As it turned out, Dirk was spared the necessity of worrying about the
fit of his next dinner coat for the following year and a half. His coat,
during that period, was a neat olive drab as was that of some millions
of young men of his age, or thereabouts. He wore it very well, and with
the calm assurance of one who knows that his shoulders are broad, his
waist slim, his stomach flat, his flanks lean, and his legs straight.
Most of that time he spent at Fort Sheridan, first as an officer in
training, then as an officer training others to be officers. He was
excellent at this job. Influence put him there and kept him there even
after he began to chafe at the restraint. Fort Sheridan is a few miles
outside Chicago, north. No smart North Shore dinner was considered
complete without at least a major, a colonel, two captains, and a
sprinkling of first lieutenants. Their boots shone so delightfully while
dancing.
In the last six months of it (though he did not, of course, know that it
was to be the last six months) Dirk tried desperately to get to France.
He was suddenly sick of the neat job at home; of the dinners; of the
smug routine; of the olive-drab motor car that whisked him wherever he
wanted to go (he had a captaincy); of making them “snap into it”; of
Paula; of his mother, even. Two months before the war’s close he
succeeded in getting over; but Paris was his headquarters.
Between Dirk and his mother the first rift had appeared.
“If I were a man,” Selina said, “I’d make up my mind straight about this
war and then I’d do one of two things. I’d go into it the way Jan Snip
goes at forking the manure pile—a dirty job that’s got to be cleaned
up; or I’d refuse to do it altogether if I didn’t believe in it as a job
for me. I’d fight, or I’d be a conscientious objector. There’s nothing
in between for any one who isn’t old or crippled, or sick.”
Paula was aghast when she heard this. So was Julie whose wailings had
been loud when Eugene had gone into the air service. He was in France
now, thoroughly happy. “Do you mean,” demanded Paula, “that you actually
want Dirk to go over there and be wounded or killed!”
“No. If Dirk were killed my life would stop. I’d go on living, I
suppose, but my life would have stopped.”
They all were doing some share in the work to be done.
Selina had thought about her own place in this war welter. She had
wanted to do canteen work in France but had decided against this as
being selfish. “The thing for me to do,” she said, “is to go on raising
vegetables and hogs as fast as I can.” She supplied countless households
with free food while their men were gone. She herself worked like a man,
taking the place of the able-bodied helper who had been employed on her
farm.
Paula was lovely in her Red Cross uniform. She persuaded Dirk to go into
the Liberty Bond selling drive and he was unexpectedly effective in his
quiet, serious way; most convincing and undeniably thrilling to look at
in uniform. Paula’s little air of possession had grown until now it
enveloped him. She wasn’t playing now; was deeply and terribly in love
with him.
When, in 1918, Dirk took off his uniform he went into the bond
department of the Great Lakes Trust Company in which Theodore Storm had
a large interest. He said that the war had disillusioned him. It was a
word you often heard uttered as a reason or an excuse for abandoning the
normal. “Disillusioned.”
“What did you think war was going to do?” said Selina. “Purify! It never
has yet.”
It was understood, by Selina at least, that Dirk’s abandoning of his
profession was a temporary thing. Quick as she usually was to arrive at
conclusions, she did not realize until too late that this son of hers
had definitely deserted building for bonds; that the only structures he
would rear were her own castles in Spain. His first two months as a bond
salesman netted him more than a year’s salary at his old post at Hollis
& Sprague’s. When he told this to Selina, in triumph, she said, “Yes,
but there isn’t much fun in it, is there? This selling things on paper?
Now architecture, that must be thrilling. Next to writing a play and
seeing it acted by real people—seeing it actually come alive before
your eyes—architecture must be the next most fun. Putting a building
down on paper—little marks here, straight lines there, figures,
calculations, blueprints, measurements—and then, suddenly one day, the
actual building itself. Steel and stone and brick, with engines
throbbing inside it like a heart, and people flowing in and out. Part of
a city. A piece of actual beauty conceived by you! Oh, Dirk!” To see her
face then must have given him a pang, it was so alive, so eager.
