CHAPTER IX
Every morning between eight-thirty and nine a boy from the Élite Garage on Twenty-sixth Street brought the Payson electric to the door. He trundled it up to the curb with the contempt that it deserved. Your self-respecting garage mechanic is contemptuous of all electric conveyances, but this young man looked on the Payson's senile vehicle as a personal insult. He manipulated its creaking levers and balky brakes as a professional pitcher would finger a soft rubber ball—thing beneath pity. As he sprang out of it in his jersey and his tight pants and his long-visored green cap he would slam its ancient door behind him with such force as almost to set it rocking on its four squat wheels. Then he would pass round behind it, kick one of its asphalt-gnawed rubber tires with a vindictive boot and walk off whistling back to the Élite Garage. Lottie had watched this performance a thousand times, surely. She was always disappointed if he failed to kick the tire. It satisfied something in her to see him do it.
This morning Lottie was up, dressed, and telephoning the Élite Garage before eight o'clock. She wanted to make an early start. She meant to use the electric in order to save time. Without it the trip between the Payson's house on Prairie Avenue and the Kemp's on Hyde Park Boulevard near the lake was a pilgrimage marked by dreary waits on clamorous corners for dirty yellow cars that never came.
Early as she was Lottie had heard Aunt Charlotte astir much earlier. She had not yet come down, however. Mrs. Payson had already breakfasted and read the paper. After Mrs. Payson had finished with a newspaper its page-sequence was irrevocably ruined for the next reader. Its sport sheet mingled with the want ads; its front page lay crumpled upon Music and the Drama. Lottie sometimes wondered if her own fondness for a neatly folded uncrumpled morning paper was only another indication of chronic spinsterhood. Aunt Charlotte had once said, as she smoothed the wrinkled sheets with her wavering withered fingers, "Reading a newspaper after you've finished with it, Carrie, is like getting the news three days stale. No flavour to it."
Lottie scarcely glanced at the headlines as she drank her coffee this morning. Her mother was doing something or other at the sideboard. Mrs. Payson was the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to the point of frenzy. She lifted dishes and put them down. She rattled silver in the drawer. She tugged at a sideboard door that always stuck. She made notes on a piece of wrapping paper with a hard pencil and tapping sounds. All interspersed with a spasmodic conversation carried on in a high voice with Hulda in the kitchen, the swinging door of the pantry between them.
"Need any rice?"
"W'at?"
"Rice!"
"We got yet."
More tapping of the pencil accompanied by a sotto voce murmur—"Soap ... kitchen cleanser ... new potatoes ... see about electric light bulbs ... coffee——" she raised her voice again: "We've got plenty of coffee I know."
Silence from the kitchen.
"Hulda, we've got plenty of coffee! I got a pound on Wednesday."
Silence. Then—"He don't last over Sunday."
"Not—why my dear young woman——" the swinging door whiffed and whoofed with the energy of her exit as she passed into the kitchen to do battle with the coffee-toper.
Lottie was quite unconscious of the frown that her rasped nerves had etched between her eyes. She was so accustomed to these breakfast irritations that she did not know they irritated her. She was even smiling a little, grimly amused.
It was a lowering Chicago March morning, gray, foggy, sodden, with a wet blanket wind from the lake that was more chilling than a walk through water and more penetrating than severe cold. The months-old soot-grimed snow and ice lay everywhere. The front page predicted rain. Not a glint of sunlight filtered through the yellow pane of the stained-glass window in the Payson dining room. "Ugh!" thought Lottie picturing the downtown streets a morass of mud trampled to a pudding consistency. And yet she smiled. She was to have the morning alone; the morning from eight until almost noon. There was Gussie to interview. There was Judge Barton to confer with—dear Emma Barton. There was poor Jennie to dispose of. There was work to do. Real work. Lottie rose from the table and stood in the pantry doorway holding the swinging door open with one foot as she was getting into her coat.
"I'll be back by noon, mother, surely. Perhaps earlier. Then we'll go right over to your buildings and collect the rents and market on the way back."
"Oh," said Mrs. Payson only. Her mouth was pursed.
"For that matter, I think it's so foolish to bother about Sunday dinner. We always get up later on Sunday, and eat more for breakfast. Let's just have lunch this once. Let's try it. Forget about the leg of lamb or the roast beef——"
Mrs. Payson raised her eyebrows in the direction of the listening Hulda. "I'll leave that kind of thing to your sister Belle—this new idea of getting up at noon on Sunday and then having no proper Sunday dinner. We've always had Sunday dinners in this house and we always will have as long as I'm head of the household."
