XIII
If those vague characteristics called (variously) magnetism, manner, grace, distinction, attractiveness, fascination, go to make up that nebulous quality known as charm; and if the possessor of that quality is accounted fortunate in his equipment for that which the class-day orators style the battle of life, then Dirk DeJong was a lucky lad and life lay promisingly before him. Undoubtedly he had it; and undoubtedly it did. People said that things “came easy” for Dirk. He said so himself, not boastfully, but rather shyly. He was not one to talk a great deal. Perhaps that was one of his most charming qualities. He listened so well. And he was so quietly effortless. He listened while other people talked, his fine head inclined just a little to one side and bent toward you. Intent on what you were saying, and evidently impressed by it. You felt him immensely intelligent, appreciative. It was a gift more valuable than any other social talent he might have possessed. He himself did not know how precious an attribute this was to prove in a later day when to be allowed to finish a sentence was an experience all too rare. Older men especially said he was a smart young feller and would make his mark. This, surprisingly enough, after a conversation to which he had contributed not a word other than “Yes,” or “No,” or, “Perhaps you’re right, sir,” in the proper places.
Selina thought constantly of Dirk’s future. A thousand other thoughts might be racing through her mind during the day—plans for the farm, for the house—but always, over and above and through all these, like the steady beat of a drum penetrating sharper and more urgent sounds—was the thought of Dirk. He did well enough at high school. Not a brilliant student, nor even a very good one. But good enough. Average. And well liked.
It was during those careless years of Dirk’s boyhood between nine and fifteen that Selina changed the DeJong acres from a worn-out and down-at-heel truck farm whose scant products brought a second-rate price in a second-rate market to a prosperous and blooming vegetable garden whose output was sought a year in advance by the South Water Street commission merchants. DeJong asparagus with firm white thick stalk bases tapering to a rich green streaked with lavender at the tips. DeJong hothouse tomatoes in February, plump, scarlet, juicy. You paid for a pound a sum Pervus had been glad to get for a bushel.
These six or seven years of relentless labour had been no showy success with Selina posing grandly as the New Woman in Business. No, it had been a painful, grubbing, heart-breaking process as is any project that depends on the actual soil for its realization. She drove herself pitilessly. She literally tore a living out of the earth with her two bare hands. Yet there was nothing pitiable about this small energetic woman of thirty-five or forty with her fine soft dark eyes, her clean-cut jaw-line, her shabby decent clothes that were so likely to be spattered with the mud of the road or fields, her exquisite nose with the funny little wrinkle across the bridge when she laughed. Rather, there was something splendid about her; something rich, prophetic. It was the splendour and richness that achievement imparts.
It is doubtful that she ever could have succeeded without the money borrowed from August Hempel; without his shrewd counsel. She told him this, sometimes. He denied it. “Easier, yes. But you would have found a way, Selina. Some way. Julie, no. But you, yes. You are like that. Me, too. Say, plenty fellers that was butchers with me twenty years ago over on North Clark Street are butchers yet, cutting off a steak or a chop. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Kruger. What’ll it be to-day?’ ”
The Hempel Packing Company was a vast monster now stretching great arms into Europe, into South America. In some of the yellow journals that had cropped up in the last few years you even saw old Aug himself portrayed in cartoons as an octopus with cold slimy eyes and a hundred writhing reaching tentacles. These bothered Aug a little, though he pretended to laugh at them. “What do they want to go to work and make me out like that for? I sell good meat for all I can get for it. That’s business, ain’t it?”
Dirk had his tasks on the farm. Selina saw to that. But they were not heavy. He left for school at eight in the morning, driving, for the distance was too great for walking. Often it was dark on his return in the late afternoon. Between these hours Selina had accomplished the work of two men. She had two field-helpers on the place now during the busy season and a woman in the house, the wife of Adam Bras, one of the labourers. Jan Snip, too, still worked about the place in the barn, the sheds, tending the coldframes and hothouses, doing odd jobs of carpentering. He distrusted Selina’s new-fangled methods, glowered at any modern piece of machinery, predicted dire things when Selina bought the twenty acres that comprised the old Bouts place adjoining the DeJong farm.
“You bit off more as you can chaw,” he told her. “You choke yet. You see.”
By the time Dirk returned from school the rough work of the day was over. His food was always hot, appetizing, plentiful. The house was neat, comfortable. Selina had installed a bathroom—one of the two bathrooms in High Prairie. The neighbourhood was still rocking with the shock of this when it was informed by Jan that Selina and Dirk ate with candles lighted on the supper table. High Prairie slapped its thigh and howled with mirth.
“Cabbages is beautiful,” said old Klaas Pool when he heard this. “Cabbages is beautiful I betcha.”
Selina, during the years of the boy’s adolescence, had never urged him to a decision about his future. That, she decided, would come. As the farm prospered and the pressure of necessity lifted she tried, in various ingenious ways, to extract from him some unconscious sign of definite preference for this calling, that profession. As in her leanest days she had bought an occasional book at the cost of much-needed shoes for herself so now she bought many of them with money that another woman would have used for luxury or adornments. Years of personal privation had not killed her love of fine soft silken things, mellow colouring, exquisite workmanship. But they had made it impossible for her to covet these things for herself. She loved to see them, to feel them. Could not wear them. Years later, when she could well afford a French hat in one of the Michigan Avenue millinery shops, she would look at the silk and satin trifles blooming in the windows like gay brilliant flowers in a conservatory—and would buy an untrimmed “shape” for $2.95 in Field’s basement. The habit of a lifetime is strong. Just once she made herself buy one of these costly silk-and-feather extravagances, going about the purchase deliberately and coldly as a man gets drunk once for the experience. The hat had cost twenty-two dollars. She never had worn it.
Until Dirk was sixteen she had been content to let him develop as naturally as possible, and to absorb impressions unconsciously from the traps she so guilefully left about him. Books on the lives of great men—lives of Lincoln, of Washington, Gladstone, Disraeli, Voltaire. History. Books on painting, charmingly illustrated. Books on architecture; law; medicine, even. She subscribed to two of the best engineering magazines. There was a shed which he was free to use as a workshop, fitted up with all sorts of tools. He did not use it much, after the first few weeks. He was pleasantly and mildly interested in all these things; held by none of them. Selina had thought of Roelf when they were fitting up the workshop. The Pools had heard from Roelf just once since his flight from the farm. A letter had come from France. In it was a sum of money for Geertje and Jozina—a small sum to take the trouble to send all the way from an outlandish country, the well-to-do Pool household thought. Geertje was married now to Vander Sijde’s son Gerrit and living on a farm out Low Prairie way. Jozina had a crazy idea that she wanted to go into the city as a nurse. Roelf’s small gift of money made little difference in their day. They never knew the struggle that the impecunious young Paris art student had had to save it sou by sou. Selina had never heard from him. But one day years later she had come running to Dirk with an illustrated magazine in her hand.
