Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening,
informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of
some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and
modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors
delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering
them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them
until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger
professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties
made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it.
They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of
slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the
girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to
give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would
start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not
above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.
Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. They were well
on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were
alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark stuff, brown or
drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They
had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces
that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another roomful of fresh
young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a
slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of
the two women one—the elder—was occasionally likely to flare into
sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour
and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to
survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the
classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions
of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.
Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia
Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable,
bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:
“In the _con_sideration of _all_ the facts in the _case_ presented
be_fore_ us we must _first_ review the _his_tory and at_tempt_ to
analyze the _out_standing——”
He found himself waiting for that emphasis and shrinking from it as from
a sledge-hammer blow. It hurt his head.
Miss Lodge droned. She approached a word with a maddening uh-uh-uh-uh.
In the uh-uh-uh face of the uh-uh-uh-uh geometrical situation of the
uh-uh-uh uh——
He shifted restlessly in his chair, found his hands clenched into fists,
and took refuge in watching the shadow cast by an oak branch outside the
window on a patch of sunlight against the blackboard behind her.
During the early spring Dirk and Selina talked things over again, seated
before their own fireplace in the High Prairie farmhouse. Selina had had
that fireplace built five years before and her love of it amounted to
fire-worship. She had it lighted always on winter evenings and in the
spring when the nights were sharp. In Dirk’s absence she would sit
before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone
to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such
luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth. High
Prairie, driving by from some rare social gathering or making a late
trip to market as they sometimes were forced to do, saw the rosy flicker
of Mrs. DeJong’s fire dancing on the wall and warmed themselves by it
even while they resented it.
“A good heater in there and yet anyway she’s got to have a fire going in
a grate. Always she does something funny like that. I should think she’d
be lonesome sitting there like that with her dog only.”
They never knew how many guests Selina entertained there before her fire
those winter evenings—old friends and new. Sobig was there, the plump
earth-grimed baby who rolled and tumbled in the fields while his young
mother wiped the sweat from her face to look at him with fond eyes. Dirk
DeJong of ten years hence was there. Simeon Peake, dapper, soft-spoken,
ironic, in his shiny boots and his hat always a little on one side.
Pervus DeJong, a blue-shirted giant with strong tender hands and little
fine golden hairs on the backs of them. Fanny Davenport, the
actress-idol of her girlhood came back to her, smiling, bowing; and the
gorgeous spangled creatures in the tights and bodices of the old
Extravaganzas. In strange contrast to these was the patient, tireless
figure of Maartje Pool standing in the doorway of Roelf’s little shed,
her arms tucked in her apron for warmth. “You make fun, huh?” she said,
wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy,
misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.
Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her
fire.
She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was
Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the week-end.
Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays. Julie
Arnold had invited Dirk to the gay parties at the Prairie Avenue house.
He had even spent two entire week-ends there. After the brocaded luxury
of the Prairie Avenue house his farm bedroom seemed almost startlingly
stark and bare. Selina frankly enjoyed Dirk’s somewhat fragmentary
accounts of these visits; extracted from them as much vicarious pleasure
as he had had in the reality—more, probably.
“Now tell me what you had to eat,” she would say, sociably, like a
child. “What did you have for dinner, for example? Was it grand? Julie
tells me they have a butler now. Well! I can’t wait till I hear Aug
Hempel on the subject.”
He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would
interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I’d
like _that_. You did! Well, I’ll have it for you next week when you come
home. I’ll get the recipe from Julie.”
He didn’t think he’d be home next week. One of the fellows he’d met at
the Arnolds’ had invited him to their place out north, on the lake. He
had a boat.
“That’ll be lovely!” Selina exclaimed, after an almost unnoticeable
moment of silence—silence with panic in it. “I’ll try not to fuss and
be worried like an old hen every minute of the time I think you’re on
the water. . . . Now do go on, Sobig. First fruit with mayonnaise, h’m?
What kind of soup?”
He was not a naturally talkative person. There was nothing surly about
his silence. It was a taciturn streak inherited from his Dutch ancestry.
