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!——”
“What _dom_ talk!” 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.
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 or _other 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.”