CHAPTER XII
For fifteen years Mrs. Carrie Payson's bitterness at the outcome of her own unfortunate marriage had been unconsciously expressed in her attitude toward the possible marriage of her daughter Lottie. Confronted with this accusation, she would have denied it and her daughter Lottie would have defended her in the denial. Nevertheless, it was true. During the years when all Mrs. Payson's energy, thought, and time were devoted to the success of the real estate and bond business, her influence had been less markedly felt than later. In some indefinable way the few men who came within Lottie's ken were startled and repelled by the grim white-haired woman who regarded them with eyes of cold hostility. One or two of them had said, uncomfortably, in one of Mrs. Payson's brief absences, "Your mother doesn't like me."
"What nonsense! Why shouldn't she?"
"I don't know. She looks at me as if she had something on me." Then as Lottie stiffened perceptibly, "Oh, I didn't mean that exactly. No offence, I hope. I just meant——"
"Mother's like I am. She isn't demonstrative but her likes and dislikes are very definite." Lottie, remember, was only twenty-three or thereabouts at this time. Still, she should have known better.
"You don't say!" the young man would exclaim, thoughtfully.
Now, suddenly, Mrs. Payson had about-faced. Perhaps this in turn was as unconscious as her previous attitude had been. Perhaps the thought of a spinster daughter of thirty-three pricked her vanity. Perhaps she, like Lottie, had got a sudden glimpse into the future in which she saw Lottie a second Aunt Charlotte, tremulous and withered, telling out her days in her sister Belle's household. It was slowly borne in on Lottie that her mother regarded Ben Gartz favourably as a possible son-in-law. Her first sensation on making this discovery was one of amusement. Her mother in the rôle of match-maker wore a humourous aspect, certainly. As the weeks went on this amusement gave way to something resembling terror. Mrs. Payson usually achieved her own ends. Lottie had never defined the relationship that existed between her mother and herself. She did not suspect that they were united by a strong bond of affection and hate so complexly interwoven that it was almost impossible to tell which strand was this and which that. Mrs. Payson did not dream that she had blocked her daughter's chances for a career or for marital happiness. Neither did she know that she looked down upon that daughter for having failed to marry. But both were true in some nightmarish and indefinable way. Mrs. Carrie Payson, the coarser metal, had beat upon Lottie, the finer, and had moulded and shaped her as iron beats upon gold.
Lottie was still in the amused stage when Mrs. Payson remarked:
"I understand that Ben Gartz is going into that business he spoke of last spring. Men's wrist watches. We all thought he was making a mistake but it seems he's right. He's going in with Beck and Diblee this fall. I shouldn't wonder if Ben Gartz should turn out to be a very rich man some day. A ve-ry rich man. Especially if this war——"
"That'll be nice," said Lottie.
"I wish Henry had some of his push and enterprise."
Lottie looked up quickly at that, prompt in defense of Henry. "Henry isn't to blame for the war. His business was successful enough until two years ago—more than successful. It just happens to be the kind that has been hardest hit."
"Why doesn't he take up a new business, then! Ben Gartz is going into something new."
"Ben's mother left him a little money when she died. I suppose he's putting that into the new business. Besides, he hasn't a family to think of. He can take a chance. If it doesn't turn out he'll be the only one to suffer."
"Ben Gartz is an unusual boy." (Boy!) "He was a wonderful son to his mother.... I'd like to know what you have against him."
"Against him! Why, not a thing, mama. Only——"
Lottie hesitated. Then, regrettably, she giggled. "Only he has never heard of Alice in Wonderland, and he thinks the Japs are a wonderful little people but look out for 'em!, and he speaks of summer as the heated term, and he says 'not an iota.'"
"Not an iota!" echoed Mrs. Payson almost feebly.
"Yes. You know—'not an iota of truth in it'; 'not an iota of difference.'"
"Lottie Payson, sometimes I think you're downright idiotic! Alice in Wonderland! The idea! Woman your age! Ben Gartz is a business man."
"Indeed he is—strictly."
"I suppose you'd prefer going around with some young fool like this poet Charley has picked up from behind the delicatessen counter. I don't know what your sister Belle can be thinking of."