"Well, I just thought——" Lottie released the swinging door. She came back into the dining room and glanced at herself in the sideboard mirror. Lottie was the kind of woman who looks well in the morning. A clear skin, a clear eye, hair that springs cleanly away from the temples. This morning she looked more than usually alert. A little half-smile of anticipation was on her lips. The lowering weather, her mother's dourness, Hulda's slightly burned toast—she had allowed none of these things to curdle the cream of her morning's adventure. She was wearing her suit and furs and the small velvet hat whose doom Belle had pronounced the evening before. As she drew on her gloves her mother entered the dining room.
"I'll be back by noon, surely." Mrs. Payson did not answer. Lottie went down the long hall toward the front door. Her mother followed.
"Going to Belle's?"
"Yes. I'll have to hurry."
At the door Mrs. Payson flung a final command.
"You'd better go South Park to Grand."
Lottie had meant to. It was the logical route to Belle's. She had taken it a thousand times. Yet now, urged by some imp of perversity, she was astonished to hear herself saying, "No, I'm going up Prairie to Fifty-first." The worst possible road.
She did not mind the wet gray wind as she clanked along in the little box-like contrivance, up Prairie Avenue, over Thirty-first, past gray stone and brick mansions whose former glory of façade and stone-and-iron fence and steps showed the neglect and decay following upon negro occupancy. It was too bad, she thought. Chicago was like a colossal and slovenly young woman who, possessing great natural beauty, is still content to slouch about in greasy wrapper and slippers run down at heel.
The Kemps lived in one of the oldest of Hyde Park's apartment houses and one as nearly aristocratic as a Chicago South Side apartment house can be. It was on Hyde Park Boulevard, near Jackson Park and the lake. When Belle had married she had protested at an apartment. She had never lived in one, she said. She didn't think she could. She would stifle. No privacy. Everything huddled together on one floor and everybody underfoot. People upstairs; people downstairs. But houses were scarce in Hyde Park and she and Henry had compromised on an apartment much too large for them and as choice as anything for miles around. There were nine rooms. The two front rooms were a parlour and sitting room but not many years had passed before Belle did away with this. Belle had caused all sorts of things to be done to the apartment—at Henry's expense, not the landlord's. Year after year partitions had been removed; old fixtures torn out and modern ones installed; dark woodwork had been cream enamelled; the old parlour and sitting room had been thrown into one enormous living room. They had even built a "sun-parlour" without which no Chicago apartment is considered complete. As it eats, sleeps, plays bridge, reads, sews, writes, and lounges in those little many-windowed peep-shows all Chicago's family life is an open book to its neighbour.
Belle's front room was a carefully careless place—livable, inviting—with its books, and lamps, and plump low chairs mothering unexpected tables nestled at their elbows—tantalising little tables holding the last new novel, face downward; a smart little tooled leather box primly packed with cigarettes; a squat wooden bowl, very small, whose tipped cover revealed a glimpse of vivid scrunchy fruit-drops within. Splashes of scarlet and orange bitter-sweet in lustre bowls, loot of Charley's autumn days at the dunes. A roll of watermelon-pink wool and a ball of the same shade in one corner of the deep davenport, with two long amber needles stuck through prophesied the first rainbow note of Charley's summer wardrobe. The grand piano holding a book of Chopin and a chromo-covered song-hit labeled, incredibly enough, Tya-da-dee. It was as unlike the Prairie Avenue living room as Charley was unlike Mrs. Carrie Payson. Belle had recently had the sun-parlour done in the new Chinese furniture—green enameled wood with engaging little Chinese figures and scenes painted on it; queer gashes of black here and there and lamp shades shaped like some sort of Chinese head-gear; no one knew quite what. Surely no Mongolian—coolie or mandarin—would have recognised the origin of anything in the Chinese sun-parlour.
Gussie answered the door. An admirable young woman, Gussie, capable, self-contained, self-respecting. Sprung from a loose-moraled slovenly household, she had, somehow, got the habit of personal cleanliness and of straight thinking. Gussie's pastry hand was a light, deft, clean one. Gussie's bedroom had none of the kennel stuffiness of the average kitchen-bedroom. Gussie's pride in her own bathroom spoke in shining tiles and gleaming porcelain.
"Oo, Miss Lottie! How you are early! Mrs. ain't up at all yet. Miss Charley she is in bathtub."
"That's all right, Gussie. I came to see you."
Gussie's eyes were red-rimmed. "Yeh ... Jennie...." She led the way back to the kitchen; a sturdy young woman facing facts squarely. Her thick-tongued speech told of her Slavic origin. She went on with her morning's work as she talked and Lottie listened. Hers was a no-good family. Her step-father she dismissed briefly as a bum. Her mother was always getting mixed up with the boarders—that menace of city tenement life. And now Jennie. Jennie wasn't bad. Only she liked a good time. The two brothers (rough, lowering fellows) were always a-jumping on Jennie. It was fierce. They wouldn't let her go out with the fellas. In the street they yelled at her and shamed Jennie for Jennie's crowd right out. They wanted she should marry one of the boarders. Well, say, he had money sure, but old like Jennie's own father. Jennie was only seventeen. All this while Gussie was slamming expertly from table to sink, from sink to stove.