This time, though, he was more voluble than usual. “Paula . . .” came
again and again into his conversation. “Paula . . . Paula . . .” and
again “. . . Paula.” He did not seem conscious of the repetition, but
Selina’s quick ear caught it.
“I haven’t seen her,” Selina said, “since she went away to school the
first year. She must be—let’s see—she’s a year older than you are.
She’s nineteen going on twenty. Last time I saw her I thought she was a
dark scrawny little thing. Too bad she didn’t inherit Julie’s lovely
gold colouring and good looks, instead of Eugene, who doesn’t need ’em.”
“She isn’t!” said Dirk, hotly. “She’s dark and slim and sort
of—uh—sensuous”—Selina started visibly, and raised her hand quickly
to her mouth to hide a smile—“like Cleopatra. Her eyes are big and kind
of slanting—not squinty I don’t mean, but slanting up a little at the
corners. Cut out, kind of, so that they look bigger than most people’s.”
“My eyes used to be considered rather fine,” said Selina, mischievously;
but he did not hear.
“She makes all the other girls look sort of blowzy.” He was silent a
moment. Selina was silent, too, and it was not a happy silence. Dirk
spoke again, suddenly, as though continuing aloud a train of thought,
“—all but her hands.”
Selina made her voice sound natural, not sharply inquisitive. “What’s
the matter with her hands, Dirk?”
He pondered a moment, his brows knitted. At last, slowly, “Well, I don’t
know. They’re brown, and awfully thin and sort of—grabby. I mean it
makes me nervous to watch them. And when the rest of her is cool they’re
hot when you touch them.”
He looked at his mother’s hands that were busy with some sewing. The
stuff on which she was working was a bit of satin ribbon; part of a hood
intended to grace the head of Geertje Pool Vander Sijde’s second baby.
She had difficulty in keeping her rough fingers from catching on the
soft surface of the satin. Manual work, water, sun, and wind had tanned
those hands, hardened them, enlarged the knuckles, spread them,
roughened them. Yet how sure they were, and strong, and cool and
reliable—and tender. Suddenly, looking at them, Dirk said, “Now your
hands. I love your hands, Mother.”
She put down her work hastily, yet quietly, so that the sudden rush of
happy grateful tears in her eyes should not sully the pink satin ribbon.
She was flushed, like a girl. “Do you, Sobig?” she said.
After a moment she took up her sewing again. Her face looked young,
eager, fresh, like the face of the girl who had found cabbages so
beautiful that night when she bounced along the rutty Halsted road with
Klaas Pool, many years ago. It came into her face, that look, when she
was happy, exhilarated, excited. That was why those who loved her and
brought that look into her face thought her beautiful, while those who
did not love her never saw the look and consequently considered her a
plain woman.
There was another silence between the two. Then: “Mother, what would you
think of my going East next fall, to take a course in architecture?”
“Would you like that, Dirk?”
“Yes, I think so—yes.”
“Then I’d like it better than anything in the world. I—it makes me
happy just to think of it.”
“It would—cost an awful lot.”
“I’ll manage. I’ll manage. . . . What made you decide on architecture?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The new buildings at the university—Gothic, you
know—are such a contrast to the old. Then Paula and I were talking the
other day. She hates their house on Prairie—terrible old lumpy gray
stone pile, with the black of the I. C. trains all over it. She wants
her father to build north—an Italian villa or French château. Something
of that sort. So many of her friends are moving to the north shore, away
from these hideous south-side and north-side Chicago houses with their
stoops, and their bay windows, and their terrible turrets. Ugh!”
“Well, now, do you know,” Selina remonstrated mildly, “I like ’em. I
suppose I’m wrong, but to me they seem sort of natural and solid and
unpretentious, like the clothes that old August Hempel wears, so
squarecut and baggy. Those houses look dignified to me, and fitting.
They may be ugly—probably are—but anyway they’re not ridiculous. They
have a certain rugged grandeur. They’re Chicago. Those French and
Italian gimcracky things they—they’re incongruous. It’s as if Abraham
Lincoln were to appear suddenly in pink satin knee breeches and buckled
shoes, and lace ruffles at his wrists.”