Sister Belle was thinking of a number of things, none of them pleasant; and none of them connected with Charley or Charley's poet. Henry Kemp had sold the car—the big, luxurious, swift-moving car. He had hinted that the nine-room apartment on Hyde Park Boulevard might soon be beyond his means.
"If this keeps up much longer," he had said one day to Charley, "your old dad will be asking you for a job as bundle boy at Shield's." His laugh, as he said it, had been none too robust.
Charley had been promoted from stock-girl to saleswoman. She said she supposed now she'd have to save up for black satin slippers, a French frock, a string of pearls, and filet collars and cuffs—the working girl's costume. She announced, further, that her education had reached a point where any blouse not hand made and bearing a thirty-nine dollar price tag was a mere rag in her opinion.
Charley's Saturday afternoons and Sundays were spent in the country about Chicago—at the Indiana sand dunes; at Palos Park when May transformed its trees into puff-balls of apple blossoms; in the woods about Beverly; along the far North Shore. Both she and Lottie were hardened trampers. Lottie was expert at what she called "cooking out." She could build a three-section fire with incredibly little fuel and only one match. Just as you were becoming properly ravenous she had the coffee steaming in one section, the bacon sizzling in another, the sausages boiling in another. Now that the Kemp car was gone these country excursions became fewer for Lottie. She missed them. The electric was impossible for country travel. It often expired even on the boulevards and had to be towed back to the garage. Charley said that Jesse Dick's flivver saved her life and youth these spring days. Together they ranged the countryside in it, a slim volume of poetry (not his own) in Jesse Dick's pocket and a plump packet of sandwiches and fruit in a corner of the seat. You were beginning to see reviews of Jesse Dicks' poems inThe Dial, in theNew Republic, in the weekly literary supplements of the newspapers. They spoke of his work as being "virile and American." They said it had a "warm human quality." He sang everyday life—the grain-pit, the stockyards, the steel mill, the street corner, the movies. Some of the reviews said, "But this isn't poetry!" Perhaps they had just been reading the thing he called "Halsted Street." You know it:
Halsted street. All the nations of the world.Mill end sales;shlagstores; Polack women gossiping.Look at the picture of the bride in her borrowed wedding dressOutside the Italian photograph gallery——
Halsted street. All the nations of the world.Mill end sales;shlagstores; Polack women gossiping.Look at the picture of the bride in her borrowed wedding dressOutside the Italian photograph gallery——
Halsted street. All the nations of the world.Mill end sales;shlagstores; Polack women gossiping.Look at the picture of the bride in her borrowed wedding dressOutside the Italian photograph gallery——
Halsted street. All the nations of the world.
Mill end sales;shlagstores; Polack women gossiping.
Look at the picture of the bride in her borrowed wedding dress
Outside the Italian photograph gallery——
Perhaps they were right.
Still, while he did not write spring poetry of the May-day variety it is certain that not a peach-pink petal on a wild-crab tree blossoming by the roadway bloomed in vain as Jesse and Charley passed by. Not that they were rhapsodic about it. These two belonged to the new order to whom lyricism was loathsome, adjective anathema. Fine and moving things were received with a trite or even an uncouth word or phrase. After a Brahms symphony you said, "Gee!" It was considered "hickey" or ostentatious to speak of a thing as being exquisite or wonderful. They even revived that humourously vulgar and practically obsolete word, "swell." A green and gold and pink May-day landscape was "elegant." Struck by the beauty of a scene, the majesty of a written passage, the magnificence of the lake in a storm, the glory of an orchard in full bloom, they used the crude and rustic "Gosh!" This only when deeply stirred.
Late in May, Ben Gartz bought a car of unimpressive make but florid complexion. He referred to it always as "the bus." As soon as he had mastered it he drove round to the Paysons' and proposed a Sunday morning ride to Lottie.
"Go on, Lottie," Mrs. Payson said, "it'll do you good."