“Look!” she had cried, and pointed to a picture. He had rarely seen her so excited, so stirred. The illustration showed a photographic reproduction of a piece of sculpture—a woman’s figure. It was called The Seine. A figure sinuous, snake-like, graceful, revolting, beautiful, terrible. The face alluring, insatiable, generous, treacherous, all at once. It was the Seine that fed the fertile valley land; the Seine that claimed a thousand bloated lifeless floating Things; the red-eyed hag of 1793; the dimpling coquette of 1650. Beneath the illustration a line or two—Roelf Pool . . . Salon . . . American . . . future . . .
“It’s Roelf!” Selina had cried. “Roelf. Little Roelf Pool!” Tears in her eyes. Dirk had been politely interested. But then he had never known him, really. He had heard his mother speak of him, but——
Selina showed the picture to the Pools, driving over there one evening to surprise them with it. Mrs. Klaas Pool had been horrified at the picture of a nude woman’s figure; had cried “Og heden!” in disgust, and had seemed to think that Selina had brought it over in a spirit of spite. Was she going to show it to the rest of High Prairie!
Selina understood High Prairie folk better now, though not altogether, even after almost twenty years of living amongst them. A cold people, yet kindly. Suspicious, yet generous. Distrustful of all change, yet progressing by sheer force of thrift and unceasing labour. Unimaginative for generations, only to produce—a Roelf Pool.
She tried now to explain the meaning of the figure Roelf had moulded so masterfully. “You see, it’s supposed to represent the Seine. The River Seine that flows through Paris into the countryside beyond. The whole history of Paris—of France—is bound up in the Seine; intertwined with it. Terrible things, and magnificent things. It flows just beneath the Louvre. You can see it from the Bastille. On its largest island stands Notre Dame. The Seine has seen such things, Mrs. Pool!——”
“Whatdomtalk!” interrupted the late widow. “A river can’t see. Anybody knows that.”
At seventeen Dirk and Selina talked of the year to come. He was going to a university. But to what university? And what did he want to study? We-e-ll, hard to say. Kind of a general course, wasn’t there? Some languages—little French or something—and political economy, and some literature and maybe history.
“Oh,” Selina had said. “Yes. General. Of course, if a person wanted to be an architect, why, I suppose Cornell would be the place. Or Harvard for law. Or Boston Tech for engineering, or——”
Oh, yeh, if a fellow wanted any of those things. Good idea, though, to take a kind of general course until you found out exactly what you wanted to do. Languages and literature and that kind of thing.
Selina was rather delighted than otherwise. That, she knew, was the way they did it in England. You sent your son to a university not to cram some technical course into him, or to railroad him through a book-knowledge of some profession. You sent him so that he might develop in an atmosphere of books, of learning; spending relaxed hours in the companionship of men who taught for the love of teaching; whose informal talks before a study fire were more richly valuable than whole courses of classroom lectures. She had read of these things in English novels. Oxford. Cambridge. Dons. Ivy. Punting. Prints. Mullioned windows. Books. Discussion. Literary clubs.
This was England. An older civilization, of course. But there must be something of that in American universities. And if that was what Dirk wanted she was glad. Glad! A reaching after true beauty.
You heard such wonderful things about Midwest University, in Chicago. On the south side. It was new, yes. But those Gothic buildings gave an effect, somehow, of age and permanence (the smoke and cinders from the Illinois Central suburban trains were largely responsible for that, as well as the soft coal from a thousand neighbouring chimneys). And there actually was ivy. Undeniable ivy, and mullioned windows.
Dirk had suggested it, not she. The entrance requirements were quite mild. Harvard? Yale? Oh, those fellows all had wads of money. Eugene Arnold had his own car at New Haven.
In that case, they decided, Midwest University, in Chicago, on the south side near the lake, would do splendidly. For a general course, sort of. The world lay ahead of Dirk. It was like the childhood game of counting buttons.
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.
Together they counted Dirk’s mental buttons but it never came out twice the same. It depended on the suit you happened to be wearing, of course. Eugene Arnold was going to take law at Yale. He said it would be necessary if he was going into the business. He didn’t put it just that way, when talking to Dirk. He said the damned old hog business. Pauline (she insisted that they call her Paula now) was at a girls’ school up the Hudson—one of those schools that never advertise even in the front of the thirty-five-cent magazines.
So, at eighteen, it had been Midwest University for Dirk. It was a much more economical plan than would have resulted from the choice of an eastern college. High Prairie heard that Dirk DeJong was going away to college. A neighbour’s son said, “Going to Wisconsin? Agricultural course there?”
“My gosh, no!” Dirk had answered. He told this to Selina, laughing. But she had not laughed.
“I’d like to take that course myself, if you must know. They say it’s wonderful.” She looked at him, suddenly. “Dirk, you wouldn’t like to take it, would you? To go to Madison, I mean. Is that what you’d like?”
He stared. “Me! No! . . . Unless you want me to, Mother. Then I would, gladly. I hate your working like this, on the farm, while I go off to school. It makes me feel kind of rotten, having my mother working for me. The other fellows——”
“I’m doing the work I’m interested in, for the person I love best in the world. I’d be lost—unhappy—without the farm. If the city creeps up on me here, as they predict it will, I don’t know what I shall do.”
But Dirk had a prediction of his own to make. “Chicago’ll never grow this way, with all those steel mills and hunkies to the south of us. The north side is going to be the place to live. It is already.”
“The place for whom?”
“For the people with money.”
She smiled then so that you saw the funny little wrinkle across her nose. “Well, then the south section of Chicago is going to be all right for us yet a while.”
“Just you wait till I’m successful. Then there’ll be no more working for you.”
“What do you mean by ‘successful’, Sobig?” She had not called him that in years. But now the old nickname came to her tongue perhaps because they were speaking of his future, his success. “What do you mean by ‘successful’, Sobig?”
“Rich. Lots of money.”
“Oh, no, Dirk! No! That’s not success. Roelf—the thing Roelf does—that’s success.”
“Oh, well, if you have money enough you can buy the things he makes, and have ’em. That’s almost as good, isn’t it?”
Midwest University had sprung up almost literally overnight on the property that had been the site of the Midway Plaisance during the World’s Fair in Chicago in ’93. One man’s millions had been the magic wand that, waved over a bare stretch of prairie land, had produced a seat of learning. The university guide book spoke of him reverently as the Founder, capitalizing the word as one does the Deity. The student body spoke of him with somewhat less veneration. They called him Coal-Oil Johnny. He had already given thirty millions to the university and still the insatiable maw of this institute of learning yawned for more. When oil went up a fraction of a cent they said, “Guess Coal-Oil Johnny’s fixing to feed us another million.”