He found excuses for himself. “Selling bonds that make that building
possible isn’t so dull, either.”
But she waved that aside almost contemptuously. “What nonsense, Dirk.
It’s like selling seats at the box office of a theatre for the play
inside.”
Dirk had made many new friends in the last year and a half. More than
that, he had acquired a new manner; an air of quiet authority, of
assurance. The profession of architecture was put definitely behind him.
There had been no building in all the months of the war; probably would
be none in years. Materials were prohibitive, labour exorbitant. He did
not say to Selina that he had put the other work from him. But after six
months in his new position he knew that he would never go back.
From the start he was a success. Within one year he was so successful
that you could hardly distinguish him from a hundred other successful
young Chicago business and professional men whose clothes were made at
Peel’s; who kept their collars miraculously clean in the soot-laden
atmosphere of the Loop; whose shoes were bench-made; who lunched at the
Noon Club on the roof of the First National Bank where Chicago’s
millionaires ate corned-beef hash whenever that plebeian dish appeared
on the bill of fare. He had had a little thrill out of his first meal at
this club whose membership was made up of the “big men” of the city’s
financial circle. Now he could even feel a little flicker of contempt
for them. He had known old Aug Hempel, of course, for years, as well as
Michael Arnold, and, later, Phillip Emery, Theodore Storm, and others.
But he had expected these men to be different.
Paula had said, “Theodore, why don’t you take Dirk up to the Noon Club
some day? There are a lot of big men he ought to meet.”
Dirk went in some trepidation. The great grilled elevator, as large as a
room, whisked them up to the roof of the fortress of gold. The club
lounge furnished his first disappointment. It looked like a Pullman
smoker. The chairs were upholstered in black leather or red plush. The
woodwork was shiny red imitation mahogany. The carpet was green. There
were bright shining brass cuspidors in the hall near the cigar counter.
The food was well cooked. Man’s food. Nine out of every ten of these men
possessed millions. Whenever corned beef and cabbage appeared on the
luncheon menu nine out of ten took it. These were not at all the
American Big Business Man of the comic papers and of fiction—that
yellow, nervous, dyspeptic creature who lunches off milk and pie. They
were divided into two definite types. The older men of between fifty and
sixty were great high-coloured fellows of full habit. Many of them had
had a physician’s warning of high blood pressure, hardening arteries,
overworked heart, rebellious kidneys. So now they waxed cautious, taking
time over their substantial lunches, smoking and talking. Their faces
were impassive, their eyes shrewd, hard. Their talk was colloquial and
frequently illiterate. They often said “was” for “were.” “Was you going
to see Baldwin about that South American stuff or is he going to ship it
through without?” Most of them had known little of play in their youth
and now they played ponderously and a little sadly and yet eagerly as
does one to whom the gift of leisure had come too late. On Saturday
afternoon you saw them in imported heather green golf stockings and
Scotch tweed suits making for the links or the lake. They ruined their
palates and livers with strong cigars, thinking cigarette smoking
undignified and pipes common. “Have a cigar!” was their greeting, their
password, their open sesame. “Have a cigar.” Only a few were so rich, so
assured as to smoke cheap light panatellas. Old Aug Hempel was one of
these. Dirk noticed that when he made one of his rare visits to the Noon
Club his entrance was met with a little stir, a deference. He was
nearing seventy-five now; was still straight, strong, zestful of life; a
magnificent old buccaneer among the pettier crew. His had been the
direct and brutal method—swish! swash! and his enemies walked the
plank. The younger men eyed him with a certain amusement and respect.