The devil of perversity seized Lottie. "I hate driving in town. I've trundled that electric of ours over these fifty miles—or is it one hundred?—of boulevards until I could follow the route blindfolded. Jackson Park to the Midway—the Midway to Washington Park—Washington to Garfield—Garfield——"
"Well, then, how about a drive in the country? Anywhere you say, Miss Lottie. The little old bus is yours to command."
"All right," said Lottie. "Let's take Charley."
"Fine!" Ben's tone was sufficiently hearty, if somewhat hollow. "Great little kid, Charley. What do you say to having lunch at one of those road-houses along the way? Chicken dinner."
"Oh, no! Let's cook out." Ben, looking dubious, regarded the end of his cigar. But Lottie was already on her way to the kitchen. He clapped on his derby hat and went out to look over the bus. Aside from keeping it supplied with oil and gasoline its insides were as complete a mystery to him as the workings of the solar system. Lottie, flushed and animated, was slicing bacon, cutting sandwiches, measuring out coffee. She loved a day in the country, Ben or no Ben. They telephoned Charley. She said, "Can I take Jesse? His fliv's got something the matter with its insides. We had planned to go to Thornton."
"Sure," Ben agreed again when Lottie put this to him. On the way to the Kemp apartment they stopped at a delicatessen and bought cream, fruit, wieners, cheese, salad. As she stepped out of the car Lottie saw that the fat gold letters on the window spelled "Dick's Delicatessen—And Bakery." She was conscious of a little shock. Immediately she was ashamed that this should be so. Dick's delicatessen was white-tiled, immaculate, smelling of things spiced and fruity and pickled. A chubby florid man with a shock of curly rust-red hair waited on her. He was affable, good-natured.
"Going on a picnic, h'm?" he said. He gave her good measure—too good for his own profit, Lottie thought. She glanced about for the wife. She must be the business man of this concern. Mrs. Dick was not there.
"Are you Mr. Dick?" Lottie asked.
"Yesma'am! I sure am." He began to total the sales, using the white marble counter as a tablet for his pencil. "Cheese—wieners—tongue—pickles—cream—that'll be one dollar and forty-three cents. If you bring back the cream bottle with this ticket you get five cents refund."
She thought of the slim and exquisite Charley; of Belle, the fastidious. "Oh, pooh!" she said to herself as she went out to the car with Ben, bundle-laden, "she's only a kid. A temporary case on a near-poet, that's all."
When they reached the Hyde Park apartment Charley and the poet were seated on the outer steps in the sun. The poet wore becoming shabby gray tweeds, a soft shirt and no hat. Lottie admitted to herself that he looked charming—even distinguished.
"Don't you own one?" she asked. He quirked one eyebrow. "A hat, I mean."
"Oh." He glanced at Ben's derby. Then he took from one capacious pocket a soft cloth cap and put it on. He glanced then at his hands, affecting great embarrassment. "My gloves!—stick!" He glanced frantically up and down the street. "My spats!"
The three laughed. Ben joined in a little late, and evidently bewildered.
Charley presented her contribution to the picnic lunch. Gussie had baked a caramel cake the day before. Sweaters, boxes, coats, baskets, bundles—they were off.
They headed for Palos Park. Hideous as is the countryside about Chicago in most directions, this spot to the southwest is a thing of loveliness in May and in October. Gently sloping hills relieve the flat monotony of the Illinois prairie landscape. The green of the fields and trees was so tender as to carry with it a suggestion of gold. Jesse and Charley occupied the back seat. Lottie sat in front with Ben Gartz. He drove badly, especially on the hills. The two in the back seat politely refrained from comment or criticism. But on the last steep hill the protesting knock of the tortured engine wrung interference from Charley. To her an engine was a precious thing. She could no more have mistreated it than she could have kicked a baby. "Shift to second!" she cried now, in actual pain. "Can't you hear her knocking!"
They struck camp on a wooded knoll a little ways back from the road and with a view of the countryside for miles around. Ben Gartz presented that most pathetic and incongruous of human spectacles—a fat man, in a derby, at a picnic.
He made himself useful, gathered wood, produced matches, carried water, arranged seats made up of cushions and robes from the car and was not at all offended when the others expressed a preference for the ground.