Dirk commenced his studies at Midwest University in the autumn of 1909. His first year was none too agreeable, as is usually the case in first years. He got on well, though. A large proportion of the men students were taking law, which accounts for the great number of real-estate salesmen and insurance agents now doing business in and about Chicago. Before the end of the first semester he was popular. He was a natural-born floor committeeman and badges bloomed in his buttonhole. Merely by donning a ready-made dress suit he could give it a made-to-order air. He had great natural charm of manner. The men liked him, and the girls, too. He learned to say, “Got Pol Econ at ten,” which meant that he took Political Economy at that hour; and “I’d like to cut Psyk,” meant that he was not up on his approaching lesson in Applied Psychology. He rarely “cut” a class. He would have felt that this was unfair and disloyal to his mother. Some of his fellow students joked about this faithfulness to his classes. “Person would think you were an Unclassified,” they said.
The Unclassifieds were made up, for the most part, of earnest and rather middle-aged students whose education was a delayed blooming. They usually were not enrolled for a full course, or were taking double work feverishly. The Classifieds, on the other hand, were the regularly enrolled students, pretty well of an age (between seventeen and twenty-three) who took their education with a sprinkling of sugar. Of the Unclassified students the University catalogue said:
Persons at least twenty-one years of age, not seeking a degree, may be admitted through the office of the University Examiner to the courses of instruction offered in the University, as unclassified students. They shall present evidence of successful experience as a teacher orother valuable educative experience in practical life. . . . They are ineligible for public appearance. . . .
Persons at least twenty-one years of age, not seeking a degree, may be admitted through the office of the University Examiner to the courses of instruction offered in the University, as unclassified students. They shall present evidence of successful experience as a teacher orother valuable educative experience in practical life. . . . They are ineligible for public appearance. . . .
You saw them the Cinderellas and the Smikes of this temple of learning.
The Classifieds and the Unclassifieds rarely mixed. Not age alone, but purpose separated them. The Classifieds, boys and girls, were, for the most part, slim young lads with caps and pipes and sweaters, their talk of football, baseball, girls; slim young girls in sheer shirtwaists with pink ribbons run through the corset covers showing beneath, pleated skirts that switched delightfully as they strolled across the campus arm in arm, their talk of football games, fudge, clothes, boys. They cut classes whenever possible. The Student Body. Midwest turned them out by the hundreds—almost by the link, one might say, as Aug Hempel’s sausage factory turned out its fine plump sausages, each one exactly like the one behind and the one ahead of it. So many hundreds graduated in this year’s class. So many more hundreds to be graduated in next year’s class. Occasionally an unruly sausage burst its skin and was discarded. They attended a university because their parents—thrifty shop-keepers, manufacturers, merchants, or professional men and their good wives—wanted their children to have an education. Were ambitious for them. “I couldn’t have it myself, and always regretted it. Now I want my boy (or girl) to have a good education that’ll fit ’em for the battle of life. This is an age of specialization, let me tell you.”
Football, fudge, I-said-to-Jim, I-said-to-Bessie.
The Unclassifieds would no more have deliberately cut a class than they would have thrown their sparse weekly budget-allowance into the gutter. If it had been physically possible they would have attended two classes at once, listened to two lectures, prepared two papers simultaneously. Drab and earnest women between thirty and forty-eight, their hair not an ornament, but something to be pinned up quickly out of the way, their clothes a covering, their shoes not even smartly “sensible,” but just shoes, scuffed, patched, utilitarian. The men were serious, shabby, often spectacled; dandruff on their coat collars; their lined, anxious faces in curious contrast to the fresh, boyish, care-free countenances of the Classifieds. They said, carefully, almost sonorously, “Political Economy. Applied Psychology.” Most of them had worked ten years, fifteen years for this deferred schooling. This one had had to support a mother; that one a family of younger brothers and sisters. This plump woman of thirty-nine, with the jolly kindly face, had had a paralyzed father. Another had known merely poverty, grinding, sordid poverty, with fifteen years of painful penny savings to bring true this gloriously realized dream of a university education. Here was one studying to be a trained Social Service Worker. She had done everything from housework as a servant girl to clerking in a 5- and 10-cent store. She had studied evenings; saved pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters.Other valuable educative experience in practical life.They had had it, God knows.
They regarded the university at first with the love-blind eyes of a bridegroom who looks with the passionate tenderness of possession upon his mistress for whom he has worked and waited through the years of his youth. The university was to bring back that vanished youth—and something more. Wisdom. Knowledge. Power. Understanding. They would have died for it—they almost had, what with privation, self-denial, work.
They came with love clasped close in their two hands, an offertory. “Take me!” they cried. “I come with all I have. Devotion, hope, desire to learn, a promise to be a credit to you. I have had experience, bitter-sweet experience. I have known the battle. See, here are my scars. I can bring to your classrooms much that is valuable. I ask only for bread—the bread of knowledge.”
And the University gave them a stone.
“Get on to the hat!” said the Classifieds, humorously, crossing the campus. “A fright!”
The professors found them a shade too eager, perhaps; too inquiring; demanding too much. They stayed after class and asked innumerable questions. They bristled with interrogation. They were prone to hold forth in the classroom, “Well, I have found it to be the case in my experience that——”
But the professor preferred to do the lecturing himself. If there was to be any experience related it should come from the teacher’s platform, not the student’s chair. Besides, this sort of thing interfered with the routine; kept you from covering ground fast enough. The period bell rang, and there you were, halfway through the day’s prescribed lesson.
In his first year Dirk made the almost fatal mistake of being rather friendly with one of these Unclassifieds—a female Unclassified. She was in his Pol Econ class and sat next to him. A large, good-humoured, plump girl, about thirty-eight, with a shiny skin which she never powdered and thick hair that exuded a disagreeable odour of oil. She was sympathetic and jolly, but her clothes were a fright, the Classifieds would have told you, and no matter how cold the day there was always a half-moon of stain showing under her armpits. She had a really fine mind, quick, eager, balanced, almost judicial. She knew just which references were valuable, which useless. Just how to go about getting information for next day’s class; for the weekly paper to be prepared. Her name was Schwengauer—Mattie Schwengauer. Terrible!
“Here,” she would say good-naturedly, to Dirk. “You don’t need to read all those. My, no! I’ll tell you. You’ll get exactly what you want by reading pages 256 to 273 in Blaine’s; 549 to 567 in Jaeckel; and the first eleven—no, twelve—pages of Trowbridge’s report. That’ll give you practically everything you need.”
Dirk was grateful. Her notes were always copious, perfect. She never hesitated to let him copy them. They got in the way of walking out of the classroom together, across the campus. She told him something of herself.
“Your people farmers!” Surprised, she looked at his well-cut clothes, his slim, strong, unmarked hands, his smart shoes and cap. “Why, so are mine. Iowa.” She pronounced it Ioway. “I lived on the farm all my life till I was twenty-seven. I always wanted to go away to school, but we never had the money and I couldn’t come to town to earn because I was the oldest, and Ma was sickly after Emma—that’s the youngest—there are nine of us—was born. Ma was anxious I should go and Pa was willing, but it couldn’t be. No fault of theirs. One year the summer would be so hot, with no rain hardly from spring till fall, and the corn would just dry up on the stalks, like paper. The next year it would be so wet the seed would rot in the ground. Ma died when I was twenty-six. The kids were all pretty well grown up by that time. Pa married again in a year and I went to Des Moines to work. I stayed there six years but I didn’t save much on account of my brother. He was kind of wild. He had come to Des Moines, too, after Pa married. He and Aggie—that’s the second wife—didn’t get along. I came to Chicago about five years ago. . . . I’ve done all kinds of work, I guess, except digging in a coal mine. I’d have done that if I’d had to.”