Dirk could laugh at that picture. But he protested, too. “But there’s no
native architecture, so what’s to be done! You wouldn’t call those
smoke-blackened old stone and brick piles with their iron fences and
their conservatories and cupolas and gingerbread exactly native, would
you?”
“No,” Selina admitted, “but those Italian villas and French châteaux in
north Chicago suburbs are a good deal like a lace evening gown in the
Arizona desert. It wouldn’t keep you cool in the daytime, and it
wouldn’t be warm enough at night. I suppose a native architecture is
evolved from building for the local climate and the needs of the
community, keeping beauty in mind as you go. We don’t need turrets and
towers any more than we need draw-bridges and moats. It’s all right to
keep them, I suppose, where they grew up, in a country where the feudal
system meant that any day your next-door neighbour might take it into
his head to call his gang around him and sneak up to steal your wife and
tapestries and gold drinking cups.”
Dirk was interested and amused. Talks with his mother were likely to
affect him thus. “What’s your idea of a real Chicago house, Mother?”
Selina answered quickly, as if she had thought often about it; as if she
would have liked just such a dwelling on the site of the old DeJong
farmhouse in which they now were seated so comfortably. “Well, it would
need big porches for the hot days and nights so’s to catch the
prevailing southwest winds from the prairies in the summer—a porch that
would be swung clear around to the east, too—or a terrace or another
porch east so that if the precious old lake breeze should come up just
when you think you’re dying of the heat, as it sometimes does, you could
catch that, too. It ought to be built—the house, I mean—rather
squarish and tight and solid against our cold winters and north-easters.
Then sleeping porches, of course. There’s a grand American institution
for you! England may have its afternoon tea on the terrace, and Spain
may have its patio, and France its courtyard, and Italy its pergola,
vine-covered; but America’s got the sleeping porch—the screened-in
open-air sleeping porch, and I shouldn’t wonder if the man who first
thought of that would get precedence, on Judgment Day, over the men who
invented the aeroplane, the talking machine, and the telephone. After
all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.” After
which grand period Selina grinned at Dirk, and Dirk grinned at Selina
and the two giggled together there by the fireplace, companionably.
“Mother, you’re simply wonderful!—only your native Chicago dwelling
seems to be mostly porch.”
Selina waved such carping criticism away with a careless hand. “Oh,
well, any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and
at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else
it has or hasn’t got.”
Next day they were more serious. The eastern college and the
architectural career seemed to be settled things. Selina was content,
happy. Dirk was troubled about the expense. He spoke of it at breakfast
next morning (Dirk’s breakfast; his mother had had hers hours before and
now as he drank his coffee, was sitting with him a moment and glancing
at the paper that had come in the rural mail delivery). She had been out
in the fields overseeing the transplanting of young tomato seedlings
from hotbed to field. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned up tight,
for the air was still sharp. On her head was a battered black felt soft
hat (an old one of Dirk’s) much like the one she had worn to the
Haymarket that day ten years ago. Selina’s cheeks were faintly pink from
her walk across the fields in the brisk morning air.
She sniffed. “That coffee smells wonderful. I think I’ll just——” She
poured herself a half cup with the air of virtue worn by one who really
longs for a whole cup and doesn’t take it.
“I’ve been thinking,” he began, “the expense——”
“Pigs,” said Selina, serenely.
“Pigs!” He looked around, bewildered; stared at his mother.
“Pigs’ll do it,” Selina explained, calmly. “I’ve been wanting to put
them in for three or four years. It’s August Hempel’s idea. Hogs, I
should have said.”
Again, as before, he echoed, “Hogs!” rather faintly.
“High-bred hogs. They’re worth their weight in silver this minute, and
will be for years to come. I won’t go in for them extensively. Just
enough to make an architect out of Mr. Dirk DeJong.” Then, at the
expression in his face: “Don’t look so pained, son. There’s nothing
revolting about a hog—not my kind, brought up in a pen as sanitary as a
tiled bathroom and fed on corn. He’s a handsome, impressive-looking
animal, the hog, when he isn’t treated like one.”