"Say, this is great!" he exclaimed, again and again, "Yessir! Nothing like getting away from the city, let me tell you, into God's big outdoors." The three smiled at what they took to be an unexpected burst of humour and were startled to see that he was quite serious. Ben tucked a napkin under his vest and played the waiter. He praised the wieners, the coffee, the bacon, the salad. He ate prodigiously, and smiled genially on Lottie and winked an eye in her direction at the same time nodding toward Charley and Jesse to indicate that he was a party to some very special secret that Lottie shared with him. He sat cross-legged on the ground and suffered. When the luncheon was finished he fell upon his cigar with almost a groan of relief.
"Have a cigar, sir?" He proffered a plump brown cylinder to Jesse Dick.
"No thanks," Jesse replied; and took from his own pocket a paper packet.
"A cigarette boy, eh? Well, let me tell you something, youngster. A hundred of those'll do you more harm than a barrel of these. Yessir! You take a fella smokes a mild cigar after his meal, why, when he's through with that cigar he's through—for awhile, anyway. He don't light another right away. But start to smoke a cigarette and first thing you know where's the package!"
Jesse appeared to consider this gravely. Ben Gartz leaned back supported by one hand, palm down, on the ground. His left was hooked in the arm-hole of his vest. One leg was extended stiffly in front of him, the other drawn up. He puffed at his cigar.
Lottie rose abruptly. "I'll clear these things away." She smiled at Jesse and Charley. "You two children go for a walk. I know you're dying to. I'll have everything slicked up in a jiffy."
"Oh, I think not," the two answered. They knew what was sporting and rigidly followed certain forms of conduct. Having eaten, they expected to pay. They scraped, cleared, folded, packed with the deftness of practiced picnickers. Jesse Dick's eye was caught by the name on the cover of a discarded pasteboard box.
"Oh, say! You got this stuff at father's."
"Yes; we stopped on the way——"
The boy tapped the cover of the box and grinned. "Best delicatessen in Chicago, Illinois, ladies and gents, if I say it as shouldn't. Dad certainly pickles a mean herring." His face sobered. "He's an artist in his line—father. Did you ever see one of his Saturday night windows? He'll have a great rugged mountain of Swiss cheese in the background, with foothills of Roquefort and Edam. Then there'll be a plateau of brown crackly roasted turkeys and chickens, and below this, like flowers in the valley, all the pimento and mayonnaise things, the salads, and lettuces and deviled eggs and stuffed tomatoes." (His poem "Delicatessen Window" is now included in the volume called "Roughneck.")
"I understand you're a poet," Ben Gartz remarked, quizzically. For him there was humour in the very word.
"Yes."
"Now that's funny, ain't it—with your father in the delicatessen business and all?"
Again Jesse Dick seemed to ponder seriously. "Maybe it is. But I know of quite a good poet who was apprenticed to a butcher."
"Butcher! No!" Ben roared genially. "What poet was that?"
Jesse Dick glanced at Charley then. He looked a little shame-faced; and yet, having begun, he went through with it. "Shakespeare, his name was. Will Shakespeare."
"Oh, say, what's this you're giving me!" But the faces of the three were serious. "Say, is that right?" He appealed to Lottie.
"It's supposed to be true," she said, gently, "though it has been doubted." Lottie had brought along the olive-drab knitting in a little flowered cretonne bag. She sat on the ground now, in the sunlight, her back against a tree, knitting.
Jesse and Charley rose, wordlessly, as though with one thought and glanced across the little meadow beyond. It was a Persian carpet of spring flowers—little pink, and mauve, and yellow chalices. Charley gazed at it a moment, her head thrown back. She began to walk toward it, through the wood. Jesse stopped to light a cigarette. His eyes were on Charley. He called out to her. "See your whole leg through that dress of yours, Charley."
She glanced down carelessly. "Yes? That's because I'm standing in the sun, I suppose." It was a slim little wool jersey frock. "I never wear a petticoat with this." They strolled off together across the meadow.
"Well!" exploded Ben Gartz, "that young fella certainly is a free talker." He looked after them, his face red. "Young folks nowdays——"
"Young folks nowdays are wonderful," Lottie said. She remembered an expression she had heard somewhere. "They're sitting on top of the world."
