THE GIRLS
BY EDNA FERBER
GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
PRINTED AT GARDEN CITY, N. Y., U. S. A.
TO
LILLIAN ADLER
WHO SHIES AT BUTTERFLIES
BUT NOT AT LIFE
THE GIRLS
CHAPTER I
It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls
pellmell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with
elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that
they will not even glance up when you enter the room, or leave it; or
to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch,
and story. This last would mean beginning with great-aunt Charlotte
Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake
Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie's niece
and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half--you
may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling _her_ Charlotte.
If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, "A story about old
maids!"--you are right. It is. Though, after all, perhaps one couldn't
call great-aunt Charlotte an old maid. When a woman has achieved
seventy-four, a virgin, there is about her something as sexless, as
aloof and monumental, as there is about a cathedral or a sequoia.
Perhaps, too, the term is inappropriate to the vigorous, alert, and
fun-loving Lottie. For that matter, a glimpse of Charley in her white
woolly sweater and gym pants might cause you to demand a complete
retraction of the term. Charley is of the type before whom this era
stands in amazement and something like terror. Charley speaks freely
on subjects of which great-aunt Charlotte has never even heard. Words
obstetrical, psychoanalytical, political, metaphysical and eugenic
trip from Charley's tongue. Don't think that Charley is a highbrow (to
use a word fallen into disuse). Not at all. Even her enemies admit,
grudgingly, that she packs a nasty back-hand tennis wallop; and that
her dancing is almost professional. Her chief horror is of what she
calls sentiment. Her minor hatreds are "glad" books, knitted underwear,
corsets, dirt both physical and mental, lies, fat minds and corporeal
fat. She looks her best in a white fuzzy sweater. A shade too slim and
boyish, perhaps, for chiffons.
The relationship between Charlotte, Lottie, and Charley is a simple
one, really, though having, perhaps, an intricate look to the outsider.
Great-aunt, niece, grand-niece: it was understood readily enough in
Chicago's South Side, just as it was understood that no one ever called
Lottie "Charlotte," or Charley "Lottie," though any of the three might
be designated as "one of the Thrift girls."
The Thrifts had been Chicago South Siders since that September in 1836
when Isaac Thrift had traveled tediously by rail, Sound steamer, river
boat, canal boat, lake ship, and horse wagon from his native New York
State to the unkempt prairie settlement on the banks of the sluggish
stream that the Pottawatamie Indians called Che-ca-gou. Their reason
for having thus named a city after the homely garlic plant was plain
enough whenever the breeze came pungently from the prairies instead of
from Lake Michigan.
Right here is the start of Aunt Charlotte. And yet the temptation
is almost irresistible to brush rudely past her and to hurry on to
Lottie Payson, who is herself hurrying on home through the slate and
salmon-pink Chicago sunset after what is known on the South Side as
"spending the afternoon."
An exhilarating but breathless business--this catching up with Lottie;
Lottie of the fine straight back, the short sturdy legs, the sensible
shoes, the well-tailored suit and the elfish exterior. All these items
contributed to the facility with which she put the long Chicago blocks
behind her--all, that is, except the last. An unwed woman of thirty-odd
is not supposed to possess an elfish exterior; she is expected to
be well-balanced and matter-of-fact and practical. Lottie knew this
and usually managed to keep the imp pretty well concealed. Yet she
so often felt sixteen and utterly irresponsible that she had to take
brisk walks along the lake front on blustery days, when the spray
stung your cheeks; or out Bryn Mawr way or even to Beverly Hills where
dwellings were sparse and one could take off one's hat and venture
to skip, furtively, without being eyed askance. This was supposed to
help work off the feeling--not that Lottie wanted to work it off.
She liked it. But you can't act Peter Pannish at thirty-two without
causing a good deal of action among conservative eyebrows. Lottie's
mother, Mrs. Carrie Payson, would have been terribly distressed at
the thought of South Side eyebrows elevated against a member of her
household. Sixty-six years of a full life had taught Mrs. Carrie Payson
little about the chemistry of existence. Else she must have known
how inevitably a disastrous explosion follows the bottling up of the
Lotties of this world.
On this particular March day the elf was proving obstreperous. An
afternoon spent indoors talking to women of her own age and position
was likely to affect Lottie Payson thus. Walking fleetly along now,
she decided that she hated spending afternoons; that they were not
only spent but squandered. Beck Schaefer had taken the others home in
her electric. Lottie, seized with a sudden distaste for the glittering
enameled box with its cut-glass cornucopia for flowers (artificial),
its gray velvet upholstery and tasseled straps, had elected to walk,
though she knew it would mean being late.