She told him all this ingenuously, simply. Dirk felt drawn toward her, sorry for her. His was a nature quick to sympathy. Something she said now stirred him while it bewildered him a little, too.
“You can’t have any idea what it means to me to be here . . . All those years! I used to dream about it. Even now it seems to me it can’t be true. I’m conscious of my surroundings all the time and yet I can’t believe them. You know, like when you are asleep and dream about something beautiful, and then wake up and find it’s actually true. I get a thrill out of just being here. ‘I’m crossing the campus,’ I say to myself. ‘I’m a student—a girl student—in Midwest University and now I’m crossing the campus of my university to go to a class.’ ”
Her face was very greasy and earnest and fine.
“Well, that’s great,” Dirk replied, weakly. “That’s cer’nly great.”
He told his mother about her. Usually he went home on Friday nights to stay until Monday morning. His first Monday-morning class was not until ten. Selina was deeply interested and stirred. “Do you think she’d spend some Saturday and Sunday here with us on the farm? She could come with you on Friday and go back Sunday night if she wanted to. Or stay until Monday morning and go back with you. There’s the spare room, all quiet and cool. She could do as she liked. I’d give her cream and all the fresh fruit and vegetables she wanted. And Meena would bake one of her fresh cocoanut cakes. I’d have Adam bring a fresh cocoanut from South Water Street.”
Mattie came one Friday night. It was the end of October, and Indian summer, the most beautiful time of the year on the Illinois prairie. A mellow golden light seemed to suffuse everything. It was as if the very air were liquid gold, and tonic. The squash and pumpkins next the good brown earth gave back the glow, and the frost-turned leaves of the maples in the sun. About the countryside for miles was the look of bounteousness, of plenty, of prophecy fulfilled as when a beautiful and fertile woman having borne her children and found them good, now sits serene-eyed, gracious, ample bosomed, satisfied.
Into the face of Mattie Schwengauer there came a certain glory. When she and Selina clasped hands Selina stared at her rather curiously, as though startled. Afterward she said to Dirk, aside, “But I thought you said she was ugly!”
“Well, she is, or—well, isn’t she?”
“Look at her!”
Mattie Schwengauer was talking to Meena Bras, the houseworker. She was standing with her hands on her ample hips, her fine head thrown back, her eyes alight, her lips smiling so that you saw her strong square teeth. A new cream separator was the subject of their conversation. Something had amused Mattie. She laughed. It was the laugh of a young girl, care-free, relaxed, at ease.
For two days Mattie did as she pleased, which meant she helped pull vegetables in the garden, milk the cows, saddle the horses; rode them without a saddle in the pasture. She tramped the road. She scuffled through the leaves in the woods, wore a scarlet maple leaf in her hair, slept like one gloriously dead from ten until six; ate prodigiously of cream, fruits, vegetables, eggs, sausage, cake.
“It got so I hated to do all those things on the farm,” she said, laughing a little shamefacedly. “I guess it was because I had to. But now it comes back to me and I enjoy it because it’s natural to me, I suppose. Anyway, I’m having a grand time, Mrs. DeJong. The grandest time I ever had in my life.” Her face was radiant and almost beautiful.
“If you want me to believe that,” said Selina, “you’ll come again.”
But Mattie Schwengauer never did come again.
Early the next week one of the university students approached Dirk. He was a Junior, very influential in his class, and a member of the fraternity to which Dirk was practically pledged. A decidedly desirable frat.
“Say, look here, DeJong, I want to talk to you a minute. Uh, you’ve got to cut out that girl—Swinegour or whatever her name is—or it’s all off with the fellows in the frat.”
“What d’you mean! Cut out! What’s the matter with her!”
“Matter! She’s Unclassified, isn’t she! And do you know what the story is? She told it herself as an economy hint to a girl who was working her way through. She bathes with her union suit and white stockings on to save laundry soap. Scrubs ’em on her! ’S the God’s truth.”
Into Dirk’s mind there flashed a picture of this large girl in her tight knitted union suit and her white stockings sitting in a tub half full of water and scrubbing them and herself simultaneously. A comic picture, and a revolting one. Pathetic, too, but he would not admit that.
“Imagine!” the frat brother-to-be was saying. “Well, we can’t have a fellow who goes around with a girl like that. You got to cut her out, see! Completely. The fellahs won’t stand for it.”
Dirk had a mental picture of himself striking a noble attitude and saying, “Won’t stand for it, huh! She’s worth more than the whole caboodle of you put together. And you can all go to hell!”
Instead he said, vaguely, “Oh. Well. Uh——”
Dirk changed his seat in the classroom, avoided Mattie’s eye, shot out of the door the minute class was over. One day he saw her coming toward him on the campus and he sensed that she intended to stop and speak to him—chide him laughingly, perhaps. He quickened his pace, swerved a little to one side, and as he passed lifted his cap and nodded, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Out of the tail of his eye he could see her standing a moment irresolutely in the path.
He got into the fraternity. The fellahs liked him from the first. Selina said once or twice, “Why don’t you bring that nice Mattie home with you again some time soon? Such a nice girl—woman, rather. But she seemed so young and care-free while she was here, didn’t she? A fine mind, too, that girl. She’ll make something of herself. You’ll see. Bring her next week, h’m?”
Dirk shuffled, coughed, looked away. “Oh, I dunno. Haven’t seen her lately. Guess she’s busy with another crowd, or something.”
He tried not to think of what he had done, for he was honestly ashamed. Terribly ashamed. So he said to himself, “Oh, what of it!” and hid his shame. A month later Selina again said, “I wish you’d invite Mattie for Thanksgiving dinner. Unless she’s going home, which I doubt. We’ll have turkey and pumpkin pie and all the rest of it. She’ll love it.”
“Mattie?” He had actually forgotten her name.
“Yes, of course. Isn’t that right? Mattie Schwengauer?”
“Oh, her. Uh—well—I haven’t been seeing her lately.”
“Oh, Dirk, you haven’t quarrelled with that nice girl!”
He decided to have it out. “Listen, Mother. There are a lot of different crowds at the U, see? And Mattie doesn’t belong to any of ’em. You wouldn’t understand, but it’s like this. She—she’s smart and jolly and everything but she just doesn’t belong. Being friends with a girl like that doesn’t get you anywhere. Besides, she isn’t a girl. She’s a middle-aged woman, when you come to think of it.”