Out on the flower-strewn carpet of meadow-grass Charley was doing a dance in the sunlight all alone—a dance that looked like an inspired improvisation and that probably represented hours of careful technical training. If a wood-nymph had ever worn a wool jersey frock she would have looked as Charley looked now. Ben, almost grudgingly, admitted something like this. "Gosh, that kid certainly can dance! Where'd she pick it up?"
"She's had years of training—lessons. Boys and girls do nowdays, you know. They have everything. We never used to. I wish we had. If their teeth aren't perfect they're straightened. Everything's made perfect that's imperfect. And they're taught about music, and they know books, and they look the world in the eye. They're free!"
Ben dug in the soft ground with a bit of wood. "How d'you mean—free?"
"Why I mean—free," she said again, lamely. "Honest. Not afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
She shook her head then, and went on with her knitting. Lottie looked very peaceful and pleasant there in the little sun-dappled wood, with the light shining on her hair, her firm strong shoulders resting against the black trunk of the tree, her slim black-silk ankles crossed primly. Ben regarded her appreciatively.
"Well, you're perfect enough to suit me," he blurted.
"Oh, Mr. Gartz, sir! You're a-flattering of me, so you are!" Inside she was thinking, "Oh, my goodness, stop him!"
But Ben himself was a little terrified at what he had said. After all, the men's watch bracelet business was still in the venturesome stage.
"Well, I'm not a man to flatter. I mean we're not so bad off, older folks like us. I'm not envying those kids anything. I guess I'm a kind of a funny fella, anyway. Different from most."
"Do you think so?" Lottie encouraged him, knitting. ("You're exactly like a million others—a million billion others.")
"I think so—yes. I've been around a good deal. I've had my ups and downs. I know this little old world from the cellar to the attic, and I don't envy anybody anything."
Lottie smiled a little, and looked at him, and wondered. How smug he was, and oily, and plausible. What seepage was there beneath the placid surface of his dull conversation. Adventure! No, not adventure. Yet this kindly paunchy bachelor knew phases of life that she had never even approached.
"What do you mean when you say you've been around? Around where?"
"Oh, around. You know what I mean. Men—well, a nice girl like you wouldn't just understand how it is with a man, but I mean I been—uh—now—subject to the same temptations other men have. But I know there's nothing in it. Give me a nice little place of my own, my own household, a little bus to run around in and I wouldn't change places with a king. No sir. Nor a poet either." He laughed largely at that, and glanced across the meadow. "I don't know. I guess I'm a funny fella. Different. That's me. Different."
Barren as Lottie's experience with men had been she still knew, as does any woman, that there are certain invariable reactions to certain given statements. These were scientific in their chemical precision. In conversation with the average man you said certain things and immediately got certain results. It was like fishing in a lively trout stream. This dialogue, for example, she or any other woman could have written before it had been spoken. She felt that she could see what was going on inside his head as plainly as though its working were charted. She thought: "He has his mind made up to propose to me but caution tells him to wait. He isn't quite sure of his business yet. He'd really prefer a younger woman but he has told himself that that's foolishness. The thing to do is to settle down. He thinks I'm not bad looking. He isn't crazy about me at all, but he thinks he could work himself up to a pretty good state of enthusiasm. He didn't have what they call his 'fling' in his youth; and he secretly regrets it. If I wanted to I could make him forget his caution and ask me to marry him right now."
He was talking. "I haven't said much about this new business I'm going into. I'm not a fella that talks much. Go ahead and do it, I always say, and then you don't have to talk. What you've done'll talk for you. Yessir!"
Lottie looked at him—at his blunt square hands and the big spatulate thumbs—the little pouches under his eyes—at the thinning hair that he allowed to grow long at the sides so that he could plaster it over the crown, deceiving no one. And she thought, "This is a kind man. What they call a good provider. Generous. Decent, as men go. On the way to fairly certain business success. He'll make what is known as a good husband. You're not so much, Lottie. You're an old girl, with no money; nothing much to look at. Who are you to turn up your nose at him! You're probably a fool to do it——"
"—not an iota of difference to me what other people say or do. I do what I think's right and that's all anybody can do, isn't that true?" He was laboriously following some dull thought of his own.
