When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are
unhappy, in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a
sunset had wrung from her only a casual tribute, such as: "My! Look how
red the sky is!" delivered as unemotionally as a weather bulletin.
Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert
heap in a cotton house coat and scuffed slippers. Her head was propped
wearily against the porch post. Her hands were limp in her lap. Her
face was turned toward the west, where shone that mingling of orange
and rose known as salmon pink. But no answering radiance in the girl's
face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.
Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wisconsin, Tessie Golden of
the presunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the
kitchen: "Ma, what'd you do with my pink blouse?"
And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar
was kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little
pressing while my iron was on."
At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink
blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to texture
and precariously low as to neck had Tessie herself not been so
reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, very brief; a hat with a
good deal of French blue about it; fragile high-heeled pumps with bows.
As she passed through the sitting room on her way out, her mother would
appear in the doorway, dishtowel in hand. Her pride in this slim young
thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping
criticism.
"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt
hem.
Tessie, the quick-tongued, would toss the wave of shining hair that lay
against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I just thought I'd dress
up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto and picked me up for a
little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."
Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Anyone in the Fox River
Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at
the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the
Pulp and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch
factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing
this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was
as unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose
family residence was in Chippewa, Wisconsin, but who wintered in Italy,
summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very
hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the
town used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton
line. Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and
zephyrs, was of silk and crepe de Chine and satin--materials that we
had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for party
dresses and wedding gowns. Of course, two years later they were
showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But
that was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went
to Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.
Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen
door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes,
following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A
spare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled
her as a water color may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's
wide mouth curved into humor lines. She was the cutup of the
escapement department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips
sagged at the corners. Tessie was buoyant and colorful with youth. The
other was shrunken and faded with years and labor. As the girl minced
across the room in her absurdly high-heeled shoes, the older woman
thought: My, but she's pretty! But she said aloud: "I should think
you'd stay home once in a while and not be runnin' the streets every
night."
"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."
And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding.
But in families such as Tessie's, demonstration is a thing to be
ashamed of; affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor
of the Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by
rheumatism, loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat
gray frame house and his new cement sidewalk and his carefully tended
yard and garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress
exchanged between her parents.
Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's
evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say, "Always gaddin'
downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home
to stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, only when you
washed your hair."
Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back
porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at
half-past six to go to work.
Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the
limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart.
She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some
errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds, to turn the row of
half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing, to flap and hang up
a damp tea towel.
"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"
"No."
"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grant evening. Why don't
you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or
somewhere, hm?"
"What for?"--listlessly.
"What for! What does anybody go out for!"
"I don't know."
If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might
have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too
strong upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy,
"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the
last fella left in the world."
A grim flash of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth.
"He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing?
Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this
evening and see if I can't make a hit with one of them."
She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie
Golden's world.
In order to understand the Tessie of today one would have to know the
Tessie of six months ago--Tessie the impudent, the life-loving. Tessie
Golden could say things to the escapement-room foreman that anyone else
would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was capable of glorious
insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls'
washroom at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring
group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift of
burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearing
the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave an
imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand Avenue in
this restricting garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though
containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She followed
it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes,
cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from the
East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall
styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of
the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected
stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.
You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft
worker. Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a blouse
or retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not
sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet
and arbor and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low
benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top,
the girls worked with pincers and flame, screwing together the three
tiny parts of the watch's anatomy that were their particular specialty.
Each wore a jeweler's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch
factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye
socket had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to
experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her,
somehow, a spiritual look which made her impudence all the more piquant.
Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation
for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap
Ballou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little
shiver of nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of
suppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew
that Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is
turned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him.
Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew
it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence
and audacity saved her.
"Someday," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll
find yourself looking for a job."
"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a
form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain
type of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer.
Restless, ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to
factory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton,
Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always
unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his
kind. The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him.
He, in turn, regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his
cap on one side of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as
never to be quite drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender,
sensitive fingers like an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts
of that intricate mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the
finishing room. It was said he had a wife or two. He was forty-six,
good-looking in a dissolute sort of way, possessing the charm of the
wanderer, generous with his money. It was known that Tessie's barbs
were permitted to prick him without retaliation because Tessie herself
appealed to his errant fancy.
When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs,
something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he
ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watchworks. All he
needs is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good
eatin' as a relish."
And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American
Express truck, hatless, sunburned, stockily muscular, clattering down
Winnebago Street on his way to the depot and the 7:50 train.
Something about the clear simplicity and uprightness of the firm little
figure appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard her curiously with a
long, hard gaze before which she would grow uncomfortable. "Think
you'll know me next time you see me?" But there was an uneasy feeling
beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was anything of the
beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous foreman about the
situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was light,
pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the
asking. Her money went for shoes and blouses and lingerie and silk
stockings. She was forever buying a vivid necktie for her father and
dressing up her protesting mother in gay colors that went ill with the
drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for me, you'd go round looking like
one of those Polack women down by the tracks," Tessie would scold.
"It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!"
That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, carefree, holding the reins
of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and
Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night
it was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's
drugstore corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went
through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from
Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length
of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they
reached it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted,
slick-looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a
thousand. An air of studied hauteur and indifference as they
approached the corner. Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from
the boys.
"Oh, how do!"
"Good evening!"
Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street.
On the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was
now stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not
exist. On as far as Megan's, which you entered and inspected, up one
brightly lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter
there was a neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of
Fashion." You took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago
Street now, homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly
unconscious of quick footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past
the Burke House, where the residential district began, and where the
trees cast their kindly shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped
through her arm; a little tingling thrill.