"Seventeen! Why doesn't she leave home and work out as you do, Gussie? Housework."
Jennie, it appeared was too toney for housework. "Like this Jennie is." Gussie took a smudged envelope from her pocket and opened it with damp fingers. With one blunt finger-tip she pointed to the signature. It was a pencil-scrawled letter from Jennie to her sister and it was signed, flourishingly, "Jeannette."
"Oh," said Lottie. "I see."
Jennie, then, worked by factory. She paid board at home. She helped with the housework evenings and Sundays. But always they yelled at her. And then Jennie had taken one hundred dollars and had run away from home.
"Jennie is smart," Gussie said, in conclusion, "she is smart like machine. She can make in her head figgers. She finished school, she wanted she should go by business college for typewriter and work in office, but ma and my brothers they won't let. They yell and they yell and so Jennie works by factory."
It was all simple enough to Lottie. She had sat in many sessions of Judge Barton's court. "You'd rather not go with me, Gussie?"
Gussie shook a vehement head. "Better you should go alone. Right away I cry and yell for scared, Jennie she begin cry and yell, ma she begin cry and——"
"All right, Gussie.... Whose hundred dollars was it?"
"Otto. He is big brother. He is mad like everything. He say he make Jennie go by jail——"
"Oh, no, Gussie. He can't do that without Judge Barton, and she'll never——"
Gussie vanished into her bedroom. She emerged again with a stout roll of grimy bills in her hand. These she proffered Lottie. "Here is more as fifty dollar. I save'm. You should give to judge he shouldn't send Jennie to jail." Gussie was of the class that never quite achieves one hundred dollars. Seventy—eighty—eighty-five—and then the dentist or doctor.
Lottie gave the girl's shoulder a little squeeze. "Oh, Gussie, you funny dear child. The judge is a woman. And besides it isn't right to bribe the——"
"No-o-o-o! A woman! In my life I ain't heard how a woman is judge."
"Well, this one is. And Jennie won't go by jail. I promise you."
Down the hall sped a figure in a pongee bathrobe, corded at the waist, slim and sleek as a goldfish. Charley.
"I heard you come in. Finished? Then sit and talk sociable while I dress. You can speed a bit on the way downtown and make it. Step on the ol' batteries. Please! Did you fix things with Gussie?"
"Yeh," Gussie answered, comfortably, but she wore a puzzled frown. "She fix. Judge is woman. Never in my life——"
"Gussie, ma'am, will you let me have my breakfast tray in the sun-parlour? It's such a glummy morning. That's a nice girl. About five minutes."
And it wasn't more than five. Lottie, watching Charley in the act of dressing wondered what that young woman's grandmother or great-aunt would have thought of the process. She decided that her dead-and-gone great-grandmother—that hoop-skirted, iron-stayed, Victorian lady all encased in linings, buckram, wool, wire, merino, and starch—would have swooned at the sight. Charley's garments were so few and scant as to be Chinese in their simplicity. She wore, usually, three wispy garments, not counting shoes and stockings. She proceeded to don them now. First she pulled the stockings up tight and slick, then cuffed them just below the knee. This cuff she then twisted deftly round, caught the slack of it, twisted that rope-like, caught the twist neatly under a fold, rolled the fold down tight and hard three inches below the knee and left it there, an ingenious silken bracelet. There it stayed, fast and firm, unaided by garter, stay, or elastic. Above this a pair of scant knickers of jersey silk or muslin; a straight little shirt with straps over the shoulders or, sometimes, just a brassière that bound the young breasts. Over this slight foundation went a slim scant frock of cloth. That was all. She was a pliant wheat-sheaf, a gracile blade, a supple spear (see verses "To C.K." inPoetry Magazinefor February, signed Jesse Dick). She twisted her hair into a knot that, worn low on the neck, would have been a test for anyone but Charley. She now pursed her lips a little critically, and leaned forward close to her mirror. Charley's lips were a little too full, the carping said; the kind of lips known as "bee-stung." Charley hated her mouth; said it was coarse and sensual. Others did not think so. (See poem "Your Lips" inCentury Magazine, June.)
"There!" she said and turned away from the mirror. The five minutes were just up.
"Meaning you're dressed?"
"Dressed. Why of——"
"Sketchy, I calls it. But I suppose it's all right. You're covered, anyway. Only I hope your grandmother'll never witness the sight I've seen this morning. You make me feel like an elderly Esquimau sewed up for the winter."
Charley shrugged luxuriously. "I hate a lot of clothes."