"Figger?" Beck Schaefer had asked, settling her own plump person in the
driver's seat.
"Air," Lottie had answered, not altogether truthfully; and drew a long
breath. She turned away from the curb. The electric trundled richly
off, its plate-glass windows filled with snugly tailored shoulders,
furs, white gloves, vivid hats. Lottie held a hand high in farewell,
palm out, as the gleaming vehicle sped silently away, lurched fatly
around a corner, and was gone.
So she strode home now, through the early evening mist, the zany
March wind buffeting her skirts--no, skirt: it is 1916 and women are
knicker-bockered underneath instead of petticoated--and the fishy
smell that was Lake Michigan in March; the fertilizer smell that was
the Stockyards when the wind was west; and the smoky smell that was
soft coal from the I. C. trains and a million unfettered chimneys,
all blending and mellowing to a rich mixture that was incense to her
Chicago-bred nostrils.
She was walking rapidly and thinking clearly, if disconnectedly:
"How we lied to each other this afternoon! Once or twice, though,
we came nearer the truth than was strictly comfortable.... Beck's
bitter.... There! I forgot Celia's recipe for that icebox cake after
all.... Beck's legs ... I never saw such--uh--tumultuous legs ... gray
silk stockings ought to be prohibited on fat legs; room seemed to be
full of them.... That's a nice sunset. I'd love to go over to the lake
just for a minute.... No, guess I'd better not with the folks coming
to dinner.... People always saying Chicago's ugly when it's really....
Of course the Loop is pretty bad.... Tomorrow'd be a good day to go
downtown and look at blue serges ... a tricotine I think.... I wonder
if mother will want to go.... I do hope this once...."
Here Lottie drew a deep breath; the kind of breathing that relieves
stomach nerves. She was so sure that mother would want to go. She
almost always did.
Here we are, striding briskly along with Lottie Payson, while
great-aunt Charlotte, a wistful black-silk figure, lingers far behind.
We are prone to be impatient of black-silk figures, quite forgetting
that they once were slim and eager white young figures in hoop-skirts
that sometimes tilted perilously up behind, displaying an unseemly
length of frilled pantalette. Great-aunt Charlotte's skirts had shaped
the course of her whole life.
Charlotte Thrift had passed eighteen when the Civil War began. There
is a really beautiful picture of her in her riding habit, taken at the
time. She is wearing a hard-boiled hat with a plume, and you wonder
how she ever managed to reconcile that skirt with a horse's back. The
picture doesn't show the color of the plume but you doubtless would
know. It is a dashing plume anyway, and caresses her shoulder. In one
hand she is catching up the folds of her voluminous skirt, oh, ever so
little; and in the other, carelessly, she is holding a rose. Her young
face is so serious as to be almost severe. That is, perhaps, due to her
eyebrows which were considered too heavy and dark for feminine beauty.
And yet there is a radiance about the face, and an effect of life and
motion about the young figure that bespeaks but one thing. Great-aunt
Charlotte still has the picture somewhere. Sometimes, in a mild orgy
of "straightening up" she comes upon it in its pasteboard box tucked
away at the bottom of an old chest in her bedroom. At such times she is
likely to take it out and look at it with a curiously detached air, as
though it were the picture of a stranger. It is in this wise, too, that
her dim old eyes regard the world--impersonally. It is as though, at
seventy-four, she no longer is swayed by emotions, memories, people,
events. Remote, inaccessible, immune, she sees, weighs, and judges with
the detached directness of a grim old idol.
Fifty-five years had yellowed the photograph of the wasp-waisted girl
in the billowing riding skirt when her grand-niece, Charley Kemp,
appeared before her in twentieth century riding clothes: sleeveless
jacket ending a little below the hips; breeches baggy in the seat but
gripping the knees. Great-aunt Charlotte had said, "So that's what it's
come to." You could almost hear her agile old mind clicking back to
that other young thing of the plume, and the rose and the little booted
foot peeping so demurely from beneath the folds of the sweeping skirt.
"Don't you like it?" Charley had looked down at her slim self and had
flicked her glittering tan boots with her riding whip because that
seemed the thing to do. Charley went to matinees.
Great-aunt Charlotte had pursed her crumpled old lips, whether in
amusement or disapproval--those withered lips whose muscles had long
ago lost their elasticity. "Well, it's kind of comical, really. And
ugly. But you don't look ugly in it, Charley, or comical either. You
look like a right pretty young boy."