Lottie jumped up quickly—leapt up, almost, so that the knitting bounded toward him, startled him, as did her sudden movement. "I'm going to get the infants," she said, hurriedly. "It's time we were starting back." Even as he stared up at her she was off. She ran through the little wood, down the knoll full pelt, across the field, her sturdy legs flashing beneath her short skirt, her arms out-stretched. Halfway across the flower-strewn meadow she called to Jesse and Charley. They stood up. Something of her feeling communicated itself to them. They sensed her protest. They ran to meet her, laughing; laughing, they met, joined hands, circled round and round, straining away from each other at arm's length like three mad things there in the May meadow until with a final shout and whoop and high-flung step they dropped panting to the ground.
Lottie, still breathing fast, was the first to rise. "I had to," she explained, "or bust."
"Sure," said the poet and Charley, together. Charley continued. "Lotta, I'll sit in the front seat going home. You and Jesse can get chummy in the back——"
"Oh, no—" But when they were ready to go it had, somehow, arranged itself in that way. Charley invariably gained her own end thus. "Will you let me drive part of the way, Mr. Gartz? Please!"
He shook a worried head. "Why, say, I'd like to, Miss Charley, but I'm afraid you don't understand this little ol' bus of mine. I'm afraid I'd be nervous with anybody else running it. You'd better just let me——"
But in the end it was Charley's slim strong hands that guided the wheel. Ben Gartz sat beside her, tense, watchful, working brakes that were not there. Under the girl's expert guidance the car took the hills like a hawk, swooped, flew, purred. "Say, you better slow down a little," Ben cautioned her again and again. Then, grudgingly, glancing sideways at her lovely young profile, vivid, electric, laughing, "You'resomedriver, kid!"
Lottie, in the back seat, was being charmed by Jesse Dick. She felt as if she had known him for years. He talked little—that is, he would express himself with tremendous enthusiasm on a topic so that you caught the spark of his warmth. Then he would fall silent and his silence was a glowing thing. He sat slumped down on the middle of his spine in a corner of the seat. He rarely glanced at Charley. His eyes flattered Lottie. She found herself being witty and a little hard. She thought now: "Here's one that's different enough. And I haven't an idea of what's going on inhishandsome head. Not an idea. Not—" she giggled a little and Jesse Dick was so companionable that he did not even ask her what she was laughing at—"not an iota of an idea."
In August Lottie accompanied her mother and Aunt Charlotte up to one of the Michigan lake resorts. They went there every summer. The food was good, the air superb, the people typical of any Michigan first-class resort. Jeannette had gone to spend ten days in a girls' camp in Wisconsin. She had a job promised for September. The Paysons had a three-room cottage near the hotel and under the hotel's management; took their meals in the hotel dining room. The cottage boasted a vine-covered porch and a tiny garden. The days were not half bad. Mrs. Payson played bridge occasionally. Aunt Charlotte rocked and knitted and watched the young girls in their gay sweaters and flat-heeled white shoes and smart loud skirts. Lottie even played golf occasionally, when her mother and Aunt Charlotte were napping or resting, or safely disposed of on their own cottage porch or hotel veranda. There were few men during the week. On Fridays husbands and fiancés swarmed down on train and boat for the week-end. On Saturday night there was a dance. Lottie, sitting on the porch of their little cottage, could hear the music. Her mother and Aunt Charlotte were always in bed by ten-thirty, at the latest. Often it was an hour earlier than that. The evenings were terrible beyond words. Long, black, velvety nights during which she sat alone on the little porch guarding the two sleeping occupants of the cottage; staring out into the darkness. The crickets cheeped and chirped. A young girl's laugh rang out from the hotel veranda beyond. A man's voice sounded, low, resonant, as two quiet figures wound their way along one of the little paths that led down to the water. A blundering moth bumped its head against the screen door. A little group of hotel kitchen-girls and dish-washers skirted the back of the cottage on their way to their quarters, talking gutturally. The evenings were terrible beyond words.