“Doesn’t get you anywhere!” Selina’s tone was cool and even. Then, as the boy’s gaze did not meet hers: “Why, Dirk DeJong, Mattie Schwengauer is one of my reasons for sending you to a university. She’s what I call part of a university education. Just talking to her is learning something valuable. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t naturally prefer pretty young girls of your own age to go around with, and all. It would be queer if you didn’t. But this Mattie—why, she’s life. Do you remember that story of when she washed dishes in the kosher restaurant over on Twelfth Street and the proprietor used to rent out dishes and cutlery for Irish and Italian neighbourhood weddings where they had pork and goodness knows what all, and then use them next day in the restaurant again for the kosher customers?”
Yes, Dirk remembered. Selina wrote Mattie, inviting her to the farm for Thanksgiving, and Mattie answered gratefully, declining. “I shall always remember you,” she wrote in that letter, “with love.”
XIV
Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.
Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. They were well on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark stuff, brown or drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another roomful of fresh young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of the two women one—the elder—was occasionally likely to flare into sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.
Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable, bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:
“In theconsideration ofallthe facts in thecasepresented beforeus we mustfirstreview thehistory and attemptto analyze theoutstanding——”
He found himself waiting for that emphasis and shrinking from it as from a sledge-hammer blow. It hurt his head.
Miss Lodge droned. She approached a word with a maddening uh-uh-uh-uh. In the uh-uh-uh face of the uh-uh-uh-uh geometrical situation of the uh-uh-uh uh——
He shifted restlessly in his chair, found his hands clenched into fists, and took refuge in watching the shadow cast by an oak branch outside the window on a patch of sunlight against the blackboard behind her.
During the early spring Dirk and Selina talked things over again, seated before their own fireplace in the High Prairie farmhouse. Selina had had that fireplace built five years before and her love of it amounted to fire-worship. She had it lighted always on winter evenings and in the spring when the nights were sharp. In Dirk’s absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth. High Prairie, driving by from some rare social gathering or making a late trip to market as they sometimes were forced to do, saw the rosy flicker of Mrs. DeJong’s fire dancing on the wall and warmed themselves by it even while they resented it.
“A good heater in there and yet anyway she’s got to have a fire going in a grate. Always she does something funny like that. I should think she’d be lonesome sitting there like that with her dog only.”
They never knew how many guests Selina entertained there before her fire those winter evenings—old friends and new. Sobig was there, the plump earth-grimed baby who rolled and tumbled in the fields while his young mother wiped the sweat from her face to look at him with fond eyes. Dirk DeJong of ten years hence was there. Simeon Peake, dapper, soft-spoken, ironic, in his shiny boots and his hat always a little on one side. Pervus DeJong, a blue-shirted giant with strong tender hands and little fine golden hairs on the backs of them. Fanny Davenport, the actress-idol of her girlhood came back to her, smiling, bowing; and the gorgeous spangled creatures in the tights and bodices of the old Extravaganzas. In strange contrast to these was the patient, tireless figure of Maartje Pool standing in the doorway of Roelf’s little shed, her arms tucked in her apron for warmth. “You make fun, huh?” she said, wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy, misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.
Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her fire.
She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the week-end. Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays. Julie Arnold had invited Dirk to the gay parties at the Prairie Avenue house. He had even spent two entire week-ends there. After the brocaded luxury of the Prairie Avenue house his farm bedroom seemed almost startlingly stark and bare. Selina frankly enjoyed Dirk’s somewhat fragmentary accounts of these visits; extracted from them as much vicarious pleasure as he had had in the reality—more, probably.
“Now tell me what you had to eat,” she would say, sociably, like a child. “What did you have for dinner, for example? Was it grand? Julie tells me they have a butler now. Well! I can’t wait till I hear Aug Hempel on the subject.”
He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I’d likethat. You did! Well, I’ll have it for you next week when you come home. I’ll get the recipe from Julie.”
He didn’t think he’d be home next week. One of the fellows he’d met at the Arnolds’ had invited him to their place out north, on the lake. He had a boat.
“That’ll be lovely!” Selina exclaimed, after an almost unnoticeable moment of silence—silence with panic in it. “I’ll try not to fuss and be worried like an old hen every minute of the time I think you’re on the water. . . . Now do go on, Sobig. First fruit with mayonnaise, h’m? What kind of soup?”
He was not a naturally talkative person. There was nothing surly about his silence. It was a taciturn streak inherited from his Dutch ancestry. This time, though, he was more voluble than usual. “Paula . . .” came again and again into his conversation. “Paula . . . Paula . . .” and again “. . . Paula.” He did not seem conscious of the repetition, but Selina’s quick ear caught it.
“I haven’t seen her,” Selina said, “since she went away to school the first year. She must be—let’s see—she’s a year older than you are. She’s nineteen going on twenty. Last time I saw her I thought she was a dark scrawny little thing. Too bad she didn’t inherit Julie’s lovely gold colouring and good looks, instead of Eugene, who doesn’t need ’em.”
“She isn’t!” said Dirk, hotly. “She’s dark and slim and sort of—uh—sensuous”—Selina started visibly, and raised her hand quickly to her mouth to hide a smile—“like Cleopatra. Her eyes are big and kind of slanting—not squinty I don’t mean, but slanting up a little at the corners. Cut out, kind of, so that they look bigger than most people’s.”
“My eyes used to be considered rather fine,” said Selina, mischievously; but he did not hear.
“She makes all the other girls look sort of blowzy.” He was silent a moment. Selina was silent, too, and it was not a happy silence. Dirk spoke again, suddenly, as though continuing aloud a train of thought, “—all but her hands.”
Selina made her voice sound natural, not sharply inquisitive. “What’s the matter with her hands, Dirk?”
He pondered a moment, his brows knitted. At last, slowly, “Well, I don’t know. They’re brown, and awfully thin and sort of—grabby. I mean it makes me nervous to watch them. And when the rest of her is cool they’re hot when you touch them.”
He looked at his mother’s hands that were busy with some sewing. The stuff on which she was working was a bit of satin ribbon; part of a hood intended to grace the head of Geertje Pool Vander Sijde’s second baby. She had difficulty in keeping her rough fingers from catching on the soft surface of the satin. Manual work, water, sun, and wind had tanned those hands, hardened them, enlarged the knuckles, spread them, roughened them. Yet how sure they were, and strong, and cool and reliable—and tender. Suddenly, looking at them, Dirk said, “Now your hands. I love your hands, Mother.”
She put down her work hastily, yet quietly, so that the sudden rush of happy grateful tears in her eyes should not sully the pink satin ribbon. She was flushed, like a girl. “Do you, Sobig?” she said.
After a moment she took up her sewing again. Her face looked young, eager, fresh, like the face of the girl who had found cabbages so beautiful that night when she bounced along the rutty Halsted road with Klaas Pool, many years ago. It came into her face, that look, when she was happy, exhilarated, excited. That was why those who loved her and brought that look into her face thought her beautiful, while those who did not love her never saw the look and consequently considered her a plain woman.
