Between these girls and the girls that worked in his office there
existed a similarity that struck and amused Dirk. He said, “Take a
letter, Miss Roach,” to a slim young creature as exquisite as the girl
with whom he had danced the day before; or ridden or played tennis or
bridge. Their very clothes were faultless imitations. They even used the
same perfume. He wondered, idly, how they did it. They were eighteen,
nineteen, twenty, and their faces and bodies and desires and natural
equipment made their presence in a business office a paradox, an
absurdity. Yet they were capable, too, in a mechanical sort of way.
Theirs were mechanical jobs. They answered telephones, pressed levers,
clicked buttons, tapped typewriters, jotted down names. They were lovely
creatures with the minds of fourteen-year-old children. Their hair was
shining, perfectly undulated, as fine and glossy and tenderly curling as
a young child’s. Their breasts were flat, their figures singularly
sexless like that of a very young boy. They were wise with the wisdom of
the serpent. They wore wonderful little sweaters and flat babyish
collars and ridiculously sensible stockings and oxfords. Their legs were
slim and sturdy. Their mouths were pouting, soft, pink, the lower lip a
little curled back, petal-wise, like the moist mouth of a baby that has
just finished nursing. Their eyes were wide apart, empty, knowledgeous.
They managed their private affairs like generals. They were cool,
remote, disdainful. They reduced their boys to desperation. They were
brigands, desperadoes, pirates, taking all, giving little. They came,
for the most part, from sordid homes, yet they knew, in some miraculous
way, all the fine arts that Paula knew and practised. They were
corsetless, pliant, bewildering, lovely, dangerous. They ate lunches
that were horrible mixtures of cloying sweets and biting acids yet their
skin was like velvet and cream. Their voices were thin, nasal, vulgar;
their faces like those in a Greuze or a Fragonard. They said, with a
twang that racked the listener, “I wouldn’t of went if I got an invite
but he could of give me a ring, anyways. I called him right. I was
sore.”
“Yeh? Wha’d he say?”
“Oh, he laffed.”
“Didja go?”
“Me! No! Whatcha think I yam, anyway?”
“Oh, he’s a good kid.”
Among these Dirk worked immune, aloof, untouched. He would have been
surprised to learn that he was known among them as Frosty. They approved
his socks, his scarfs, his nails, his features, his legs in their
well-fitting pants, his flat strong back in the Peel coat. They admired
and resented him. Not one that did not secretly dream of the day when he
would call her into his office, shut the door, and say, “Loretta” (their
names were burbankian monstrosities, born of grafting the original
appellation onto their own idea of beauty in nomenclature—hence
Loretta, Imogene, Nadine, Natalie, Ardella), “Loretta, I have watched
you for a long, long time and you must have noticed how deeply I admire
you.”
It wasn’t impossible. Those things happen. The movies had taught them
that.
Dirk, all unconscious of their pitiless, all-absorbing scrutiny, would
have been still further appalled to learn how fully aware they were of
his personal and private affairs. They knew about Paula, for example.
They admired and resented her, too. They were fair in granting her the
perfection of her clothes, drew immense satisfaction from the knowledge
of their own superiority in the matters of youth and colouring; despised
her for the way in which she openly displayed her feeling for him (how
they knew this was a miracle and a mystery, for she almost never came
into the office and disguised all her telephone talks with him). They
thought he was grand to his mother. Selina had been in his office twice,
perhaps. On one of these occasions she had spent five minutes chatting
sociably with Ethelinda Quinn who had the face of a Da Vinci cherub and
the soul of a man-eating shark. Selina always talked to everyone. She
enjoyed listening to street car conductors, washwomen, janitors,
landladies, clerks, doormen, chauffeurs, policemen. Something about her
made them talk. They opened to her as flowers to the sun. They sensed
her interest, her liking. As they talked Selina would exclaim, “You
don’t say! Well, that’s terrible!” Her eyes would be bright with
sympathy.
Selina had said, on entering Dirk’s office, “My land! I don’t see how
you can work among those pretty creatures and not be a sultan. I’m going
to ask some of them down to the farm over Sunday.”
