>And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the +women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up +one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a +musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some +seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing +across the river. Their hands were purple.</p> + +<p>"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But +I know it, anyway."</p> + +<p>Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk +and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because +they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now. +With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But +then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a +personality when he saw it.</p> + +<p>Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called +it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very +straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach +held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a +little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a +pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit.</p> + +<p>"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie.</p> + +<p>Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture. +She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between +seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth +pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its +two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high +in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed +deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it. +Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just +accomplished the gymnastic feat.</p> + +<p>"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage +is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly."</p> + +<p>A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were +abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew +chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men +followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore +overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food—very +small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and +sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the +whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished.</p> + +<p>"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward +Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from +her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise, +over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks +red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic.</p> + +<p>She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book +things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and +white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the +neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear +voice.</p> + +<p>"What's that?" asked Hahn.</p> + +<p>"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't +speak German, did you know that? They hate it."</p> + +<p>The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves +comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of +anticipation.</p> + +<p>"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same +every day."</p> + +<p>Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of +the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of +the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like +this:</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span>A hundred geese in a row<br /></span> +<span>Going into the coop.<br /></span> +<span>At the head of the procession<br /></span> +<span>A stick over his shoulder—<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly +would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience +gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot +Time":</p> + + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span>When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling,<br /></span> +<span>All join round and sweetly you must sing<br /></span> +<span>And when the words am through in the chorus all join in<br /></span> +<span>There'll be a <i>hot time</i><br /></span> +<span>In the <i>old town</i><br /></span> +<span>To-night.<br /></span> +<span class="i6">My<br /></span> +<span class="i7">Ba-<br /></span> +<span class="i9">By.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still +think it's our national anthem.</p> + +<p>When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped +their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual +beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and +flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in +a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive +pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality +that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember.</p> + +<p>There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted +description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call +it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these +things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it +is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it.</p> + +<p>So now he said, quietly, "She's got it."</p> + +<p>"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne +ever had. A year of training and some clothes—"</p> + +<p>"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself."</p> + +<p>"I'm sorry," stiffly.</p> + +<p>But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I +like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out +anything?"</p> + +<p>"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. +Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's +Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father—nobody +knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible +language in the world—Hungarian. They'll stick a <i>b</i> next to a <i>k</i> and +follow it up with a <i>z</i> and put an accent mark over the whole business +and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!"</p> + +<p>"What?" said Hahn, obligingly.</p> + +<p>"On her way she had to cross the big square—the one they call Gisela +Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's—"</p> + +<p>"What's Gerbeaud's?"</p> + +<p>"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and +guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes—and say! It isn't like our +pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous +stuff, this is!"</p> + +<p>After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All +right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. +Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?"</p> + +<p>"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside. +There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You +know—the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue. +There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in +that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of +the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I +waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her—I knew she couldn't +any more than knock me down—and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?' +She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an +Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I +had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she +opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice +of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an +imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of +stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then +they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up +dashed an equipage—you couldn't possibly call it anything less—with +flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside +the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old +frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and +her name is Josefa."</p> + +<p>"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I +don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And +what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?"</p> + +<p>"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the +Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot +of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice +a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always +manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and +see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I +couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just +this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and +she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she +said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh."</p> + +<p>"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously.</p> + +<p>And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know +it.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition +seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse, +cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman +of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic. +No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the +first—he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades.</p> + +<p>You know she wasn't—and isn't—a beauty, even in that portrait of her +by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on +either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose +very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then +there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for +it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for +pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest."</p> + +<p>While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged +woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook, +she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she +would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement +for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his +cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the +peasant women do it—the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife +cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she +would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing +the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent +figure.</p> + +<p>With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that +some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread +upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her +mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory.</p> + +<p>"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my +girl," Sid Hahn had said.</p> + +<p>She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest—I will not eat—I will not +sleep—I will not love—until I have it."</p> + +<p>Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity.</p> + +<p>"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought +of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had +hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them, +very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though +neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young +faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness.</p> + +<p>Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff—you know—complexes +and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know +to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which +they considered desirable.</p> + +<p>He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi, +remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He +watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on +his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his +own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving +himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world—the one thing he +wanted more than he had ever wanted anything.</p> + +<p>He decided that Destiny—a ponderous, slow-moving creature at +best—needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all +effective plans are.</p> + +<p>Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was +amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became +in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of +audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She +took it to her breast. She romped with it.</p> + +<p>He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for +Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office.</p> + +<p>"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some +little thing might be wrong—you know how they are. And all the rest +would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world—when they like +you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two +weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl +has got more real genius than any woman since—since Bernhardt in her +prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And +it'll <i>be</i> acting."</p> + +<p>"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly.</p> + +<p>"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll +probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago +I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't +get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do +something for me?"</p> + +<p>"Sure."</p> + +<p>"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The +Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. +You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your +friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he +likes to hear you play."</p> + +<p>He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship +that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his +books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion.</p> + +<p>Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the +sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it. +Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the +Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as +any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish +comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal +though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi +stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, +just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a +scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the +steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a +rosy line of splendour.</p> + +<p>The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the +play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door +closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out +after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, +and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, +and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came +again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and +profitless, without nourishment or sweetness.</p> + +<p>The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, +without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New +York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his +round, ugly face in at the opening.</p> + +<p>"Let's surprise Wallie," he said.</p> + +<p>"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly.</p> + +<p>"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being +home for dinner. Unless you're too tired."</p> + +<p>"I'm not tired."</p> + +<p>The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a +quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, +lamp-lighted room.</p> + +<p>Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a +purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers' +windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather +distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They +said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face!</p> + +<p>"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!"</p> + +<p>"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello."</p> + +<p>Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi."</p> + +<p>"Hello," said Mizzi.</p> + +<p>"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn.</p> + +<p>They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again.</p> + +<p>Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly +together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on +the back. "How'd you like it—the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? +H'm?"</p> + +<p>"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice."</p> + +<p>"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure."</p> + +<p>"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently.</p> + +<p>"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English.</p> + +<p>At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you! +I'll—I'll be glad to take you."</p> + +<p>Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the +three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when +it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to +be home."</p> + +<p>Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go, +suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around. +Hahn—he had to stand on tiptoe to do it—kissed her once on the mouth, +hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie +about the red carpet," he said.</p> + +<p>"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets."</p> + +<p>Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left. +There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and +See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous.</p> + +<p>Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small, +very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the +piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing +the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a +little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it +atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white +keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked +up. His cheeks were wet with tears.</p> + +<p>"God! I wish I could play!" he said.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="LONG_DISTANCE" id="LONG_DISTANCE" />LONG DISTANCE</h2> + + +<p>Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was +mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny +wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the +plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old.</p> + +<p>You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. +Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any +wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about +him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick +to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to +his task, his surroundings, and his attitude.</p> + +<p>Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that +of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working +position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous +perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which +are likely to trick you in an emergency.</p> + +<p>Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the +absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like +Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all +greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those +rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is +complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds +similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular +English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9.</p> + +<p>The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black +paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him +to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the +other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet +went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he +painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the +whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the +index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently +from his strong hands.</p> + +<p>"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said.</p> + +<p>Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell."</p> + +<p>Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden +chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter +bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, +with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as +A.E.F. and Co. 11.</p> + +<p>"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But +Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?"</p> + +<p>"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One."</p> + +<p>Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began +to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the +centuries-old English garden.</p> + +<p>It marked an epoch in Chet's life—that letter. But before we can +appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days.</p> + +<p>Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men +whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could +shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his +pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was +his pleasure—and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's +gangs the world over—to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any +passing petticoat that caught his fancy.</p> + +<p>Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, +protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the +law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of +their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street +below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"</p> + +<p>There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of +beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt +as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's +has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with +his work—a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or +a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and +called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks +a little higher.</p> + +<p>But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on +the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down +from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia +Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, +except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more +remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to +be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't.</p> + +<p>So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and +I'll be down."</p> + +<p>Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the +streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which +would make them border on the red.</p> + +<p>"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you +had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like +that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're +safe up there."</p> + +<p>The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs +were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine +of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and +stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One +ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he +said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish +heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. +Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing +slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet +straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes +wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her +hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And +as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, +looking after her.</p> + +<p>Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing +at the foot of the pole, waiting.</p> + +<p>They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet +Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot +somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that +same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's +costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) +you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began.</p> + +<p>Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet +was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever +indiscernible among its tender foliage.</p> + +<p>Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss +Kate, and the letter.</p> + +<p>His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war +surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine +of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing—they put it down +under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English +garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the +shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead +chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the +doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the +memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or +weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers—the fingers that +had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days.</p> + +<p>"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the +nerve specialist. "Time may do it—but I doubt it. Sometimes just a +word—the right word—will set the thing in motion again. Does he get +any letters?"</p> + +<p>"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet +about—about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that +his leg is healed and she wonders—"</p> + +<p>That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked +Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his +eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she +began to read:</p> + +<div class="letter"><p>Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it + rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than + any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're + reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place + takes the prize.</p> + +<p> I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet + darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and + nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something + you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the + leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference + with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how + bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any + features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's + happened to the outside of you, they can't change your + insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that + day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece + of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to + be slapped, God bless the boy in you—</p></div> + +<p>A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball +was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand.</p> + +<p>"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.</p> + +<p>Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy +and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood."</p> + +<p>"What'm I doin' with it?"</p> + +<p>"You've just finished painting it."</p> + +<p>Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, +struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement +he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a +little.</p> + +<p>"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, +beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't—"</p> + +<p>But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. +She was registering joy—pure joy.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG" id="UN_MORSO_DOO_PANG" />UN MORSO DOO PANG</h2> + + +<p>When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, +in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that +Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a +casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as +unemotionally as a weather bulletin.</p> + +<p>Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert +heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the +Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her +hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where +shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no +answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the +pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: +"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?"</p> + +<p>And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was +kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing +while my iron was on."</p> + +<p>At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink +georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to +texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so +reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very +brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve +the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top; +finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it.</p> + +<p>As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would +appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young +thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping +criticism.</p> + +<p>"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt +hem.</p> + +<p>Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that +lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I +just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto +and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River +Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at +the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp +and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch +factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing +this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as +unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose +family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy, +summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very +hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town +used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. +Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and +zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin—materials +that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for +party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were +showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that +was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to +Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.</p> + +<p>Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen +door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, +following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, +caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a +water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth +curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement +department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the +corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was +shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the +room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman +thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could +stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not +be runnin' the streets every night."</p> + +<p>"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."</p> + +<p>And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in +families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; +affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the +Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, +loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame +house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and +garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged +between her parents.</p> + +<p>Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's +evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin' +downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to +stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed +your hair."</p> + +<p>Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back +porch—she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at +half-past six to go to work.</p> + +<p>Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the +limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. +She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some +errand or other—to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of +half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a +damp tea towel.</p> + +<p>"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"</p> + +<p>"No."</p> + +<p>"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't +you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, +h'm?"</p> + +<p>"What for?"—listlessly.</p> + +<p>"What for! What does anybody go out for!"</p> + +<p>"I don't know."</p> + +<p>If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might +have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong +upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy: +"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the +last fella left in the world."</p> + +<p>A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He +is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe +Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see +if I can't make a hit with one of them."</p> + +<p>She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie +Golden's world.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the +Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the +pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room +foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was +capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter +from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth +to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with +the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from +Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie +gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand +Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, +though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She +followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie +Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from +the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall +styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of +the last cry in Paris modes—and no model in Mattie's newly selected +stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.</p> + +<p>You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. +Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or +retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not +sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and +arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches +along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls +worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny +parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each +wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch +factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket +had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to +experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, +somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.</p> + +<p>Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation +for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, +the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of +nervous apprehension—a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed +laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie +Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had +directed one of her sure shafts at him.</p> + +<p>Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew +it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence +and audacity saved her.</p> + +<p>"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll +find yourself looking for a job."</p> + +<p>"Go on—fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"—a +form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type +of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, +ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through +the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, +Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, +certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady +worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, +regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side +of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite +drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like +an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate +mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was +said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort +of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, +it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without +retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.</p> + +<p>When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs +something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he +ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs +is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' +as a relish."</p> + +<p>And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American +Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his +horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the +depot and the 7:50 train.</p> + +<p>I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness +of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard +her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow +uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there +was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was +anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous +foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was +light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the +asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir +caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid +necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay +colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for +me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the +tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!"</p> + +<p>That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins +of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and +Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it +was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's +drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went +through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from +Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length +of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached +it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick +looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An +air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner. +Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys.</p> + +<p>"Oh, how do!"</p> + +<p>"Good evening!"</p> + +<p>Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On +the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now +stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist. +On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly +lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a +neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You +took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now, +homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick +footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where +the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly +shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little +tingling thrill.</p> + +<p>"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way."</p> + +<p>At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order +to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of +Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they +reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in +retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they +lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss.</p> + +<p>Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at +factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the +Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and +assuming the managership of the office.</p> + +<p>"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old +Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I +step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get +there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will +you be glad, Tess? H'm?"</p> + +<p>Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more +tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job +that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and +all."</p> + +<p>But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp +tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>No more of that now. Chuck—gone. Scotty—gone. All the boys at the +watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood—gone. At first she +hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe +me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose +already."</p> + +<p>"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the +top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' +bullets."</p> + +<p>There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's +big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck +was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid +him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in +their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and +their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In +their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their +young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters—black, yellow, +brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one +head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A +great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:</p> + +<p>"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a +week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo—"</p> + +<p>They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot +platform—high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, +shouting.</p> + +<p>Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received +equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent +boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable +forms of cake.</p> + +<p>Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was +furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in +his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She +tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in +it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of +the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, +inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New +York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it +turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a +cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as +dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and +I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me +swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make +Hatton's place look sick."</p> + +<p>The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among +themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they +could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. +Well, I should say not!</p> + +<p>They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the +type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or +their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as +knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in +men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly +boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish +swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a +little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be +stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."</p> + +<p>Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink +upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the +music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and +chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands +on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they +giggled and shrieked and ran.</p> + +<p>But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch +hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the +stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases +such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little +conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters +on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last +letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in +Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed +looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which +she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were +those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red +triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. +They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere +in the East. These letters were not from him.</p> + +<p>Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop +on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue +shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, +veiled, aproned—and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, +your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that +complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not +belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No +matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and +pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled +and folded them was pure cerulean.</p> + +<p>Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to +their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' +bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of +starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing +it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might +have been invaluable. It never was asked.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he +was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care.</p> + +<p>"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes +lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather +ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to +be home, Chuck? Gee!"</p> + +<p>"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in +his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's +swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and +come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know—kind +of—" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: +"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a +regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in +San Francisco and around there. Why, they was—were—enough to make the +Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and +acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something +to eat or drink. And the folks themselves—why, say! Here we are +scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what +some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and +Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. +Take Megan's store, too"—he was warming to his subject, so that he +failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face—"it's a joke compared +to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint."</p> + +<p>Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her +head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you +had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything. +You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd +probably be tickled to see you."</p> + +<p>He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't +mean—why, say—you don't suppose—why, believe me, I pretty near busted +out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in. +And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day—"</p> + +<p>"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't +a fool." She was perilously near to tears.</p> + +<p>"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew—if you knew—a guy's got +to—he's got no right to—"</p> + +<p>And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled +and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked +differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. +It was something else—an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, +an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the +extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she +had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! +It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the +broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could +not have put it into words.</p> + +<p>They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of +the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with +little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression +indicative of extreme disgust.</p> + +<p>"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. +"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains—sulphur and +iron and so forth."</p> + +<p>"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often +walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had +never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse +and drifted down the lovely Fox River.</p> + +<p>"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."</p> + +<p>"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do +it."</p> + +<p>Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing +looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever +against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as +he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red +skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a +minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the +throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in +strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness +surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have +fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! +Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." +She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. +I never did before."</p> + +<p>Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each +brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then +at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I +must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."</p> + +<p>"Have you, Chuck?"</p> + +<p>They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's +good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play +baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are +wonders!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about +something else?"</p> + +<p>He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or +why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.</p> + +<p>"About—you." Tessie made it a caress.</p> + +<p>"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and +marchin' and readin' some—Oh, say, what d'you think?"</p> + +<p>"What?"</p> + +<p>"They been learnin' us—teachin' us, I mean—French. It's the darnedest +language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a +piece of bread, you say like this: <i>Donnay ma un morso doo pang</i>. See?"</p> + +<p>"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration.</p> + +<p>And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He +knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I +don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?"</p> + +<p>It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her +grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in +France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just +as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it +sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he—he'd be a +different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, +French, girls, swell folks—</p> + +<p>And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in +the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box."</p> + +<p>"Chocolate cake."</p> + +<p>"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this +morning."</p> + +<p>"Yes, you did!"</p> + +<p>"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the +way you talk."</p> + +<p>"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think."</p> + +<p>"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else."</p> + +<p>"Fried chicken!"</p> + +<p>"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily.</p> + +<p>"You asked me to, didn't you?"</p> + +<p>Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty.</p> + +<p>Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden +among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say +they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and +Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not +just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I +suppose it looks like a shanty to you now."</p> + +<p>Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place."</p> + +<p>They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the +river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him—the breast of +the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, +juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a +double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, +but she was wise in feminine wiles.</p> + +<p>From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this +tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it +you get so you don't believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and +chocolate cake."</p> + +<p>"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't +eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken.</p> + +<p>Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie +pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back +again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. +And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand +on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their +kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, +they would have been something like this:</p> + +<p>"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had +you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our house, +with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the +parlour, and all the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get +it. What'll I do if I don't?"</p> + +<p>And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me +and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so +that if I come back—"</p> + +<p>Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French girls. +I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be +raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton +time you get back."</p> + +<p>And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. +I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their +jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a +fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and +fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. +Nix!"</p> + +<p>It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. +Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, +surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little +point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, +beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, +homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those +Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The +husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart +outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at +Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts +outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, +fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. +"Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess."</p> + +<p>"Tha' so? Mine, too. Well, how's everything?"</p> + +<p>Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and +that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available +by the more important sleeping bundle—two yards of goods; a spool of +100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten.</p> + +<p>There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, +felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she +envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last +letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's +eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. +Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and châteaux. He and a +bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or +something—it was all one to Tessie—and what do you think? She had +kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France.</p> + +<p>The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch +factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied +with a new and more absorbing topic.</p> + +<p>"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?"</p> + +<p>"What about her?"</p> + +<p>"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being +Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being +the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home +and all to go to work in a Y.M.C.A. canteen for her country and bleeding +France."</p> + +<p>"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be +painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the +doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or +baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf +of bread decent. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust +her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over +there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, +and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to +set home and make the best of it. Or take what's left." She turned her +head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the +room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. "I guess when you can't +go after what you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice."</p> + +<p>All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious +Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, +pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing +hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two +inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless +little laugh.</p> + +<p>"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been +at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet."</p> + +<p>He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her +shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to +Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to +exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in +a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. +Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home +and—and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for +Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless +it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. +But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge +the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' +France. Yeh! Joke!</p> + +<p>The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a +square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In +architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French +château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its +façade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed +magnificence.</p> + +<p>Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, +could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, +usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. +People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it +mattered whether anything happened to her or not!</p> + +<p>Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she +struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little +group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as +she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou +among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she looked straight +ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to +her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. +Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!"</p> + +<p>"Hello, yourself."</p> + +<p>"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink."</p> + +<p>"Think so?"</p> + +<p>She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have someone +following, someone walking home with you. What if he was old enough to +be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying +hair at the sides. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is. +And Nap Ballou told her.</p> + +<p>They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once +heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she +entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were +brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, +peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very much askew.</p> + +<p>"Where you been, Tessie?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, walkin'."</p> + +<p>"Who with?"</p> + +<p>"Cora."</p> + +<p>"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago."</p> + +<p>Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this +coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back."</p> + +<p>Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into +the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's +the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about +the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' +'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't +be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the +same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind +groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She +didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to +think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass +buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain +of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, +smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the +words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. +"What're you going to do—" She rolled over on one side and buried her +head in her arms.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the +old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest +bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. +But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world +about her. The Chippewa <i>Courier</i> went into the newspaper pile behind +the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye.</p> + +<p>She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her +glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of +unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.</p> + +<p>"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood +there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden +she ran to her pa—"</p> + +<p>"Both comin' at once, like that—"</p> + +<p>"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She—"</p> + +<p>Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her +and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this +picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I +come in in the middle of the reel, I guess."</p> + +<p>They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly +news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices +high with the note of hysteria.</p> + +<p>"Angie Hatton's beau was killed—"</p> + +<p>"They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet—"</p> + +<p>"The news come only last evenin' about eight—"</p> + +<p>"She won't see nobody but her pa—"</p> + +<p>Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house envying +Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, +and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic +reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one +to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the +luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted +commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in +that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, +bending over her on some pretence that deceived no one, spoke low-voiced +in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. +She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work.</p> + +<p>She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the +river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her +had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless +overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get."</p> + +<p>She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about the +girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. +She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid shoes, flimsy +blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the city +park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a tree +idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lack-lustre eyes. Silhouetted +there against the tender green of the pretty square he looked very old, +somehow, and different—much older than he looked in his shop clothes, +issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where he should have stuck +out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across +her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she had last seen him: +brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of flank.</p> + +<p>Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly: "Somebody +looks mighty sweet this afternoon."</p> + +<p>Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line +you like you stick to it, don't you?"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats +and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust +the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray in +the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her.</p> + +<p>"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and +turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie +felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a +little as she stepped into the boat.</p> + +<p>The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and +told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same +when he asked her.</p> + +<p>"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little +with the unwonted exercise. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly +to rowing.</p> + +<p>Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough, +considerin' the company."</p> + +<p>He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card.</p> + +<p>When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had +supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White +meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk."</p> + +<p>"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around +her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark so +early."</p> + +<p>"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking +sort of way, though he consumed very little food actually.</p> + +<p>"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, half-heartedly. She decided +that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she +hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white double +row ...</p> + +<p>"Well," she said, "let's be going."</p> + +<p>"No hurry," again.</p> + +<p>Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What +d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at her +own joke.</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, I don't."</p> + +<p>He rose, too. "Why not?"</p> + +<p>"Because I don't, that's why." She stooped and began picking up the +remnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly and +thriftily in the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her.</p> + +<p>"Let me help," he said. And then his arm was about her and his face was +close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after a little +wordless struggle. And then she knew. Tessie's lips were not virgin. She +had been kissed before. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at +him furiously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had +worked in the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped +her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her.</p> + +<p>At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you—you +drunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll ..."