They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the
riverbank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him--the breast of
the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest,
juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a
double share of icing.
From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good this
tastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of it
you get so you don't believe there IS such a thing as real fried
chicken and homemade chocolate cake."
"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain't
eating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken.
Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with
Tessie pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her.
Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the
current. And so up the hill, homeward bound. They walked very slowly,
Chuck's hand on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent
dumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that were
churning in her mind, they would have been something like this:
"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had
you. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want our
house, with a dining-room set, and a mahogany bed, and one of those
overstuffed sets in the living room, and all the housework to do. I'm
scared. I'm scared I won't get it. What'll I do if I don't?"
And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on
thinking about me? And will you keep yourself like you are so that if
I come back----"
Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those French
girls. I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going
to be raised, workers are so scarce. I'll probably be as rich as Angie
Hatton time you get back."
And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for
Chuck. I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't
like their jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em,
last week, a fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is
all funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark
like foreigners."
It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months
ago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings,
surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie.
Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no
familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm
Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those
Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town.
The husband, very damp as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the
gocart outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading
at Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen
gocarts outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed,
chubby, fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed
largely. "Hello, Ed. The woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I
guess."
"That so? Mine, to. Well, how's everything?"
Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and
that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available
by the more important sleeping bundle--two yards of oilcloth; a spool
of 100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the five-and-ten.
There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at
all, felt sorry for them--worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now
she envied them.
There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his
last letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia.
Tessie's eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a
great fear. Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and
chateaux. He and a bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess
or a countess or something--it was all one to Tessie--and what do you
think? She had kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way
they did in France.
The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch
factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied
with a new and more absorbing topic.
"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?"
"What about her?"
"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her
being Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her
being the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her
palatial home and all to go to work in a canteen for her country and
bleeding France."
"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be
painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the
doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or
baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a
loaf of bread decent. Bleeding France! Ha! That's rich, that is."
She thrust her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits.
"She's going over there after that fella of hers. She's chasing him.
It's now or never, and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest
of us. On'y we got to set home and make the best of it. Or take what's
left." She turned her head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a
table at the far end of the room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little
laugh. "I guess when you can't go after what you want, like Angie, why
you gotta take second choice."
All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious
Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her,
pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing
hers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than two
inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless
little laugh.
"Thanks for helping teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been
at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet."
He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her
shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off.
That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to
Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to
exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went
in a spirit of unwholesome brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment.
Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay
home and--and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job
for Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her,
unless it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of
the time. But in Tessie's heart was a great envy of this girl who
could bridge the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her
man. Bleeding France. Yeh! Joke!
The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a
square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In
architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle,
French chateau, and Rhenish schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about
its facade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed
magnificence.
Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron
fence, could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the
place, usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in
front. People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful.
Just as if it mattered whether anything happened to her or not!
Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then
she struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A
little group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and
gossiping, as she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she
saw Nap Ballou among them. She had known that, too. As she passed she
looked straight ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he
caught up with her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap
Ballou. No. Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!"
"Hello, yourself."
"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink."
"Think so?" She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to
have someone following, someone walking home with you. What if he was
old enough to be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie
heroes had graying hair at the sides.
They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once
heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she
entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes
were brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up
quickly, peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very
much askew.
"Where you been, Tessie?"
"Oh, walkin'."
"Who with?"
"Cora."
"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago."
Tessie, taking off her hat on her way upstairs, met this coolly. "Yeh,
I ran into her comin' back."
Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up
into the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well,
what's the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a
fuss about the soldiers--feeding 'em, and asking 'em to their houses,
and sending 'em things, and giving dances and picnics and parties so
they wouldn't be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other
boys told the same. They could just pick and choose their good times.
Tessie's mind groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the
girls? She didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind.
Easy enough to paw over the men-folks and get silly over brass buttons
and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain of a
popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie,
smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the
words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she
demanded. "What're you going to do----" She rolled over on one side
and buried her head in her arms.
There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the
old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest
bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first.
But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the
world about her. The Chippewa Courier went into the newspaper pile
behind the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye.
She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her
glass in her eye, the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of
unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.
"And they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood
there, kind of quiet, looking straight ahead, and then all of a sudden
she ran to her pa----"
"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She----"
Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about
her and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this
picture? I come in in the middle of the film, I guess."
They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly
news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices
high with the note of hysteria.
"Angie Hatton's beau was killed----"
"They say his airyoplane fell ten thousand feet----"
"The news come only last evening about eight----"
"She won't see nobody but her pa----"
Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house,
envying Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the
automobiles, and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news
with the dramatic reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved.
Tessie, turning from one to the other quietly, had said nothing. She
was pitying Angie. Oh, the luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in
swiftly to still the unwonted commotion in work hours, found Tessie the
only one quietly occupied in that chatter-filled room. She was smiling
as she worked. Nap Ballou, bending over her on some pretense that
deceived no one, spoke low-voiced in her ear. But she veiled her eyes
insolently and did not glance up. She hummed contentedly all the
morning at her tedious work.
She had promised Nap Ballou to go picknicking with him Sunday. Down the
river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within
her had said, "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched,
reckless overtone said, "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can
get."
She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication about
the girls at the watchworks did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate
cake. She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled shoes, flimsy
blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in the
city park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against a
tree, idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lackluster eyes.
Silhouetted there against the tender green of the pretty square, he
looked very old, somehow, and different--much older than he looked in
his shop clothes, issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged where
he should have stuck out, and protruded where he should have been flat.
There flashed across her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as she
had last seen him--brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim of
flank.
Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly. "Somebody
looks mighty sweet this afternoon."
Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a line
you like you stick to it, don't you?"
Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boats
and oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjust
the oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very gray
in the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her.
"Ready in a minute, sweetheart," he said. He took off his collar and
turned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessie
felt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled a
little as she stepped into the boat.
The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water and
told herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the same
when he asked her.
"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a little
with the unwonted exercise.
Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good
enough, considering the company."
He laughed admiringly at that and said she was a sketch.
When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had
supper. This time Nap fed her the tidbits, though she protested.
"White meat for you," he said, "with your skin like milk."
"You must of read that in a book," scoffed Tessie. She glanced around
her at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets dark
so early."
"No hurry," Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely,
finicking sort of way, though he consumed very little food, actually.
"You're not eating much," Tessie said once, halfheartedly. She decided
that she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that she
hated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white,
double row----
"Well," she said, "let's be going."
"No hurry," again.
Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "What
d'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed at
her own joke.
"Yes."