He looked dejected. “I’d rather not go to school on—hogs.”
She took off the felt hat and tossed it over to the old couch by the
window; smoothed her hair back with the flat of her palm. You saw that
the soft dark hair was liberally sprinkled with gray now, but the eyes
were bright and clear as ever.
“You know, Sobig, this is what they call a paying farm—as vegetable
farms go. We’re out of debt, the land’s in good shape, the crop promises
well if we don’t have another rainy cold spring like last year’s. But no
truck garden is going to make its owner rich these days, with labour so
high and the market what it is, and the expense of hauling and all. Any
truck farmer who comes out even thinks he’s come out ahead.”
“I know it.” Rather miserably.
“Well. I’m not complaining, son. I’m just telling you. I’m having a
grand time. When I see the asparagus plantation actually yielding, that
I planted ten years ago, I’m as happy as if I’d stumbled on a gold mine.
I think, sometimes, of the way your father objected to my planting the
first one. April, like this, in the country, with everything coming up
green and new in the rich black loam—I can’t tell you. And when I know
that it goes to market as food—the best kind of food, that keeps
people’s bodies clean and clear and flexible and strong! I like to think
of babies’ mothers saying: ‘Now eat your spinach, every scrap, or you
can’t have any dessert! . . . Carrots make your eyes bright. . . .
Finish your potato. Potatoes make you strong!’”
Selina laughed, flushed a little.
“Yes, but how about hogs? Do you feel that way about hogs?”
“Certainly!” said Selina, briskly. She pushed toward him a little
blue-and-white platter that lay on the white cloth near her elbow. “Have
a bit more bacon, Dirk. One of these nice curly slivers that are so
crisp.”
“I’ve finished my breakfast, Mother.” He rose.
The following autumn saw him a student of architecture at Cornell. He
worked hard, studied even during his vacations. He would come home to
the heat and humidity of the Illinois summers and spend hours each day
in his own room that he had fitted up with a long work table and a
drawing board. His T-square was at hand; two triangles—a 45 and a 60;
his compass; a pair of dividers. Selina sometimes stood behind him
watching him as he carefully worked on the tracing paper. His contempt
for the local architecture was now complete. Especially did he hold
forth on the subject of the apartment-houses that were mushrooming on
every street in Chicago from Hyde Park on the south to Evanston on the
north. Chicago was very elegant in speaking of these; never called them
“flats”; always apartments. In front of each of these (there were
usually six to a building), was stuck a little glass-enclosed cubicle
known as a sun-parlour. In these (sometimes you heard them spoken of,
grandly, as solariums) Chicago dwellers took refuge from the leaden
skies, the heavy lake atmosphere, the gray mist and fog and smoke that
so frequently swathed the city in gloom. They were done in yellow or
rose cretonnes. Silk lamp shades glowed therein, and flower-laden boxes.
In these frank little boxes Chicago read its paper, sewed, played
bridge, even ate its breakfast. It never pulled down the shades.
“Terrible!” Dirk fumed. “Not only are they hideous in themselves, stuck
on the front of those houses like three pairs of spectacles; but the
lack of decent privacy! They do everything but bathe in ’em. Have they
never heard the advice given people who live in glass houses!”
By his junior year he was talking in a large way about the Beaux Arts.
But Selina did not laugh at this. “Perhaps,” she thought. “Who can tell!
After a year or two in an office here, why not another year of study in
Paris if he needs it.”
Though it was her busiest time on the farm Selina went to Ithaca for his
graduation in 1913. He was twenty-two and, she was calmly sure, the
best-looking man in his class. Undeniably he was a figure to please the
eye; tall, well-built, as his father had been, and blond, too, like his
father, except for his eyes. These were brown—not so dark as Selina’s,
but with some of the soft liquid quality of her glance. They
strengthened his face, somehow; gave him an ardent look of which he was
not conscious. Women, feeling the ardour of that dark glance turned upon
them, were likely to credit him with feelings toward themselves of which
he was quite innocent. They did not know that the glance and its effect
were mere matters of pigmentation and eye-conformation. Then, too, the
gaze of a man who talks little is always more effective than that of one
who is loquacious.