These younger men whose ages ranged from twenty-eight to forty-five were
disciples of the new system in business. They were graduates of
universities. They had known luxury all their lives. They were the
second or third generation. They used the word “psychology.” They
practised restraint. They knew the power of suggestion. Where old Aug
Hempel had flown the black flag they resorted to the periscope. Dirk
learned that these men did not talk business during meal time except
when they had met definitely for that purpose. They wasted a good deal
of time, Dirk thought, and often, when they were supposed to be “in
conference” or when their secretaries said primly that they were very
busy and not to be disturbed until three, they were dozing off for a
comfortable half hour in their private offices. They were the sons or
grandsons of those bearded, rugged, and rather terrible old boys who, in
1835 or 1840, had come out of County Limerick or County Kilkenny or out
of Scotland or the Rhineland to mold this new country in their strong
hairy hands; those hands whose work had made possible the symphony
orchestras, the yacht clubs, the golf clubs through which their
descendants now found amusement and relaxation.
Dirk listened to the talk of the Noon Club.
“I made it in eighty-six. That isn’t so bad for the Tippecanoe course.”
“. . . boxes are going pretty well but the Metropolitan grabs up all the
big ones and the house wants names. Garden doesn’t draw the way she used
to, even in Chicago. It’s the popular subscription that counts.”
“. . . grabbed the Century out of New York at two-forty-five and got
back here in time to try out my new horse in the park. She’s a little
nervous for city riding but we’re opening the house at Lake Forest next
week——”
“. . . pretty good show but they don’t send the original companies here,
that’s the trouble . . .”
“. . . in London. It’s a neat shade of green, isn’t it? You can’t get
ties like this over here, I don’t know why. Got a dozen last time I was
over. Yeh, Plumbridge in Bond Street.”
Well, Dirk could talk like that easily enough. He listened quietly,
nodded, smiled, agreed or disagreed. He looked about him carefully,
appraisingly. Waist lines well kept in; carefully tailored clothes;
shrewd wrinkles of experience radiating in fine sprays in the skin
around the corners of their eyes. The president of an advertising firm
lunching with a banker; a bond salesman talking to a rare book
collector; a packer seated at a small table with Horatio Craft, the
sculptor.
Two years and Dirk, too, had learned to “grab the Century” in order to
save an hour or so of time between Chicago and New York. Peel said it
was a pleasure to fit a coat to his broad, flat tapering back, and
trousers to his strong sturdy legs. His colour, inherited from his
red-cheeked Dutch ancestors brought up in the fresh sea-laden air of the
Holland flats, was fine and clear. Sometimes Selina, in pure sensuous
delight, passed her gnarled, work-worn hand over his shoulders and down
his fine, strong, straight back. He had been abroad twice. He learned to
call it “running over to Europe for a few days.” It had all come about
in a scant two years, as is the theatrical way in which life speeds in
America.
Selina was a little bewildered now at this new Dirk whose life was so
full without her. Sometimes she did not see him for two weeks, or three.
He sent her gifts which she smoothed and touched delightedly and put
away; fine soft silken things, hand-made—which she could not wear. The
habit of years was too strong upon her. Though she had always been a
woman of dainty habits and fastidious tastes the grind of her early
married life had left its indelible mark. Now, as she dressed, you might
have seen that her petticoat was likely to be black sateen and her
plain, durable corset cover neatly patched where it had worn under the
arms. She employed none of the artifices of a youth-mad day. Sun and
wind and rain and the cold and heat of the open prairie had wreaked
their vengeance on her flouting of them. Her skin was tanned,
weather-beaten; her hair rough and dry. Her eyes, in that frame,
startled you by their unexpectedness, they were so calm, so serene, yet
so alive. They were the beautiful eyes of a wise young girl in the face
of a middle-aged woman. Life was still so fresh to her.
She had almost poignantly few personal belongings. Her bureau drawers
were like a nun’s; her brush and comb, a scant stock of plain white
underwear. On the bathroom shelf her toothbrush, some vaseline, a box of
talcum powder. None of those aids to artifice with which the elderly
woman deludes herself into thinking that she is hoodwinking the world.
She wore well-made walking oxfords now, with sensible heels—the kind
known as Field’s special; plain shirtwaists and neat dark suits, or a
blue cloth dress. A middle-aged woman approaching elderliness; a woman
who walked and carried herself well; who looked at you with a glance
that was direct but never hard. That was all. Yet there was about her
something arresting, something compelling. You felt it.