</p> + +<p>The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. +With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand and +clawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His +hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed to her that +her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing +against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but the +broken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ran +on, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might have +happened ... to her, Tessie Golden ... that nobody could even talk fresh +to. She gave a little sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It +was growing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. +It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, +climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly for +support, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summer +cottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. A warm, +flickering light danced in the window.</p> + +<p>Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with a +little instinctive gesture, she patted her hair, tidied her blouse, and +walked uncertainly toward the house, up the steps to the door. She stood +there a moment, swaying slightly. Somebody'd be there. The light. The +woman who cooked for them or the man who took care of the place. +Somebody'd—</p> + +<p>She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her way and +got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, louder now. +Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The +door opened wide. Old Man Hatton!</p> + +<p>She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his +glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, that his +face was so kindly.</p> + +<p>Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!" +she whimpered. "It's me!"</p> + +<p>He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside.</p> + +<p>"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid...."</p> + +<p>Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried +to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she +had planned to tell?</p> + +<p>"Who is it, dad? Who...?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared +at Angie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come in here."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie +Hatton's expensive blouse. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no +surprise at the act.</p> + +<p>"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, dad. +And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you +know. Something...."</p> + +<p>Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. +Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her +eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped +little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head.</p> + +<p>"That's all right," Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after a +while."</p> + +<p>There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the +fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting +in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tearstained young ladies at +dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a +torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They +evinced no curiosity about this dishevelled creature who had flung +herself in upon their decent solitude.</p> + +<p>Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face and +opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a +quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, +some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked—well, Tessie put it to herself, +thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry no more—only +inside."</p> + +<p>And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never have +gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. +It's fierce. You get scared, sittin' home, waitin', and they're in +France and everywheres, learnin' French and everything, and meetin' +grand people and havin' a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said I +didn't care, I wasn't goin' to squat home all my life, waitin'...."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down +at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and +thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These +things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now +was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no +questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted +with: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-room +foreman, eh?"</p> + +<p>Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. +"Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't +I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make no difference +who I went with, but it does." She looked down at her hands clasped so +tightly in her lap.</p> + +<p>"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference," Angie agreed, and looked up +at her father.</p> + +<p>At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all +kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home +he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He...."</p> + +<p>"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck +comes home...."</p> + +<p>Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'd +like to learn to swim—and row a boat—and play ball—like the rich +girls—like the girls that's makin' such a fuss over the soldiers."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessie +brought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talk +French."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked +at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd +found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just +one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for +them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you +need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you +say?"</p> + +<p>But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white +with earnestness.</p> + +<p>"C'n you speak French?"</p> + +<p>"Yes," Angie answered.</p> + +<p>"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French: +'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first."</p> + +<p>Angie Hatton said it correctly.</p> + +<p>"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?"</p> + +<p>Angie said it again.</p> + +<p>Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her +hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she +articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that +of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT" id="ONE_HUNDRED_PER_CENT" />ONE HUNDRED PER CENT</h2> + + +<p>They had always had two morning papers—he his, she hers. The <i>Times</i>. +Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and +Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm +and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast +and the First Page simultaneously with no—"Just let me see the inside +sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning.</p> + +<p>In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman +for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal +of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished +between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the +depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which +seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of +a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste, +but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight +thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse +behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost +coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news +to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something +of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline +such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and +vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From +Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a +column or a page at a glance.</p> + +<p>Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, +his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the +next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or +coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest +is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page +and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, +Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that +clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew +away from the temple.</p> + +<p>"T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the +Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way +purposely."</p> + +<p>"Francis X—?" He was not a follower of the films.</p> + +<p>Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side +face."</p> + +<p>"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to +me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four.</p> + +<p>Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, +as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. +Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the +clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, +vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" +Emma knew he was pursuing the daily <i>schrecklichkeit</i>.</p> + +<p>Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, +the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, +pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon +it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest:</p> + +<p>"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who +aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the <i>Times</i> +delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies +for it, mornings."</p> + +<p>It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, +its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes.</p> + +<p>"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him.</p> + +<p>"You take it, dear."</p> + +<p>"Oh, no! No."</p> + +<p>She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing +tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess.</p> + +<p>"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m—"</p> + +<p>"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three +years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't +endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I +shall have to consider our marriage a failure."</p> + +<p>"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be—"</p> + +<p>"I am. But there's something about having it read to you—"</p> + +<p>On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her +blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was +shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs +with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the +hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment—just the fraction +of a minute—when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. +Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. +They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper +fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, +apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned.</p> + +<p>Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a +moment—a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover.</p> + +<p>"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and +drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the +price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are +husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two +establishments."</p> + +<p>They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing +an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize +that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning +business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they +most treasured.</p> + +<p>Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the +Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, +and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits +about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of +family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense +that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor +Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory—it +seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, +Emma's interest in the business was unflagging.</p> + +<p>"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this +firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck +& Co."</p> + +<p>"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that +first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don't know +how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into +a Madam Chairman. You'll see."</p> + +<p>She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her.</p> + +<p>By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as +gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and +woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going +abroad.</p> + +<p>Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a +half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft +fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her +eyes.</p> + +<p>"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. +It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's +neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is."</p> + +<p>She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. +The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife +had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and +scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and +pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new +neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the +woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been +obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and +motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many +fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, +and said, "But it looks so—so lumpy around the neck."</p> + +<p>Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie +on—"</p> + +<p>"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar."</p> + +<p>"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but +the high, close-fitting collar."</p> + +<p>The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd +shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, +grumbling.</p> + +<p>Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. +At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had +telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. +People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick +of calling her by any other.</p> + +<p>With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her +attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma +McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those +Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could +cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm +going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished +service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that +hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six +o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for +their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't +blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, +I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...."</p> + +<p>By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts +herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, +initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. +November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them +seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma +now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, +lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she +herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and +bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail.</p> + +<p>She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found +her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week +to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the +autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to +the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, +and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about +this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, +that convinced and impressed you.</p> + +<p>"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma +remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond +pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. +"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method +could sell sandbags in the Sahara."</p> + +<p>Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw +each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, +espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the +street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure +swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him +so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant +attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the +street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert +recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block +ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his +stride, and touched his arm lightly.</p> + +<p>"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck."</p> + +<p>Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand +on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve.</p> + +<p>"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, +young 'ooman."</p> + +<p>"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation +from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green +and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make +a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker."</p> + +<p>There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical +comedy, dear. These men are—Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you. +Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining +room. There are things at the office—"</p> + +<p>"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there +are two vice-commandants ready to snatch my shoulder-straps."</p> + +<p>"Emma! Emma!"</p> + +<p>At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone +wrong?"</p> + +<p>"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at +the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this +Serbian thing end? I'll call for you."</p> + +<p>"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, +dear."</p> + +<p>He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingué in the +blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent cocked hat. +The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely +smart affair of white silk, high-collared, stitched, expensively simple. +And yet he frowned as he looked.</p> + +<p>"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance.</p> + +<p>"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better +call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife +practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and +the funeral—The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into +the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes.</p> + +<p>But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told +me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, +where she can be bathed and massaged and fed with milk. And if Fisk +could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had +training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg."</p> + +<p>"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't +he?... I really must hurry, T.A."</p> + +<p>"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned +away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her +shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. +Emma's taxi crept into the stream. But uppermost in her mind was not the +thought of Serbians, uniforms, Fisk, or Ritz, but of her husband's right +hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into +a fist.</p> + +<p>She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers; but the +Serbians, despite their four tragic years, turned out to be as sprightly +as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the Fannings dropped +her at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she +doffed her warlike garments, her feminine canniness warned her that this +was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better.</p> + +<p>But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all Jock.</p> + +<p>A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been Grace Gait, one +of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the +profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office she had been +turning out compelling copy. They had been married four years. Now Jock +ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Raynor suite overlooking the +lake in the great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, "Eat +the crust, girlie. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly."</p> + +<p>Emma, uniformed for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter. Buck +listened in silence.</p> + +<p>"You wouldn't know Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody. And the queer +part of it is he doesn't know it. He tries to be cheerful, and I could +weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work +from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning, and from writing free full-page +national advertising copy to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke +fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought. But you +know I haven't been really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the +doctor says it will be another six months before I'm myself, really. If +I had only myself to think of—how simple! But two kiddies need such a +lot of things. I could get a job at Raynor's. They need writers. Jock +says, bitterly, that all the worth-while men have left. Don't think I'm +complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone +who understands often clears the way."</p> + +<p>"Well!" said Emma.</p> + +<p>And, "Well?" said T.A.</p> + +<p>She sat fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her. "Of +course, Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of +him. He'd be beautiful in khaki. But there's work to do right here. And +he ought to be willing to wait six months."</p> + +<p>"They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now."</p> + +<p>"Oh, come, T.A.! One man—"</p> + +<p>"Multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk. Just such another case. Look +at—"</p> + +<p>The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up +alertly. She glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little exclamation of +horror.</p> + +<p>"That's for me! I'm half an hour late! The first time, too." She was at +the telephone a second later, explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the +dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised +for flight. "Sorry, dear. But this morning was so important, and that +letter about Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier."</p> + +<p>"I'm afraid you are, Emma."</p> + +<p>She stared at that. "Why—! Oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, +dear—I'll call for you at the office to-night at five, and we'll walk +home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late—"</p> + +<p>She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a +long minute, staring down at the coffee cup whose contents he did not +mean to drink. The light from the window cameoed his fine profile. And +you saw that his jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away, in +Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't.</p> + +<p>Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules +would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a +thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois.</p> + +<p>And a thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three +hours later, was slamming down the two big windows of his office. From +up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk +march. And his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you +know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices—a +great gray shaft, towering even above its giant neighbours, its head in +the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until +very recently those windows of his office had been a source of joy and +inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below. The +tangle of I.C. tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond +that, as far as the eye could see. He had seen the changes the year had +brought. The lake dotted with sinister gray craft. Dog tents in Grant +Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms. Men—mere boys, most of +them—awkward in their workaday clothes of office and shop, drilling, +wheeling, marching at the noon hour. And parades, and parades, and +parades. At first Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff—heads of +departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys—would +suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the +street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, +bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its +white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six +contortionistic drum-major.</p> + +<p>By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor +windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from +the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh +parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"> +"Where are <i>you</i>! (sounded the bugle)<br /> +Where are <i>you</i>?<br /> +Where are YOU?!!!<br /> +<span class="i5">Where<br /></span> +<span class="i7">are<br /></span> +<span class="i10">you?<br /></span> +Where—are—you-u-u-u—"<br /> +</div> + +<p>He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out +dictation in a loud, rasping voice.</p> + +<p>"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to +say—"</p> + +<p><i>(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)</i></p> + +<p>"—all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and +will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office +think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising—"</p> + +<p><i>(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)</i></p> + +<p>"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?"</p> + +<p>"Over th—I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new +record in soap advertising—'"</p> + +<p>"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl +stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in +the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and +swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp +Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab +world.</p> + +<p>"—and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been +sent out from the Raynor offices."</p> + +<p>The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or +breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her +foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left! +Left-right-left!</p> + +<p>Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much +of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by +heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, +thinking, planning; feeling his agony, and trying not to admit the +transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for +Chicago.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>At five o'clock Emma left the war to its own devices and dropped in at +the loft building in which Featherlooms were born and grew up. Mike, the +elevator man, twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to +gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure.</p> + +<p>"Haven't seen you around fur many the day, Mis' Buck."</p> + +<p>"Been too busy, Mike."</p> + +<p>Mike turned back to face the door. "Well, 'tis a great responsibility, +runnin' this war, an' all." He stopped at the Featherloom floor and +opened the door with his grandest flourish. Emma glanced at him quickly. +His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little +jingling of buckles and strap hooks.</p> + +<p>The work day was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She +could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at +his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that +littered tables and chairs. At the window near the door Fisk, the +Western territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The +two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with +admiration. Into Fisk's face there flashed a look so nearly resembling +resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a +moment with the two.</p> + +<p>Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, "I'm more resigned to war this +minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began."</p> + +<p>Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His +face was unsmiling. "Like my uniform?" Emma asked; and wished, somehow, +that she hadn't.</p> + +<p>Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were +hard, resentful. Suddenly, "Like it! God! I wish I could wear one!" He +turned away, abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared +his throat, apologetically.</p> + +<p>Emma glanced down at her own trim self—at her stitched seams, her +tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands—and +suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. +Something—something—</p> + +<p>She wheeled and made for Buck's office, her colour high. He looked up, +rose, offered her a chair. She felt strangely ill at ease there in the +office to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the +glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall smiled and nodded and +called through the open door: "My, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck."</p> + +<p>"Be with you in a minute, Emma," said T.A. And turned to his desk again. +She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. "Don't hurry." Out in +the showroom again she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was +ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and +night-gowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth and his +eyes squinted, half closed through the smoke.</p> + +<p>She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment +that lay under her hand. "Spring samples?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money, war or +no war."</p> + +<p>"'S right."</p> + +<p>"How's Gertie?"</p> + +<p>"Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl!—say, I knew what she was +when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long +enough. But I never really knew that kid until now, and we've been +married two years. You know what the last year has been for her; the +baby and all. And then losing him. And do you know what she says! That +if there was somebody who knew the Western territory and could cover it, +she'd get a job and send me to war. Yessir! That's Gert. We've been +married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time +she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was +away on my long spring trip she used to say it wasn't so bad being +alone, because there was always my home-coming to count on. How's that +for a wife!"</p> + +<p>"Gertie's splendid," agreed Emma. And wondered why it sounded so lame.</p> + +<p>"You don't know her. Why, when it comes to patriotism, she makes T.R. +look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, +she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war. Gert +says a travelling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife, +anyway; and that if I went it would only be like my long Western trip, +multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie."</p> + +<p>Emma was fingering the cotton-flannel garment on the table.</p> + +<p>Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. "Sorry I kept you waiting. +Three of the boys were called to-day. It crippled us pretty badly in the +shipping room. Ready?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. Good-night, Charley. Give my love to Gertie."</p> + +<p>"Thanks, Mrs. Buck." He picked up his cigar, took an apprehensive puff +and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar +now.</p> + +<p>Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth +Avenue. Flags of every nation, save one. Uniforms of every blue from +French to navy; of almost any shade save field green. Pongee-coloured +Englishmen, seeming seven feet high, to a man; aviators slim and +elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered +planes, with a notch for every Hun plane bagged. Slim girls, exotic as +the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior <i>élégants</i>. +Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war +accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. Buck +eyed them gravely, hat and arm describing parabolas with increasing +frequency as they approached Fiftieth Street, slackening as the +colourful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park +mists.</p> + +<p>Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose-pink. Head high, shoulders back, she +matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were +bright and very blue.</p> + +<p>"There's a beautiful one, T.A.! The Canadian officer with the limp. +They've all been gassed, and shot five times in the thigh and seven in +the shoulder, and yet look at 'em! What do you suppose they were when +they were new if they can look like that, damaged!"</p> + +<p>Buck cut a vicious little semi-circle in the air with his walking stick.</p> + +<p>"I know now how the father of the Gracchi felt, and why you never hear +him mentioned."</p> + +<p>"Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot." She did not intend her tone to be +smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have +seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense +his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay +between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New +York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, +Sr.</p> + +<p>"Tell me, Emma. Does this satisfy you—the work you're doing, I mean? Do +you think you're giving the best you've got?"</p> + +<p>"Well, of course I'd like to go to France—"</p> + +<p>"I didn't ask you what you'd like."</p> + +<p>"Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I don't know what you call giving the best +one has got. But you know I work from eight in the morning until +midnight, often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do +my work just as well. And I don't say, either, that it doesn't include a +lot of dashing up and down Fifth Avenue, and teaing at the Ritz, and +meeting magnificent Missions, and being cooed over by Lady Millionaires. +But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of +thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to +oblige." She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart +leather-bound notebook.</p> + +<p>"Spare me! I've had all the statistics I can stand for one day at the +office. I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't +realize—"</p> + +<p>They turned into their own street. "Realize what?"</p> + +<p>"Nothing. Nothing."</p> + +<p>Emma sighed a mock sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. +"Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. +That second window shade is crooked. Isn't it queer how maids never +do.... I'll tell you what I can realize, though. I realize that we're +going to have dinner at home, reg'lar old-fashioned befo'-de-war. And I +can bathe before dinner. There's richness."</p> + +<p>But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly +re-coifed, she again wore the blue uniform, with the service cap atop +her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with +a little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on +a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a +little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of +masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the +table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he +gripped it.</p> + +<p>"It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little +less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see +why you should make me feel like your orderly. It's like being married +to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of +time it takes to dine with your husband."</p> + +<p>It was the bitterest speech he had made to her in the years of their +married life. She flushed a little. "I thought you knew that I was going +out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the +understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30."</p> + +<p>He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the +chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored +self with a placidity that had in it, perhaps, a dash of malice. His +last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an +olive, and nibbled it, head on one side.</p> + +<p>"D'you know, T.A., what I think? H'm? I think you're jealous of your +wife's uniform."</p> + +<p>She had touched the match to the dynamite.</p> + +<p>He looked up. At the blaze in his eyes she shrank back a little. His +face was white. He was breathing quickly.</p> + +<p>"You're right! I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in +the army! I'm jealous of the mule drivers! Of the veterinarians. Of the +stokers in the transports. Men!" He doubled his hand into a fist. His +fine eyes glowed. "Men!"</p> + +<p>And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his hands.</p> + +<p>Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked +down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him. She got up +and came over to him.</p> + +<p>"Why, dear—dearest—I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I +thought you were happy. You—"</p> + +<p>"Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are +gritting our teeth and pretending."</p> + +<p>She put a hand on his shoulder. "But what do you want—what can you do +that—"</p> + +<p>He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. +His head came up. "They've offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a +fancy job. It has to do with merchandising. But I think you know they're +having a devil of a time with all the millions of bales of goods. They +need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes +enough. I know values. It would mean hard work—manual work lots of +times. No pay. And happiness. For me." There was a silence. It seemed to +fill the room, that silence. It filled the house. It roared and +thundered about Emma's ears, that silence. When finally she broke it:</p> + +<p>"Blind!" she said. "Blind! Deaf! Dumb! <i>And</i> crazy." She laughed, and +two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge +uniform. "Oh, T.A.! Where have I been? How you must have despised me. +Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the Government three +strapping men. My uniform, that was keeping three man-size soldiers out +of khaki. You, Jock, and Fisk. Why didn't you tell me, dear! Why didn't +you tell me!"</p> + +<p>"I've tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask +you to go back to the factory."</p> + +<p>"Factory! Factory nothing! I'm going back on the road. I'm taking Fisk's +Western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I +ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisk's salary +until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one +so good. Grace can give the office a few hours a week. And we can +promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road."</p> + +<p>Buck was staring at her, dully. "Grace? Now wait a minute. You're +travelling too fast for a mere man." His hand was gripping hers, tight, +tight.</p> + +<p>Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a +chair around to his. They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth.</p> + +<p>"It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for +lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this: Jock gets a +commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York, and live +right here, with me, in this house. Fisk goes to war. Gertie gets well +and comes back to work for Featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. +Old Emmer takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country—on the +road."</p> + +<p>At that he got up and began pacing the room. "I can't have you do that, +dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me."</p> + +<p>"Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee."</p> + +<p>"Gad, Emma, you're glorious!"</p> + +<p>"Glorious nothing! I'm going to earn the living for three families for a +few months, until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about +that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the +road means these days. It isn't travelling. It's exploring. You never +know where you're going to land, or when, unless you're travelling in a +freight train. They're cock o' the walk now. I think I'll check myself +through as first-class freight. Or send my pack ahead, with natives on +foot, like an African explorer. But it'll be awfully good for me +character. And when I'm eating that criminal corn bread they serve on +dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth I'll remember +when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my +hand on the steering wheel along o' the nobility and gentry."</p> + +<p>"Listen, dear, I can't have you—"</p> + +<p>"Too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. +They'll wire back 'No!' but another fifty'll fetch 'em. After all, it +takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to +change eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but +filling."</p> + +<p>Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, +less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have +faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was +alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the +swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought +within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this +time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every +town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the +readjustment of this little family and business group was so +unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, +seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the +Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be +won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled.</p> + +<p>It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma's awakening +that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed +plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows +suitcase ("Can't count on trunks these days," she had said. "I'm not +taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist"). Buck, standing in the +doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his +khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: +"Can't I help, dear?" Or, "Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the +Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I'd like to know what +they had on you, Emma."</p> + +<p>And from Emma: "Yeh, ain't I noble!" Then, after a little pause: "This +house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it'll look like a Home for +Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be +the only male protector around the place. We'll make him captain of the +home guard."</p> + +<p>"Gertie was in to-day. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to +Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we +ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any +woman in the shop except you. She's down to ninety-eight pounds, poor +little girl, but every ounce of it's pure pluck, and she says she'll be +as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will."</p> + +<p>Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. +"Seventeen—eighteen—When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice +the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand +boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands +money that an operator used to brag about—nineteen—"</p> + +<p>Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was +rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes +closets.</p> + +<p>"All except you, Emma. You'll be working without a salary—working like +a man—like three men—"</p> + +<p>"Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I've got two service +buttons already," she glanced down at her blouse, "and Charley Fisk said +I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm +going to put 'em all on."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The day before Emma's departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, +bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the +spirit of the times in her eyes.</p> + +<p>"Jock!" she repeated, in answer to their questions. "My dears, he +doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He +thinks he'll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn't that be +glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss +with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even +listening. He couldn't wait until I had finished a sentence so that he +could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the +moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he +answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And +when I said, 'Dearest, isn't this hotel a <i>little</i> like the place we +spent our honeymoon in—that porch, and all?' he said, 'See this feller +coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. +He's my Captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college +when I was a fresh.'"</p> + +<p>But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words.</p> + +<p>Emma's trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's +date for sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. "When I +went to school," she said, "I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian +War worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I +want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it'll be +over sooner; and because we've won."</p> + +<p>They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear +platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried frantically to +get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully. "Don't look so tragic about it," +she laughed. "It's like old times. These last three years have been a +dream—a delusion."</p> + +<p>He looked up at her, as she stood there in her blue suit, and white +blouse, and trim blue hat and crisp veil. "Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I +believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you, +when you came in off the road after father died and I had just taken +hold of the business."</p> + +<p>For answer she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized +"Silver Threads Among the Gold." The train moved away, gathered speed. +He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the +railing, as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would +allow. He was walking swiftly along with the train, as though +hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train +platform. The brave figure in khaki outside. The blue suddenly swam in a +haze before his eyes; the khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little +veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for Upper +Eleven.</p> + +<p>The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed +and unnoticing as she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her +newspaper suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained +self-control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white +coat that she desired Upper Eleven made up early.</p> + +<p>The White Coat had said, "Yas'm," and glanced up at her. Whereupon she +had said:</p> + +<p>"Why, William!"</p> + +<p>And he, "Well, fo' de lan'! 'F 'tain't Mis' McChesney! Well, mah sakes +alive, Mis' McChesney! Ah ain't seen yo' since yo' married. Ah done heah +yo' married yo' boss an' got a swell brownstone house, an' ev'thing +gran'—"</p> + +<p>"I've got everything, William, but a lower berth to Chicago. They swore +they couldn't give me anything but an upper."</p> + +<p>A speculative look crept into William's rolling eye. Emma recognized it. +Her hand reached toward her bag. Then it stopped. She smiled. "No. No, +William. Time was. But not these days. Four years ago I'd have slipped +you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower berth from +somewhere. But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, +and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift +stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, aged three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney, +aged six months. And I'll dispose my old bones in Upper Eleven."</p> + +<p>She went in to dinner.</p> + +<p>At eight-thirty a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear.</p> + +<p>"Ah got yo' made up, Mis' McChesney."</p> + +<p>"But this is my—"</p> + +<p>He beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar +result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He +stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower +which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman +agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The +key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it +with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain +with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used before +a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one +gray-black hand. Then he bowed like any courtier.</p> + +<p>Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. +Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him—at the wrinkled, +kindly, ape-like face, and he looked down at her.</p> + +<p>"William," she said, "war is a filthy, evil, vile thing, but it bears +wonderful white flowers."</p> + +<p>"Yas'm!" agreed William, genially, and smiled all over his rubbery, +gray-black countenance. "<i>Yas'm!</i>"</p> + +<p>And who shall say he did not understand?</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="FARMER_IN_THE_DELL" id="FARMER_IN_THE_DELL" />FARMER IN THE DELL</h2> + + +<p>Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve +tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the +stuffy room—there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was +hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that +the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were +curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath +came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld +didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of +fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and +is taking it easy?</p> + +<p>If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell +whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To +do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light +meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his +wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.</p> + +<p>When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty +daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully you must +be a natural-born loller to begin with, and revert. Bella Westerveld was +and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there +he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast +when he was lying so still. If It had been light, you could have seen +the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient +face.</p> + +<p>They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every +morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching +for the limp, drab, work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by +his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of +depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the +chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.</p> + +<p>Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the +instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the +bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the +feeling—an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very +quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the +cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the +old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the +ghostly light—these things he had never needed. He had known. But here, +in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of +Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar +noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, +there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the +city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had +gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his +wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his +case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the +flat next door must have heard her.</p> + +<p>"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around +like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there +if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."</p> + +<p>Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be +appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech—she who had seemed so +mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to +bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat +just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, +grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the +power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily +shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been +a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood +floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal +confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and +distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and +had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the +steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the +Mississippi rolling grandly by.</p> + +<p>Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he +really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's +matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who +released Ben Westerveld from durance vile—or had been until the winter +months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than +useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The +milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he +had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of +his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in +motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. +He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if +they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, +with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they +used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of +his hands and around the thumbs.</p> + +<p>"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She +gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring +tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."</p> + +<p>He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted +Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated +and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The +reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly—while it +lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped +back into his old apathy.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his +incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty +streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply +from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely +unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning +great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body +suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than +tragedy—waste.</p> + +<p>For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, +eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and +drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before +sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the +rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he +toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might +fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the +high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with +the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as +were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the +city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though +form and substance are the same.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to +introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a +comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, +have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know +him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of +the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots.</p> + +<p>At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, +slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those +rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals +canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A +serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew +older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated +the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost +of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds +of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had +married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost +entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of +those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, +then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, +majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical +Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their +relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his +face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for +clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring +flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the +drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men +are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He +seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed +that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a +saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."</p> + +<p>At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run +faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the +rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at +arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. +The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength +which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to +their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick +of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about +to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing +had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. +There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he +had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going +down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He +had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very +different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He +had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a +tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and +the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never +so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.</p> + +<p>An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.</p> + +<p>"Hello, Emma."</p> + +<p>"How do, Ben."</p> + +<p>"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf +at Aug Tietjens with five legs."</p> + +<p>"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, +though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking +up."</p> + +<p>Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two +would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of +embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was +no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the +minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty +on easy payments if—when—"</p> + +<p>Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a +fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."</p> + +<p>Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine +and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes +would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for +her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her +butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, +twelve miles away, than did any in the district. She was not a pretty +girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at +twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well +for Ben Westerveld's future happiness.</p> + +<p>But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers's capable +hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was +the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that +cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from +any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being +a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that +day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the +present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty +miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a +step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded +her apprenticeship.</p> + +<p>"I'll get a beau," she said, "that'll take me driving and around. And +Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town."</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road +toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was +behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could +have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that +later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and +dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought +or speech.</p> + +<p>He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher. He had heard of +her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not +at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history +of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. +That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact +that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip +in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben +Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column.</p> + +<p>He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his +embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his +dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded +forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with +natural canine curiosity.</p> + +<p>Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping +her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand +and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life +that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that +time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he would never have +forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, +quivering body.</p> + +<p>Bella screamed again. Still clinging to him, Ben was saying: "He won't +hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder +reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so +childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. +From—well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter +femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella the +experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a +queer, electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it +something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. +If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have +realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she +could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was +scared!" She stepped away from him a little—very little.</p> + +<p>"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."</p> + +<p>But Bella looked over her shoulders fearfully to where Dunder stood by +the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought +that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but +still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up +a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. "Go on +home!" he commanded, sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with +a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail +between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog.</p> + +<p>Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her.</p> + +<p>"You're the new teacher, ain't you?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that +dog."</p> + +<p>"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt +nobody. He's pretty big." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben +Westerveld."</p> + +<p>"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed +shyness.</p> + +<p>"Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens that's enough +to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big."</p> + +<p>"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over +to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get +there. You were going the other way, weren't you?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you +company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden +masterfulness.</p> + +<p>They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one +another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. +The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if +they had been whisked away on a magic rug.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. She was +contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The +Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was +always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding +cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch +counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should +be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could +find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and +talk and colour. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she +always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or +with an armful of clean towels.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself: "I want to marry Bella." +He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma +Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed +at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she +selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes +and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella +was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his +finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring +woman. But in the end they married. The neighbourhood was rocked with +surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the +dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and +women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends.</p> + +<p>Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of +pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too +honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally +truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this +slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He +had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing +was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. +He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of +fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of +skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line +from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary +of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitués of Old +Red Front Huckins's bar.</p> + +<p>They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered +in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, +eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the +Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was +too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward +to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, +his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the +county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her +plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm +all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather +have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."