"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our
way."
At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order
to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of
Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until
they reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in
retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually
they lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss.
Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at
factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the
Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the truck and
assuming the managership of the office.
"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old
Benke is going to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I
step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to
get there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little
silence. "Will you be glad, Tess? Hm?"
Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more
tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a
job that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and
all."
But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew.
No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the
watchworks, all the fellows in the neighborhood--gone. At first she
hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well,
believe me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone
goon already."
"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the
top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright and save you wasting
bullets."
There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's
big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck
was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to
bid him good-by. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of
them, in their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow
suitcases and their pasteboard boxes in their hands, sheepish,
red-faced, awkward. In their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off
for Camp Sherman, their young heads sticking out of the car windows in
clusters--black, yellow, brown, red. But for each woman on the depot
platform there was just one head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with
a misty halo around it. A great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:
"Good-by! Good-by! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a
week, for a visit. Good-by! Good----"
They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot
platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children,
shouting.
Well, you wrote letters--fat, bulging letters--and in turn you received
equally plump envelopes with a red emblem in one corner.
You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more
durable forms of cake.
Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California.
He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was
expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her
replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch
of terror in it, too. California! Might as well send a person to the
end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then,
inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New
York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it
turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a
cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is
as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time
and I've traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats
me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They
make Hatton's place look like a dump."
The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among
themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they
could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys
around.
They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the
type known as a stag. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced,
and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake and
went home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other's
shoulders, still singing.
But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch
hour and in the washroom, there was a little desultory talk about the
stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases
such as "I says to him"--and "He says to me." They wasted little
conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters
on blue-lined paper with the red emblem at the top. Chuck's last
letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.
Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in
Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the
gnawed-looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the
letters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of
paper as were those Tessie had from Chuck--blue-lined, cheap in
quality. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. They knew,
too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in the
East. These letters were not from him.
Ever since her home-coming, Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop
on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand
Avenue shop was the society shop. The East End crowd sewed there,
capped, veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so
deft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with
that complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny, if you
did not belong to the East End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue
shop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue
bandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers
that rolled and folded them was pure cerulean.
Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to
their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that
stinkin' bunch." Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting a
blouse in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing it in time for a
Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might have been
invaluable. It never was asked.
Without warning, Chuck came home on three days' furlough. It meant
that he was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't
care.
"I don't care where you're goin'," she said exultantly, her eyes
lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather
ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled
to be home, Chuck? Gee!"
"I'll say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in
his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly:
"Sure. It's swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've
traveled around, and come back, things look so kind of little to you.
I don't know--kind of----" He floundered about, at a loss for
expression. Then tried again: "Now, take Hatton's place, for example.
I always used to think it was a regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to
see places where I was asked to in San Francisco and around there.
Why, they was--were--enough to make the Hatton house look like a shack.
Swimmin' pools of white marble, and acres of yard like a park, and the
help always bringing you something to eat or drink. And the folks
themselves--why, say! Here we are scraping and bowing to Hattons and
that bunch. They're pikers to what some people are that invited me to
their houses in New York and Berkeley, and treated me and the other
guys like kings or something. Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming
to his subject, so that he failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's
face--"it's a joke compared to New York and San Francisco stores.
Reg'lar hick joint."
Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed
her head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad
you had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and
everything. You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wasting time
on me. She'd probably be tickled to see you."
He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't
mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near
busted out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train
came in. And I been thinking of you every minute. There wasn't a
day----"
"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a hick but I ain't
a fool." She was near to tears.
"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--A guy's
got to--he's got no right to----"
And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She
smiled and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror.
He talked differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes
or the army. It was something else--an ease of manner, a new
leisureliness of glance, an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee
over Labor Day. It was the extent of her experience as a traveler.
She remembered how superior she had felt for at least two days after.
But Chuck! California! New York! It wasn't the distance that
terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the broadening of his vision,
though she did not know it and certainly could not have put it into
words.
They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some
of the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it
with little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an
expression indicative of extreme disgust.
"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully.
"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and
iron and so forth."
"I don't care," snapped Tessie irritably. "I hate it!" They had often
walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had
never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse
and drifted down the lovely Fox River.
"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."
"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you
do it."
Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing
looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than
ever against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a
little as he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the
warm red skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll
be ready in a minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt
in at the throat, so that you saw the white line of his untanned chest
in strange contrast to his sun-burned throat. A feeling of giddy
faintness surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and
would have fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her.
"Whoa, there! Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk
along the middle."
She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do
that. I never did before."
Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each
brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him,
then at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I
guess I must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."
"Have you, Chuck?"
They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row.
It's good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play
tennis and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are
wonders!"
"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about
something else?"
He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or
why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.
"About--you." Tessie made it a caress.
"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and
marchin' and readin' some---- Oh, say, what d'you think?"
"What?"
"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the
darnedest language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to
ask for a piece of bread, you say like this: DONNAY MA UN MORSO DOO
PANG. See?"
"My!" breathed Tessie.
And within her something was screaming: Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He
knows French. And those girls that can row and swim and everything.
And me, I don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?
It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her
grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in
France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it,
just as he always made the 7:50 when it seemed as if he was going to
miss it sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he'd be a
different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel,
French, girls, swell folks----
And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in
the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box."
"Chocolate cake."
"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this
morning."
"Yes, you did!" "Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't
do anything, the way you talk."
"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think."
"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else."
"Fried chicken!"
"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily.
"You asked me to, didn't you?"
Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. Down the
river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden among
the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say they
have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and
Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not
just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment.
"I suppose it looks like a shanty to you now."