“I don’t see how you do it!” Julie Arnold complained one day as Selina
was paying her one of her rare visits in town. “Your eyes are as bright
as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” They were up in Julie’s
dressing room in the new house on the north side—the new house that was
now the old house. Julie’s dressing table was a bewildering thing.
Selina DeJong, in her neat black suit and her plain black hat, sat
regarding it and Julie seated before it, with a grim and lively
interest.
“It looks,” Selina said, “like Mandel’s toilette section, or a hospital
operating room just before a major operation.” There were great glass
jars that contained meal, white and gold. There were rows and rows of
cream pots holding massage cream, vanishing cream, cleansing cream.
There were little china bowls of scarlet and white and yellowish pastes.
A perforated container spouted a wisp of cotton. You saw toilet waters,
perfumes, atomizers, French soaps, unguents, tubes. It wasn’t a dressing
table merely, but a laboratory.
“This!” exclaimed Julie. “You ought to see Paula’s. Compared to her
toilette ceremony mine is just a splash at the kitchen sink.” She rubbed
cold cream now around her eyes with her two forefingers, using a
practised upward stroke.
“It looks fascinating,” Selina exclaimed. “Some day I’m going to try it.
There are so many things I’m going to try some day. So many things I’ve
never done that I’m going to do for the fun of it. Think of it, Julie!
I’ve never had a manicure! Some day I’m going to have one. I’ll tell the
girl to paint my nails a beautiful bright vermilion. And I’ll tip her
twenty-five cents. They’re so pretty with their bobbed hair and their
queer bright eyes. I s’pose you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you they
make me feel young.”
Julie was massaging. Her eyes had an absent look. Suddenly: “Listen,
Selina. Dirk and Paula are together too much. People are talking.”
“Talking?” The smile faded from Selina’s face.
“Goodness knows I’m not strait-laced. You can’t be in this day and age.
If I had ever thought I’d live to see the time when—— Well, since the
war of course anything’s all right, seems. But Paula has no sense.
Everybody knows she’s insane about Dirk. That’s all right for Dirk, but
how about Paula! She won’t go anywhere unless he’s invited. Of course
Dirk is awfully popular. Goodness knows there are few enough young men
like him in Chicago—handsome and successful and polished and all. Most
of them dash off East just as soon as they can get their fathers to
establish an Eastern branch or something. . . . They’re together all the
time, everywhere. I asked her if she was going to divorce Storm and she
said no, she hadn’t enough money of her own and Dirk wasn’t earning
enough. His salary’s thousands, but she’s used to millions. Well!”
“They were boy and girl together,” Selina interrupted, feebly.
“They’re not any more. Don’t be silly, Selina. You’re not as young as
that.”
No, she was not as young as that. When Dirk next paid one of his rare
visits to the farm she called him into her bedroom—the cool, dim shabby
bedroom with the old black walnut bed in which she had lain as Pervus
DeJong’s bride more than thirty years ago. She had on a little knitted
jacket over her severe white nightgown. Her abundant hair was neatly
braided in two long plaits. She looked somehow girlish there in the dim
light, her great soft eyes gazing up at him.
“Dirk, sit down here at the side of my bed the way you used to.”
“I’m dead tired, Mother. Twenty-seven holes of golf before I came out.”
“I know. You ache all over—a nice kind of ache. I used to feel like
that when I’d worked in the fields all day, pulling vegetables, or
planting.” He was silent. She caught his hand. “You didn’t like that. My
saying that. I’m sorry. I didn’t say it to make you feel bad, dear.”
“I know you didn’t, Mother.”
“Dirk, do you know what that woman who writes the society news in the
Sunday _Tribune_ called you to-day?”
“No. What? I never read it.”
“She said you were one of the _jeunesse dorée_.”
Dirk grinned. “Gosh!”