“Don’t, Mother! They wouldn’t understand. I scarcely see them. They’re
just part of the office equipment.”
Afterward, Ethelinda Quinn had passed expert opinion. “Say, she’s got
ten times the guts that Frosty’s got. I like her fine. Did you see her
terrible hat! But say, it didn’t look funny on her, did it? Anybody else
in that getup would look comical, but she’s the kind that could walk off
with anything. I don’t know. She’s got what I call an air. It beats
style. Nice, too. She said I was a pretty little thing. Can you beat it!
At that she’s right. I cer’nly yam.”
All unconscious, “Take a letter, Miss Quinn,” said Dirk half an hour
later.
In the midst, then, of this fiery furnace of femininity Dirk walked
unscorched. Paula, the North Shore girls, well-bred business and
professional women he occasionally met in the course of business, the
enticing little nymphs he encountered in his own office, all practised
on him their warm and perfumed wiles. He moved among them cool and
serene. Perhaps his sudden success had had something to do with this;
and his quiet ambition for further success. For he really was accounted
successful now, even in the spectacular whirl of Chicago’s meteoric
financial constellation. North-side mammas regarded his income, his
career, and his future with eyes of respect and wily speculation. There
was always a neat little pile of invitations in the mail that lay on the
correct little console in the correct little apartment ministered by the
correct little Jap on the correct north-side street near (but not too
near) the lake, and overlooking it.
The apartment had been furnished with Paula’s aid. Together she and Dirk
had gone to interior decorators. “But you’ve got to use your own taste,
too,” Paula had said, “to give it the individual touch.” The apartment
was furnished in a good deal of Italian furniture, the finish a dark oak
or walnut, the whole massive and yet somehow unconvincing. The effect
was sombre without being impressive. There were long carved tables on
which an ash tray seemed a desecration; great chairs roomy enough for
lolling, yet in which you did not relax; dull silver candlesticks;
vestments; Dante’s saturnine features sneering down upon you from a
correct cabinet. There were not many books. Tiny foyer, large living
room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, and a cubby-hole for the Jap. Dirk
did not spend much time in the place. Sometimes he did not sit in a
chair in the sitting room for days at a time, using the room only as a
short cut in his rush for the bedroom to change from office to dinner
clothes. His upward climb was a treadmill, really. His office, the
apartment, a dinner, a dance. His contacts were monotonous, and too few.
His office was a great splendid office in a great splendid office
building in LaSalle Street. He drove back and forth in a motor car along
the boulevards. His social engagements lay north. LaSalle Street bounded
him on the west, Lake Michigan on the east, Jackson Boulevard on the
south, Lake Forest on the north. He might have lived a thousand miles
away for all he knew of the rest of Chicago—the mighty, roaring,
sweltering, pushing, screaming, magnificent hideous steel giant that was
Chicago.
Selina had had no hand in the furnishing of his apartment. When it was
finished Dirk had brought her in triumph to see it. “Well,” he had said,
“what do you think of it, Mother?”
She had stood in the centre of the room, a small plain figure in the
midst of these massive sombre carved tables, chairs, chests. A little
smile had quirked the corner of her mouth. “I think it’s as cosy as a
cathedral.”
Sometimes Selina remonstrated with him, though of late she had taken on
a strange reticence. She no longer asked him about the furnishings of
the houses he visited (Italian villas on Ohio Street), or the exotic
food he ate at splendid dinners. The farm flourished. The great steel
mills and factories to the south were closing in upon her but had not
yet set iron foot on her rich green acres. She was rather famous now for
the quality of her farm products and her pens. You saw “DeJong
asparagus” on the menu at the Blackstone and the Drake hotels. Sometimes
Dirk’s friends twitted him about this and he did not always acknowledge
that the similarity of names was not a coincidence.
“Dirk, you seem to see no one but just these people,” Selina told him in
one of her infrequent rebukes. “You don’t get the full flavour of life.
You’ve got to have a vulgar curiosity about people and things. All kinds
of people. All kinds of things. You revolve in the same little circle,
over and over and over.”
“Haven’t time. Can’t afford to take the time.”
