CHAPTER XIII
It was Lottie Payson's last August of that sort. When next August came round there she was folding gauze, rolling bandages, stitching pneumonia jackets with the rest of them at the Michigan Avenue Red Cross shop and thinking to herself that the conversation of the women busy about the long tables or at the machines was startlingly like that of the old Reading Club. The Reading Club was, in fact, there almost in its entirety. The Girls' faces, framed in the white linen folds of their Red Cross coifs, looked strangely purified and aloof. Beck Schaefer alone wore her cap with a certain diablerie. She was captain of her section and her official coif was scarlet. She looked like Carmen strayed into a nunnery. A strange new spirit had come upon Chicago that summer. People talked high, and worked hard, prayed a good deal, gave their money away liberally and did not go to northern Michigan to escape the heat. Lottie sewed at the Red Cross shop three days every week. Even Mrs. Carrie Payson seemed to realize that driving about the parks and boulevards on summer afternoons was not quite the thing. When autumn came she was selling Liberty Bonds in the sure-fire manner of a professional. As for great-aunt Charlotte—the hand that had sewed and folded and stitched during the four years of the '60s and that had fashioned the prize-winning patchwork silk quilt in the '70s had not lost its cunning. She knitted with a speed and perfection nothing short of miraculous, turning out a sweater in three days, a pair of socks in two. The dip, bite, and recovery of her needles was machine-like in its regularity. She folded and rolled bandages as well, having enrolled in a Red Cross shop established in the parlours of a near-by hotel. Even Jeannette had been caught by the spirit of the new order. Her wage as stenographer was a queenly sum these days; and while she could not resist silk stockings, new hats, expensive blouses, and gloves, and talked of a fur coat for the coming winter (every self-respecting stenographer boasted one by December) she still had enough left to contribute freely to every drive, fund, association, and relief committee connected with the war. She had long ago paid back the hundred dollars to that Otto who had been whisked away in the first draft. Even Hulda in the kitchen had deserted her yards of crochet for a hank of wool. Henry Kemp worked nights as a member of the district draft board. Charley danced in benefits all the way from Lake Forest to South Chicago, and enrolled as Emergency Driver for Sunday work. Alone, of all the family, Belle remained aloof. True, she knitted now and then, languidly. But the Red Cross sewing gave her a headache, she said; the excitement affected her digestive disorder. She was anti-war, anti-draft, anti-Wilson.
And Ben Gartz thrived. If anyone had ever doubted Ben Gartz's business foresight that person was forever silenced now. On every martial male left arm—rookie or general, gob or admiral—reposed a wrist watch. And now when Ben Gartz offered Henry a plump brown cylinder with the customary "Have a cigar!" Henry took it reluctantly, if reverently, eyed its scarlet and gold belly-band with appreciation, and knew better than to proffer one of his own inferior brand in return. "I'll smoke it after dinner," he would say, and tuck it away in his vest pocket. Henry Kemp had aged in the last year. His business was keeping its head barely above water with the makeshift of American manufactured products.
It had been during the winter before the war—February, 1917—that Charley Kemp had announced one evening to her father and mother that she intended to marry Jesse Dick when she was twenty. That would be in June. He had got a job as feature writer with the Chicago News Bureau and he was acting as motion picture critic for one of the afternoon papers. His comment was caustic but highly readable. His writing in this new field was characterised by the same crude force that made his poetry a living thing.
"Well, was I right or wasn't I?" demanded Mrs. Payson of her daughter Belle. "Talking about her five children like a—like a hussy!"
"Hussies don't have five children," Belle retorted, meaninglessly.
Mrs. Payson endeavoured to arouse her daughter to the necessity for immediate action against this proposed madness of Charley's. "You've got to stop it, that's all."
"Stop it how?"
"How! By forbidding it, that's how."
Belle could even smile at that. "Oh, mother, aren't you quaint! Nowadays parents don't forbid girls marrying this man or that, any more than they lock them up in a high tower like the princess What's-her-name in the fairy tale."
"You let me talk to her," said Mrs. Carrie Payson. "I'll do a little plain speaking."