Her eyes had a tenderly amused glint. Those eyes saw less now than
they used to: an encroaching cataract. But they had a bright and
piercing appearance owing to the heavy brows which, by some prank of
nature, had defied the aging process that had laid its blight upon
hair, cheek, lips, skin, and frame. The brows had remained jetty black;
twin cornices of defiance in the ivory ruin of her face. They gave her
a misleadingly sinister and cynical look. Piratical, almost.
Perhaps those eyebrows indicated in Charlotte Thrift something of the
iron that had sustained her father, Isaac Thrift, the young Easterner,
throughout his first years of Middle-Western hardship. Chicago to-day
is full of resentful grandsons and -daughters who will tell you that if
their grandsire had bought the southwest corner of State and Madison
Streets for $2,050 in cash, as he could have, they would be worth their
millions to-day. And they are right. Still, if all those who tell you
this were granted their wish Chicago now would be populated almost
wholly by millionaire real estate holders; and the southwest corner of
State and Madison would have had to be as the loaves and the fishes.
Isaac Thrift had been one of these inconsiderate forebears. He had
bought real estate, it is true, but in the mistaken belief that the
city's growth and future lay along the south shore instead of the
north. Chicago's South Side in that day was a prairie waste where
wolves howled on winter nights and where, in the summer, flowers grew
so riotously as to make a trackless sea of bloom. Isaac Thrift had
thought himself very canny and far-sighted to vision that which his
contemporaries could not see. They had bought North Side property.
They had built their houses there. Isaac Thrift built his on Wabash,
near Madison, and announced daringly that some day he would have
a real country place, far south, near Eighteenth Street. For that
matter, he said, the time would come when they would hear of houses
thick in a street that would be known as Thirtieth, or even Fortieth.
How they laughed at that! Besides, it was pretty well acknowledged by
the wiseacres that St. Charles, a far older town, would soon surpass
Chicago and become the metropolis of the West.
In books on early Chicago and its settlers you can see Isaac Thrift
pictured as one of the stern and flinty city fathers, all boots and
stock and massive watch-chain and side-whiskers. It was neither a time
nor a place for weaklings. The young man who had come hopefully out
of New York state to find his fortune in the welter of mud, swamp,
Indians, frame shanties and two-wheeled carts that constituted Chicago,
had needed all his indomitability.
It is characteristic of him that until his marriage he lived at the
New Temperance Hotel (board and lodging $2.00 a week; clothes washed
extra), instead of at the popular Saugenash Hotel on Market and Lake,
where the innkeeper, that gay and genial Frenchman and pioneer,
Mark Beaubien, would sometimes take down his fiddle and set feet to
twinkling and stepping in the square-dance. None of this for Isaac
Thrift. He literally had rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Little
enough use he made of the fine bottle-green broadcloth coat with the
gilt buttons, the high stock, and the pale gray pantaloons brought from
the East. But in two years he had opened a sort of general store and
real estate office on Lake Street, had bought a piece of ground for a
house on Wabash (which piece he later foolishly sold) and had sent back
East for his bride. That lady left her comfortable roof-tree to make
the long and arduous trip that duplicated the one made earlier by her
husband-to-be. It is to her credit that she braved it; but she had a
hard time trying to adjust her New England viewpoint to the crude rough
setting in which she now found herself. Her letters back East are so
typical and revealing that extracts, at least, are imperative.
"... The times are exceedingly dull in this city of Chicago; there is
little business, no balls, no parties, some shooting, some riding,
and plenty of loafers, and to-day, after the rain, a plenty of mud
which completes the picture.... The water here is first-rate bad and
the only way we get along is by drinking a great deal of tea and
coffee--two coffees to one tea.... The weather has been very mild.
There has not been snow enough to stop the burning of the prairies....
If the waters of Lake Michigan continue to rise for a year or two
more Chicago and all the surrounding country will be covered with one
vast sheet of water, and the inhabitants of this place must find a
home elsewhere--and I, for one, will find said home farther East....
Everyone admires my pretty things from New York; my cherry-colored
scarf; my gingham dress with the silk stripe in it, my Thibet cloth
cloak of dark mulberry color; and my fine velvet bonnet which cost
only $3.50 in New York. It is prettier than any I have seen here. A
milliner here said that it would have cost $8.00 in Chicago but I think
that is exaggerated. The ladies here wear only one flounce to their
skirts. Even my third best--the brown-and-white plaid merino--has
three.... The mud here is so bad that the men wear hip boots and we
women must go about in two-wheeled carts that sink to the hubs in many
places. There are signs stuck up in the mud with the warning, 'No
bottom here'.... Our new furniture has come. A beautiful flowered red
and green carpet in the chamber and parlor. When the folding doors
are open the stove will heat both rooms.... They have most excellent
markets in this place. We can get meat of every description for four
cents a pound, such as sausages, venison, beef, pork--everything except
fowls. Of fruit there is little. I saw some grapes yesterday in the
market, all powdered over with sawdust. They had come from Spain. They
made my mouth water.... Every day great prairie schooners, as they call
them, go by the house. They have come all the way from the East.... I
am terrified of the Indians though I have said little to Isaac. They
are very dirty and not at all noble as our history and geography books
state...."