Selina, in her black silk dress, and her plain black hat, and her
sensible shoes was rather a quaint little figure amongst all those
vivacious, bevoiled, and beribboned mammas. But a distinctive little
figure, too. Dirk need not be ashamed of her. She eyed the rather
paunchy, prosperous, middle-aged fathers and thought, with a pang, how
much handsomer Pervus would have been than any of these, if only he
could have lived to see this day. Then, involuntarily, she wondered if
this day would ever have occurred, had Pervus lived. Chided herself for
thinking thus.
When he returned to Chicago, Dirk went into the office of Hollis &
Sprague, Architects. He thought himself lucky to work with this firm,
for it was doing much to guide Chicago’s taste in architecture away from
the box car. Already Michigan Boulevard’s skyline soared somewhat above
the grimly horizontal. But his work there was little more than that of
draughtsman, and his weekly stipend could hardly be dignified by the
term of salary. But he had large ideas about architecture and he found
expression for his suppressed feelings on his week-ends spent with
Selina at the farm. “Baroque” was the word with which he dismissed the
new Beachside Hotel, north. He said the new Lincoln Park band-stand
looked like an igloo. He said that the city council ought to order the
Potter Palmer mansion destroyed as a blot on the landscape, and waxed
profane on the subject of the east face of the Public Library Building,
down town.
“Never mind,” Selina assured him, happily. “It was all thrown up so
hastily. Remember that just yesterday, or the day before, Chicago was an
Indian fort, with tepees where towers are now, and mud wallows in place
of asphalt. Beauty needs time to perfect it. Perhaps we’ve been waiting
all these years for just such youngsters as you. And maybe some day I’ll
be driving down Michigan Boulevard with a distinguished visitor—Roelf
Pool, perhaps. Why not? Let’s say Roelf Pool, the famous sculptor. And
he’ll say, ‘Who designed that building—the one that is so strong and
yet so light? So gay and graceful, and yet so reticent!’ And I’ll say,
‘Oh, that! That’s one of the earlier efforts of my son, Dirk DeJong.’”
But Dirk pulled at his pipe moodily; shook his head. “Oh, you don’t
know, Mother. It’s so damned slow. First thing you know I’ll be thirty.
And what am I! An office boy—or little more than that—at Hollis’s.”
During his university years Dirk had seen much of the Arnolds, Eugene
and Paula, but it sometimes seemed to Selina that he avoided these
meetings—these parties and week-ends. She was content that this should
be so, for she guessed that the matter of money held him back. She
thought it was well that he should realize the difference now. Eugene
had his own car—one of five in the Arnold garage. Paula, too, had hers.
She had been one of the first Chicago girls to drive a gas car; had
breezed about Chicago’s boulevards in one when she had been little more
than a child in short skirts. At the wheel she was dexterous,
dare-devil, incredibly relaxed. Her fascination for Dirk was strong.
Selina knew that, too. In the last year or two he had talked very little
of Paula and that, Selina knew, meant that he was hard hit.
Sometimes Paula and Eugene drove out to the farm, making the distance
from their new north-shore house to the DeJong place far south in some
breath-taking number of minutes. Eugene would appear in rakish cap,
loose London coat, knickers, queer brogans with an English look about
them, a carefully careless looseness about the hang and fit of his
jacket. Paula did not affect sports clothes for herself. She was not the
type, she said. Slim, dark, vivacious, she wore slinky clothes—crêpes,
chiffons. Her feet were slim in sheer silk stockings and slippers with
buckles. Her eyes were languorous, lovely. She worshipped luxury and
said so.
“I’ll have to marry money,” she declared. “Now that they’ve finished
calling poor Grandpa a beef-baron and taken I don’t know how many
millions away from him, we’re practically on the streets.”
“You look it!” from Dirk; and there was bitterness beneath his light
tone.