“I remember enough of my French at Miss Fister’s school to know that
that means gilded youth.”
“Me! That’s good! I’m not even spangled.”
“Dirk!” her voice was low, vibrant. “Dirk, I don’t want you to be a
gilded youth, I don’t care how thick the gilding. Dirk, that isn’t what
I worked in the sun and cold for. I’m not reproaching you; I didn’t mind
the work. Forgive me for even mentioning it. But, Dirk, I don’t want my
son to be known as one of the _jeunesse dorée_. No! Not my son!”
“Now, listen, Mother. That’s foolish. If you’re going to talk like that.
Like a mother in a melodrama whose son’s gone wrong. . . . I work like a
dog. You know that. You get the wrong angle on things, stuck out here on
this little farm. Why don’t you come into town and take a little place
and sell the farm?”
“Live with you, you mean?” Pure mischievousness.
“Oh, no. You wouldn’t like that,” hastily. “Besides, I’d never be there.
At the office all day, and out somewhere in the evening.”
“When do you do your reading, Dirk?”
“Why—uh——”
She sat up in bed, looking down at the thin end of her braid as she
twined it round and round her finger. “Dirk, what is this you sell in
that mahogany office of yours? I never did get the hang of it.”
“Bonds, Mother. You know that perfectly well.”
“Bonds.” She considered this a moment. “Are they hard to sell? Who buys
them?”
“That depends. Everybody buys them—that is . . .”
“I don’t. I suppose because whenever I had any money it went back into
the farm for implements, or repairs, or seed, or stock, or improvements.
That’s always the way with a farmer—even on a little truck farm like
this.” She pondered again a moment. He fidgeted, yawned. “Dirk
DeJong—Bond Salesman.”
“The way you say it, Mother, it sounds like a low criminal pursuit.”
“Dirk, do you know sometimes I actually think that if you had stayed
here on the farm——”
“Good God, Mother! What for!”
“Oh, I don’t know. Time to dream. Time to—no, I suppose that isn’t true
any more. I suppose the day is past when the genius came from the farm.
Machinery has cut into his dreams. He used to sit for hours on the wagon
seat, the reins slack in his hands, while the horses plodded into town.
Now he whizzes by in a jitney. Patent binders, ploughs, reapers—he’s a
mechanic. He hasn’t time to dream. I guess if Lincoln had lived to-day
he’d have split his rails to the tune of a humming, snarling patent wood
cutter, and in the evening he’d have whirled into town to get his books
at the public library, and he’d have read them under the glare of the
electric light bulb instead of lying flat in front of the flickering
wood fire. . . . Well. . . .”
She lay back, looked up at him. “Dirk, why don’t you marry?”
“Why—there’s no one I want to marry.”
“No one who’s free, you mean?”
He stood up. “I mean no one.” He stooped and kissed her lightly. Her
arms went round him close. Her hand with the thick gold wedding band on
it pressed his head to her hard. “Sobig!” He was a baby again.
“You haven’t called me that in years.” He was laughing.
She reverted to the old game they had played when he was a child. “How
big is my son! How big?” She was smiling, but her eyes were sombre.
“So big!” answered Dirk, and measured a very tiny space between thumb
and forefinger. “So big.”
She faced him, sitting up very straight in bed, the little wool shawl
hunched about her shoulders. “Dirk, are you ever going back to
architecture? The war is history. It’s now or never with you. Pretty
soon it will be too late. Are you ever going back to architecture? To
your profession?”
A clean amputation. “No, Mother.”
She gave an actual gasp, as though icy water had been thrown full in her
face. She looked suddenly old, tired. Her shoulders sagged. He stood in
the doorway, braced for her reproaches. But when she spoke it was to
reproach herself. “Then I’m a failure.”
“Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I’m happy. You can’t live somebody else’s
life. You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn’t
just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something
glorious was always hidden just around the corner. You said you had
lived that way and it hadn’t worked. You said——”
She interrupted him with a little cry. “I know I did. I know I did.”