</p> + +<p>Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as +slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin +coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears +she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get +away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube +like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by +her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an +over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty +she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They +moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older +boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. +Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father. +He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill +and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling +his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of +the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm +life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they +found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had +trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road +behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was +asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off +to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not +have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before +his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood +and the reins.</p> + +<p>That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife +together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her +hatred of the locality and the life.</p> + +<p>"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless +reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a +farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your +hand at Dike now for a change."</p> + +<p>Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at +him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come +honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was +a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, +stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had +come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by +thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until +help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the +reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained.</p> + +<p>Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The +boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you +might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs—great +black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; +speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich +patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious +pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a +fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's +opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, +was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter +disappointment of his married life.</p> + +<p>That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben +Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step—for his years. The +stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat +and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five—a habit that +requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with +difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of +standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered +the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and +his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk +to say: "Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"</p> + +<p>When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no +unpaid notes to his discredit.</p> + +<p>All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of +his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were +dependent on him for their future well-being—on him and on Dike after +him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; +most of it was back-breaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was +his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he +never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that +he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning +ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said:</p> + +<p>"Well, I got my work cut out for me, an' I do it an' do it right."</p> + +<p>There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, +so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, +middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and +beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday +afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street +in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces.</p> + +<p>As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her +benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on +twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He +had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a +commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella +remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, +surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell +on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the +coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.</p> + +<p>Minnie was living in Chicago now—a good-natured creature, but slack, +like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and +crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, +and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street +just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you +downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, +after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a +terrible termagant.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't +dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long +years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But +wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike +with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest +training camp that was to fit them for France and war.</p> + +<p>Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. +Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When +the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how +the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue +shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step +began to lag a little.</p> + +<p>He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were +no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of +rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice +seemed never to stop its plaint.</p> + +<p>"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll +die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he +eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing +down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in +him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that +had made him master and superior in spite of everything.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma +Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years +ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and +was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, +and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, +never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person—a +sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with +honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.</p> + +<p>"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. +"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't +make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out +the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it and glad. They +got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or +cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on +shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never +come b—"</p> + +<p>But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed +rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben +Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to +camp was stamped there again—indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun +County, in the spring, has much the beauty of California. There is a +peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben +Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly +dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, +though, as they do in a play. He dared not.</p> + +<p>They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella +was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past +thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the +movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the +cramped, unnatural mode of living necessitated by a four-room flat—all +these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been +bred in the midst of them.</p> + +<p>She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was +a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and +small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments +and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They +seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from +seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite +bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of +sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery +bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's +for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a +nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some +strange chemical process, to bring them together as well.</p> + +<p>"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. +"Do you want to come along, ma?"</p> + +<p>"What you got to get?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie."</p> + +<p>"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore."</p> + +<p>"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I +can do to tend to the house, without sewing."</p> + +<p>"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' +besides—"</p> + +<p>"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me."</p> + +<p>The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L +together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, +indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent +store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap +lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would +buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or +a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, +and this they would munch as they went.</p> + +<p>They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their +hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by +delicatessen.</p> + +<p>Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we +find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the +edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another +day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was—yesterday—a little +feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had +been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be +Thursday. Not that it made any difference.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not +digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. +There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. +A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or +State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and +taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben +used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the +day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the +firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, +sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he +clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.—if he thought of how +the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and +opinion—he said nothing.</p> + +<p>Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of +the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He +tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and +scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave +him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.</p> + +<p>"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you +want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and +grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm."</p> + +<p>His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her +that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate +little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to +gardening—he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.</p> + +<p>On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away +one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the +place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful +tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding +forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He +talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy +man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the +street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat +did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of +wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.</p> + +<p>"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about +917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win +the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say."</p> + +<p>"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is +that Farmer Ben was right.</p> + +<p>Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave +her many hours of unearned freedom for gadding and gossiping.</p> + +<p>"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got +to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting +if I take her along. Ma's goin' with me."</p> + +<p>He loved the feel of Pearlie's, small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. +He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big +brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her +tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender +offices. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and +that he pretended this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair +managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day +looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature +railway.</p> + +<p>They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. +Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. +They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the +impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they +were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters +were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the +armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben +tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole +being revolted at the thought.</p> + +<p>He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths in their one-button suits and +striped shirts standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third, +spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing +labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and +terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the over-dressed, +scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's +heart.</p> + +<p>The lack of exercise and manual labour began to tell on Ben. He did not +grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his +frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. +Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city +pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by +accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as +a water-crazed traveller in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, +and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.</p> + +<p>South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare +come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. +Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he +stumbled upon it and standing there felt at home in Chicago for the +first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in +overalls and carrying whips in their hands—wagon whips, actually. He +hadn't seen men like that since he left the farm. The sight of them sent +a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he +ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His +fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly.</p> + +<p>At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry +seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar +things for which they had been starving.</p> + +<p>He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of +onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables!</p> + +<p>The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure +orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The +cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages +glowed like jade.</p> + +<p>And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, +shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men +in overalls—worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, +and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men jovial, good-natured, with +clear blue eyes and having about them some of the revivifying freshness +and wholesomeness of the products they handled.</p> + +<p>Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and +garlic and of the good earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, +washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt +strangely at peace.</p> + +<p>It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid +hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to +greet him friendlily: "H'are you!" they said, genially. "H'are you this +morning!"</p> + +<p>He was market-wise enough to know that some of these busy people were +commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It +was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in +front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. +Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing +boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain +blue skirt and a small black hat.</p> + +<p>He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the hat. A funny job +for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays! He turned sidewise +in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one +of the men—a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in white +apron—laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving +a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!"</p> + +<p>Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, +tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was +the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank +curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those +intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of +them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so +surprising. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes +and serene brows.</p> + +<p>He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he +acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't +you?"</p> + +<p>She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the +roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: +"Why, Ben!" she said, quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though +she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand—that capable, +reassuring hand—and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and +significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers.</p> + +<p>"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to +be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been +dealing and smiled.</p> + +<p>"What am I doing here, Joe?" she said.</p> + +<p>Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street +at his own game, and makin' so much money that—"</p> + +<p>But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She +turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?"</p> + +<p>Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm—we're +livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here."</p> + +<p>She glanced at him, sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?"</p> + +<p>"Yes."</p> + +<p>"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it +briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her +alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a +wren—a business-like little wren—a very early wren that is highly +versed in the worm-catching way.</p> + +<p>At her next utterance he was startled but game. "Have you had your +lunch?"</p> + +<p>"Why, no; I—"</p> + +<p>"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a +bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee +and a sandwich, anyway."</p> + +<p>Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those +intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from +him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was +listening quietly and advising him.</p> + +<p>She interrogated him, gently. But something of his old masterfulness +came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the +rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all."</p> + +<p>So she told him, briefly. She was in the commission business. +Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the +Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, +but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know +that here was a woman of wealth and established commercial position.</p> + +<p>"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, +you must be anyway—it ain't that you look it—but—" He floundered, +stopped.</p> + +<p>She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And +I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My +children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not +going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in +his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first when the +children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything +else. It came natural to me. That's all."</p> + +<p>So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and +of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, +and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came +falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for +deception. When he had finished:</p> + +<p>"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm."</p> + +<p>"I can't. She—I can't."</p> + +<p>She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm."</p> + +<p>He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't."</p> + +<p>"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever +hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. +You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's +ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. +There isn't a bigger job in the world than that."</p> + +<p>For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own +inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go his +shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a +moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered.</p> + +<p>"Emma—I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the +way it turned out—but I always wanted to—"</p> + +<p>She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright +brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live +a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't +to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go +back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger +man-size job in the world. It's where you belong."</p> + +<p>Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And +so they parted, the two.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and +miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he +looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.</p> + +<p>So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the +right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, +or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.</p> + +<p>But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness +could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. +High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there +was Minnie's, too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy +Ed's, and—</p> + +<p>At the other voice his hand trembled so that the key rattled in the +lock, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled +in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's.</p> + +<p>He must just have arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in +progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his +hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, +strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older.</p> + +<p>All this he saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's +two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying: "Hello, pop."</p> + +<p>Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others +were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and +marvelling, and asking questions.</p> + +<p>"He come in to—what's that place, Dike?—Hoboken—yesterday only. An' +he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that +you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more +here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out +to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!"</p> + +<p>But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike +spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped +way of uttering his words:</p> + +<p>"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about +an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little +dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I +never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep +that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta +the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was +the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of +new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds—womenfolks and +men about eighty years old—runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. +I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'."</p> + +<p>"Forget the farm," said Minnie.</p> + +<p>"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out +at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right."</p> + +<p>Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What +d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all—"</p> + +<p>Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're +livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more."</p> + +<p>Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A +stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made +old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered +mother.</p> + +<p>"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been +livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I—The streets here, +they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to +go back and be a farmer. I want—"</p> + +<p>And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld—no, not a new, but +the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six +hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.</p> + +<p>"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got +another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm."</p> + +<p>Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not +agoin' back to the farm."</p> + +<p>But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' +back, Bella," he said, quietly. "An' things are goin' to be different. +You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you +can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' +back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a +bigger man-size job in the world."</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><a name="THE_DANCING_GIRLS" id="THE_DANCING_GIRLS" />THE DANCING GIRLS</h2> + + +<p>When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform +with a background of assorted star-shells in full flower; a young man in +uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady (in uniform); a young man +in uniform crouching in a trench, dugout, or shell-hole, this happens:</p> + +<p>You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform; you jump +hurriedly over the picture; and you plunge into the next story, noting +that it is called "The Crimson Emerald" and that, judging from the +pictures, all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt took his dose of war with the best of them, but this is of +Chug before and after taking. If, inadvertently, there should sound a +faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those +stylish dots ... indicative of what the early Victorian writers +conveniently called a drawn veil.</p> + +<p>Nothing could be fairer than that.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt was (and is) the proprietor and sole owner of the Elite +Garage, and he pronounced it with a long i. Automobile parties, touring +Wisconsin, used to mistake him for a handy man about the place and would +call to him, "Heh, boy! Come here and take a look at this engine. She +ain't hitting." When Chug finished with her she was hitting, all right. +A medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, +laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the +grease-grimed grotesquerie of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his +tight-fitting, belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat +russet shoes he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole +owner—much less the proprietor—of anything so successful and +established as the Elite Garage.</p> + +<p>In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin—or in any other sort of town, for +that matter—a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the +community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a +pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug +Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured +forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a pæan of sweetness +and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on +gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt +for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on +business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. Gurnee's electric. Chug +didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible he put his foot +down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was +something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to +thrive and flourish. It was like a combination newspaper office and +Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down but there might +generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running +board of an idle car a little group of slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced +young men in form-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly +virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been +picked before he was ripe.</p> + +<p>They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about +them; terse of speech, quick of eye, engine-wise, and, generally, +nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt. Not vicious. +Not even tough. Rather bored, though they didn't know it. In their +boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their +class in a town of Chippewa's size: cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap +talk. This last unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things +mechanical. Baseball, or a sweet-running engine brought out the best +that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the +dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went +by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency +of their skirts. At supper time they would growl to their surprised +sisters:</p> + +<p>"Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to +make a person sick."</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was +his business responsibility on one side; his very early history on the +other. Once you learn the derivation of Chug's nickname you have that +history from the age of five to twenty-five, inclusive.</p> + +<p>Chug had been christened Floyd (she had got it out of a book) but it was +an appendix rather then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of +addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers. +Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking +in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to +that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed +over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky +named Fayette who—but that's another story.</p> + +<p>The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, +or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only +did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them +that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame +cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first +intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation +of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the +Junction. When Chug ran away—which was on an average of twice daily—he +was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about +the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, +would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe.</p> + +<p>He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your +pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug, +deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him +a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night, +before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at +variance with his easy-going nature.</p> + +<p>"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good +toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go +smashing—"</p> + +<p>The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted +tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been +some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had +merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been +too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, +nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his +investigating fingers.</p> + +<p>It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up +and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians +would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an +engine on a track, and his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng! +Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to +sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon).</p> + +<p>Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the +Chippewa <i>Eagle</i>. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it +he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that +its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover +has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about +Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed +that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving +mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its +way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not +more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. +True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old +wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced +every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, +hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went.</p> + +<p>He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of +mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to +its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a +monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or +screw in his grease-grimed fingers.</p> + +<p>Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or +a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more +than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his +nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across +a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. +There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a +garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out +of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned +beneficent.</p> + +<p>Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len +Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic. +Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men +who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a +spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on +endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of +dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, +neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity.</p> + +<p>"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big +concerns—"</p> + +<p>After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the +silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of +hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have +grown accustomed.</p> + +<p>Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always +earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work +in earnest. His mother took it hard.</p> + +<p>"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An +education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of +pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good +nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had +her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for +Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a +sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows, +embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling +every corner.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He +don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare +quarrels between the two. "I never had none."</p> + +<p>The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering +it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was +working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send +him to college, next."</p> + +<p>"Well, if I do? Then what?"</p> + +<p>"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a +self-evident fact.</p> + +<p>That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the <i>Eagle</i> and +inserted a neat ad.</p> + +<div class="center"><span class="smaller">LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25<br /> + CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST.</span></div> + +<p>For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing +the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against +the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains +as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or +his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore +sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy +treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands.</p> + +<p>Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and +deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle +handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat +paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching +frame.</p> + +<p>At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a +month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here +bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into +her."</p> + +<p>Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and +count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The +look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string.</p> + +<p>For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested +batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the +engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just +emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came +in, en route—a proud, glittering affair—he always managed to get a +chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so +jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an +electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles +possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable. +The least that they called them was juice-boxes.</p> + +<p>At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his +mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always +rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the +time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was +saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home +you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your +pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on +Sundays."</p> + +<p>"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. +Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, +and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over +my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em."</p> + +<p>"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug—those curtain frames."</p> + +<p>"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix +with the lace curtains for you."</p> + +<p>Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much +like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told +of his social side he may be misunderstood.</p> + +<p>Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music +has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: "What is this, +anyway—waltz or fox trot?" This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never +had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was +infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have +started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn't +look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, +but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to +be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second.</p> + +<p>When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky +car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your +view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, +differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the +evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug.</p> + +<p>He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's +amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its +thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple +that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban +lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, +its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it +was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need it would have put you down as +mad.</p> + +<p>Boiled down, Chug Scaritt's crying need was girls. At twenty-two or +three you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but +Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many +labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand. Its millionaires +had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social +functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; +and when it came to costume—diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large +feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers—you couldn't tell their +women from the city dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and +plough works.</p> + +<p>The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish +Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. +They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid +infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt and boys of his kind were left high and dry. So, then, when +Chug went out with a girl it was likely to be by way of someone's +kitchen; or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper +and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in +front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had +been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In +Chippewa they did housework. Big, robust girls they were, miraculously +well dressed in good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for +the most part, with a scum over them; over-fond of coffee; and were +rather dull company. But they were good-natured, and hearty, and +generous.</p> + +<p>The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish +pallor due to lungs dust-choked from work in the rag room. That same +pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa. But they had a +rather appealing, wistful fragility. Their eyes generally looked too big +for their faces. They possessed, though, a certain vivacity and +diablerie that the big, slower-witted Swede girls lacked.</p> + +<p>When Chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little +choice. In the winter he often went up to Woodman's Hall. The dances at +Woodman's Hall were of the kind advertised at fifty cents a couple. +Extra lady, twenty-five cents. Ladies without gents, thirty-five cents. +Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he +escorted home one of the ladies-without-gents. It was not that he +begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went +to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and +out of sheer boredom. Once there he danced every dance and all the +encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to +cheek, in wordless rhythm. His arm about the ample waist of one of the +Swedish girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill +hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played +"Home Sweet Home." The conversation, if any, varied little.</p> + +<p>"The music's swell to-night," from the girl.</p> + +<p>"Yeh."</p> + +<p>"You're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with +you forever." This with a pressure of the girl's arm, and spoken with a +little accent, whether Swedish, Belgian, or Slavic.</p> + +<p>"They all say that."</p> + +<p>"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!"</p> + +<p>"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry.</p> + +<p>He was very little stirred, really.</p> + +<p>"Yeh, you are. I wish you was. It makes no never minds to you who you're +dancing with, s'long's you're dancing."</p> + +<p>This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It +startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look +at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would +have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks +with a stolid persistence.</p> + +<p>"Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded. He was +rather surprised to find that this was so.</p> + +<p>"Wisht it was thirty."</p> + +<p>That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. +When Chug said, "Can I see you home?" he knew the answer before he put +the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of +time, waiting, when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you +when you failed to show up. Telephoned you when you were busy. Didn't +give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven eighths of it +herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl, with the physical +development of a woman and the mind of a child. There were dozens like +her in Chippewa.</p> + +<p>If the girls of his own class noticed him at all it was the more to +ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their +vision down Outagamie Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy +of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making +advances even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped +acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie +Hatton, Old Man Hatton's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa—so +rich that she drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind.</p> + +<p>You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were, take +them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you +danced with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what +you were going to say to them.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt suspected in a vague sort of way that Chug was "running +with the hired girls." The thought distressed her. She was too smart a +woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy.</p> + +<p>"Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I like to fuss +around for company." She was a wonderful cook, Mrs. Scaritt, and liked +to display her skill.</p> + +<p>"Who is there to bring?"</p> + +<p>"The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing +up for, evenings?"</p> + +<p>"Nobody."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt tried another tack.</p> + +<p>"I s'pose this house isn't good enough for 'em? Is that it?"</p> + +<p>"Good enough!" Chug laughed rather grimly. "I'd like to know what's the +matter with it!"</p> + +<p>There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as +spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching +days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house +by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt had rebelled.</p> + +<p>"I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to 'em. It's got so I can +tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven fifty-two goes by in +the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear +the 'leven-forty. Let's stay, Chug."</p> + +<p>So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a +convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by +the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric-lighted, with a +cement walk front and back and a porch with a wicker swing and flower +baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, +though she, in turn, served him meals that would have threatened the +waist-line of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for +instance (it sounds sickish, but wait!) which she baked in a deep pan, +and over which she poured a golden-brown custard all flecked with crusty +melted sugar. You took a bite and lo! it had vanished like a sweet +dewdrop, leaving in your mouth a taste as of nectar, and clover-honey, +and velvet cream.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt learned to gauge Chug's plans for the evening by his +ablutions. Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted +to a rite. In the old days Chug's father had always made a brief enough +business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the +kitchen sink or on the back-porch bench sufficed. The noises he made +were out of all proportion to the results obtained. His snufflings, and +snortings, and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he +emerged from them you were surprised to find that he had merely washed +his face.</p> + +<p>Chug had grease to fight. He had learned how in his first days at the +garage. His teacher had been old Rudie, a mechanic who had tinkered +around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about +them than their inventor. Soap and water alone were powerless against +the grease and carbon and dust that ground themselves into Chug's skin. +First, he lathered himself with warm, soapy water. Then, while arms, +neck, and face were still wet, he covered them with oil—preferably +lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust over all; great +handfuls of it. The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin +smooth and white. Old Rudie, while advocating this process, made little +use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method +of washing in gasoline guaranteed to take the varnish off a car fender. +It seemed to leave Rudie's tough hide undevastated.</p> + +<p>At twenty-four Chug Scaritt was an upstanding, level-headed, and +successful young fellow who worked hard all day and found himself +restless and almost irritable toward evening. He could stay home and +read, or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very +quiet. For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the +street corner, the Y.M.C.A. This last had proved a boon. The swimming +pool, the gym, the reading room, had given Chug many happy, healthful +hours. But, after all, there was something—</p> + +<p>Chug didn't know it was girls—girls you could talk to, and be with, and +take around. But it was. After an hour in the pool, or around the +reading table, or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the +quiet street. He could go home. Or there was Wanda. If he went home he +found himself snapping rather irritably at his mother, for no reason at +all. Ashamed of doing it. Powerless, somehow, to stop.</p> + +<p>He took to driving in the evening: long drives along the country roads, +his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He +used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes +on the road; the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda +along, or one of the mill girls. But not often. They were disappointed +if you didn't drive with one arm around them. He liked being alone. It +soothed him.</p> + +<p>It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain +daughter of the Widow Weld. The Widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of +widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When +you met her together with her daughter Elizabeth you were supposed to +say, "Not mother and daughter! Surely not! Sisters, of course." +Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf-club dances on +Saturday night she would sit, unsought, against the wall while her +skittish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man +would cross the floor toward her and her heart would give a little leap, +but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced +much better than her mother—much better than most girls, for that +matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick +glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now +and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my +little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they +belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted +significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was +common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time +because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the +moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. +Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly +loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly +maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and +pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom +her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the +lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her +Machiavellian mother approved.</p> + +<p>"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after +a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy +and red-eyed old widower of that name.</p> + +<p>"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes."</p> + +<p>"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you."</p> + +<p>"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the +glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than +dance with him. Fat!"</p> + +<p>"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness.</p> + +<p>"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful +inside."</p> + +<p>"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly.</p> + +<p>Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been +unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that +of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle.</p> + +<p>When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the +middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and +the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road +toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His +thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected.</p> + +<p>"If I can rent Bergstrom's place next door when their lease is up I'll +knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in +'em.... Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next +week.... That was swell cake Ma had for supper.... What's that in the +road! What's!—"</p> + +<p>Jammed down the foot-brake. Jerked back the emergency. A girl standing +in the road. A dark mass in the ditch by the road-side. He was out of +his car. He recognized her as the Weld girl.</p> + +<p>"'S'matter?"</p> + +<p>"In the ditch. She's hurt. Quick!"</p> + +<p>"Whose car?" Chug was scrambling down the banks.</p> + +<p>"Hatton's. Angie Hatton's."</p> + +<p>"Gosh!"</p> + +<p>Over by the fence, where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found +sitting up, dizzily, and saying, "Betty! Betty!" in what she supposed +was a loud cry but which was really a whisper.</p> + +<p>"I'm all right, dear. I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you—"</p> + +<p>She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls +clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of +the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender.</p> + +<p>"You're a lucky bunch," said Chug. "Who was driving?"</p> + +<p>"I was," said Angie Hatton.</p> + +<p>"It wasn't her fault," the Weld girl put in, quickly. "We were coming +from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm-wagon coming +toward us. One of those big ones. The middle of the road. Perhaps he was +asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought he would, of course. At the last +minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep."</p> + +<p>"Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you both home in +twenty minutes. We'll have to leave five thousand dollars' worth of car +in the road till morning. It'll be all right."</p> + +<p>He did get them home in twenty minutes and the five thousand dollars' +worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. +Old Man Hatton himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following +day. Chug met him in overalls, smudge-faced as he was. Old Man Hatton +put out his hand. Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw.</p> + +<p>"That's all right," said Old Man Hatton, and grasped it firmly. "Want to +thank you."</p> + +<p>"That's all right," said Chug. "Didn't do a thing."</p> + +<p>"No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays—" He +looked around the garage. "Work here, I suppose?"</p> + +<p>"Yessir."</p> + +<p>"If there's anything I can do for you? Over at the mill."</p> + +<p>"Guess not," said Chug.</p> + +<p>"Treat you right here, do they?"</p> + +<p>"Fine."</p> + +<p>"Let's see. Who owns this place?"</p> + +<p>"I do."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton's face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles. He threw +back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "One on me. +Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one."</p> + +<p>Chug walked to the street with him. "Your daughter, she's got a lot of +nerve, all right. And that girl with her—Weld. Say, not a whimper out +of her and the blood running down her face. She all right?"</p> + +<p>"Cut her head a little. They're both all right. Angie wouldn't even stay +in bed. Well, as I say, if there's anything—?"</p> + +<p>Chug flushed a little. "Tell you what, Mr. Hatton. I'm working on a +thing that'll take the whine out of the Daker."</p> + +<p>Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things. The Daker +is the best car for the money in the world. Not much for looks but +everything in the engine. And everyone who has ever owned one knows that +its only fault is the way its engine moans. Daker owners hate that moan. +When you're going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a +banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked +over it.</p> + +<p>"Can't be done," said Old Man Hatton.</p> + +<p>"Another three months and I'll show you."</p> + +<p>"Hope you do, son. Hope you do."</p> + +<p>But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys +destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a +long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some +eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an +ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval +between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt....</p> + +<p>No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way +it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city. No going into detail +concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. +These things were important and interesting. But perhaps not more +interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following +that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth +Weld, and saying, "Angie Hatton's a smooth little dancer, all right; but +she isn't in it with you."</p> + +<p>For Chippewa, somehow, had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, +cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, +figuratively, wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all +artificial social boundaries. Chug Scaritt, in uniform, must be kept +happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, fun, amusement, +entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall +in Elm Street, on what had been a vacant lot. And there, by day or by +night, were to be had music, and dancing, and hot cakes, and magazines, +and hot coffee, and ice cream and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight, +and slim, and young, and bright-eyed, and companionable. Girls like +Angie Hatton. Girls like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat +against the wall at the golf-club dances and prayed in her heart that +fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance.</p> + +<p>Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to +her, in a tactful aside, "My dear, you've danced three times this +evening with the Scaritt boy. You know that's against the rules."</p> + +<p>Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could +hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true +like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent +effort. She liked that, and understood.</p> + +<p>It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls +could understand like that. She talked to you, straight. Looked at you, +straight. Was interested in the things that interested you. No +waist-squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses.</p> + +<p>"I'm going to try to get over."</p> + +<p>"Say, you don't want to do that."</p> + +<p>"I certainly do. Why not?"</p> + +<p>"You're—why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're—"</p> + +<p>"I'm as old as you, or almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to +work in the canteens, and entertain the boys. If they'll take me. I'll +have to lie six months on my age."</p> + +<p>Rudie was in charge of the garage now. "That part of it's all right," +Chug confided to the Weld girl. "Only thing that worries me is Ma. She +hasn't peeped, hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum, all right."</p> + +<p>"I don't know your mother," said the Weld girl.</p> + +<p>"Thasso," absent-mindedly, from Chug.</p> + +<p>"I'd—like to."</p> + +<p>Chug woke up. "Why, say, that'd be fine! Listen, why don't you come for +Sunday dinner. I've got a hunch we'll shove off next week, and this'll +be my last meal away from camp. They haven't said so, but I don't +know—maybe you wouldn't want to, though. Maybe you—we live the other +side of the tracks—"</p> + +<p>"I'd love to," said the Weld girl. "If you think your mother would like +to have me."</p> + +<p>"Would she! And cook! Say!"</p> + +<p>The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all +right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went.</p> + +<p>It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized +that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of +shortcake he leaned back and said, "Death, where is thy sting?" But his +mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld +that it was plain food but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. "Mrs. Scaritt, it's the best dinner I've +ever eaten."</p> + +<p>Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: "Oh, now! You +folks up in the East End—"</p> + +<p>"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows +that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little +to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of +crackers-and-tea codfish, really."</p> + +<p>"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But +Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly +at each other.</p> + +<p>An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, +the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em +up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high +school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), +she went home, escorted by Chug.</p> + +<p>Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months +passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had +swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines.</p> + +<p>Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld +went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. +Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, +tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She +danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the +boards. She danced in hospitals, châteaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, +Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two +weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at +night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let +them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She +danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New +York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and +once with a general. But never a dance with Chug.</p> + +<p>Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. +She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to +look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor +toward her—her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl +next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the +taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her +mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in +thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish +note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, +shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the +wheezy breath, should ask her to dance.</p> + +<p>She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in +the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's +fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return.</p> + +<p>Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown +figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did +this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might +be said to have been alarmingly accelerated.</p> + +<p>Sometimes—though they did not know it—she and Chug were within a half +hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank +Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in +that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so.</p> + +<p>"It has been awful here," said the Widow Weld. "Nothing to do but sew at +the Red Cross shop; and no sugar or white bread."</p> + +<p>"It must have been," agreed Elizabeth.</p> + +<p>"They're giving a dance for you—and dinner—a week from Saturday, at +the golf club. In your honour."</p> + +<p>"Dance!" Elizabeth closed her eyes, faintly. Then, "Who is?"</p> + +<p>"Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it—that is, it was his idea. But the +club wanted to tender some fitting—"</p> + +<p>"I won't go."</p> + +<p>"Oh, yes, you will."</p> + +<p>Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask.</p> + +<p>"Have the boys come back?"</p> + +<p>"What boys?"</p> + +<p>"The—the boys."</p> + +<p>"Some of them. You know about dear Harry Hatton, of course. Croix de—"</p> + +<p>"What have they done with the Khaki Club, where they used to give the +dances?"</p> + +<p>"Closed. Long ago. There was some talk of keeping it open for a +community centre, or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you'll +have to have a dress for Saturday night, I wonder if that old chiffon, +with a new—"</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>Chug Scaritt came home in September. The First National Bank Building +seemed, somehow, to have shrunk. And his mother hadn't had all that gray +hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudie had +made out, all right, hadn't he? Good old scout.</p> + +<p>"The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. +Old Rudie was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you +to-night, Chug."</p> + +<p>"Where's this party? I don't want any party."</p> + +<p>"Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up +yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't—"</p> + +<p>"Don't they give dances any more at the Soldiers' Club down on Elm?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they +called a community club. The <i>Eagle</i> was boosting for a big new place. +What they called a Community Memorial Centre. But I don't know. It kind +of fell through, I guess."</p> + +<p>"I won't go," said Chug, suddenly.</p> + +<p>"Go where, Chug?"</p> + +<p>But instead of answering, Chug put his second question.</p> + +<p>"Have you seen—is that—I wonder if that Weld girl's back."