There was another silence between the two. Then: “Mother, what would you think of my going East next fall, to take a course in architecture?”
“Would you like that, Dirk?”
“Yes, I think so—yes.”
“Then I’d like it better than anything in the world. I—it makes me happy just to think of it.”
“It would—cost an awful lot.”
“I’ll manage. I’ll manage. . . . What made you decide on architecture?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The new buildings at the university—Gothic, you know—are such a contrast to the old. Then Paula and I were talking the other day. She hates their house on Prairie—terrible old lumpy gray stone pile, with the black of the I. C. trains all over it. She wants her father to build north—an Italian villa or French château. Something of that sort. So many of her friends are moving to the north shore, away from these hideous south-side and north-side Chicago houses with their stoops, and their bay windows, and their terrible turrets. Ugh!”
“Well, now, do you know,” Selina remonstrated mildly, “I like ’em. I suppose I’m wrong, but to me they seem sort of natural and solid and unpretentious, like the clothes that old August Hempel wears, so squarecut and baggy. Those houses look dignified to me, and fitting. They may be ugly—probably are—but anyway they’re not ridiculous. They have a certain rugged grandeur. They’re Chicago. Those French and Italian gimcracky things they—they’re incongruous. It’s as if Abraham Lincoln were to appear suddenly in pink satin knee breeches and buckled shoes, and lace ruffles at his wrists.”
Dirk could laugh at that picture. But he protested, too. “But there’s no native architecture, so what’s to be done! You wouldn’t call those smoke-blackened old stone and brick piles with their iron fences and their conservatories and cupolas and gingerbread exactly native, would you?”
“No,” Selina admitted, “but those Italian villas and French châteaux in north Chicago suburbs are a good deal like a lace evening gown in the Arizona desert. It wouldn’t keep you cool in the daytime, and it wouldn’t be warm enough at night. I suppose a native architecture is evolved from building for the local climate and the needs of the community, keeping beauty in mind as you go. We don’t need turrets and towers any more than we need draw-bridges and moats. It’s all right to keep them, I suppose, where they grew up, in a country where the feudal system meant that any day your next-door neighbour might take it into his head to call his gang around him and sneak up to steal your wife and tapestries and gold drinking cups.”
Dirk was interested and amused. Talks with his mother were likely to affect him thus. “What’s your idea of a real Chicago house, Mother?”
Selina answered quickly, as if she had thought often about it; as if she would have liked just such a dwelling on the site of the old DeJong farmhouse in which they now were seated so comfortably. “Well, it would need big porches for the hot days and nights so’s to catch the prevailing southwest winds from the prairies in the summer—a porch that would be swung clear around to the east, too—or a terrace or another porch east so that if the precious old lake breeze should come up just when you think you’re dying of the heat, as it sometimes does, you could catch that, too. It ought to be built—the house, I mean—rather squarish and tight and solid against our cold winters and north-easters. Then sleeping porches, of course. There’s a grand American institution for you! England may have its afternoon tea on the terrace, and Spain may have its patio, and France its courtyard, and Italy its pergola, vine-covered; but America’s got the sleeping porch—the screened-in open-air sleeping porch, and I shouldn’t wonder if the man who first thought of that would get precedence, on Judgment Day, over the men who invented the aeroplane, the talking machine, and the telephone. After all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.” After which grand period Selina grinned at Dirk, and Dirk grinned at Selina and the two giggled together there by the fireplace, companionably.
“Mother, you’re simply wonderful!—only your native Chicago dwelling seems to be mostly porch.”
Selina waved such carping criticism away with a careless hand. “Oh, well, any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else it has or hasn’t got.”
Next day they were more serious. The eastern college and the architectural career seemed to be settled things. Selina was content, happy. Dirk was troubled about the expense. He spoke of it at breakfast next morning (Dirk’s breakfast; his mother had had hers hours before and now as he drank his coffee, was sitting with him a moment and glancing at the paper that had come in the rural mail delivery). She had been out in the fields overseeing the transplanting of young tomato seedlings from hotbed to field. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned up tight, for the air was still sharp. On her head was a battered black felt soft hat (an old one of Dirk’s) much like the one she had worn to the Haymarket that day ten years ago. Selina’s cheeks were faintly pink from her walk across the fields in the brisk morning air.
She sniffed. “That coffee smells wonderful. I think I’ll just——” She poured herself a half cup with the air of virtue worn by one who really longs for a whole cup and doesn’t take it.
“I’ve been thinking,” he began, “the expense——”
“Pigs,” said Selina, serenely.
“Pigs!” He looked around, bewildered; stared at his mother.
“Pigs’ll do it,” Selina explained, calmly. “I’ve been wanting to put them in for three or four years. It’s August Hempel’s idea. Hogs, I should have said.”
Again, as before, he echoed, “Hogs!” rather faintly.
“High-bred hogs. They’re worth their weight in silver this minute, and will be for years to come. I won’t go in for them extensively. Just enough to make an architect out of Mr. Dirk DeJong.” Then, at the expression in his face: “Don’t look so pained, son. There’s nothing revolting about a hog—not my kind, brought up in a pen as sanitary as a tiled bathroom and fed on corn. He’s a handsome, impressive-looking animal, the hog, when he isn’t treated like one.”
He looked dejected. “I’d rather not go to school on—hogs.”
She took off the felt hat and tossed it over to the old couch by the window; smoothed her hair back with the flat of her palm. You saw that the soft dark hair was liberally sprinkled with gray now, but the eyes were bright and clear as ever.
“You know, Sobig, this is what they call a paying farm—as vegetable farms go. We’re out of debt, the land’s in good shape, the crop promises well if we don’t have another rainy cold spring like last year’s. But no truck garden is going to make its owner rich these days, with labour so high and the market what it is, and the expense of hauling and all. Any truck farmer who comes out even thinks he’s come out ahead.”
“I know it.” Rather miserably.
“Well. I’m not complaining, son. I’m just telling you. I’m having a grand time. When I see the asparagus plantation actually yielding, that I planted ten years ago, I’m as happy as if I’d stumbled on a gold mine. I think, sometimes, of the way your father objected to my planting the first one. April, like this, in the country, with everything coming up green and new in the rich black loam—I can’t tell you. And when I know that it goes to market as food—the best kind of food, that keeps people’s bodies clean and clear and flexible and strong! I like to think of babies’ mothers saying: ‘Now eat your spinach, every scrap, or you can’t have any dessert! . . . Carrots make your eyes bright. . . . Finish your potato. Potatoes make you strong!’ ”
Selina laughed, flushed a little.
“Yes, but how about hogs? Do you feel that way about hogs?”
“Certainly!” said Selina, briskly. She pushed toward him a little blue-and-white platter that lay on the white cloth near her elbow. “Have a bit more bacon, Dirk. One of these nice curly slivers that are so crisp.”
“I’ve finished my breakfast, Mother.” He rose.