“Well, it’s true. All this silly muckraking in the past ten years or
more. Poor Father! Of course Grand-dad was pur-ty rough, let me tell
you. I read some of the accounts of that last indictment—the 1910
one—and I must say I gathered that dear old Aug made Jesse James look
like a philanthropist. I should think, at his age, he’d be a little
scared. After all, when you’re over seventy you’re likely to have some
doubts and fears about punishment in the next world. But not a grand old
pirate like Grandfather. He’ll sack and burn and plunder until he goes
down with the ship. And it looks to me as if the old boat had a pretty
strong list to starboard right now. Father says himself that unless a
war breaks, or something, which isn’t at all likely, the packing
industry is going to spring a leak.”
“Elaborate figure of speech,” murmured Eugene. The four of them—Paula,
Dirk, Eugene, and Selina—, were sitting on the wide screened porch that
Selina had had built at the southwest corner of the house. Paula was, of
course, in the couch-swing. Occasionally she touched one slim languid
foot to the floor and gave indolent impetus to the couch.
“It is, rather, isn’t it? Might as well finish it, then. Darling Aug’s
been the grand old captain right through the vi’age. Dad’s never been
more than a pretty bum second mate. And as for you, Gene my love, cabin
boy would be, y’understand me, big.” Eugene had gone into the business a
year before.
“What can you expect,” retorted Eugene, “of a lad that hates salt pork?
And every other kind of pig meat?” He despised the yards and all that
went with it.
Selina now got up and walked to the end of the porch. She looked out
across the fields, shading her eyes with her hand. “There’s Adam coming
in with the last load for the day. He’ll be driving into town now.
Cornelius started an hour ago.” The DeJong farm sent two great loads to
the city now. Selina was contemplating the purchase of one of the large
automobile trucks that would do away with the plodding horses and save
hours of time on the trip. She went down the steps now on her way to
oversee the loading of Adam Bras’s wagon. At the bottom of the steps she
turned. “Why can’t you two stay to supper? You can quarrel comfortably
right through the meal and drive home in the cool of the evening.”
“I’ll stay,” said Paula, “thanks. If you’ll have all kinds of
vegetables, cooked and uncooked. The cooked ones smothered in cream and
oozing butter. And let me go out into the fields and pick ’em myself
like Maud Muller or Marie Antoinette or any of those make-believe rustic
gals.”
In her French-heeled slippers and her filmy silk stockings she went out
into the rich black furrows of the fields, Dirk carrying the basket.
“Asparagus,” she ordered first. Then, “But where is it? Is _that_ it!”
“You dig for it, idiot,” said Dirk, stooping, and taking from his basket
the queerly curved sharp knife or spud used for cutting the asparagus
shoots. “Cut the shoots three or four inches below the surface.”
“Oh, let me do it!” She was down on her silken knees in the dirt, ruined
a goodly patch of the fine tender shoots, gave it up and sat watching
Dirk’s expert manipulation of the knife. “Let’s have radishes, and corn,
and tomatoes and lettuce and peas and artichokes and——”
“Artichokes grow in California, not Illinois.” He was more than usually
uncommunicative, and noticeably moody.
Paula remarked it. “Why the Othello brow?”
“You didn’t mean that rot, did you? about marrying a rich man.”
“Of course I meant it. What other sort of man do you think I ought to
marry?” He looked at her, silently. She smiled. “Yes, wouldn’t I make an
ideal bride for a farmer!”
“I’m not a farmer.”
“Well, architect then. Your job as draughtsman at Hollis & Sprague’s
must pay you all of twenty-five a week.”
“Thirty-five,” said Dirk, grimly. “What’s that got to do with it!”
“Not a thing, darling.” She stuck out one foot. “These slippers cost
thirty.”
“I won’t be getting thirty-five a week all my life. You’ve got brains
enough to know that. Eugene wouldn’t be getting that much if he weren’t
the son of his father.”
“The grandson of his grandfather,” Paula corrected him. “And I’m not so
sure he wouldn’t. Gene’s a born mechanic if they’d just let him work at
it. He’s crazy about engines and all that junk. But no—‘Millionaire
Packer’s Son Learns Business from Bottom Rung of Ladder.’ Picture of
Gene in workman’s overalls and cap in the Sunday papers. He drives to
the office on Michigan at ten and leaves at four and he doesn’t know a
steer from a cow when he sees it.”