Her tray awaited her on the table in the sun-parlour—fruit, toast, steaming hot chocolate. "I've got to go," Lottie kept murmuring and leaned in the doorway watching her. Charley attacked the food with a relish that gave you an appetite. She rolled an ecstatic eye at the first sip of chocolate. "Oo, hot! Sure you won't have some?" She demolished the whole daintily and thoroughly. As she sat there in the cruel morning light of the many-windowed little room she was as pink-cheeked and bright-eyed and scrubbed-looking as a Briggs boy ready for supper. You could see the fine pores of her skin.
Lottie began to button her coat. Charley chased a crumb of toast around her plate. "What, if any, do you think of him?"
Lottie had seen and met shoals of Charley's young men. "Suitors" was the official South Side name for them. But Charley had never asked Lottie's opinion of one of them.
"Charming youngster. I grew quite mooney, after you'd gone, thinking about him, and trumped mother's ace. He doesn't look like a poet—that is, poet."
"They never do. Good poets, I mean. I've often thought it was all for the best that Rupert Brooke—that Byron collar of his. Fancy by the time he became forty ... you really think he's charming?"
"So does your mother. Last night she was enthusiastic—about his work."
"M-m-m. Mother's partial to young poets."
Between Charley and her mother there existed an unwritten code. Charley commanded whole squads of devoted young men in assorted sizes, positions, and conditions. Young men who liked country hikes and wayside lunches; young men who preferred to dance at the Blackstone on Saturday afternoons; young men who took Charley to the Symphony concerts; young men who read to her out of books. And Mrs. Henry Kemp, youngish, attractive, almost twenty years of married life with Henry Kemp behind her, relished a chat with these slim youngsters. A lean-flanked graceful crew they were, for the most part, with an almost feline co-ordination of muscle. When they shook hands with you their grip drove the rings into your fingers. They looked you in the eye—and blushed a little. Their profiles would have put a movie star to shame. Their waists were slim as a girl's (tennis and baseball). They drove low-slung cars around Hyde Park corners with death-defying expertness. Nerveless; not talkative and yet well up on the small-talk of the younger set—Labour, Socialism, sex, baseball, Freud, psychiatry, dancing and—just now—the War. Some were all for dashing across to join the Lafayette Escadrille. Belle Kemp would have liked to sit and talk with these young men—talk, and laugh, and dangle her slipper on the end of her toe. Charley knew this. And her mother knew she knew. No pulling the wool over Charley's eyes. No pretending to play the chummy young mother with her. "Pal stuff."
So, then, "M-m-m," said Charley, sipping the last of her chocolate. "Mother's partial to young poets."
Lottie had to be off. She cast a glance down the hall. "Do you suppose she's really asleep still? I'd like to talk to her just a minute."
"You might tap once at the door. I never disturb her in the morning. But I don't think she's sleeping."
Another code rule. These two—mother and daughter—treated one another with polite deference. Never intruded on each other's privacy. Rarely interfered with each other's engagements. Mrs. Kemp liked her breakfast in bed—a practice Charley loathed. Once a week a strapping Swedish damsel came to the apartment to give Mrs. Kemp a body massage and what is known as a "facial." You should have heard Mrs. Carrie Payson on the subject. Belle defended the practice, claiming that it benefited some obscure digestive ailment from which she suffered.
Lottie tapped at Belle's door. A little silence. Then an unenthusiastic voice bade her enter. Belle was in bed, resting. Belle looked her age in bed in the morning. Slightly haggard and a little yellow.
"I thought it must be you."
"It is."
Belle rolled a languid eye. "I woke up feeling wretched. How about this Gussie business?"
"I'm just going downtown. It'll turn out all right, I think."
"Just arrange things so that Gussie won't be upset for Tuesday. You wouldn't think she was nervous, to look at her. Great huge creature. But when she's upset! And I do so want that luncheon to be just right. Mrs. Radcliffe Phelps——"
Lottie could not restrain a little smile. "Oh, Belle."
Belle turned her head pettishly on the pillow. "Oh, Belle!" she mimicked in an astonishingly un-grown-up manner. Indeed, she sounded amazingly like the school-girl of Armour Institute days. "You're more like mother every day, Lottie." Lottie closed the door softly.
Charley was waiting for her at the end of the hall. "Don't say I didn't warn you. Here—I'll give you a chocolatey kiss. Are you lunching downtown? There's a darling new tea-room just opened in the Great Lakes Building——"
"I've promised to be home by noon, at the latest."
"What for?"
"To take mother marketing and over to the West Side——"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake!"
"You have your job, Charley. This is mine."
"Oh, is it? Do you like it?"
"N-n-no."
"Then it isn't."
Lottie flung a final word at the door. "Even a free untrammelled spirit like you will acknowledge that such a thing as duty does exist, I suppose?"
Charley leaned over the railing to combat that as Lottie flew downstairs. "There is no higher duty than that of self-expression."
"Gabble-gabble!" laughed Lottie, at the vestibule door.
"Coward!" shouted Charley over the railing.