The following autumn saw him a student of architecture at Cornell. He worked hard, studied even during his vacations. He would come home to the heat and humidity of the Illinois summers and spend hours each day in his own room that he had fitted up with a long work table and a drawing board. His T-square was at hand; two triangles—a 45 and a 60; his compass; a pair of dividers. Selina sometimes stood behind him watching him as he carefully worked on the tracing paper. His contempt for the local architecture was now complete. Especially did he hold forth on the subject of the apartment-houses that were mushrooming on every street in Chicago from Hyde Park on the south to Evanston on the north. Chicago was very elegant in speaking of these; never called them “flats”; always apartments. In front of each of these (there were usually six to a building), was stuck a little glass-enclosed cubicle known as a sun-parlour. In these (sometimes you heard them spoken of, grandly, as solariums) Chicago dwellers took refuge from the leaden skies, the heavy lake atmosphere, the gray mist and fog and smoke that so frequently swathed the city in gloom. They were done in yellow or rose cretonnes. Silk lamp shades glowed therein, and flower-laden boxes. In these frank little boxes Chicago read its paper, sewed, played bridge, even ate its breakfast. It never pulled down the shades.
“Terrible!” Dirk fumed. “Not only are they hideous in themselves, stuck on the front of those houses like three pairs of spectacles; but the lack of decent privacy! They do everything but bathe in ’em. Have they never heard the advice given people who live in glass houses!”
By his junior year he was talking in a large way about the Beaux Arts. But Selina did not laugh at this. “Perhaps,” she thought. “Who can tell! After a year or two in an office here, why not another year of study in Paris if he needs it.”
Though it was her busiest time on the farm Selina went to Ithaca for his graduation in 1913. He was twenty-two and, she was calmly sure, the best-looking man in his class. Undeniably he was a figure to please the eye; tall, well-built, as his father had been, and blond, too, like his father, except for his eyes. These were brown—not so dark as Selina’s, but with some of the soft liquid quality of her glance. They strengthened his face, somehow; gave him an ardent look of which he was not conscious. Women, feeling the ardour of that dark glance turned upon them, were likely to credit him with feelings toward themselves of which he was quite innocent. They did not know that the glance and its effect were mere matters of pigmentation and eye-conformation. Then, too, the gaze of a man who talks little is always more effective than that of one who is loquacious.
Selina, in her black silk dress, and her plain black hat, and her sensible shoes was rather a quaint little figure amongst all those vivacious, bevoiled, and beribboned mammas. But a distinctive little figure, too. Dirk need not be ashamed of her. She eyed the rather paunchy, prosperous, middle-aged fathers and thought, with a pang, how much handsomer Pervus would have been than any of these, if only he could have lived to see this day. Then, involuntarily, she wondered if this day would ever have occurred, had Pervus lived. Chided herself for thinking thus.
When he returned to Chicago, Dirk went into the office of Hollis & Sprague, Architects. He thought himself lucky to work with this firm, for it was doing much to guide Chicago’s taste in architecture away from the box car. Already Michigan Boulevard’s skyline soared somewhat above the grimly horizontal. But his work there was little more than that of draughtsman, and his weekly stipend could hardly be dignified by the term of salary. But he had large ideas about architecture and he found expression for his suppressed feelings on his week-ends spent with Selina at the farm. “Baroque” was the word with which he dismissed the new Beachside Hotel, north. He said the new Lincoln Park band-stand looked like an igloo. He said that the city council ought to order the Potter Palmer mansion destroyed as a blot on the landscape, and waxed profane on the subject of the east face of the Public Library Building, down town.
“Never mind,” Selina assured him, happily. “It was all thrown up so hastily. Remember that just yesterday, or the day before, Chicago was an Indian fort, with tepees where towers are now, and mud wallows in place of asphalt. Beauty needs time to perfect it. Perhaps we’ve been waiting all these years for just such youngsters as you. And maybe some day I’ll be driving down Michigan Boulevard with a distinguished visitor—Roelf Pool, perhaps. Why not? Let’s say Roelf Pool, the famous sculptor. And he’ll say, ‘Who designed that building—the one that is so strong and yet so light? So gay and graceful, and yet so reticent!’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, that! That’s one of the earlier efforts of my son, Dirk DeJong.’ ”
But Dirk pulled at his pipe moodily; shook his head. “Oh, you don’t know, Mother. It’s so damned slow. First thing you know I’ll be thirty. And what am I! An office boy—or little more than that—at Hollis’s.”
During his university years Dirk had seen much of the Arnolds, Eugene and Paula, but it sometimes seemed to Selina that he avoided these meetings—these parties and week-ends. She was content that this should be so, for she guessed that the matter of money held him back. She thought it was well that he should realize the difference now. Eugene had his own car—one of five in the Arnold garage. Paula, too, had hers. She had been one of the first Chicago girls to drive a gas car; had breezed about Chicago’s boulevards in one when she had been little more than a child in short skirts. At the wheel she was dexterous, dare-devil, incredibly relaxed. Her fascination for Dirk was strong. Selina knew that, too. In the last year or two he had talked very little of Paula and that, Selina knew, meant that he was hard hit.
Sometimes Paula and Eugene drove out to the farm, making the distance from their new north-shore house to the DeJong place far south in some breath-taking number of minutes. Eugene would appear in rakish cap, loose London coat, knickers, queer brogans with an English look about them, a carefully careless looseness about the hang and fit of his jacket. Paula did not affect sports clothes for herself. She was not the type, she said. Slim, dark, vivacious, she wore slinky clothes—crêpes, chiffons. Her feet were slim in sheer silk stockings and slippers with buckles. Her eyes were languorous, lovely. She worshipped luxury and said so.
“I’ll have to marry money,” she declared. “Now that they’ve finished calling poor Grandpa a beef-baron and taken I don’t know how many millions away from him, we’re practically on the streets.”
“You look it!” from Dirk; and there was bitterness beneath his light tone.
“Well, it’s true. All this silly muckraking in the past ten years or more. Poor Father! Of course Grand-dad was pur-ty rough, let me tell you. I read some of the accounts of that last indictment—the 1910 one—and I must say I gathered that dear old Aug made Jesse James look like a philanthropist. I should think, at his age, he’d be a little scared. After all, when you’re over seventy you’re likely to have some doubts and fears about punishment in the next world. But not a grand old pirate like Grandfather. He’ll sack and burn and plunder until he goes down with the ship. And it looks to me as if the old boat had a pretty strong list to starboard right now. Father says himself that unless a war breaks, or something, which isn’t at all likely, the packing industry is going to spring a leak.”
“Elaborate figure of speech,” murmured Eugene. The four of them—Paula, Dirk, Eugene, and Selina—, were sitting on the wide screened porch that Selina had had built at the southwest corner of the house. Paula was, of course, in the couch-swing. Occasionally she touched one slim languid foot to the floor and gave indolent impetus to the couch.
“It is, rather, isn’t it? Might as well finish it, then. Darling Aug’s been the grand old captain right through the vi’age. Dad’s never been more than a pretty bum second mate. And as for you, Gene my love, cabin boy would be, y’understand me, big.” Eugene had gone into the business a year before.