Her plain speaking consisted in calling Jesse Dick a butcher's boy and a good-for-nothing scribbler who couldn't earn a living. Charley heard her out, a steely light in her eyes.
She spoke quietly and with deadly effect. "You're my grandmother, but that doesn't entitle you to talk to me with the disrespect you've just shown."
"Disrespect! To you! Well, upon my word!"
"Yes, I know it strikes you as extraordinary. If it had been written 'Honor thy sons and thy daughters' along with 'Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother' there'd have been a lot less trouble in the world. You never did respect your own people—your own family. You've never shown respect to Lottie or to mother, or to father or to Aunt Charlotte, for that matter. So why should I expect you to respect me. I'm marrying Jesse Dick because he's the man I want to marry. I may be making a mistake but if I am I'm willing to pay for it. At least I'll have only myself to reproach."
"You children to-day think you know everything, but you don't. You wait. You'll see. I know."
"No you don't. You didn't know when you married. You thought you were making a good match and your husband turned out to be a good-for-nothing rogue. I'm sorry to hurt you but you make me do it. If I'm wrong I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I went into it with my eyes open. I know all Jesse Dick's weaknesses and I love them. Five years from now he'll be a famous American poet—if not the most famous. I know just what he needs. He needs me, for one thing. In time he may go off with other women——"
"Charley Kemp how can you sit there and talk like that!"
"—but he'll come back to me. I know. I'll keep on with my job at Shields'. In two or three years I'll be making a very respectable number of thousands a year."
"And in the meantime you'll live where, may I ask? Your father's in no position, goodness knows, to have a poet son-in-law dumped on his hands. Unless you're planning to live in the rear of the delicatessen, perhaps."
"We've got a three-room cottage in Hubbard Woods. Some time, when you're feeling stronger, I'd like to have you see it. It belongs to Dorn, the landscape painter. He built it when Hubbard Woods was a wilderness. It's got a fireplace that doesn't draw and a sink that doesn't drain and windows that don't fit. It's right on the edge of the big ravine and the very thought of it makes me happy all over. And now I'm going to kiss you, grandma, which I think is awfully sweet of me, all things considered, you dear mistaken old-fashioned darling." Which she did, on the tip of Mrs. Payson's nose.
At the word "old-fashioned" Mrs. Carrie Payson had bristled; then, inexplicably, had slumped without voicing a word in her own defense. She seemed momentarily uncertain, bewildered almost. Still, she did allow herself a last javelin. "'In five years he'll be a famous poet.' That's a sensible reason for marrying a man! Huh!"
"But that's not my reason," Charley explained with charming good humour, "any more than because his hair is sort of red in lights, or his ears a little pointed, or his hands slim and brown or his ties always terrible."
"What is your reason?" snapped Mrs. Payson. But an honest curiosity lighted her eye.
"The same thing strikes us funny at the same time. We like the same kind of book though we may disagree about it. We like to be outdoors a lot, and we understand each other's language and we're not sentimental and we don't snarl if food is delayed and we don't demand explanations, and any one of those reasons would make marriage between two people a reasonably safe bet."
Mrs. Payson forced herself to a tremendous effort. "You haven't even said you're——" she gulped—"you're——" with a rush—"in love with him."
"I haven't said anything else."
But next June, when she was twenty, Charley was saying, "But a man who won't fight——!"
"I haven't said I won't fight. I said I wouldn't enlist, and I won't. I hate war. It's against every principle I've got. If I'm drafted I'll go into the damn thing as a private and if I find that shooting a gun or jabbing a bayonet into another fellow's guts is going to stop his doing the same to me I'll shoot and jab. I don't pretend to be fired with the martial spirit simply because a European nation, grown too big for its clothes, tried to grab off a new lot and failed in the first attempt."
"I believe you're afraid."
"Of course I'm afraid. Any man who says he isn't lies. I hate living in filth and mud and lice and getting an eye shot out. But that isn't my reason for not going, and you know it. I won't voluntarily further this thing."
Charley did know it. She knew, too, that the instinct that made her want to send her man to war was a thing of low derivation yet terribly human. She did not say, definitely. "I can't marry a man who feels as you do." It was the first time in her life that she had lacked the courage to say definitely the thing she thought. But the family realised that the June wedding was no longer a thing to be combated. June came and went. The Hyde Park Boulevard apartment had not known the young poet for a month.