</p> + +<p>"My, yes. Papers were full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance, and +all, at the Country Club. They say—"</p> + +<p>A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing +at Woodman's Hall. There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on +a georgette blouse and high-heeled shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled +up at him. Wanda had bad teeth—yellow, with a sort of scum over them.</p> + +<p>"I sure was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say. +Honest, I could dance with you all night." A little pressure of her arm.</p> + +<p>Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke. Dimly he +heard himself saying, "Oh, they all tell me that."</p> + +<p>"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!"</p> + +<p>"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry.</p> + +<p>Then, suddenly, Chug stopped dancing. He stopped, and stepped back from +Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its +jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of +the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in +vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded +floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety +wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of +Chippewa's night.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<div class="center"><span class="smaller">THE END</span></div> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + +***** This file should be named 14714-h.htm or 14714-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/7/1/14714/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Half Portions + +Author: Edna Ferber + +Release Date: January 17, 2005 [EBook #14714] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + + + + + HALF PORTIONS + + BY + + EDNA FERBER + + + + GARDEN CITY NEW YORK + DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY + 1920 + + + + + + +CONTENTS PAGE + +I. THE MATERNAL FEMININE 3 +II. APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL 36 +III. OLD LADY MANDLE 76 +IV. YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH 113 +V. LONG DISTANCE 148 +VI. UN MORSO DOO PANG 157 +VII. ONE HUNDRED PER CENT 201 +VIII. FARMER IN THE DELL 230 +IX. THE DANCING GIRLS 280 + + + + +HALF PORTIONS + + + + +THE MATERNAL FEMININE + + +Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall +back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," +states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." +That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most +certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in +the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with +broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was +practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was +strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and +ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's +East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and +hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of +that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest +hats. + +The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women +of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married +sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces +and nephews. + +"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old +thing. And she's had so little in life, really." + +She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a +spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this +pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter, +to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips. +Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen +foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family. +Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their +husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It +was always the same. + +"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living +soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the +children--" + +There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of +to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each +other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a +confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes +of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk, +safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot +rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by +saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I +don't know why I'm telling you all this." + +But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little +heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that +she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life, +has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had +never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it +meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you +have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least +knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her +time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would +have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old +maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all +what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's +viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her +food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women +sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of +what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how +she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business. + +You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from +one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago +wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First +National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and +trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own +family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own +people. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, +and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate +disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks. + +"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora +confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had +made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to +everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train. +Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion. +You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour +car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was +getting along--she called him William--and if they were going to send +her west, and all about her. I _wish_ she wouldn't." + +Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. +You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator +starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof, +unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed +and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper +water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity +in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your +innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of +her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister +Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at +Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, +with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to +her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder. + +Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the +East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the +millinery business in Elm Street. + +"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and +all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now +that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats +of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is." + +H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are +made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the +Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth +Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little +natural bewilderment. + +The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the +original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an +unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree +in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front +porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From +May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing +the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, +accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak +of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace +Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in +Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, +the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) +Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose +never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, +purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that +vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet +shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there +is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than +to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. +Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only +her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and +as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was +that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a +photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish +mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of +its fragile reticence and grace. + +It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to +ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, +as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she +walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that +Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless +cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style +met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in +the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch. + +That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as +inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage +badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the +twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. +Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a +skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years +ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked +about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section +of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon. + +"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full +of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view." + +Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its +exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the +grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the +Chippewa _Eagle_. + +"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow +pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what +was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, +couldn't you die!" + +For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went +East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and +gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played +on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, +in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of +the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago: + + NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY. + H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES. + +Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, +which read: + + MISS SOPHY DECKER + Millinery + +Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had +always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional +hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself +in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat +trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little +bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, +awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still +stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, +came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy +cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five +years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the +old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and +transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of +green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, +and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her +spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, +and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the +superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her +city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases: + +"This is awfully good this year." + +"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the +style--the line--you're paying for, not the material." + +"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it. +Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on." + +When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the +mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it +in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated +eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, +slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples. +A little sigh of relieved suspense. + +"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because +you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have +a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I +proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this +needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it." + +And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat +against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist +and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out +of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you +bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something +more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her +admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow: + +"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. +You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat +and veil as soon's I get my hair combed." + +In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight +brassiere and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat +and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the +bedroom from the shoulders down. + +The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and +expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and +lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as +well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these +opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, +frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart +trade. + +"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. +They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell +them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, +or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to +cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it. +Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the +same idea." + +Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, +severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the +other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes. + +At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques +completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No +one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol. + +"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody +feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a +fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to +be there." + +The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a +treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of +satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make +her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of +the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little +scavenger. + +"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt +Sophy. "You must have barrels of it." + +Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I +keep it," she said. + +When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say +'Poor Sophy'?" + +"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and +has always worked." + +Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're +poor?" + +"Well--yes--" + +"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, +skinny and rather foreign looking. + +The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very +tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora +of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his +mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a +girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And +that's such hard work." + +Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still +coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to +baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her +admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her +selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen +years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great +deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or +twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the +beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. +It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had +taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, +unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features +seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large +white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of +those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a +telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's +large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating +strength, courage, and a great human understanding. + +From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have +chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a +lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or +her husband. They all hated it. + +"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had +stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as +an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children. +She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech, +but shockingly true. + +Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, +had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of +pillows. + +"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way +you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with +all that lovely colour!" + +Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me +credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my +blood is in my cheeks." + +Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary +for success in that direction. + +"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's +a profession in itself--being a wife and mother." + +She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's +land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear +he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity +and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of +beauty. + +"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence. +"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a +fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing." + +The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The +girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more +immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods; +irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited +following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid +bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any +one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would +have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a +giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection +unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having +her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a +prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not +a step. + +Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of +affairs, tried to stop it. + +"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, +bluntly, to her sister. + +"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. +"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the +world. That's the trouble. I love them too much." + +"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's +nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. +You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's +ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom +she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban +that Angie Hatton--" + +"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your +shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to +your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the +minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. +That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her +come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, +cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't +know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have +suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--" + +So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and +their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, +their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in +some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one. + +"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How +can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then." + +This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and +became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old +frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was +something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, +that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin +house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the +Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best +residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly +furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary +chill to your heart. + +The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and +snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not +unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam, +and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head +trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray +patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him +for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have +around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls +would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and +cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, +especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from +Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the +best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or +Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original +design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a +small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory +down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her +invaluable. + +The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very +black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark +line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but +when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by +a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low. +She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking +something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream +she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being +pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the +sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. +But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it. + +"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a +boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you +good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me +company." + +Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the +house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big +flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her +skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in +and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny +game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, +always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a +partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings. + +It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly +into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging +for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms +clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came +in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was +thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite +twenty-one. + +"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a +leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look +comic. + +"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're +going to be married." + +Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and +plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen--" she began. + +"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!" + +Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's +face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That +isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is +when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you. +Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother, +pretty near." + +"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk +that way--Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to +really--" + +"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and +old. + +And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the +idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?" + +Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a +capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back +but the boy did not. + +"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will +you promise me? Will you?" + +"Are you going to tell Father?" + +"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. +No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to--You're not a +bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him a +chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over +then." + +Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen. + +"Quick!" + +"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing. + +"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, +sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open +the olives with this fool can opener. I tried." + +There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; +what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just +hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three +days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew +that her prayers were answered. + +Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite +twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely." +She was almost hysterical. + +Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt +Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said +nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora +took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her +cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the +recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing +up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the +floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted +curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and +crafty look. + +"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My +nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or +other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more +economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he +do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--" + +H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at +the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her +teeth as though a knife had entered her heart. + +Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her +hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, +she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and +simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own +affairs, must have marked it. + +The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel +Oakley." + +Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had +been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and +Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his +strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding +his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had +had business relations as well as friendly ones. + +At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth +stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer +look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion +a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain. + +"When did he ask you?" + +"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will +be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France. +I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her +young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean." + +Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your +mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, +'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I _am_ so faint ... all of a +sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...." + +Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks +later. They had a regular pre-war wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and +all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The +girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile +twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever. + +"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of +milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt +who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I +can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!" + +Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl. + +"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't +want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for? +Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy." + +But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of +her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just +like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not +laugh. + +"Now look here, Delia. If you're--" + +But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's +all right," she said. + +Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she +said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for +you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty +close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. +It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby." + +"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been +wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, +anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't +it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm +lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing +like me." + +"But your mother--" + +"Mother doesn't know a thing." + +Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed +enough for two. + +When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face +drawn and queer, Sophy knew. + +"How much?" she said. + +"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that--" + +"I thought Oakley--Adele said--" + +"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's +this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got +scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash." + +"Speculating with it, were you?" + +"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals." + +"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me." + +"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, +and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the +money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that." + +Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the +children, anyway. They won't need it now." + +He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't +they?" + +"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream." + +"Eugene?" + +"Yes." + +"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and +presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this +money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand +these things but I can talk to you. It's like this--" + +"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it, +not for you, but for Flora, and Delia--and Eugene. Flora has lived such +a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you. +Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia +and Eugene are my children--were my children." + +When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was +getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said. + +"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's +lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats +and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother +suffers--poor Sophy." + +"Um," Baldwin grunted. + +When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War +Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora +had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they +thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything +to give comfort to the stricken two. + +"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit +there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel +something." + +"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy. + +"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!" + +This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have +to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the +printed page. You must not skip this. + + AMERICAN RED CROSS + (CROIX ROUGE AMERICAINE) + + MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN: + + I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by + the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H. + Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last + hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm + sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who + was privileged to be with her boy at the last. + + Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed + from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not + receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special + hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked + this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us. + + Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who + examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as + he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a + few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and + strong as he was could not pull through. + + The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly + choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were + both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not + to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good + to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his + head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more + easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on + duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he + died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every + minute of that night and have never seen a finer character + than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had + several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each + one simply because of his great will power and fighting + spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, + "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll + only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during + the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he + could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I + had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness + even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was + going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all + his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He + seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in + bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll + fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually + thought we had won when on the third day.... + + But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been + the mother of such a son.... + + I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come + home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than + I can possibly write? + + MARIAN KING. + +It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped +for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in +the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora +and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then +Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. +Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning +a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat +quietly, waiting. + +There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora +broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she +spoke. + +"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I +do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor +Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the +married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, +Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know +how cruel life is." + +Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and +faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's +hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station. +Pretty good." + +Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced +her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood +a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older +women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, +quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into +her eyes straight and sure. + +"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very +proud woman." + + + + +APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL + + +Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She +started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar +in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for +House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five +years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five +years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled +up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of +What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone +through the ceremony twice a year. + +Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the +yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, +flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of +these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in +again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, +things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental +things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things +wrapped up in brown-paper parcels. + +And boxes--oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square +and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; +cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned +an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another +stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents +under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing +fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key +they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as +Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip +covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance. + +The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American +household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, +Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten +years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his +sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the +neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had +lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the +Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful +magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow +chested (she'd need to be with that decolletage), carrying feather fan. +You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves +the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too +tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded. + +Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, +ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a +palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and +slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, +were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at +Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless +heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of +citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and +to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's. + +Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and +Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up +above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the +afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster +place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen +closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, +as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be. + +That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically, +that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in +tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with +them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental +chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins +and closets for all your worries and confidences. + +But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every +woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I +only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it +weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago," +complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood +floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, +aesthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as +clearly as if a sociologist had charted it. + + * * * * * + +Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the +crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a +junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon +portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each +of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink +cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the +labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a +soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes +behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster +household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in +artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had +prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two +years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the +dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall. + +Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with +them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel +and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the +entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks +as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a +nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping +porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in +the attic. + +One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. +Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, +cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. +Brewster's _bete noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace. +"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: +"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn +mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know +what's got into her." + +By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin +September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of +the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly +again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you +understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little +necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might +have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and +left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, +no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that +it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this +relentless and expert crew. + +Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened +and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz' +Brewster?" + +"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home +with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie." + +Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the +funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _passe_ than a +last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the +tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the +plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had +worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these +were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed +by unbrightened by covetousness. + +The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and +the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic. +Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen +and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's +relations' latest flagrancy. + +"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I +says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I +guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and +much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the +second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same +footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard. + + * * * * * + +Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it +looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent +had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise. + +Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished: + +"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--" + +"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all +smudged, too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked +about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was +a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in +June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor +trips into the country. + +"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come +here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat +they're--why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just +got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father." + +Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping +a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot +your old friends, have you?" + +"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other +woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's +house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was +such a thing, I mean." + +"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely. + +Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor +clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, +crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included +and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the +kind. This is--this is an anachronism." + +"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be +cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned." + +They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended +the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting +each other. + +Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the +protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him. +You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz Merz; you know--boiled. Well, +you know what a despot she is." + +It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch +Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes +and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, +mother!" + +Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at +Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of +Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift +movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly +at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled +it through the open doorway. + +"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off +your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's +the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the +war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster. + +Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard. +"It's just that it seems so idiotic--your digging around in an attic in +this day and age! Why, it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much +more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an +attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this +huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just +you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent +anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?" + +"Why, no. I hate it." + +"Then why in the world--" + +"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in +New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your +room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming--the slip +covers--" + +"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She +succeeded in slurring it ludicrously. + +It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not +be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up +delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young +lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped +to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused +at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft +grays and blues. + +Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing +forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's +the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed. + +"I know it." + +The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the +situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable +streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up." + +"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to +meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I +didn't know there was any situation." + +"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of +mind." + +Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her +voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that +tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter." +She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on. +Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a +bath, won't you, dear?" + +"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled--honestly?--on a day like this?" + +"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly. + +Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of +Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz' +Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter +flannels!" + +"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young +fist down in the water--spat!--so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and +floor impartially. + +Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea +Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of +the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a +queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her +throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin +winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner +where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!" + +His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red. +He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was +pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long +minute--close. + +"Need a shave, dad." + +"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off. +"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?" + +"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio--you +know--plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for +you." + +Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a +little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated +porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I +thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows, +and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a +change." + +Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about +that. Mother needs--" + +Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an +all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?" +She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner +so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want +to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's +everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky. + +But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly +sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese +souffle, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream. + +"But, mother, you shouldn't have--" feebly. + +"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just +wanted to tease you." + +Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But +two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him +go, a speculative look in her eyes. + +She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, +clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the +centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged, +trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern +deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; +the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's +Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs." + +"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval! +Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs +and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for +the bowl in the dining room. + +Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night, +there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's +volcanic remarks. + +Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to +have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September +before they began firing up for the winter. + +"I'll go down with you," said Pinky. + +"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust." + +But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed, +after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy." + +And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling +process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of +the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two +men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea +Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his +sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came +forward. + +She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you." + +"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred." + +"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well." + +He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked +at her. "Huh? What d'you mean--isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open. +His eyes looked suddenly strained. + +"This house--it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at +supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself--like +other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And +you're another." + +"Me?" feebly. + +"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that +it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something--I don't know +what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills +for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true. +Wasn't it? Wasn't it?" + +"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was +terribly disturbed, "About mother--you said--" + +"You and she ought to go away this winter--not just for a trip, but to +stay. You"--she drew a long breath and made the plunge--"you ought to +give up the house." + +"Give up--" + +"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to +New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few +days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little +apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it--two +rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse." + +Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great +furnace room. "Oh, but listen--" + +"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't +as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the +theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and +concerts." + +He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady +diet--Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a +business to--" + +"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole +thing--or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it +wants its way. + +He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her +a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you +don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she +hated it. I asked about the attic--the cleaning and all--and she said +she hated it." + +"Did she say that, Paula?" + +"Yes." + +He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked +pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to +himself, and thinking, thinking. + +Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, +through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's +bedroom door was open. + +A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the +plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in +the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?" + +"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the +bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. +Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face +and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. +Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't +well. He ought to go away." + +As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow. +As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked +suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father--but he isn't +sick. He--" + +"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That +furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred. +He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This +house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or +sell it, and come to New York?" + +"But we do. We did. Last winter--" + +"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little +two-room apartment in one of the new buildings--near my studio--and +relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a +rut--both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with +these Wisconsin winters--" + +"But California--we could go to California for--" + +"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled, +and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great +hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it." + +"Did he ever say so?" + +"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He--" + +Slow steps ascending the stairs--heavy, painful steps. The two women +listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words. +The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her +eyes anxious, tender. + +"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only--why, dad's +only fifty-eight." + +"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly. + +Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so +tired, aren't you?" + +Her father stood in the doorway. + +"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned +around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember." + +So Pinky went off to her own room (_sans_ slp cov) and slept soundly, +dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done. + + * * * * * + +Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform, +a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done. + +"_Au 'voir!