“What can you expect,” retorted Eugene, “of a lad that hates salt pork? And every other kind of pig meat?” He despised the yards and all that went with it.
Selina now got up and walked to the end of the porch. She looked out across the fields, shading her eyes with her hand. “There’s Adam coming in with the last load for the day. He’ll be driving into town now. Cornelius started an hour ago.” The DeJong farm sent two great loads to the city now. Selina was contemplating the purchase of one of the large automobile trucks that would do away with the plodding horses and save hours of time on the trip. She went down the steps now on her way to oversee the loading of Adam Bras’s wagon. At the bottom of the steps she turned. “Why can’t you two stay to supper? You can quarrel comfortably right through the meal and drive home in the cool of the evening.”
“I’ll stay,” said Paula, “thanks. If you’ll have all kinds of vegetables, cooked and uncooked. The cooked ones smothered in cream and oozing butter. And let me go out into the fields and pick ’em myself like Maud Muller or Marie Antoinette or any of those make-believe rustic gals.”
In her French-heeled slippers and her filmy silk stockings she went out into the rich black furrows of the fields, Dirk carrying the basket.
“Asparagus,” she ordered first. Then, “But where is it? Isthatit!”
“You dig for it, idiot,” said Dirk, stooping, and taking from his basket the queerly curved sharp knife or spud used for cutting the asparagus shoots. “Cut the shoots three or four inches below the surface.”
“Oh, let me do it!” She was down on her silken knees in the dirt, ruined a goodly patch of the fine tender shoots, gave it up and sat watching Dirk’s expert manipulation of the knife. “Let’s have radishes, and corn, and tomatoes and lettuce and peas and artichokes and——”
“Artichokes grow in California, not Illinois.” He was more than usually uncommunicative, and noticeably moody.
Paula remarked it. “Why the Othello brow?”
“You didn’t mean that rot, did you? about marrying a rich man.”
“Of course I meant it. What other sort of man do you think I ought to marry?” He looked at her, silently. She smiled. “Yes, wouldn’t I make an ideal bride for a farmer!”
“I’m not a farmer.”
“Well, architect then. Your job as draughtsman at Hollis & Sprague’s must pay you all of twenty-five a week.”
“Thirty-five,” said Dirk, grimly. “What’s that got to do with it!”
“Not a thing, darling.” She stuck out one foot. “These slippers cost thirty.”
“I won’t be getting thirty-five a week all my life. You’ve got brains enough to know that. Eugene wouldn’t be getting that much if he weren’t the son of his father.”
“The grandson of his grandfather,” Paula corrected him. “And I’m not so sure he wouldn’t. Gene’s a born mechanic if they’d just let him work at it. He’s crazy about engines and all that junk. But no—‘Millionaire Packer’s Son Learns Business from Bottom Rung of Ladder.’ Picture of Gene in workman’s overalls and cap in the Sunday papers. He drives to the office on Michigan at ten and leaves at four and he doesn’t know a steer from a cow when he sees it.”
“I don’t care a damn about Gene. I’m talking about you. You were joking, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t. I’d hate being poor, or even just moderately rich. I’m used to money—loads of it. I’m twenty-four. And I’m looking around.”
He kicked an innocent beet-top with his boot. “You like me better than any man you know.”
“Of course I do. Just my luck.”
“Well, then!”
“Well, then, let’s take these weggibles in and have ’em cooked in cream, as ordered.”
She made a pretense of lifting the heavy basket. Dirk snatched it roughly out of her hand so that she gave a little cry and looked ruefully down at the red mark on her palm. He caught her by the shoulder—even shook her a little. “Look here, Paula. Do you mean to tell me you’d marry a man simply because he happened to have a lot of money!”
“Perhaps not simply because he had a lot of money. But it certainly would be a factor, among other things. Certainly he would be preferable to a man who knocked me about the fields as if I were a bag of potatoes.”
“Oh, forgive me. But—listen, Paula—you know I’m—gosh!—— And there I am stuck in an architect’s office and it’ll be years before I——”
“Yes, but it’ll probably be years before I meet the millions I require, too. So why bother? And even if I do, you and I can be just as good friends.”
“Oh, shut up. Don’t pull that ingénue stuff on me, please. Remember I’ve known you since you were ten years old.”
“And you know just how black my heart is, don’t you, what? You want, really, some nice hearty lass who can tell asparagus from peas when she sees ’em, and who’ll offer to race you from here to the kitchen.”
“God forbid!”
Six months later Paula Arnold was married to Theodore A. Storm, a man of fifty, a friend of her father’s, head of so many companies, stockholder in so many banks, director of so many corporations that even old Aug Hempel seemed a recluse from business in comparison. She never called him Teddy. No one ever did. Theodore Storm was a large man—not exactly stout, perhaps, but flabby. His inches saved him from grossness. He had a large white serious face, fine thick dark hair, graying at the temples, and he dressed very well except for a leaning toward rather effeminate ties. He built for Paula a town house on the Lake Shore drive in the region known as the Gold Coast. The house looked like a restrained public library. There was a country place beyond Lake Forest far out on the north shore, sloping down to the lake and surrounded by acres and acres of fine woodland, expertly parked. There were drives, ravines, brooks, bridges, hothouses, stables, a race-track, gardens, dairies, fountains, bosky paths, keeper’s cottage (twice the size of Selina’s farmhouse). Within three years Paula had two children, a boy and a girl. “There! That’s done,” she said. Her marriage was a great mistake and she knew it. For the war, coming in 1914, a few months after her wedding, sent the Hempel-Arnold interests sky-rocketing. Millions of pounds of American beef and pork were shipped to Europe. In two years the Hempel fortune was greater than it ever had been. Paula was up to her eyes in relief work for Bleeding Belgium. All the Gold Coast was. The Beautiful Mrs. Theodore A. Storm in her Gift Shop Conducted for the Relief of Bleeding Belgium.
Dirk had not seen her in months. She telephoned him unexpectedly one Friday afternoon in his office at Hollis & Sprague’s.
“Come out and spend Saturday and Sunday with us, won’t you? We’re running away to the country this afternoon. I’m so sick of Bleeding Belgium, you can’t imagine. I’m sending the children out this morning. I can’t get away so early. I’ll call for you in the roadster this afternoon at four and drive you out myself.”
“I am going to spend the week-end with Mother. She’s expecting me.”
“Bring her along.”
“She wouldn’t come. You know she doesn’t enjoy all that velvet-footed servitor stuff.”
“Oh, but we live quite simply out there, really. Just sort of rough it. Do come, Dirk. I’ve got some plans to talk over with you . . . How’s the job?”
“Oh, good enough. There’s very little building going on, you know.”
“Will you come?”
“I don’t think I——”
“I’ll call for you at four. I’ll be at the curb. Don’t keep me waiting, will you? The cops fuss so if you park in the Loop after four.”