“You can’t afford not to.”
Sometimes Selina came into town for a week or ten days at a stretch, and
indulged in what she called an orgy. At such times Julie Arnold would
invite her to occupy one of the guest rooms at the Arnold house, or Dirk
would offer her his bedroom and tell her that he would be comfortable on
the big couch in the living room, or that he would take a room at the
University Club. She always declined. She would take a room in a hotel,
sometimes north, sometimes south. Her holiday before her she would go
off roaming gaily as a small boy on a Saturday morning, with the day
stretching gorgeously and adventuresomely ahead of him, sallies down the
street without plan or appointment, knowing that richness in one form or
another lies before him for the choosing. She loved the Michigan
Boulevard and State Street shop windows in which haughty waxed ladies in
glittering evening gowns postured, fingers elegantly crooked as they
held a fan, a rose, a programme, meanwhile smiling condescendingly out
upon an envious world flattening its nose against the plate glass
barrier. A sociable woman, Selina, savouring life, she liked the lights,
the colour, the rush, the noise. Her years of grinding work, with her
face pressed down to the very soil itself, had failed to kill her zest
for living. She prowled into the city’s foreign quarters—Italian,
Greek, Chinese, Jewish. She penetrated the Black Belt, where Chicago’s
vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its
great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing
the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her
bland interest and friendly look protected her. They thought her a
social worker, perhaps; one of the uplifters. She bought and read the
_Independent_, the Negro newspaper in which herb doctors advertised
magic roots. She even sent the twenty-five cents required for a box of
these, charmed by their names—Adam and Eve roots, Master of the Woods,
Dragon’s Blood, High John the Conqueror, Jezebel Roots, Grains of
Paradise.
“Look here, Mother,” Dirk would protest, “you can’t wander around like
that. It isn’t safe. This isn’t High Prairie, you know. If you want to
go round I’ll get Saki to drive you.”
“That would be nice,” she said, mildly. But she never availed herself of
this offer. Sometimes she went over to South Water Street, changed now,
and swollen to such proportions that it threatened to burst its
confines. She liked to stroll along the crowded sidewalks, lined with
crates and boxes and barrels of fruits, vegetables, poultry. Swarthy
foreign faces predominated now. Where the red-faced overalled men had
been she now saw lean muscular lads in old army shirts and khaki pants
and scuffed puttees wheeling trucks, loading boxes, charging down the
street in huge rumbling auto vans. Their faces were hard, their talk
terse. They moved gracefully, with an economy of gesture. Any one of
these, she reflected, was more vital, more native, functioned more
usefully and honestly than her successful son, Dirk DeJong.
“Where ’r’ beans?”
“In th’ ol’ beanery.”
“Tough.”
“Best you can get.”
“Keep ’em.”
Many of the older men knew her, shook hands with her, chatted a moment
friendlily. William Talcott, a little more dried up, more wrinkled, his
sparse hair quite gray now, still leaned up against the side of his
doorway in his shirt sleeves and his neat pepper-and-salt pants and
vest, a pretty good cigar, unlighted, in his mouth, the heavy gold watch
chain spanning his middle.
“Well, you certainly made good, Mrs. DeJong. Remember the day you come
here with your first load?”
Oh, yes. She remembered.
“That boy of yours has made his mark, too, I see. Doing grand, ain’t he?
Wa-al, great satisfaction having a son turn out well like that. Yes,
sirree! Why, look at my da’ter Car’line——”
Life at High Prairie had its savour, too. Frequently you saw strange
visitors there for a week or ten days at a time—boys and girls whose
city pallor gave way to a rich tan; tired-looking women with sagging
figures who drank Selina’s cream and ate her abundant vegetables and
tender chickens as though they expected these viands to be momentarily
snatched from them. Selina picked these up in odd corners of the city.
Dirk protested against this, too. Selina was a member of the High
Prairie school board now. She often drove about the roads and into town
in a disreputable Ford which she manipulated with imagination and skill.
She was on the Good Roads Committee and the Truck Farmers’ Association
valued her opinion. Her life was full, pleasant, prolific.