_ The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love +it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your +minds, remember." + +And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New +Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a +studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady +who turned out to be from Des Moines. + +When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their +inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being +the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as +black diamonds and twice as costly. + +Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and +said: "How many rooms did you say?" + +"Two--and a kitchenette, of course." + +"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for +that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum." + +But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very +impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the +best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no +matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the +prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it +was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon. + +"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded +Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder +they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you +feel like a book agent." + +He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster, +soothingly. + +They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and +(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known +as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in +red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray. + +Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, _we've_ been very +comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager." + +"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster. + +"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good. +She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five. +She'll take two hundred." + +"You bet she will," growled Hosea. + +She answered the door--hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's +chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio +living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was +window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of +tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its +back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just +behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as +you've see it in the second-act library. + +Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty +ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he +remarked. + +But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was +saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You +see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six--eight, in fact." + +"Heaven forbid!" in fervent _sotto voce_ from Father Brewster. + +"It's an enormous saving in time and labour." + +"The--kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster. + +The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She +skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really +handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a +part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was +dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. +And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the +miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the +Brewster's Winnebago china closet. + +"Why, how--how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster. + +"Isn't it? So complete--and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks, +chops, everything right here. It's just play." + +A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the +tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are +the beds?" + +She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're +upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know." + +A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung +with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom--a +rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with +whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on +dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall. + +They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for +Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. + + * * * * * + +Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great +deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and +let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, _a la_ Juliet, +having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume +consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's +little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the +Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, +the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky +legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter. + +After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room +apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible +loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room +house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the +winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a +light-heartedness that neither of them felt. + +They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the +street noises of New York came up to them--a loose chain flapping +against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth +Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a +motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down. + +She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious +gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at +home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet! + +Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?" + +"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off." + +"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though. +Great!" + +"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily. + +They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in +Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more +doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had +learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain. +Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all +over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the +happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known +that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious +bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding. + +When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh, +take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster +used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can +start the eggs." + + * * * * * + +In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster +never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet +By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of +jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He +deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail +off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, +heavily, as though it were a physical weight. + +Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life! + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say. + +"Time of my life, father." + +She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which +no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less +frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. +Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for +her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, +slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture +those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she +had talked to five or six of them. + +She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he +confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or approximately; Michigan, and +Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one +New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em." + +"Which one?" + +"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the +blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, +but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place +in the country, in a house." + +A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to +talk to her, Hosey. Take me over." + +She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the +quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's +fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you +Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. +Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the +children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love +it--oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult." + +Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a +tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--" + +The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But +she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still +wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the +slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette." + +This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked +to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At +first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on +Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed +and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a +mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than +women. + +The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When +she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say: +"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. +Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me +show you our new taupes." + + * * * * * + +Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine +individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was +startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's +simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps +two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York. + +"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said. + +"Me? No." + +"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't." + +"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't +they? Most of 'em?" + +"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an' +around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they +come from. I dunno." + +Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. +He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, +buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, +with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white +linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his +square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his +baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he +thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed +that they did not. + +"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" + +"I should say I am, father." + +"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?" + +"It's play." + +She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen +pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: +apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; +sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, +that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one +combination kitchen-dining-and-living room. + +"Chops taste good, Hosey?" + +"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out +to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show." + +"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?" + +"It's the life, mother! It's the life!" + + * * * * * + +His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store +kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream +whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily +with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even +known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used +to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price +of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin +cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market +before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with +tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the +buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time. + +Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had +known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, +naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg +acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin +farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a +ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had +sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on +Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out +on the porch early, very early summer mornings. + +You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant +there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he +had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its +black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to +struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had +thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever. + +"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just +seemed to kind of pine away." + + * * * * * + +It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this +memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market. +Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of +eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness +over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway +he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face +was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung +loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out. + +"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--" + +He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into +the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A +great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick. + +The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The +glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have +gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged +corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be +sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, +fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim +little hall. + +A barked shin. A good, round oath. + +"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him +into the bright front room. + +"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the +door. What the--" + +"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I +didn't know--" + +Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up +at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her +head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves +were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a +promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house. + +"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to +get away from. If Pinky--" + +"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a +letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She +asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own +things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, +and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!" + +Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in +the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic +pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; +"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms." + +Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a +little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick, +Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman +with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came +to the door with her hat on, and yet--" + +Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he +said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go +home." + +Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?" + +"Now." + +"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--" + +"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this +make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's +go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe." + +In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The +Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene +Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of +daisies. + +At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head +out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?" + +They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs. +Brewster leaned back without comment. + +Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug +Hengel. + +"Yep." + +"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long." + +"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon--the big piece. And +send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll +take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right." + +It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of +his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the +restaurant fare of the past six months. + + * * * * * + +All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with +an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as +they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very +still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited. +The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then +Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain +with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He +took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide +and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief. + +"Welcome home! Home!" + +She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks! +Huge!" + +"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to +library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No +wonder it grins and throws out its arms." + +They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the +cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and +shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his +stubby black pipe. + +"Hosey!"--from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of +preserves when you come." + +"What?" + +"Can of preserves." + +"What kind?" + +"Any kind you like." + +"Can I have two kinds?" + +He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put +them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands +together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now. +That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does. +Is the house getting warmer?" + +He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was +back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out +the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the +tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why--" + +"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and +slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm +going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the +table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've +cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I +don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your +overalls. Come on." + +He cut into the steak--a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat +it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, +ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness +and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them. + +The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly. + +"Let me go, Milly." + +"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're--" + +He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She +says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. +She--Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time +for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning." + +Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, +Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight." + + + + +OLD LADY MANDLE + + +Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room +flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an +ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at +cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more +artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg +sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, +admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. +Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And +the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo. + +Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a +spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and +wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an +admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she +acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no +proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never +spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son +Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were +delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and +sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the +stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For +they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies +could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons +and their sons' wives. + +Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs. +Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row, +on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon +coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of +them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her +voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo. + +My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no +thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine +about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It +may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his +thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form +a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old +mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been +hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked +over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and +regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with +dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This +had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the +purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the +iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She +possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins +of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she +essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now! +None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night." + +When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her +two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first +and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of +lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her +friends. + +"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my +old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo." + +In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk +together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinee tickets in +pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent +Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her +pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon +which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her +cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that +she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was +a spoiled old lady. + +At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her +neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box +in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old +frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No +fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds +that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long +hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and +soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed, +dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black +silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three +friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty +apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians, +guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and +craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink +scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, +for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared +clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's +exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were +worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They +were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, +scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at +bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle +triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three +was imitation. + +So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling +their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into +the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They +represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they +themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its +apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the +roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers +over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none +of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over +her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a +man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did +not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama, +undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they +derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the +modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that +this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on +four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired +four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path. + +Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They +seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, +and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her +voice was unctuous with pride. + +"My son's wife--" one of the three would begin. There was something +terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the +title. + +"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if +I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to +depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead." + +"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked +tones from Mrs. Mandle. + +"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than +nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see +enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it +all." + +A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do +you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?" + +More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an +Old People's Home as a refuge. Then: + +"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to +housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he +says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a +restaurant--well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You +couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'" + +Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll +marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly +streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always +grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a +marvel of perfection. + +Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries +late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, +either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in +his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait." + +"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a +trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let +a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them +like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time." + +The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her +fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she +made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son +Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I +won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I +guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I +said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he +laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass +me another, Ma'." + +"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser. + +"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud." + +"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a--" + +"He's just like a man of twenty-five--only worse." + +Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son +Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?" + +They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the +park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They +never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or +how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely +fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves. + +Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She +had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, +healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man +twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life +together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could +call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, +according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, +the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's +miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving +necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the +spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never +quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of +heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty +became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned +matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and +linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow. + +Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business. +He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers, +documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when +a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was +none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for +masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced, +stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way +they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched +against the father and daughter. + +It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in +a Bronte brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when +the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping +Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the debris. Stocks and bonds and real +estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, +clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands +more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a +black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down +figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of +terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of +the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a +curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching +the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she +found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's +sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the +wake of the devastating panic. + +Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a +household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen +he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a +stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a +boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and +responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From +his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material +values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never +attained her iron indomitability. + +It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most +modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and +take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china +houses. + +The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to +get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her." + +"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said. + +Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy--or +as happy as she knows how to be--she'll never come back. That's what I +want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along." + +They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of +economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the +acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the +impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, +long-suffering, subdued--and in need of a start. He was. They managed a +very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. +Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented +incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. +Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had +expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the +last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were +right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement +colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes. + +The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound +steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A +new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle. + +Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle +side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them +a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a +man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight, +but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest +against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the +cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness) +in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar +smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play +that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would +tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, +in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and +son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo +kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she +looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat +her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough +thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill +that her husband's withered kisses had never given her. + +Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a +comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit +of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady +Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend +freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his +savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a +time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She +and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. +When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma +Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch +of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his +money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household +capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to +protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony. + +"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst +tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than +the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!" + +She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next +day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo +spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand +and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed +contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo +regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, +articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with +age, shrewd though she naturally was. + +It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an +evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full +hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. +"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing +I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a +chicken." + +"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a +musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next +day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. +Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old +lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his +becoming what she called fast. + +"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman +like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a +dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick. + +So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South +Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life. + +And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does. + +Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might +have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She +remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken +admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of +business. + +"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like +it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at +rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss. +Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she +turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for +novelties." + +Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. +Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner. +Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal, +too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly +during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of +angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The +following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in +Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. +Usually he praised this dish, or that. + +"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?" + +"'S all right." And declined a second piece. + +The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped +his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before +her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said. + +Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?" + +"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about +her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll +love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. +Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look +so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?" + +"But who--?" + +"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and +strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home +an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--" + +Ad lib. + +They were married the following month. + +Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment +farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her +mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of +grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, +miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were +swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna, +with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her +gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the +afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat +Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never +failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day +scrubber. + +But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, +voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, +bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd +business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship. + +He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany +front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. +She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. +Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a +concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for +its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her +shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair +gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was +clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was +always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would +emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles +were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed +when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her +scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look +as if they might have been eaten as something souffle. + +"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose +daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligee. Not that +she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her +knowledge. + +"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right." + +He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove +it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in +a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her +own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom +reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a +fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and +on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that +its utilitarian dial was almost lost. + +It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and +she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes +up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean +things out on the bed--fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted +to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate +handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown--hot, +fagged, sticky--she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour +so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to +eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool, +interested, sweet-smelling. + +When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More +than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long +in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered +that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could +never resent it. + +Ma Mandle's reign was over. + +To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied +magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, +but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things +different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears +caught the familiar phrase. + +"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been +boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of +the way. Don't I know!" + +"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is +no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure +is welcome." + +But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow +pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew. +She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of +ashes. + +Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in +his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that +made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as +bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree +with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her +provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. +She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo +agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma +Mandle fought every ounce of it. + +"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I +never heard of such a thing. Fads!" + +But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental +relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He +only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother +had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, +tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed +miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a +certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf +clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just +the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it +the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among +a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying +up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, +crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he +would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. +Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she +had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face +and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but +she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the +pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote +corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about +not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at +breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the +milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that +had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to +say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now +it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and +Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines. + +If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life +of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told +you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she +would have denied it, furiously. But both were true. + +When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well. + +"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," +she would say, unreasonably. + +"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?" + +If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked. + +Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, +well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat +but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?" + +"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked +over." + +"Oh--to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy." + +In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the +marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said. +"This is your household now." + +But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen +table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a +head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump +chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with +meaning. + +Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of +her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the +fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and +she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the +result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon +parties at the homes of married women of her own age and +station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too +much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery +biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes +of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a +heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing. + +"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what +we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked +teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed +her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the +sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her +clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent +life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing +her face had not coarsened its texture. + +Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between +the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about +cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted +after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him +about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about +Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always +treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at +ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling +of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her +house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts +to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only +thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know +that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which +caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should +not do. + +Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the +theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became +marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man. + +"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say. + +"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some +night life." + +"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. +You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along." + +That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the +end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper +would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill +talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented +it. + +Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the +vaguely suspicious three. + +Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good +deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically +precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long +passe and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and +flowers. + +Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they +liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier +one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for +hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture +absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of +Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression. + +A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own +good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating +heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice +it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him +mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into +his ear. + +"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't +have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old +that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't +enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't +enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week." + +An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would +come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining +point, goaded by much repetition. + +The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a +simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from +mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a +time is all that any man can handle successfully. + +"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling. +Why can't you get along." + +One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a +decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black +lace." + +Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to +die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear +mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think +of me the way I was when I was alive." + +The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. +Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her +temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma +Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation, +denial; vituperation, retort. + +"You'll be happy when I'm gone." + +"If I am it's your fault." + +"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They +don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha--" + +"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever +saw." + +And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at +pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's +got into you two women?" + +It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house, +hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June +night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was +even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars +streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline +blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in +front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded +in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic +bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time, +with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She +came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and +agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this +you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How +right they were--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless. +Unconsidered. In the way. + +By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body +lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how +worried Hugo had looked.... + +Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward +home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted +scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely +fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in +duration. + +She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The +place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of +someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again. +The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She +crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs. + +"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it +wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd--" + +"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's +an old lady--" + +"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year +and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any +reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!" + +"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick." + +Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing +endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through +the tears. + +"No, I'm not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just +wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, +maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love +them too much we really harm them. I suppose--" + +"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?" + +"Yes." + +Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all +worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you +cry before." + +"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right. +I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past +and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to +her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, +maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you." + +Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband +belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by +accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and +deliberately." + +But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If +it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just +now, too, when you're so worried about business." + +"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got +to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the +French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year. +If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood +the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above +water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now." + +"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself +sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the +business--" + +"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see." + +The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out +alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd +better--" + +Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as +though she had just come in. + +"That you, Ma?" called Hugo. + +He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic +little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began +to worry about you." + +"I'm all right. I'm going to bed." + +He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going +over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma." + +Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed +behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled +bravely. + +"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off." + +But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, +you two." + +That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. +Something new, something gentle, something wise. + +She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and +hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into +bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had +lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be +seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to +crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would +express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could +not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her +mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child +to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life. +She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she +sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in +a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They +called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it +to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday +Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a +moth get into her husband's winter suit. + +"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never. +But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my +son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house." + +Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She +forgets. We all forget." + +It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from +the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. +Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare +feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a +line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. +With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's +pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the +light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again. + +She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the +blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her +head ... pounding.... + +At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was +his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he +whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully +by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful +awkwardness up the hall again. + +"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on +a scorcher like this." + +Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said. +She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper +pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read +it. + +"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than +half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder. + +"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in +the world." + +A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished +reading them. + + + + +YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH + + +When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi +Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the +personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in +newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short +story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised +as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and +been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the +background. You can't see the heavens for the stars. + +Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no +introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been +described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on +Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though +quoted, thus: + +"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a +genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, +artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very +force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the +eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a +comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to +a vice." + +Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine +diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, +"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--" + +That was Sid Hahn. + +I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his +likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the +theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and +top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black +cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone +interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew +all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those +middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or +something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the +profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his +having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, +indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally +controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing +in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It +had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized +in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, +at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, +producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy +with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid +Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever +said to himself in so many words: + +"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let +anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to +be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be +selfish." + +Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in +the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination +running through the whole fibre of his being could have been +crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that. + +By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than +Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them +even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood +behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But +taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of +the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world. + +He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early +love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved +what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as +though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. +Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by +people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular +east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with +make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play +with real ones, like God. But always kind. + +No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn +appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired +ingenues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war +horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit +there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and +inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense +and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket +of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It +smells!" + +Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from +years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly +afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had +thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as +they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the +treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes. + +It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the +famous Renee Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and +swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when +she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he +regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that +time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, +very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as +a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop +rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think +of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well." + +Renee had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in +French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?" + +"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is +a woman-hater." + +"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!" + +"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. +They don't need to know a language to understand it." + +"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz +course, was it?" + +Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen +face. "No. I learned that in another school." + +Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might +almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin +Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to +Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a +tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be +said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre. + +He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed +him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs +suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of +office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very +firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, +how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those +expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring +precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable +high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, +while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high +note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it. + +"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer +office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling +and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a--a--" + +"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly. + +Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?" + +"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?" + +Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your +age, you are." + +"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly. + +There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He +probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he +whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, +too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from +another, and doesn't to this day. + +At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, +he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance +to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room +(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was +the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would +have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect +servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for +four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot +plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be +cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, +in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and +wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he +would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly +to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the +firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the +side of the piano (grand). + +His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing +of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the +office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn +called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie. +From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a +sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he +was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in +rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, +lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but +Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit +it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable. + +He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November +evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie +might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of +Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat +over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold +drizzle of the November evening. + +Hahn's apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth +Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to +which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's +errand. + +It was Saki--or Saki's equivalent--who opened the door. A white-coated, +soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. +Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly. + +"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it." + +"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly. + +"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?" + +"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders. + +"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want--" + +Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at +his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room +beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but +something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, +and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve. + +Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with +those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest +eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He +glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing +the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He +had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, +the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he +could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own +inability to reproduce it. + +The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie. + +"God, I wish I could play!" + +"Helps a lot." + +"You play?" + +"Yes." + +"What?" + +"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up." + +"Compose, you mean?" + +"Yes." + +"Play one of those." + +So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good +Night--Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even +published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for +Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the +success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was +sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky +Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long +been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam +and glow in the lamplight. + +When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're +you going to do with it?" + +"With what?" + +"With what you've got. You know." + +Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going +to--I'm going to do a lot with it." + +"Yeh, but how?" + +Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a +long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time. +And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to +be selfish ..." + +As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the +doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what +he had meant to say. + +"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I--" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was +too much. + +"Better." + +They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's +encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, +Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither of them +knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an +intoxicant and a stimulant. + +"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more. +More." + +"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then, +immediately, "No, of course not." + +"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a +baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't +the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a +baby--but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!" + +"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each +other, this ill-assorted pair. + +It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the +play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big +room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One +lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely. + +As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming +out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!" + +"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it." + +"That's what they all say"--grimly--"_after_ they've got it." + +The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was +now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into +earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!" + +"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you +know if you're right." + +In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his +official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort +of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the +theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this +no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense. +There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie, +for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when +she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power +to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which +gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the +ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority. + +When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on +one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped +down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign +stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise +rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on +the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in +tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely +repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant, +perhaps, but characteristic. + + MR. SID. HAHN, + Hotel Savoy, + London, + England. + + It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of + a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to + five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical + creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful + investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any + is extinct. + + WALLIE. + +This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions, +went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised, +wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days +later. + +Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of +magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous +women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and +Cigany music, and cafes and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low +and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely +on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow). + +It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then +a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier. + +Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the +manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long +ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound. + +"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've +found something big!" + +Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good +as that." + +"Play! It isn't a play." + +"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned +good! You don't mean to tell me--" + +"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good--or will be when you get through +with it." + +"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with +two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk +hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a +boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe. + +"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!" + +"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?" + +"Her name's Mizzi." + +"Mizzi what?" + +"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She--" + +"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and +real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine." + +But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings." + +"Beautiful, is she?" + +"No, not particularly. No." + +"Wonderful voice, h'm?" + +"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful." + +Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill +circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry +bricks!" + +"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head +and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides--" + +But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If +I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway. +You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick." + +Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You +wait. You'll see." + +Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep +so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was +unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had +decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera), +it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the +negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first +train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you. +You've got to see her." + +Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs +along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the +royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the +monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve +and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed, +daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers +which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest +men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of +the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the +river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new +building being erected across the way. It was on this building that +Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier. + +The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a +million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells, +running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two +American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women +were employed was dreadful and incredible. + +Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a +little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After +they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before." + +By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an +indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled +him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he +met Mizzi. + +They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive. +Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks. + +"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question. + +Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of +the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking +stuff for them. The women do that." + +And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the +women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up +one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a +musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some +seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing +across the river. Their hands were purple. + +"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But +I know it, anyway." + +Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk +and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because +they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now. +With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But +then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a +personality when he saw it. + +Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called +it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very +straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach +held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a +little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a +pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit. + +"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie. + +Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture. +She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between +seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth +pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its +two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high +in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed +deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it. +Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just +accomplished the gymnastic feat. + +"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage +is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly." + +A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were +abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew +chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men +followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore +overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food--very +small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and +sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the +whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished. + +"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward +Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from +her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise, +over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks +red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic. + +She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book +things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and +white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the +neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear +voice. + +"What's that?" asked Hahn. + +"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't +speak German, did you know that? They hate it." + +The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves +comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of +anticipation. + +"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same +every day." + +Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of +the building debris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of +the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like +this: + + A hundred geese in a row + Going into the coop. + At the head of the procession + A stick over his shoulder-- + +No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly +would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience +gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot +Time": + + + When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling, + All join round and sweetly you must sing + And when the words am through in the chorus all join in + There'll be a _hot time_ + In the _old town_ + To-night. + My + Ba- + By. + +And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still +think it's our national anthem. + +When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped +their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual +beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and +flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in +a hundred cafes. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive +pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality +that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember. + +There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted +description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call +it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these +things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it +is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it. + +So now he said, quietly, "She's got it." + +"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renee Paterne +ever had. A year of training and some clothes--" + +"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself." + +"I'm sorry," stiffly. + +But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I +like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out +anything?" + +"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. +Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's +Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody +knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible +language in the world--Hungarian. They'll stick a _b_ next to a _k_ and +follow it up with a _z_ and put an accent mark over the whole business +and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!" + +"What?" said Hahn, obligingly. + +"On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela +Ter, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's--" + +"What's Gerbeaud's?" + +"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and +guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn't like our +pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous +stuff, this is!" + +After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All +right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. +Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?" + +"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside. +There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You +know--the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue. +There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in +that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of +the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I +waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her--I knew she couldn't +any more than knock me down--and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?' +She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an +Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I +had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she +opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice +of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an +imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of +stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then +they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up +dashed an equipage--you couldn't possibly call it anything less--with +flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside +the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old +frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and +her name is Josefa." + +"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I +don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And +what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?" + +"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the +Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot +of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice +a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always +manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and +see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I +couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just +this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and +she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she +said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh." + +"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously. + +And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know +it. + + * * * * * + +There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition +seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse, +cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman +of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic. +No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the +first--he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades. + +You know she wasn't--and isn't--a beauty, even in that portrait of her +by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on +either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose +very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then +there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for +it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for +pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest." + +While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged +woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook, +she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she +would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement +for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his +cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the +peasant women do it--the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife +cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she +would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing +the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent +figure. + +With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that +some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread +upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her +mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory. + +"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my +girl," Sid Hahn had said. + +She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest--I will not eat--I will not +sleep--I will not love--until I have it." + +Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity. + +"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought +of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had +hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them, +very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though +neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young +faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness. + +Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff--you know--complexes +and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know +to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which +they considered desirable. + +He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi, +remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He +watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on +his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his +own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving +himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world--the one thing he +wanted more than he had ever wanted anything. + +He decided that Destiny--a ponderous, slow-moving creature at +best--needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all +effective plans are. + +Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was +amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became +in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of +audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She +took it to her breast. She romped with it. + +He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for +Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office. + +"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some +little thing might be wrong--you know how they are. And all the rest +would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world--when they like +you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two +weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl +has got more real genius than any woman since--since Bernhardt in her +prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And +it'll _be_ acting." + +"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly. + +"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll +probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago +I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't +get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do +something for me?" + +"Sure." + +"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The +Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. +You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your +friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he +likes to hear you play." + +He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship +that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his +books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion. + +Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the +sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it. +Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the +Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as +any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish +comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal +though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi +stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, +just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a +scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the +steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a +rosy line of splendour. + +The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the +play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door +closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out +after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, +and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, +and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came +again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and +profitless, without nourishment or sweetness. + +The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, +without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New +York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his +round, ugly face in at the opening. + +"Let's surprise Wallie," he said. + +"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly. + +"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being +home for dinner. Unless you're too tired." + +"I'm not tired." + +The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a +quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, +lamp-lighted room. + +Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a +purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers' +windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather +distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They +said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face! + +"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!" + +"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello." + +Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi." + +"Hello," said Mizzi. + +"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn. + +They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again. + +Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly +together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on +the back. "How'd you like it--the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all? +H'm?" + +"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice." + +"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure." + +"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently. + +"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English. + +At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you! +I'll--I'll be glad to take you." + +Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the +three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when +it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to +be home." + +Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go, +suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around. +Hahn--he had to stand on tiptoe to do it--kissed her once on the mouth, +hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie +about the red carpet," he said. + +"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets." + +Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left. +There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and +See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous. + +Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small, +very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the +piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing +the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a +little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it +atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white +keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked +up. His cheeks were wet with tears. + +"God! I wish I could play!" he said. + + + + +LONG DISTANCE + + +Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was +mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny +wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the +plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old. + +You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. +Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any +wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about +him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick +to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to +his task, his surroundings, and his attitude. + +Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that +of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working +position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous +perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which +are likely to trick you in an emergency. + +Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the +absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like +Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all +greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those +rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is +complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds +similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular +English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9. + +The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black +paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him +to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the +other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet +went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he +painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the +whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the +index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently +from his strong hands. + +"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said. + +Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell." + +Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden +chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter +bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, +with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as +A.E.F. and Co. 11. + +"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But +Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?" + +"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One." + +Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began +to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the +centuries-old English garden. + +It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can +appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days. + +Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men +whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could +shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his +pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was +his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's +gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any +passing petticoat that caught his fancy. + +Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, +protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the +law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of +their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street +below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" + +There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of +beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt +as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's +has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with +his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or +a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and +called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks +a little higher. + +But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on +the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down +from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia +Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, +except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more +remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to +be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. + +So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and +I'll be down." + +Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the +streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which +would make them border on the red. + +"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you +had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like +that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're +safe up there." + +The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs +were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine +of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and +stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One +ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he +said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish +heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. +Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing +slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet +straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes +wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her +hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And +as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, +looking after her. + +Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing +at the foot of the pole, waiting. + +They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet +Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot +somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that +same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's +costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) +you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began. + +Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet +was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever +indiscernible among its tender foliage. + +Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss +Kate, and the letter. + +His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war +surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine +of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing--they put it down +under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English +garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the +shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead +chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the +doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the +memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or +weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers--the fingers that +had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days. + +"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the +nerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it. Sometimes just a +word--the right word--will set the thing in motion again. Does he get +any letters?" + +"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet +about--about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that +his leg is healed and she wonders--" + +That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked +Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his +eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she +began to read: + + Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it + rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than + any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're + reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place + takes the prize. + + I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet + darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and + nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something + you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the + leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference + with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how + bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any + features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's + happened to the outside of you, they can't change your + insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that + day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece + of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to + be slapped, God bless the boy in you-- + +A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball +was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. + +"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice. + +Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy +and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood." + +"What'm I doin' with it?" + +"You've just finished painting it." + +Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, +struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement +he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a +little. + +"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, +beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--" + +But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. +She was registering joy--pure joy. + + + + +UN MORSO DOO PANG + + +When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, +in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that +Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a +casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as +unemotionally as a weather bulletin. + +Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert +heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the +Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her +hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where +shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no +answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky. + + * * * * * + +Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the +pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: +"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?" + +And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was +kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing +while my iron was on." + +At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink +georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to +texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so +reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very +brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve +the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top; +finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it. + +As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would +appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young +thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping +criticism. + +"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt +hem. + +Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that +lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I +just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto +and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting." + +Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River +Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at +the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp +and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch +factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing +this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as +unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose +family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy, +summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very +hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town +used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. +Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and +zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crepe de Chine and satin--materials +that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for +party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were +showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that +was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to +Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her. + +Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen +door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, +following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, +caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a +water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth +curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement +department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the +corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was +shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the +room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman +thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could +stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not +be runnin' the streets every night." + +"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you." + +And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in +families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; +affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the +Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, +loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame +house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and +garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged +between her parents. + +Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's +evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin' +downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to +stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed +your hair." + +Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back +porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at +half-past six to go to work. + +Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the +limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. +She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some +errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of +half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a +damp tea towel. + +"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?" + +"No." + +"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't +you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, +h'm?" + +"What for?"--listlessly. + +"What for! What does anybody go out for!" + +"I don't know." + +If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might +have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong +upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy: +"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the +last fella left in the world." + +A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He +is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe +Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see +if I can't make a hit with one of them." + +She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie +Golden's world. + + * * * * * + +In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the +Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the +pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room +foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was +capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter +from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth +to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with +the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from +Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie +gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand +Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, +though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She +followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie +Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from +the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall +styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of +the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected +stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it. + +You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. +Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or +retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not +sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and +arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches +along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls +worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny +parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each +wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch +factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket +had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to +experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, +somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant. + +Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation +for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, +the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of +nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed +laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie +Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had +directed one of her sure shafts at him. + +Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew +it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence +and audacity saved her. + +"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll +find yourself looking for a job." + +"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a +form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type +of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, +ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through +the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, +Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, +certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady +worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, +regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side +of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite +drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like +an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate +mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was +said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort +of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, +it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without +retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy. + +When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs +something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he +ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs +is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' +as a relish." + +And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American +Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his +horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the +depot and the 7:50 train. + +I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness +of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard +her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow +uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there +was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was +anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous +foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was +light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the +asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir +caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid +necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay +colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for +me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the +tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!" + +That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins +of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and +Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it +was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's +drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went +through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from +Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length +of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached +it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick +looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An +air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner. +Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys. + +"Oh, how do!" + +"Good evening!" + +Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On +the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now +stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist. +On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly +lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a +neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You +took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now, +homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick +footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where +the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly +shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little +tingling thrill. + +"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way." + +At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order +to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of +Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they +reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in +retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they +lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss. + +Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at +factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the +Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and +assuming the managership of the office. + +"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old +Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I +step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get +there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will +you be glad, Tess? H'm?" + +Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more +tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job +that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and +all." + +But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp +tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad. + + * * * * * + +No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the +watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood--gone. At first she +hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe +me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose +already." + +"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the +top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' +bullets." + +There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's +big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck +was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid +him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in +their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and +their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In +their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their +young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters--black, yellow, +brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one +head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A +great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs: + +"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a +week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--" + +They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot +platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, +shouting. + +Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received +equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent +boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable +forms of cake. + +Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was +furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in +his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She +tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in +it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of +the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, +inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New +York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it +turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a +cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as +dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and +I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me +swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make +Hatton's place look sick." + +The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among +themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they +could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. +Well, I should say not! + +They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the +type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or +their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as +knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in +men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly +boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish +swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a +little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be +stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy." + +Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink +upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the +music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and +chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands +on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they +giggled and shrieked and ran. + +But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch +hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the +stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases +such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little +conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters +on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last +letter had contained the news of his sergeancy. + +Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in +Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed +looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which +she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were +those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red +triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. +They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere +in the East. These letters were not from him. + +Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop +on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue +shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, +veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, +your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that +complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not +belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No +matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and +pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled +and folded them was pure cerulean. + +Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to +their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' +bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of +starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing +it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might +have been invaluable. It never was asked. + + * * * * * + +Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he +was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care. + +"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes +lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather +ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to +be home, Chuck? Gee!" + +"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in +his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's +swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and +come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind +of--" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: +"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a +regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in +San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the +Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and +acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something +to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are +scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what +some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and +Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. +Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming to his subject, so that he +failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--"it's a joke compared +to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint." + +Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her +head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you +had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything. +You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd +probably be tickled to see you." + +He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't +mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near busted +out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in. +And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day--" + +"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't +a fool." She was perilously near to tears. + +"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--a guy's got +to--he's got no right to--" + +And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled +and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked +differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. +It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, +an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the +extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she +had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! +It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the +broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could +not have put it into words. + +They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of +the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with +little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression +indicative of extreme disgust. + +"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. +"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and +iron and so forth." + +"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often +walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had +never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse +and drifted down the lovely Fox River. + +"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do." + +"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do +it." + +Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing +looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever +against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as +he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red +skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a +minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the +throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in +strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness +surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have +fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! +Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." +She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. +I never did before." + +Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each +brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then +at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I +must have dreamed about this more'n a million times." + +"Have you, Chuck?" + +They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's +good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play +baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are +wonders!" + +"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about +something else?" + +He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or +why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission. + +"About--you." Tessie made it a caress. + +"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and +marchin' and readin' some--Oh, say, what d'you think?" + +"What?" + +"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the darnedest +language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a +piece of bread, you say like this: _Donnay ma un morso doo pang_. See?" + +"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration. + +And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He +knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I +don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?" + +It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her +grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in +France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just +as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it +sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he--he'd be a +different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, +French, girls, swell folks-- + +And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in +the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box." + +"Chocolate cake." + +"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this +morning." + +"Yes, you did!" + +"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the +way you talk." + +"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think." + +"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else." + +"Fried chicken!" + +"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily. + +"You asked me to, didn't you?" + +Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. + +Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden +among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say +they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and +Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not +just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I +suppose it looks like a shanty to you now." + +Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place." + +They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the +river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him--the breast of +the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, +juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a +double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, +but she was wise in feminine wiles. + +From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this +tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it +you get so you don't believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and +chocolate cake." + +"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't +eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken. + +Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie +pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back +again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. +And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand +on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their +kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, +they would have been something like this: + +"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had +you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our house, +with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the +parlour, and all the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get +it. What'll I do if I don't?" + +And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me +and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so +that if I come back--" + +Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French girls. +I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be +raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton +time you get back." + +And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. +I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their +jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a +fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and +fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. +Nix!" + +It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. +Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, +surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little +point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, +beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, +homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those +Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The +husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart +outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at +Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts +outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, +fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. +"Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess." + +"Tha' so? Mine, too. Well, how's everything?" + +Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and +that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available +by the more important sleeping bundle--two yards of goods; a spool of +100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten. + +There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, +felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she +envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty. + + * * * * * + +There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last +letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's +eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. +Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and chateaux. He and a +bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or +something--it was all one to Tessie--and what do you think? She had +kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France. + +The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch +factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied +with a new and more absorbing topic. + +"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?" + +"What about her?" + +"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being +Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being +the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home +and all to go to work in a Y.M.C.A. canteen for her country and bleeding +France." + +"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be +painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the +doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or +baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf +of bread decent. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust +her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over +there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, +and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to +set home and make the best of it. Or take what's left." She turned her +head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the +room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. "I guess when you can't +go after what you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice." + +All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious +Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, +pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing +hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two +inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless +little laugh. + +"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been +at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet." + +He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her +shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off. + + * * * * * + +That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to +Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to +exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in +a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. +Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home +and--and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for +Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless +it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. +But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge +the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' +France. Yeh! Joke! + +The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a +square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In +architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French +chateau, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its +facade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed +magnificence. + +Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, +could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, +usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. +People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it +mattered whether anything happened to her or not! + +Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she +struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little +group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as +she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou +among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she looked straight +ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to +her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. +Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!" + +"Hello, yourself." + +"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink." + +"Think so?" + +She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have someone +following, someone walking home with you. What if he was old enough to +be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying +hair at the sides. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is. +And Nap Ballou told her. + +They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once +heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she +entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were +brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, +peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very much askew. + +"Where you been, Tessie?" + +"Oh, walkin'." + +"Who with?" + +"Cora." + +"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago." + +Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this +coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back." + +Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into +the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's +the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about +the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' +'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't +be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the +same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind +groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She +didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to +think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass +buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain +of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, +smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the +words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. +"What're you going to do--" She rolled over on one side and buried her +head in her arms. + + * * * * * + +There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the +old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest +bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. +But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world +about her. The Chippewa _Courier_ went into the newspaper pile behind +the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye. + +She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her +glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of +unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness. + +"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood +there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden +she ran to her pa--" + +"Both comin' at once, like that--" + +"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She--" + +Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her +and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this +picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I +come in in the middle of the reel, I guess." + +They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly +news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices +high with the note of hysteria. + +"Angie Hatton's beau was killed--" + +"They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet--" + +"The news come only last evenin' about eight--" + +"She won't see nobody but her pa--" + +Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house envying +Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, +and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic +reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one +to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the +luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted +commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in +that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, +bending over her on some pretence that deceived no one, spoke low-voiced +in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. +She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work. + +She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the +river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her +had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless +overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get." + +She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about the +girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. +She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid shoes, flimsy +blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the city +park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a tree +idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lack-lustre eyes. Silhouetted +there against the tender green of the pretty square he looked very old, +somehow, and different--much older than he looked in his shop clothes, +issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where he should have stuck +out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across +her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she had last seen him: +brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of flank. + +Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly: "Somebody +looks mighty sweet this afternoon." + +Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line +you like you stick to it, don't you?" + + * * * * * + +Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats +and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust +the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray in +the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her. + +"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and +turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie +felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a +little as she stepped into the boat. + +The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and +told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same +when he asked her. + +"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little +with the unwonted exercise. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly +to rowing. + +Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough, +considerin' the company." + +He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card. + +When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had +supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White +meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk." + +"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around +her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark so +early." + +"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking +sort of way, though he consumed very little food actually. + +"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, half-heartedly. She decided +that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she +hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white double +row ... + +"Well," she said, "let's be going." + +"No hurry," again. + +Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What +d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at her +own joke. + +"Yes." + +She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, I don't." + +He rose, too. "Why not?" + +"Because I don't, that's why." She stooped and began picking up the +remnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly and +thriftily in the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her. + +"Let me help," he said. And then his arm was about her and his face was +close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after a little +wordless struggle. And then she knew. Tessie's lips were not virgin. She +had been kissed before. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at +him furiously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had +worked in the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped +her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her. + +At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you--you +drunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll ..." + +The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. +With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand and +clawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His +hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed to her that +her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing +against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but the +broken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ran +on, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might have +happened ... to her, Tessie Golden ... that nobody could even talk fresh +to. She gave a little sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It +was growing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. +It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, +climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly for +support, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summer +cottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. A warm, +flickering light danced in the window. + +Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with a +little instinctive gesture, she patted her hair, tidied her blouse, and +walked uncertainly toward the house, up the steps to the door. She stood +there a moment, swaying slightly. Somebody'd be there. The light. The +woman who cooked for them or the man who took care of the place. +Somebody'd-- + +She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her way and +got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, louder now. +Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The +door opened wide. Old Man Hatton! + +She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered over his +glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, that his +face was so kindly. + +Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!" +she whimpered. "It's me!" + +He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside. + +"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid...." + +Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She tried +to straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story she +had planned to tell? + +"Who is it, dad? Who...?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. She stared +at Angie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come in here." + +Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in Angie +Hatton's expensive blouse. Tessie remembered later that she had felt no +surprise at the act. + +"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, dad. +And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you +know. Something...." + +Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. +Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped her +eyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trapped +little animal. She put a hand to her tousled head. + +"That's all right," Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after a +while." + +There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the +fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting +in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tearstained young ladies at +dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a +torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They +evinced no curiosity about this dishevelled creature who had flung +herself in upon their decent solitude. + +Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face and +opened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flashed a +quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, +some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked--well, Tessie put it to herself, +thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry no more--only +inside." + +And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never have +gone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. +It's fierce. You get scared, sittin' home, waitin', and they're in +France and everywheres, learnin' French and everything, and meetin' +grand people and havin' a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said I +didn't care, I wasn't goin' to squat home all my life, waitin'...." + +Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking down +at her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions and +thoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. These +things which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she now +was laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked no +questions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interrupted +with: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-room +foreman, eh?" + +Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. +"Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't +I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make no difference +who I went with, but it does." She looked down at her hands clasped so +tightly in her lap. + +"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference," Angie agreed, and looked up +at her father. + +At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all +kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home +he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He...." + +"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuck +comes home...." + +Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'd +like to learn to swim--and row a boat--and play ball--like the rich +girls--like the girls that's makin' such a fuss over the soldiers." + +Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessie +brought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talk +French." + +Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked +at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd +found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just +one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for +them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you +need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you +say?" + +But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white +with earnestness. + +"C'n you speak French?" + +"Yes," Angie answered. + +"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French: +'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first." + +Angie Hatton said it correctly. + +"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?" + +Angie said it again. + +Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her +hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she +articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that +of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see. + + + + +ONE HUNDRED PER CENT + + +They had always had two morning papers--he his, she hers. The _Times_. +Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and +Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm +and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast +and the First Page simultaneously with no--"Just let me see the inside +sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning. + +In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman +for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal +of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished +between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the +depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which +seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of +a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste, +but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight +thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse +behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost +coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news +to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something +of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline +such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and +vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From +Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a +column or a page at a glance. + +Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise in his chair, +his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the +next and down that, seriously and methodically; giving to toast or +coffee-cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest +is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page +and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, +Emma still caught herself occasionally gazing with appreciation at that +clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew +away from the temple. + +"T.A.," she had announced one morning, to his mystification, "you're the +Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way +purposely." + +"Francis X--?" He was not a follower of the films. + +Emma elucidated. "Discoverer and world's champion exponent of the side +face." + +"I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to +me, but I shan't." He returned to Page Two, Column Four. + +Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, +as is the breakfast talk of two people who understand each other. +Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the +clink of china, an occasional, "Toast, dear?" And when Buck, in a low, +vibrating tone (slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin) said, "Dogs!" +Emma knew he was pursuing the daily _schrecklichkeit_. + +Upon this cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, +the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, +pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon +it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among the rest: + +"One morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who +aren't living on a Boffin basis. There'll be one copy of the _Times_ +delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies +for it, mornings." + +It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, +its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes. + +"Paper, T.A.," she said, and handed it to him. + +"You take it, dear." + +"Oh, no! No." + +She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing +tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess. + +"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--" + +"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three +years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't +endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the day's news, I +shall have to consider our marriage a failure." + +"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--" + +"I am. But there's something about having it read to you--" + +On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her +blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was +shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs +with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the +hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment--just the fraction +of a minute--when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. +Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. +They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper +fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, +apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned. + +Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a +moment--a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover. + +"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and +drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the +price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are +husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two +establishments." + +They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing +an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize +that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning +business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they +most treasured. + +Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the +Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, +and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits +about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of +family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense +that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor +Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory--it +seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, +Emma's interest in the business was unflagging. + +"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this +firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck +& Co." + +"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that +first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don't know +how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into +a Madam Chairman. You'll see." + +She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her. + +By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as +gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and +woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going +abroad. + +Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a +half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft +fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her +eyes. + +"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. +It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's +neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is." + +She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. +The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife +had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and +scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and +pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new +neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the +woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been +obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and +motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many +fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, +and said, "But it looks so--so lumpy around the neck." + +Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie +on--" + +"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar." + +"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but +the high, close-fitting collar." + +The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd +shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, +grumbling. + +Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. +At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had +telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. +People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick +of calling her by any other. + +With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her +attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma +McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those +Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could +cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm +going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished +service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that +hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six +o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for +their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't +blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, +I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...." + +By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts +herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, +initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. +November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them +seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma +now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, +lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she +herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and +bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail. + +She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found +her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week +to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the +autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to +the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, +and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about +this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, +that convinced and impressed you. + +"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma +remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond +pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. +"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method +could sell sandbags in the Sahara." + +Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw +each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, +espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the +street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure +swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him +so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant +attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the +street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert +recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block +ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his +stride, and touched his arm lightly. + +"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?" + +"Yes." + +"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck." + +Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand +on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve. + +"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, +young 'ooman." + +"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation +from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green +and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make +a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker." + +There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical +comedy, dear. These men are--Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you. +Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining +room. There are things at the office--" + +"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there +are two vice-commandants ready to snatch my shoulder-straps." + +"Emma! Emma!" + +At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone +wrong?" + +"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at +the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this +Serbian thing end? I'll call for you." + +"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, +dear." + +He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingue in the +blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent cocked hat. +The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely +smart affair of white silk, high-collared, stitched, expensively simple. +And yet he frowned as he looked. + +"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance. + +"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better +call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife +practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and +the funeral--The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into +the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes. + +But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told +me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, +where she can be bathed and massaged and fed with milk. And if Fisk +could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had +training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg." + +"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't +he?... I really must hurry, T.A." + +"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned +away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her +shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. +Emma's taxi crept into the stream. But uppermost in her mind was not the +thought of Serbians, uniforms, Fisk, or Ritz, but of her husband's right +hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into +a fist. + +She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers; but the +Serbians, despite their four tragic years, turned out to be as sprightly +as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the Fannings dropped +her at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she +doffed her warlike garments, her feminine canniness warned her that this +was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better. + +But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all Jock. + +A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been Grace Gait, one +of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the +profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office she had been +turning out compelling copy. They had been married four years. Now Jock +ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Raynor suite overlooking the +lake in the great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, "Eat +the crust, girlie. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly." + +Emma, uniformed for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter. Buck +listened in silence. + +"You wouldn't know Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody. And the queer +part of it is he doesn't know it. He tries to be cheerful, and I could +weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work +from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning, and from writing free full-page +national advertising copy to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke +fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought. But you +know I haven't been really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the +doctor says it will be another six months before I'm myself, really. If +I had only myself to think of--how simple! But two kiddies need such a +lot of things. I could get a job at Raynor's. They need writers. Jock +says, bitterly, that all the worth-while men have left. Don't think I'm +complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone +who understands often clears the way." + +"Well!" said Emma. + +And, "Well?" said T.A. + +She sat fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her. "Of +course, Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of +him. He'd be beautiful in khaki. But there's work to do right here. And +he ought to be willing to wait six months." + +"They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now." + +"Oh, come, T.A.! One man--" + +"Multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk. Just such another case. Look +at--" + +The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up +alertly. She glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little exclamation of +horror. + +"That's for me! I'm half an hour late! The first time, too." She was at +the telephone a second later, explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the +dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised +for flight. "Sorry, dear. But this morning was so important, and that +letter about Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier." + +"I'm afraid you are, Emma." + +She stared at that. "Why--! Oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, +dear--I'll call for you at the office to-night at five, and we'll walk +home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late--" + +She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a +long minute, staring down at the coffee cup whose contents he did not +mean to drink. The light from the window cameoed his fine profile. And +you saw that his jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away, in +Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't. + +Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules +would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a +thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois. + +And a thousand miles away, in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three +hours later, was slamming down the two big windows of his office. From +up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk +march. And his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you +know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices--a +great gray shaft, towering even above its giant neighbours, its head in +the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until +very recently those windows of his office had been a source of joy and +inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below. The +tangle of I.C. tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond +that, as far as the eye could see. He had seen the changes the year had +brought. The lake dotted with sinister gray craft. Dog tents in Grant +Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms. Men--mere boys, most of +them--awkward in their workaday clothes of office and shop, drilling, +wheeling, marching at the noon hour. And parades, and parades, and +parades. At first Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff--heads of +departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys--would +suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the +street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, +bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its +white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six +contortionistic drum-major. + +By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor +windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from +the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh +parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note. + + "Where are _you_! (sounded the bugle) + Where are _you_? + Where are YOU?!!! + Where + are + you? + Where--are--you-u-u-u--" + +He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out +dictation in a loud, rasping voice. + +"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to +say--" + +_(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)_ + +"--all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and +will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office +think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising--" + +_(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)_ + +"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?" + +"Over th--I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new +record in soap advertising--'" + +"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl +stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in +the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and +swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp +Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab +world. + +"--and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been +sent out from the Raynor offices." + +The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or +breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her +foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left! +Left-right-left! + +Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much +of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by +heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, +thinking, planning; feeling his agony, and trying not to admit the +transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for +Chicago. + + * * * * * + +At five o'clock Emma left the war to its own devices and dropped in at +the loft building in which Featherlooms were born and grew up. Mike, the +elevator man, twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to +gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure. + +"Haven't seen you around fur many the day, Mis' Buck." + +"Been too busy, Mike." + +Mike turned back to face the door. "Well, 'tis a great responsibility, +runnin' this war, an' all." He stopped at the Featherloom floor and +opened the door with his grandest flourish. Emma glanced at him quickly. +His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little +jingling of buckles and strap hooks. + +The work day was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She +could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at +his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that +littered tables and chairs. At the window near the door Fisk, the +Western territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The +two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with +admiration. Into Fisk's face there flashed a look so nearly resembling +resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a +moment with the two. + +Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, "I'm more resigned to war this +minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began." + +Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His +face was unsmiling. "Like my uniform?" Emma asked; and wished, somehow, +that she hadn't. + +Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were +hard, resentful. Suddenly, "Like it! God! I wish I could wear one!" He +turned away, abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared +his throat, apologetically. + +Emma glanced down at her own trim self--at her stitched seams, her +tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands--and +suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. +Something--something-- + +She wheeled and made for Buck's office, her colour high. He looked up, +rose, offered her a chair. She felt strangely ill at ease there in the +office to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the +glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall smiled and nodded and +called through the open door: "My, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck." + +"Be with you in a minute, Emma," said T.A. And turned to his desk again. +She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. "Don't hurry." Out in +the showroom again she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was +ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and +night-gowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth and his +eyes squinted, half closed through the smoke. + +She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment +that lay under her hand. "Spring samples?" + +"Yes." + +"It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money, war or +no war." + +"'S right." + +"How's Gertie?" + +"Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl!--say, I knew what she was +when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long +enough. But I never really knew that kid until now, and we've been +married two years. You know what the last year has been for her; the +baby and all. And then losing him. And do you know what she says! That +if there was somebody who knew the Western territory and could cover it, +she'd get a job and send me to war. Yessir! That's Gert. We've been +married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time +she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was +away on my long spring trip she used to say it wasn't so bad being +alone, because there was always my home-coming to count on. How's that +for a wife!" + +"Gertie's splendid," agreed Emma. And wondered why it sounded so lame. + +"You don't know her. Why, when it comes to patriotism, she makes T.R. +look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, +she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war. Gert +says a travelling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife, +anyway; and that if I went it would only be like my long Western trip, +multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie." + +Emma was fingering the cotton-flannel garment on the table. + +Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. "Sorry I kept you waiting. +Three of the boys were called to-day. It crippled us pretty badly in the +shipping room. Ready?" + +"Yes. Good-night, Charley. Give my love to Gertie." + +"Thanks, Mrs. Buck." He picked up his cigar, took an apprehensive puff +and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar +now. + +Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth +Avenue. Flags of every nation, save one. Uniforms of every blue from +French to navy; of almost any shade save field green. Pongee-coloured +Englishmen, seeming seven feet high, to a man; aviators slim and +elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered +planes, with a notch for every Hun plane bagged. Slim girls, exotic as +the orchids they wore, gazing limpid-eyed at these warrior _elegants_. +Women uniformed to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls, war +accoutred, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. Buck +eyed them gravely, hat and arm describing parabolas with increasing +frequency as they approached Fiftieth Street, slackening as the +colourful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park +mists. + +Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose-pink. Head high, shoulders back, she +matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were +bright and very blue. + +"There's a beautiful one, T.A.! The Canadian officer with the limp. +They've all been gassed, and shot five times in the thigh and seven in +the shoulder, and yet look at 'em! What do you suppose they were when +they were new if they can look like that, damaged!" + +Buck cut a vicious little semi-circle in the air with his walking stick. + +"I know now how the father of the Gracchi felt, and why you never hear +him mentioned." + +"Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot." She did not intend her tone to be +smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have +seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense +his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay +between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New +York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, +Sr. + +"Tell me, Emma. Does this satisfy you--the work you're doing, I mean? Do +you think you're giving the best you've got?" + +"Well, of course I'd like to go to France--" + +"I didn't ask you what you'd like." + +"Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I don't know what you call giving the best +one has got. But you know I work from eight in the morning until +midnight, often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do +my work just as well. And I don't say, either, that it doesn't include a +lot of dashing up and down Fifth Avenue, and teaing at the Ritz, and +meeting magnificent Missions, and being cooed over by Lady Millionaires. +But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of +thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to +oblige." She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart +leather-bound notebook. + +"Spare me! I've had all the statistics I can stand for one day at the +office. I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't +realize--" + +They turned into their own street. "Realize what?" + +"Nothing. Nothing." + +Emma sighed a mock sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. +"Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. +That second window shade is crooked. Isn't it queer how maids never +do.... I'll tell you what I can realize, though. I realize that we're +going to have dinner at home, reg'lar old-fashioned befo'-de-war. And I +can bathe before dinner. There's richness." + +But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly +re-coifed, she again wore the blue uniform, with the service cap atop +her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with +a little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on +a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a +little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of +masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the +table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he +gripped it. + +"It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little +less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see +why you should make me feel like your orderly. It's like being married +to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of +time it takes to dine with your husband." + +It was the bitterest speech he had made to her in the years of their +married life. She flushed a little. "I thought you knew that I was going +out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the +understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30." + +He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the +chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored +self with a placidity that had in it, perhaps, a dash of malice. His +last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an +olive, and nibbled it, head on one side. + +"D'you know, T.A., what I think? H'm? I think you're jealous of your +wife's uniform." + +She had touched the match to the dynamite. + +He looked up. At the blaze in his eyes she shrank back a little. His +face was white. He was breathing quickly. + +"You're right! I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in +the army! I'm jealous of the mule drivers! Of the veterinarians. Of the +stokers in the transports. Men!" He doubled his hand into a fist. His +fine eyes glowed. "Men!" + +And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his hands. + +Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked +down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him. She got up +and came over to him. + +"Why, dear--dearest--I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I +thought you were happy. You--" + +"Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are +gritting our teeth and pretending." + +She put a hand on his shoulder. "But what do you want--what can you do +that--" + +He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. +His head came up. "They've offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a +fancy job. It has to do with merchandising. But I think you know they're +having a devil of a time with all the millions of bales of goods. They +need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes +enough. I know values. It would mean hard work--manual work lots of +times. No pay. And happiness. For me." There was a silence. It seemed to +fill the room, that silence. It filled the house. It roared and +thundered about Emma's ears, that silence. When finally she broke it: + +"Blind!" she said. "Blind! Deaf! Dumb! _And_ crazy." She laughed, and +two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge +uniform. "Oh, T.A.! Where have I been? How you must have despised me. +Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the Government three +strapping men. My uniform, that was keeping three man-size soldiers out +of khaki. You, Jock, and Fisk. Why didn't you tell me, dear! Why didn't +you tell me!" + +"I've tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask +you to go back to the factory." + +"Factory! Factory nothing! I'm going back on the road. I'm taking Fisk's +Western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I +ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisk's salary +until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one +so good. Grace can give the office a few hours a week. And we can +promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road." + +Buck was staring at her, dully. "Grace? Now wait a minute. You're +travelling too fast for a mere man." His hand was gripping hers, tight, +tight. + +Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a +chair around to his. They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth. + +"It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for +lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this: Jock gets a +commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York, and live +right here, with me, in this house. Fisk goes to war. Gertie gets well +and comes back to work for Featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. +Old Emmer takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country--on the +road." + +At that he got up and began pacing the room. "I can't have you do that, +dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me." + +"Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee." + +"Gad, Emma, you're glorious!" + +"Glorious nothing! I'm going to earn the living for three families for a +few months, until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about +that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the +road means these days. It isn't travelling. It's exploring. You never +know where you're going to land, or when, unless you're travelling in a +freight train. They're cock o' the walk now. I think I'll check myself +through as first-class freight. Or send my pack ahead, with natives on +foot, like an African explorer. But it'll be awfully good for me +character. And when I'm eating that criminal corn bread they serve on +dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth I'll remember +when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my +hand on the steering wheel along o' the nobility and gentry." + +"Listen, dear, I can't have you--" + +"Too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. +They'll wire back 'No!' but another fifty'll fetch 'em. After all, it +takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to +change eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but +filling." + +Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, +less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have +faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was +alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the +swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought +within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this +time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every +town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the +readjustment of this little family and business group was so +unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, +seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the +Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be +won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled. + +It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma's awakening +that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed +plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows +suitcase ("Can't count on trunks these days," she had said. "I'm not +taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist"). Buck, standing in the +doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his +khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: +"Can't I help, dear?" Or, "Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the +Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I'd like to know what +they had on you, Emma." + +And from Emma: "Yeh, ain't I noble!" Then, after a little pause: "This +house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it'll look like a Home for +Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be +the only male protector around the place. We'll make him captain of the +home guard." + +"Gertie was in to-day. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to +Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we +ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any +woman in the shop except you. She's down to ninety-eight pounds, poor +little girl, but every ounce of it's pure pluck, and she says she'll be +as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will." + +Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. +"Seventeen--eighteen--When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice +the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand +boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands +money that an operator used to brag about--nineteen--" + +Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was +rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes +closets. + +"All except you, Emma. You'll be working without a salary--working like +a man--like three men--" + +"Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I've got two service +buttons already," she glanced down at her blouse, "and Charley Fisk said +I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm +going to put 'em all on." + + * * * * * + +The day before Emma's departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, +bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the +spirit of the times in her eyes. + +"Jock!" she repeated, in answer to their questions. "My dears, he +doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He +thinks he'll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn't that be +glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss +with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even +listening. He couldn't wait until I had finished a sentence so that he +could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the +moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he +answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And +when I said, 'Dearest, isn't this hotel a _little_ like the place we +spent our honeymoon in--that porch, and all?' he said, 'See this feller +coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. +He's my Captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college +when I was a fresh.'" + +But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words. + +Emma's trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's +date for sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. "When I +went to school," she said, "I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian +War worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I +want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it'll be +over sooner; and because we've won." + +They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear +platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried frantically to +get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully. "Don't look so tragic about it," +she laughed. "It's like old times. These last three years have been a +dream--a delusion." + +He looked up at her, as she stood there in her blue suit, and white +blouse, and trim blue hat and crisp veil. "Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I +believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you, +when you came in off the road after father died and I had just taken +hold of the business." + +For answer she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized +"Silver Threads Among the Gold." The train moved away, gathered speed. +He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the +railing, as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would +allow. He was walking swiftly along with the train, as though +hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train +platform. The brave figure in khaki outside. The blue suddenly swam in a +haze before his eyes; the khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little +veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for Upper +Eleven. + +The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed +and unnoticing as she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her +newspaper suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained +self-control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white +coat that she desired Upper Eleven made up early. + +The White Coat had said, "Yas'm," and glanced up at her. Whereupon she +had said: + +"Why, William!" + +And he, "Well, fo' de lan'! 'F 'tain't Mis' McChesney! Well, mah sakes +alive, Mis' McChesney! Ah ain't seen yo' since yo' married. Ah done heah +yo' married yo' boss an' got a swell brownstone house, an' ev'thing +gran'--" + +"I've got everything, William, but a lower berth to Chicago. They swore +they couldn't give me anything but an upper." + +A speculative look crept into William's rolling eye. Emma recognized it. +Her hand reached toward her bag. Then it stopped. She smiled. "No. No, +William. Time was. But not these days. Four years ago I'd have slipped +you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower berth from +somewhere. But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, +and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift +stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, aged three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney, +aged six months. And I'll dispose my old bones in Upper Eleven." + +She went in to dinner. + +At eight-thirty a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear. + +"Ah got yo' made up, Mis' McChesney." + +"But this is my--" + +He beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar +result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He +stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower +which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman +agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The +key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it +with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain +with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used before +a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one +gray-black hand. Then he bowed like any courtier. + +Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. +Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him--at the wrinkled, +kindly, ape-like face, and he looked down at her. + +"William," she said, "war is a filthy, evil, vile thing, but it bears +wonderful white flowers." + +"Yas'm!" agreed William, genially, and smiled all over his rubbery, +gray-black countenance. "_Yas'm!_" + +And who shall say he did not understand? + + + + +FARMER IN THE DELL + + +Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve +tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the +stuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was +hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that +the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were +curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath +came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld +didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of +fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and +is taking it easy? + +If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell +whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To +do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light +meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his +wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him. + +When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty +daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully you must +be a natural-born loller to begin with, and revert. Bella Westerveld was +and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there +he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast +when he was lying so still. If It had been light, you could have seen +the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient +face. + +They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every +morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching +for the limp, drab, work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by +his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of +depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the +chair by the bed. He was taking it easy. + +Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the +instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the +bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the +feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very +quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the +cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the +old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the +ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But here, +in the unsylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of +Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. A hundred unfamiliar +noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, +there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the +city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had +gone clumping about the flat waking up everyone and loosing from his +wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his +case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the +flat next door must have heard her. + +"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around +like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the backyard and sleep there +if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day." + +Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be +appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed so +mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to +bed, shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat +just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, +grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the +power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily +shocks to him whose most immediate neighbour, back on the farm, had been +a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood +floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal +confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and +distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and +had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the +steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the +Mississippi rolling grandly by. + +Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he +really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's +matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who +released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had been until the winter +months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than +useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The +milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he +had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of +his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in +motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. +He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if +they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, +with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they +used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of +his hands and around the thumbs. + +"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She +gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring +tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up." + +He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted +Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated +and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The +reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly--while it +lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped +back into his old apathy. + +Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his +incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty +streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply +from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely +unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning +great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body +suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than +tragedy--waste. + +For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, +eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and +drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before +sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the +rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he +toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might +fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the +high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with +the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as +were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the +city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though +form and substance are the same. + +Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to +introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a +comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, +have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know +him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of +the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots. + +At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, +slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those +rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals +canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A +serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew +older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated +the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost +of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished. + + * * * * * + +The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds +of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had +married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost +entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of +those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, +then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, +majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical +Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their +relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his +face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for +clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring +flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the +drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men +are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He +seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed +that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a +saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock." + +At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run +faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the +rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at +arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. +The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength +which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to +their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick +of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about +to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing +had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. +There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he +had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going +down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He +had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very +different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He +had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a +tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and +the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never +so much as flicked a dandelion head with it. + +An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship. + +"Hello, Emma." + +"How do, Ben." + +"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf +at Aug Tietjens with five legs." + +"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, +though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking +up." + +Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two +would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of +embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was +no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the +minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty +on easy payments if--when--" + +Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a +fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man." + +Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine +and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes +would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for +her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her +butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, +twelve miles away, than did any in the district. She was not a pretty +girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at +twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well +for Ben Westerveld's future happiness. + +But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers's capable +hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was +the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that +cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from +any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being +a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that +day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the +present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty +miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a +step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded +her apprenticeship. + +"I'll get a beau," she said, "that'll take me driving and around. And +Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town." + + * * * * * + +The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road +toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was +behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could +have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that +later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and +dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought +or speech. + +He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher. He had heard of +her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not +at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history +of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. +That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact +that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip +in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben +Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column. + +He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his +embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his +dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded +forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with +natural canine curiosity. + +Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping +her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand +and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life +that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that +time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he would never have +forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, +quivering body. + +Bella screamed again. Still clinging to him, Ben was saying: "He won't +hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder +reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so +childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. +From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter +femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella the +experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a +queer, electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it +something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. +If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have +realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she +could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was +scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little. + +"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea." + +But Bella looked over her shoulders fearfully to where Dunder stood by +the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought +that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but +still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up +a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. "Go on +home!" he commanded, sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with +a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail +between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog. + +Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. + +"You're the new teacher, ain't you?" + +"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that +dog." + +"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt +nobody. He's pretty big." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben +Westerveld." + +"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed +shyness. + +"Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens that's enough +to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big." + +"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over +to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get +there. You were going the other way, weren't you?" + +"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you +company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden +masterfulness. + +They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one +another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. +The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if +they had been whisked away on a magic rug. + + * * * * * + +Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. She was +contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The +Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was +always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding +cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch +counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should +be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could +find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and +talk and colour. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she +always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or +with an armful of clean towels. + +Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself: "I want to marry Bella." +He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma +Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed +at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she +selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes +and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella +was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his +finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring +woman. But in the end they married. The neighbourhood was rocked with +surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the +dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and +women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends. + +Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of +pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too +honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally +truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this +slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He +had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing +was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. +He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of +fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of +skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line +from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary +of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of Old +Red Front Huckins's bar. + +They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered +in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, +eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the +Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was +too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward +to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, +his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the +county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her +plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm +all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather +have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here." + +Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as +slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin +coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears +she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get +away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube +like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by +her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an +over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty +she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They +moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older +boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. +Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father. +He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill +and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling +his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of +the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm +life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they +found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had +trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road +behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was +asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off +to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not +have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before +his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood +and the reins. + +That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife +together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her +hatred of the locality and the life. + +"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless +reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a +farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your +hand at Dike now for a change." + +Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at +him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come +honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was +a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, +stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had +come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by +thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until +help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the +reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained. + +Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The +boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you +might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs--great +black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; +speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich +patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious +pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a +fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's +opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, +was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter +disappointment of his married life. + +That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben +Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. The +stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat +and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five--a habit that +requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with +difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of +standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered +the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and +his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk +to say: "Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?" + +When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no +unpaid notes to his discredit. + +All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of +his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were +dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dike after +him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; +most of it was back-breaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was +his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he +never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that +he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning +ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said: + +"Well, I got my work cut out for me, an' I do it an' do it right." + +There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, +so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, +middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and +beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday +afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street +in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces. + +As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her +benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on +twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He +had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a +commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella +remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, +surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell +on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the +coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold. + +Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack, +like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and +crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, +and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street +just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you +downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, +after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a +terrible termagant. + + * * * * * + +When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't +dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long +years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But +wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike +with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest +training camp that was to fit them for France and war. + +Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. +Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When +the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how +the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue +shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step +began to lag a little. + +He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were +no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of +rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice +seemed never to stop its plaint. + +"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll +die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he +eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing +down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in +him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that +had made him master and superior in spite of everything. + + * * * * * + +In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma +Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years +ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and +was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, +and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, +never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person--a +sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with +honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow. + +"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. +"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't +make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out +the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it and glad. They +got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or +cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on +shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never +come b--" + +But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed +rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter. + + * * * * * + +They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben +Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to +camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun +County, in the spring, has much the beauty of California. There is a +peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben +Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly +dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, +though, as they do in a play. He dared not. + +They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella +was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past +thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the +movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the +cramped, unnatural mode of living necessitated by a four-room flat--all +these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been +bred in the midst of them. + +She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was +a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and +small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments +and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They +seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from +seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite +bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of +sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery +bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's +for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a +nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some +strange chemical process, to bring them together as well. + +"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. +"Do you want to come along, ma?" + +"What you got to get?" + +"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie." + +"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore." + +"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I +can do to tend to the house, without sewing." + +"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' +besides--" + +"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me." + +The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L +together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, +indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent +store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap +lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would +buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or +a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, +and this they would munch as they went. + +They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their +hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by +delicatessen. + +Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we +find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the +edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another +day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday--a little +feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had +been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be +Thursday. Not that it made any difference. + + * * * * * + +They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not +digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. +There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. +A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or +State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and +taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben +used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the +day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the +firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, +sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he +clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.--if he thought of how +the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and +opinion--he said nothing. + +Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of +the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He +tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and +scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave +him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy. + +"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you +want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and +grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm." + +His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her +that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate +little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to +gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil. + +On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away +one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the +place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful +tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding +forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He +talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy +man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the +street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat +did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of +wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world. + +"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about +917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win +the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say." + +"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is +that Farmer Ben was right. + +Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave +her many hours of unearned freedom for gadding and gossiping. + +"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got +to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting +if I take her along. Ma's goin' with me." + +He loved the feel of Pearlie's, small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. +He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big +brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her +tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender +offices. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and +that he pretended this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair +managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day +looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature +railway. + +They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade. + + * * * * * + +Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. +Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. +They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the +impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they +were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters +were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the +armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben +tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole +being revolted at the thought. + +He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths in their one-button suits and +striped shirts standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third, +spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing +labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and +terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the over-dressed, +scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's +heart. + +The lack of exercise and manual labour began to tell on Ben. He did not +grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his +frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. +Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city +pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by +accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as +a water-crazed traveller in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, +and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully. + +South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare +come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. +Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he +stumbled upon it and standing there felt at home in Chicago for the +first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in +overalls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He +hadn't seen men like that since he left the farm. The sight of them sent +a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he +ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His +fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly. + +At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry +seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar +things for which they had been starving. + +He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of +onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! + +The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure +orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The +cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages +glowed like jade. + +And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, +shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men +in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, +and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men jovial, good-natured, with +clear blue eyes and having about them some of the revivifying freshness +and wholesomeness of the products they handled. + +Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and +garlic and of the good earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, +washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt +strangely at peace. + +It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid +hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to +greet him friendlily: "H'are you!" they said, genially. "H'are you this +morning!" + +He was market-wise enough to know that some of these busy people were +commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It +was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in +front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. +Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing +boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain +blue skirt and a small black hat. + +He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the hat. A funny job +for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays! He turned sidewise +in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one +of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in white +apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving +a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!" + +Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, +tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was +the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank +curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those +intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of +them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so +surprising. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes +and serene brows. + +He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he +acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't +you?" + +She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the +roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: +"Why, Ben!" she said, quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though +she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--that capable, +reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and +significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers. + +"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to +be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been +dealing and smiled. + +"What am I doing here, Joe?" she said. + +Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street +at his own game, and makin' so much money that--" + +But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She +turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?" + +Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we're +livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here." + +She glanced at him, sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?" + +"Yes." + +"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it +briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her +alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a +wren--a business-like little wren--a very early wren that is highly +versed in the worm-catching way. + +At her next utterance he was startled but game. "Have you had your +lunch?" + +"Why, no; I--" + +"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a +bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee +and a sandwich, anyway." + +Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those +intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from +him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was +listening quietly and advising him. + +She interrogated him, gently. But something of his old masterfulness +came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the +rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all." + +So she told him, briefly. She was in the commission business. +Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the +Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, +but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know +that here was a woman of wealth and established commercial position. + +"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, +you must be anyway--it ain't that you look it--but--" He floundered, +stopped. + +She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And +I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My +children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not +going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in +his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first when the +children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything +else. It came natural to me. That's all." + +So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and +of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, +and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came +falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for +deception. When he had finished: + +"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm." + +"I can't. She--I can't." + +She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm." + +He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't." + +"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever +hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. +You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's +ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. +There isn't a bigger job in the world than that." + +For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own +inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go his +shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a +moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered. + +"Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the +way it turned out--but I always wanted to--" + +She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright +brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live +a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't +to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go +back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger +man-size job in the world. It's where you belong." + +Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And +so they parted, the two. + + * * * * * + +He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and +miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he +looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one. + +So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the +right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, +or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew. + +But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness +could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. +High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there +was Minnie's, too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy +Ed's, and-- + +At the other voice his hand trembled so that the key rattled in the +lock, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled +in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's. + +He must just have arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in +progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his +hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, +strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older. + +All this he saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's +two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying: "Hello, pop." + +Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others +were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and +marvelling, and asking questions. + +"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An' +he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that +you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more +here. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He come out +to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!" + +But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike +spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped +way of uttering his words: + +"Say, pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about +an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little +dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I +never see nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep +that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta +the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was +the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of +new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds--womenfolks and +men about eighty years old--runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. +I learned somethin' off of them about farmin'." + +"Forget the farm," said Minnie. + +"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out +at the works for four a day, and six when you learn it right." + +Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What +d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all--" + +Bella laughed, jovially. "F'r Heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're +livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more." + +Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A +stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made +old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered +mother. + +"But I been countin' on the farm," he said, miserably. "I just been +livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I--The streets here, +they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to +go back and be a farmer. I want--" + +And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--no, not a new, but +the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six +hundred acres of bounteous bottomland. + +"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got +another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm." + +Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not +agoin' back to the farm." + +But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' +back, Bella," he said, quietly. "An' things are goin' to be different. +You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you +can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' +back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a +bigger man-size job in the world." + + + + +THE DANCING GIRLS + + +When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform +with a background of assorted star-shells in full flower; a young man in +uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady (in uniform); a young man +in uniform crouching in a trench, dugout, or shell-hole, this happens: + +You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform; you jump +hurriedly over the picture; and you plunge into the next story, noting +that it is called "The Crimson Emerald" and that, judging from the +pictures, all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time. + +Chug Scaritt took his dose of war with the best of them, but this is of +Chug before and after taking. If, inadvertently, there should sound a +faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those +stylish dots ... indicative of what the early Victorian writers +conveniently called a drawn veil. + +Nothing could be fairer than that. + +Chug Scaritt was (and is) the proprietor and sole owner of the Elite +Garage, and he pronounced it with a long i. Automobile parties, touring +Wisconsin, used to mistake him for a handy man about the place and would +call to him, "Heh, boy! Come here and take a look at this engine. She +ain't hitting." When Chug finished with her she was hitting, all right. +A medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, +laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the +grease-grimed grotesquerie of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his +tight-fitting, belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat +russet shoes he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole +owner--much less the proprietor--of anything so successful and +established as the Elite Garage. + +In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin--or in any other sort of town, for +that matter--a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the +community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a +pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug +Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured +forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a paean of sweetness +and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on +gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt +for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on +business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. Gurnee's electric. Chug +didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible he put his foot +down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was +something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to +thrive and flourish. It was like a combination newspaper office and +Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down but there might +generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running +board of an idle car a little group of slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced +young men in form-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly +virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been +picked before he was ripe. + +They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about +them; terse of speech, quick of eye, engine-wise, and, generally, +nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt. Not vicious. +Not even tough. Rather bored, though they didn't know it. In their +boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their +class in a town of Chippewa's size: cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap +talk. This last unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things +mechanical. Baseball, or a sweet-running engine brought out the best +that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the +dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went +by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency +of their skirts. At supper time they would growl to their surprised +sisters: + +"Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to +make a person sick." + +Chug Scaritt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was +his business responsibility on one side; his very early history on the +other. Once you learn the derivation of Chug's nickname you have that +history from the age of five to twenty-five, inclusive. + +Chug had been christened Floyd (she had got it out of a book) but it was +an appendix rather then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of +addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers. +Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking +in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to +that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed +over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky +named Fayette who--but that's another story. + +The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, +or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only +did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them +that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame +cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first +intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation +of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the +Junction. When Chug ran away--which was on an average of twice daily--he +was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about +the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, +would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe. + +He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your +pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug, +deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him +a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night, +before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at +variance with his easy-going nature. + +"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good +toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go +smashing--" + +The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted +tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been +some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had +merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been +too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, +nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his +investigating fingers. + +It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up +and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians +would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an +engine on a track, and his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng! +Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to +sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon). + +Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the +Chippewa _Eagle_. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it +he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that +its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover +has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about +Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed +that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving +mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its +way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not +more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. +True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old +wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced +every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, +hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went. + +He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of +mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to +its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a +monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or +screw in his grease-grimed fingers. + +Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or +a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more +than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his +nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across +a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. +There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a +garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out +of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned +beneficent. + +Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len +Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic. +Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men +who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a +spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on +endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of +dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, +neighbourhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity. + +"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rins'ance, one these here big +concerns--" + +After he was gone Mrs. Scaritt used to find herself listening to the +silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of +hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache to which we have +grown accustomed. + +Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa high school. He had always +earned some money, afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work +in earnest. His mother took it hard. + +"I wanted you to have an education," she said. "Not just schooling. An +education." Mittie Scaritt had always had ambition and a fierce sort of +pride. She had needed them to combat Len's shiftlessness and slack good +nature. They had kept the two-story frame cottage painted and tidy, had +her pride and ambition; they had managed a Sunday suit, always, for +Chug; money for the contribution box; pork roast on Sundays; and a +sitting room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows, +embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling +every corner. + +Mrs. Scaritt had had to fight for Chug's two years of high school. "He +don't need no high school," Len Scaritt had argued, in one of the rare +quarrels between the two. "I never had none." + +The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering +it. Len continued: "He don't go with none of my money. His age I was +working 'n' had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send +him to college, next." + +"Well, if I do? Then what?" + +"Then you're crazy," said Len, without heat, as one would state a +self-evident fact. + +That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the _Eagle_ and +inserted a neat ad. + + LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25 + CENTS A PR. MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST. + +For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing +the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against +the back porch in the sun. Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains +as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or +his flesh tones. In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore +sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy +treasures to Mrs. Scaritt's expert hands. + +Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and +deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle +handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat +paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching +frame. + +At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a +month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here +bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into +her." + +Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and +count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The +look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string. + +For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested +batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the +engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just +emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came +in, en route--a proud, glittering affair--he always managed to get a +chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so +jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an +electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles +possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable. +The least that they called them was juice-boxes. + +At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his +mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always +rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the +time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was +saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home +you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your +pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on +Sundays." + +"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. +Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, +and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over +my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em." + +"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug--those curtain frames." + +"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix +with the lace curtains for you." + +Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much +like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told +of his social side he may be misunderstood. + +Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music +has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: "What is this, +anyway--waltz or fox trot?" This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never +had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was +infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have +started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn't +look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, +but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to +be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second. + +When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky +car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your +view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, +differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the +evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug. + +He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's +amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its +thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple +that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban +lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, +its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it +was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need it would have put you down as +mad. + +Boiled down, Chug Scaritt's crying need was girls. At twenty-two or +three you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but +Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many +labourers at the other for a town of thirty thousand. Its millionaires +had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social +functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Galli-Curci; +and when it came to costume--diamond bracelet, daring decolletage, large +feather fans, and brilliant-buckled slippers--you couldn't tell their +women from the city dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and +plough works. + +The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish +Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. +They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges to which they paid +infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance. + +Chug Scaritt and boys of his kind were left high and dry. So, then, when +Chug went out with a girl it was likely to be by way of someone's +kitchen; or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper +and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in +front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had +been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In +Chippewa they did housework. Big, robust girls they were, miraculously +well dressed in good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for +the most part, with a scum over them; over-fond of coffee; and were +rather dull company. But they were good-natured, and hearty, and +generous. + +The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish +pallor due to lungs dust-choked from work in the rag room. That same +pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa. But they had a +rather appealing, wistful fragility. Their eyes generally looked too big +for their faces. They possessed, though, a certain vivacity and +diablerie that the big, slower-witted Swede girls lacked. + +When Chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little +choice. In the winter he often went up to Woodman's Hall. The dances at +Woodman's Hall were of the kind advertised at fifty cents a couple. +Extra lady, twenty-five cents. Ladies without gents, thirty-five cents. +Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he +escorted home one of the ladies-without-gents. It was not that he +begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went +to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and +out of sheer boredom. Once there he danced every dance and all the +encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to +cheek, in wordless rhythm. His arm about the ample waist of one of the +Swedish girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill +hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played +"Home Sweet Home." The conversation, if any, varied little. + +"The music's swell to-night," from the girl. + +"Yeh." + +"You're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with +you forever." This with a pressure of the girl's arm, and spoken with a +little accent, whether Swedish, Belgian, or Slavic. + +"They all say that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +He was very little stirred, really. + +"Yeh, you are. I wish you was. It makes no never minds to you who you're +dancing with, s'long's you're dancing." + +This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It +startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look +at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would +have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks +with a stolid persistence. + +"Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded. He was +rather surprised to find that this was so. + +"Wisht it was thirty." + +That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. +When Chug said, "Can I see you home?" he knew the answer before he put +the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of +time, waiting, when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you +when you failed to show up. Telephoned you when you were busy. Didn't +give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven eighths of it +herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl, with the physical +development of a woman and the mind of a child. There were dozens like +her in Chippewa. + +If the girls of his own class noticed him at all it was the more to +ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their +vision down Outagamie Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy +of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making +advances even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped +acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie +Hatton, Old Man Hatton's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa--so +rich that she drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind. + +You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were, take +them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you +danced with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what +you were going to say to them. + +Mrs. Scaritt suspected in a vague sort of way that Chug was "running +with the hired girls." The thought distressed her. She was too smart a +woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy. + +"Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I like to fuss +around for company." She was a wonderful cook, Mrs. Scaritt, and liked +to display her skill. + +"Who is there to bring?" + +"The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing +up for, evenings?" + +"Nobody." + +Mrs. Scaritt tried another tack. + +"I s'pose this house isn't good enough for 'em? Is that it?" + +"Good enough!" Chug laughed rather grimly. "I'd like to know what's the +matter with it!" + +There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as +spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching +days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house +by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt had rebelled. + +"I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to 'em. It's got so I can +tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven fifty-two goes by in +the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear +the 'leven-forty. Let's stay, Chug." + +So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a +convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by +the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric-lighted, with a +cement walk front and back and a porch with a wicker swing and flower +baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, +though she, in turn, served him meals that would have threatened the +waist-line of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for +instance (it sounds sickish, but wait!) which she baked in a deep pan, +and over which she poured a golden-brown custard all flecked with crusty +melted sugar. You took a bite and lo! it had vanished like a sweet +dewdrop, leaving in your mouth a taste as of nectar, and clover-honey, +and velvet cream. + +Mrs. Scaritt learned to gauge Chug's plans for the evening by his +ablutions. Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted +to a rite. In the old days Chug's father had always made a brief enough +business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the +kitchen sink or on the back-porch bench sufficed. The noises he made +were out of all proportion to the results obtained. His snufflings, and +snortings, and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he +emerged from them you were surprised to find that he had merely washed +his face. + +Chug had grease to fight. He had learned how in his first days at the +garage. His teacher had been old Rudie, a mechanic who had tinkered +around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about +them than their inventor. Soap and water alone were powerless against +the grease and carbon and dust that ground themselves into Chug's skin. +First, he lathered himself with warm, soapy water. Then, while arms, +neck, and face were still wet, he covered them with oil--preferably +lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust over all; great +handfuls of it. The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin +smooth and white. Old Rudie, while advocating this process, made little +use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method +of washing in gasoline guaranteed to take the varnish off a car fender. +It seemed to leave Rudie's tough hide undevastated. + +At twenty-four Chug Scaritt was an upstanding, level-headed, and +successful young fellow who worked hard all day and found himself +restless and almost irritable toward evening. He could stay home and +read, or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very +quiet. For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the +street corner, the Y.M.C.A. This last had proved a boon. The swimming +pool, the gym, the reading room, had given Chug many happy, healthful +hours. But, after all, there was something-- + +Chug didn't know it was girls--girls you could talk to, and be with, and +take around. But it was. After an hour in the pool, or around the +reading table, or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the +quiet street. He could go home. Or there was Wanda. If he went home he +found himself snapping rather irritably at his mother, for no reason at +all. Ashamed of doing it. Powerless, somehow, to stop. + +He took to driving in the evening: long drives along the country roads, +his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He +used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes +on the road; the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda +along, or one of the mill girls. But not often. They were disappointed +if you didn't drive with one arm around them. He liked being alone. It +soothed him. + +It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain +daughter of the Widow Weld. The Widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of +widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When +you met her together with her daughter Elizabeth you were supposed to +say, "Not mother and daughter! Surely not! Sisters, of course." +Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf-club dances on +Saturday night she would sit, unsought, against the wall while her +skittish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man +would cross the floor toward her and her heart would give a little leap, +but he always asked the girl seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced +much better than her mother--much better than most girls, for that +matter. But she was small, and dark, and rather shy, and wore thick +glasses that disguised the fineness of her black-lashed gray eyes. Now +and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, "Is my +little girl having a good time?" The Welds had no money, but they +belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted +significant eyebrows at mention of the Widow Weld's name, and it was +common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time +because of the scanty provender. The widow kowtowed shamelessly to the +moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. +Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly +loyal to her. Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly +maternal. But she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and +pretence. She was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom +her mother was servile. Her strange friendship with Angie Hatton, the +lovely and millioned, was the one thing in Elizabeth's life of which her +Machiavellian mother approved. + +"Betty, you practically stuck out your tongue at Mr. Oakley!" This after +a dance at which Elizabeth had been paired off, as usual, with the puffy +and red-eyed old widower of that name. + +"I don't care. His hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes." + +"Next to Hatton, he's the richest man in Chippewa. And he likes you." + +"He'd better not!" She spat it out, and the gray eyes blazed behind the +glasses. "I'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life than +dance with him. Fat!" + +"Well, my dear, you're no beauty, you know," with cruel frankness. + +"I'm not much to look at," replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful +inside." + +"Rot!" retorted the Widow Weld, inelegantly. + +Had you lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been +unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that +of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle. + +When Chug Scaritt first met the Weld girl she was standing out in the +middle of the country road at ten-thirty P.M., her arms outstretched and +the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road +toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion and the April air. His +thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected. + +"If I can rent Bergstrom's place next door when their lease is up I'll +knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in +'em.... Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next +week.... That was swell cake Ma had for supper.... What's that in the +road! What's!--" + +Jammed down the foot-brake. Jerked back the emergency. A girl standing +in the road. A dark mass in the ditch by the road-side. He was out of +his car. He recognized her as the Weld girl. + +"'S'matter?" + +"In the ditch. She's hurt. Quick!" + +"Whose car?" Chug was scrambling down the banks. + +"Hatton's. Angie Hatton's." + +"Gosh!" + +Over by the fence, where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found +sitting up, dizzily, and saying, "Betty! Betty!" in what she supposed +was a loud cry but which was really a whisper. + +"I'm all right, dear. I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you--" + +She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls +clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of +the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender. + +"You're a lucky bunch," said Chug. "Who was driving?" + +"I was," said Angie Hatton. + +"It wasn't her fault," the Weld girl put in, quickly. "We were coming +from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm-wagon coming +toward us. One of those big ones. The middle of the road. Perhaps he was +asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought he would, of course. At the last +minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep." + +"Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you both home in +twenty minutes. We'll have to leave five thousand dollars' worth of car +in the road till morning. It'll be all right." + +He did get them home in twenty minutes and the five thousand dollars' +worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. +Old Man Hatton himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following +day. Chug met him in overalls, smudge-faced as he was. Old Man Hatton +put out his hand. Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw. + +"That's all right," said Old Man Hatton, and grasped it firmly. "Want to +thank you." + +"That's all right," said Chug. "Didn't do a thing." + +"No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays--" He +looked around the garage. "Work here, I suppose?" + +"Yessir." + +"If there's anything I can do for you? Over at the mill." + +"Guess not," said Chug. + +"Treat you right here, do they?" + +"Fine." + +"Let's see. Who owns this place?" + +"I do." + +Old Man Hatton's face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles. He threw +back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "One on me. +Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one." + +Chug walked to the street with him. "Your daughter, she's got a lot of +nerve, all right. And that girl with her--Weld. Say, not a whimper out +of her and the blood running down her face. She all right?" + +"Cut her head a little. They're both all right. Angie wouldn't even stay +in bed. Well, as I say, if there's anything--?" + +Chug flushed a little. "Tell you what, Mr. Hatton. I'm working on a +thing that'll take the whine out of the Daker." + +Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things. The Daker +is the best car for the money in the world. Not much for looks but +everything in the engine. And everyone who has ever owned one knows that +its only fault is the way its engine moans. Daker owners hate that moan. +When you're going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a +banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked +over it. + +"Can't be done," said Old Man Hatton. + +"Another three months and I'll show you." + +"Hope you do, son. Hope you do." + +But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys +destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a +long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some +eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an +ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval +between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt.... + +No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way +it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city. No going into detail +concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. +These things were important and interesting. But perhaps not more +interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following +that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth +Weld, and saying, "Angie Hatton's a smooth little dancer, all right; but +she isn't in it with you." + +For Chippewa, somehow, had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, +cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, +figuratively, wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all +artificial social boundaries. Chug Scaritt, in uniform, must be kept +happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, fun, amusement, +entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall +in Elm Street, on what had been a vacant lot. And there, by day or by +night, were to be had music, and dancing, and hot cakes, and magazines, +and hot coffee, and ice cream and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight, +and slim, and young, and bright-eyed, and companionable. Girls like +Angie Hatton. Girls like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat +against the wall at the golf-club dances and prayed in her heart that +fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance. + +Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to +her, in a tactful aside, "My dear, you've danced three times this +evening with the Scaritt boy. You know that's against the rules." + +Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could +hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true +like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent +effort. She liked that, and understood. + +It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls +could understand like that. She talked to you, straight. Looked at you, +straight. Was interested in the things that interested you. No +waist-squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses. + +"I'm going to try to get over." + +"Say, you don't want to do that." + +"I certainly do. Why not?" + +"You're--why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're--" + +"I'm as old as you, or almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to +work in the canteens, and entertain the boys. If they'll take me. I'll +have to lie six months on my age." + +Rudie was in charge of the garage now. "That part of it's all right," +Chug confided to the Weld girl. "Only thing that worries me is Ma. She +hasn't peeped, hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum, all right." + +"I don't know your mother," said the Weld girl. + +"Thasso," absent-mindedly, from Chug. + +"I'd--like to." + +Chug woke up. "Why, say, that'd be fine! Listen, why don't you come for +Sunday dinner. I've got a hunch we'll shove off next week, and this'll +be my last meal away from camp. They haven't said so, but I don't +know--maybe you wouldn't want to, though. Maybe you--we live the other +side of the tracks--" + +"I'd love to," said the Weld girl. "If you think your mother would like +to have me." + +"Would she! And cook! Say!" + +The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all +right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went. + +It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized +that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of +shortcake he leaned back and said, "Death, where is thy sting?" But his +mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld +that it was plain food but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it. + +Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. "Mrs. Scaritt, it's the best dinner I've +ever eaten." + +Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: "Oh, now! You +folks up in the East End--" + +"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows +that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little +to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of +crackers-and-tea codfish, really." + +"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But +Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly +at each other. + +An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, +the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em +up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high +school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), +she went home, escorted by Chug. + +Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months +passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had +swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines. + +Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld +went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. +Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, +tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She +danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the +boards. She danced in hospitals, chateaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, +Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two +weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at +night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let +them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She +danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New +York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and +once with a general. But never a dance with Chug. + +Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. +She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to +look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor +toward her--her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl +next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the +taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her +mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in +thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish +note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, +shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the +wheezy breath, should ask her to dance. + +She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in +the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's +fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return. + +Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown +figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did +this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might +be said to have been alarmingly accelerated. + +Sometimes--though they did not know it--she and Chug were within a half +hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met. + +Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank +Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in +that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so. + +"It has been awful here," said the Widow Weld. "Nothing to do but sew at +the Red Cross shop; and no sugar or white bread." + +"It must have been," agreed Elizabeth. + +"They're giving a dance for you--and dinner--a week from Saturday, at +the golf club. In your honour." + +"Dance!" Elizabeth closed her eyes, faintly. Then, "Who is?" + +"Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it--that is, it was his idea. But the +club wanted to tender some fitting--" + +"I won't go." + +"Oh, yes, you will." + +Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask. + +"Have the boys come back?" + +"What boys?" + +"The--the boys." + +"Some of them. You know about dear Harry Hatton, of course. Croix de--" + +"What have they done with the Khaki Club, where they used to give the +dances?" + +"Closed. Long ago. There was some talk of keeping it open for a +community centre, or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you'll +have to have a dress for Saturday night, I wonder if that old chiffon, +with a new--" + + * * * * * + +Chug Scaritt came home in September. The First National Bank Building +seemed, somehow, to have shrunk. And his mother hadn't had all that gray +hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudie had +made out, all right, hadn't he? Good old scout. + +"The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. +Old Rudie was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you +to-night, Chug." + +"Where's this party? I don't want any party." + +"Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up +yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't--" + +"Don't they give dances any more at the Soldiers' Club down on Elm?" + +"Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they +called a community club. The _Eagle_ was boosting for a big new place. +What they called a Community Memorial Centre. But I don't know. It kind +of fell through, I guess." + +"I won't go," said Chug, suddenly. + +"Go where, Chug?" + +But instead of answering, Chug put his second question. + +"Have you seen--is that--I wonder if that Weld girl's back." + +"My, yes. Papers were full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance, and +all, at the Country Club. They say--" + +A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing +at Woodman's Hall. There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on +a georgette blouse and high-heeled shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled +up at him. Wanda had bad teeth--yellow, with a sort of scum over them. + +"I sure was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say. +Honest, I could dance with you all night." A little pressure of her arm. + +Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke. Dimly he +heard himself saying, "Oh, they all tell me that." + +"Crazy about yourself, ain't you!" + +"Not as crazy as I am about you," with tardy gallantry. + +Then, suddenly, Chug stopped dancing. He stopped, and stepped back from +Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its +jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of +the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in +vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded +floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety +wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of +Chippewa's night. + + + THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Half Portions, by Edna Ferber + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS *** + +***** This file should be named 14714.txt or 14714.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/7/1/14714/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Aaron Reed and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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