Suddenly she raised a warning finger. Her eyes were luminous, prophetic.
“Dirk, you can’t desert her like that!”
“Desert who?” He was startled.
“Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She’ll
turn on you some day. Some day you’ll want her, and she won’t be there.”
Inwardly he had been resentful of this bedside conversation with his
mother. She made little of him, he thought, while outsiders appreciated
his success. He had said, “So big,” measuring a tiny space between thumb
and forefinger in answer to her half-playful question, but he had not
honestly meant it. He thought her ridiculously old-fashioned now in her
viewpoint, and certainly unreasonable. But he would not quarrel with
her.
“You wait, too, Mother,” he said now, smiling. “Some day your wayward
son will be a real success. Wait till the millions roll in. Then we’ll
see.”
She lay down, turned her back deliberately upon him, pulled the covers
up about her.
“Shall I turn out your light, Mother, and open the windows?”
“Meena’ll do it. She always does. Just call her. . . . Good-night.”
He knew that he had come to be a rather big man in his world. Influence
had helped. He knew that, too. But he shut his mind to much of Paula’s
manœuvring and wire pulling—refused to acknowledge that her lean, dark,
eager fingers had manipulated the mechanism that ordered his career.
Paula herself was wise enough to know that to hold him she must not let
him feel indebted to her. She knew that the debtor hates his creditor.
She lay awake at night planning for him, scheming for his advancement,
then suggested these schemes to him so deftly as to make him think he
himself had devised them. She had even realized of late that their
growing intimacy might handicap him if openly commented on. But now she
must see him daily, or speak to him. In the huge house on Lake Shore
Drive her own rooms—sitting room, bedroom, dressing room, bath—were as
detached as though she occupied a separate apartment. Her telephone was
a private wire leading only to her own bedroom. She called him the first
thing in the morning; the last thing at night. Her voice, when she spoke
to him, was an organ transformed; low, vibrant, with a timbre in its
tone that would have made it unrecognizable to an outsider. Her words
were commonplace enough, but pregnant and meaningful for her.
“What did you do to-day? Did you have a good day? . . . Why didn’t you
call me? . . . Did you follow up that suggestion you made about Kennedy?
I think it’s a wonderful idea, don’t you? You’re a wonderful man, Dirk;
did you know that? . . . I miss you. . . . Do you? . . . When? . . . Why
not lunch? . . . Oh, not if you have a business appointment . . . How
about five o’clock? . . . No, not there . . . Oh, I don’t know. It’s so
public . . . Yes . . . Good-bye. . . . Good-night. . . .
Good-night. . . .”
They began to meet rather furtively, in out-of-the-way places. They
would lunch in department store restaurants where none of their friends
ever came. They spent off afternoon hours in the dim, close atmosphere
of the motion picture palaces, sitting in the back row, seeing nothing
of the film, talking in eager whispers that failed to annoy the
scattered devotees in the middle of the house. When they drove it was on
obscure streets of the south side, as secure there from observation as
though they had been in Africa, for to the north sider the south side of
Chicago is the hinterland of civilization.
Paula had grown very beautiful, her world thought. There was about her
the aura, the glow, the roseate exhalation that surrounds the woman in
love.
Frequently she irritated Dirk. At such times he grew quieter than ever;
more reserved. As he involuntarily withdrew she advanced. Sometimes he
thought he hated her—her hot eager hands, her glowing asking eyes, her
thin red mouth, her sallow heart-shaped exquisite face, her perfumed
clothing, her air of ownership. That was it! Her possessiveness. She
clutched him so with her every look and gesture, even when she did not
touch him. There was about her something avid, sultry. It was like the
hot wind that sometimes blew over the prairie—blowing, blowing, but
never refreshing. It made you feel dry, arid, irritated, parched.
Sometimes Dirk wondered what Theodore Storm thought and knew behind that
impassive flabby white mask of his.
Dirk met plenty of other girls. Paula was clever enough to see to that.