Jesse Dick was called in the first draft. Charley kept doggedly at her work all summer, riding back and forth in the dirt and cinders of the I. C. trains. It was a summer of intense heat. Daily Charley threatened to appear at Shields' in her bathing suit or in one of the Greekest of her dancing costumes. But it was surprising to see how roselike she could look as she emerged after dinner in a last year's organdie. Everyone was dancing. Sometimes Charley went to the Midway Garden at the entrance to Washington Park or over to the old Bismarck (now known as the Marigold Gardens) there to dance and dine outdoors in the moonlight. Always she was squired by a dashing blue-and-gold or white duck uniform from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, or olive-drab and shiny tan boots from Fort Sheridan.
Jesse Dick came home just before he sailed for France. He wore an issue uniform which would have rendered grotesque a Captain Jinks or a D'Artagnan. The sleeves were too short; the collar too large; the jacket too brief. Spiral puttees wrapped his slim shanks. Army brogans—yellow—were on his feet.
Bairnsfather's drawings had already achieved a popularity in America. Charley hung between laughter and tears when Jesse struck a pose and said, "Alf."
They drove to the Marigold Gardens on the North Side. Jesse had not sold his little flivver. The place was a fairyland of lights, music, flower-banked terraces. Hundreds were dining outdoors under the moonlight, the women in pale-coloured organdies and chiffons, the men in Palm Beach suits or in uniforms. No where else in America could one find just this sort of thing—nor, for that matter, in Europe even in the days before the war. In a city constantly referred to as crude, commercial, and unlovely there flourished two garden spots unique, exquisite and unproclaimed.
Jesse ordered a dinner that brought a look of wonder to the face of the waiter (Swiss, of course) who had gauged his prospective order after one glance at the ill-fitting issue uniform.
"Dance?" said Jesse.
"Yes." They danced, wordlessly. They danced before and after the hors d'œuvres, the fowl, the salad, the dessert, the coffee. They talked little. The boy glanced about with cold wise young eyes. "God!"
"Yes, I know," Charley said, as if in answer to a long speech, "but after all what good would it do if they all stayed home! They're probably all doing their share. They hate it as much as you do. Moping won't help."
"Dance?"
"Yes."
They rose and wound their way among the little green tables to the dancing platform. Charley raised her eyes to his as they danced. "Will you marry me to-morrow, Jesse? Before you go?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"That's all right for truck drivers and for sloppy emotionalists. But it's a poor plan. You're only suggesting it because of the music and my nearness and the fact that I'm leaving day after to-morrow. I'm no different than I was three months ago. I hate war as much as I ever did. If you think three months of camp training——"
"Will you marry me to-morrow, Jesse?"
"No."
"I'm afraid, Jesse."
"So am I. But not as scared as that." His cheek rested against hers. Her fingers clutched tight a fold of the bunchy cloth of his rough uniform. She could not bring herself to name the fear she felt. All the way home she pressed close to the rough sleeve—the good tangible rough cloth of the sleeve—and the muscle-hard arm within it.
Hyde Park is cut through by the Illinois Central tracks. All that summer and autumn and winter Charley would start up in her sleep at the sound of high shrill voices like the voices of children. Lottie Payson heard them, too, at night in the old house on Prairie and could not sleep again. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central trains were bringing boys to the training camps, or from the training camps to the points of embarkation. They were boys from Illinois farms, Wisconsin towns, Minnesota and Michigan villages. "Yee-ow!" they yelled as their trains passed through the great sleeping city. "Whoo-ee! Yip!" Keeping their courage up. Yelling defiance at a world gone mad. All that summer you heard them, and through the autumn and winter, and the next spring and summer and autumn. High young voices they were, almost like the voices of children. "Berlin or Bust" was scrawled in chalk on the outside of their cars—scrawled by some raw youth from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, who was going to camp and to war in a baseball cap and his Sunday pants and a red sweater.
Charley would pull the covers over her head and cover her ears with her hands until the last yip had died away. But Lottie would sit up in bed, her head thrown back, listening—listening as if they were calling to her.