“I don’t care a damn about Gene. I’m talking about you. You were joking,
weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t. I’d hate being poor, or even just moderately rich. I’m used
to money—loads of it. I’m twenty-four. And I’m looking around.”
He kicked an innocent beet-top with his boot. “You like me better than
any man you know.”
“Of course I do. Just my luck.”
“Well, then!”
“Well, then, let’s take these weggibles in and have ’em cooked in cream,
as ordered.”
She made a pretense of lifting the heavy basket. Dirk snatched it
roughly out of her hand so that she gave a little cry and looked
ruefully down at the red mark on her palm. He caught her by the
shoulder—even shook her a little. “Look here, Paula. Do you mean to
tell me you’d marry a man simply because he happened to have a lot of
money!”
“Perhaps not simply because he had a lot of money. But it certainly
would be a factor, among other things. Certainly he would be preferable
to a man who knocked me about the fields as if I were a bag of
potatoes.”
“Oh, forgive me. But—listen, Paula—you know I’m—gosh!—— And there I
am stuck in an architect’s office and it’ll be years before I——”
“Yes, but it’ll probably be years before I meet the millions I require,
too. So why bother? And even if I do, you and I can be just as good
friends.”
“Oh, shut up. Don’t pull that ingénue stuff on me, please. Remember I’ve
known you since you were ten years old.”
“And you know just how black my heart is, don’t you, what? You want,
really, some nice hearty lass who can tell asparagus from peas when she
sees ’em, and who’ll offer to race you from here to the kitchen.”
“God forbid!”
Six months later Paula Arnold was married to Theodore A. Storm, a man of
fifty, a friend of her father’s, head of so many companies, stockholder
in so many banks, director of so many corporations that even old Aug
Hempel seemed a recluse from business in comparison. She never called
him Teddy. No one ever did. Theodore Storm was a large man—not exactly
stout, perhaps, but flabby. His inches saved him from grossness. He had
a large white serious face, fine thick dark hair, graying at the
temples, and he dressed very well except for a leaning toward rather
effeminate ties. He built for Paula a town house on the Lake Shore drive
in the region known as the Gold Coast. The house looked like a
restrained public library. There was a country place beyond Lake Forest
far out on the north shore, sloping down to the lake and surrounded by
acres and acres of fine woodland, expertly parked. There were drives,
ravines, brooks, bridges, hothouses, stables, a race-track, gardens,
dairies, fountains, bosky paths, keeper’s cottage (twice the size of
Selina’s farmhouse). Within three years Paula had two children, a boy
and a girl. “There! That’s done,” she said. Her marriage was a great
mistake and she knew it. For the war, coming in 1914, a few months after
her wedding, sent the Hempel-Arnold interests sky-rocketing. Millions of
pounds of American beef and pork were shipped to Europe. In two years
the Hempel fortune was greater than it ever had been. Paula was up to
her eyes in relief work for Bleeding Belgium. All the Gold Coast was.
The Beautiful Mrs. Theodore A. Storm in her Gift Shop Conducted for the
Relief of Bleeding Belgium.
Dirk had not seen her in months. She telephoned him unexpectedly one
Friday afternoon in his office at Hollis & Sprague’s.
“Come out and spend Saturday and Sunday with us, won’t you? We’re
running away to the country this afternoon. I’m so sick of Bleeding
Belgium, you can’t imagine. I’m sending the children out this morning. I
can’t get away so early. I’ll call for you in the roadster this
afternoon at four and drive you out myself.”
“I am going to spend the week-end with Mother. She’s expecting me.”
“Bring her along.”
“She wouldn’t come. You know she doesn’t enjoy all that velvet-footed
servitor stuff.”
“Oh, but we live quite simply out there, really. Just sort of rough it.
Do come, Dirk. I’ve got some plans to talk over with you . . . How’s the
job?”
“Oh, good enough. There’s very little building going on, you know.”
“Will you come?”
“I don’t think I——”
“I’ll call for you at four. I’ll be at the curb. Don’t keep me waiting,
will you? The cops fuss so if you park in the Loop after four.”