She asked them to share her box at the opera. She had them at her
dinners. She affected great indifference to their effect on him. She
suffered when he talked to one of them.
“Dirk, why don’t you take out that nice Farnham girl?”
“Is she nice?”
“Well, isn’t she! You were talking to her long enough at the Kirks’
dance. What were you talking about?”
“Books.”
“Oh. Books. She’s awfully nice and intelligent, isn’t she? A lovely
girl.” She was suddenly happy. Books.
The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should
fall in love with and doesn’t. The Farnham girl was one of many
well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest,
clear-headed, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and
unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough
eyes, clear skin, sensible medium hands and feet; skated well, danced
well, talked well. Read the books you had read. A companionable girl.
Loads of money but never spoke of it. Travelled. Her hand met yours
firmly—and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through
you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.
But when Paula showed you a book her arm, as she stood next you, would
somehow fit into the curve of yours and you were conscious of the feel
of her soft slim side against you.
He knew many girls. There was a distinct type known as the North Shore
Girl. Slim, tall, exquisite; a little fine nose, a high, sweet, slightly
nasal voice, earrings, a cigarette, luncheon at Huyler’s. All these
girls looked amazingly alike, Dirk thought; talked very much alike. They
all spoke French with a pretty good accent; danced intricate symbolic
dances; read the new books; had the same patter. They prefaced,
interlarded, concluded their remarks to each other with, “My deah!” It
expressed, for them, surprise, sympathy, amusement, ridicule, horror,
resignation. “My _deah_! You should have seen her! My
_dee-ah_!”—horror. Their slang was almost identical with that used by
the girls working in his office. “She’s a good kid,” they said, speaking
in admiration of another girl. They made a fetish of frankness. In a day
when everyone talked in screaming headlines they knew it was necessary
to red-ink their remarks in order to get them noticed at all. The word
rot was replaced by garbage and garbage gave way to the ultimate swill.
One no longer said “How shocking!” but, “How perfectly obscene!” The
words, spoken in their sweet clear voices, fell nonchalantly from their
pretty lips. All very fearless and uninhibited and free. That, they told
you, was the main thing. Sometimes Dirk wished they wouldn’t work so
hard at their play. They were forever getting up pageants and plays and
large festivals for charity; Venetian fêtes, Oriental bazaars, charity
balls. In the programme performance of these many of them sang better,
acted better, danced better than most professional performers, but the
whole thing always lacked the flavour, somehow, of professional
performance. On these affairs they lavished thousands in costumes and
decorations, receiving in return other thousands which they soberly
turned over to the Cause. They found nothing ludicrous in this.
Spasmodically they went into business or semi-professional ventures,
defying the conventions. Paula did this, too. She or one of her friends
were forever opening blouse shops; starting Gifte Shoppes; burgeoning
into tea rooms decorated in crude green and vermilion and orange and
black; announcing their affiliation with an advertising agency. These
adventures blossomed, withered, died. They were the result of post-war
restlessness. Many of these girls had worked indefatigably during the
1917-1918 period; had driven service cars, managed ambulances, nursed,
scrubbed, conducted canteens. They missed the excitement, the
satisfaction of achievement.
They found Dirk fair game, resented Paula’s proprietorship. Susans and
Janes and Kates and Bettys and Sallys—plain old-fashioned names for
modern, erotic misses—they talked to Dirk, danced with him, rode with
him, flirted with him. His very unattainableness gave him piquancy. That
Paula Storm had him fast. He didn’t care a hoot about girls.
“Oh, Mr. DeJong,” they said, “your name’s Dirk, isn’t it? What a slick
name! What does it mean?”
“Nothing, I suppose. It’s a Dutch name. My people—my father’s
people—were Dutch, you know.”
“A dirk’s a sort of sword, isn’t it, or poniard? Anyway, it sounds very
keen and cruel and fatal—Dirk.”
He would flush a little (one of his assets) and smile, and look at them,
and say nothing. He found that to be all that was necessary.
He got on enormously.