She bore Isaac Thrift two children, accomplishing the feat as
circumspectly and with as much reticence as is possible in the
achievement of so physical a rite. Girls, both. I think she would have
considered a man-child indelicate.
Charlotte had been the first of these girls. Carrie, the second,
came a tardy ten years later. It was a time and a city of strange
contradictions and fluctuations. Fortunes were made in the boom of 1835
and lost in the panic of '37. Chicago was a broken-down speculative
shanty village one day and an embryo metropolis the next. The Firemen's
Ball was the event of the social season, with Engine No. 3, glittering
gift of "Long John" Wentworth, set in the upper end of the dance-hall
and festooned with flowers and ribbons. All the worth-while beaux of
the town belonged to the volunteer fire brigade. The names of Chicago's
firemen of 1838 or '40, if read aloud to-day, would sound like the
annual list of box-holders at the opera. The streets of the town were
frequently impassable; servants almost unknown; quiltings and church
sociables noteworthy events. The open prairie, just beyond town, teemed
with partridges, quail, prairie chicken. Fort Dearborn, deserted, was a
playground for little children. Indians, dirty, blanketed, saturnine,
slouched along the streets. "Long John" Wentworth was kinging it in
Congress. Young ladies went to balls primly gowned in dark-colored
merinos, long-sleeved, high-necked. Little girls went to school in
bodices low-cut and nearly sleeveless; toe-slippers; and manifold
skirts starched to stand out like a ballerina's.
These stiffly starched skirts, layer on layer, first brought romance
into Charlotte Thrift's life. She was thirteen, a rather stocky little
girl, not too obedient of the prim maternal voice that was forever
bidding her point her toes out, hold her shoulders back and not talk at
table. She must surely have talked at table this morning, or, perhaps,
slouched her shoulders and perversely toed in once safely out of sight
of the house, because she was late for school. The horrid realization
of this came as Charlotte reached the Rush Street ferry--a crude
ramshackle affair drawn from one side of the river to the other with
ropes pulled by hand. Charlotte attended Miss Rapp's school on the
North Side though the Thrifts lived South. This makeshift craft was
about to leave the south shore as Charlotte, her tardiness heavy upon
her, sighted the river. With a little cry and a rush she sped down the
path, leaped, slipped, and landed just short of the ferry in the slimy
waters of the Chicago River. Landed exactly expresses it. Though, on
second thought, perhaps settled is better. Layer on layer of stiffly
starched skirts sustained her. She had fallen feet downward. There she
rested on the water, her skirts spread petal-like about her, her toes,
in their cross-strapped slippers, no doubt pointing demurely downward.
She looked like some weird white river-lily afloat on its pad in the
turbid stream. Her eyes were round with fright beneath the strongly
marked black brows. Then, suddenly and quite naturally, she screamed,
kicked wildly, and began to sink. Sank, in fact. It had all happened
with incredible swiftness. The ferry men had scarcely had time to open
their mouths vacuously. Charlotte's calliope screams, so ominously
muffled now, wakened them into action. But before their clumsy wits
and hands had seized on ropes a slim black-and-white line cleft
the water, disappeared, and reappeared with the choking struggling
frantic Charlotte, very unstarched now and utterly unmindful of toes,
shoulders, and vocal restraint.
The black-and-white line had been young Jesse Dick, of the
"Hardscrabble" Dicks; the black had been his trousers, the white his
shirt. He swam like a river rat--which he more or less was. Of all the
Chicago male inhabitants to whom Mrs. Thrift would most have objected
as the rescuer of her small daughter, this lounging, good-for-nothing
young Jesse Dick would have been most prominently ineligible.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) she did not even know his name until
five years later. Charlotte herself did not know it. She had had one
frantic glimpse of a wet, set face above hers, but it had been only a
flash in a kaleidoscopic whole. Young Dick, having towed her ashore,
had plumped her down, retrieved his coat, and lounged off unmissed
and unrecognized in the ensuing hubbub. The rescue accomplished,
his seventeen-year-old emotions found no romantic stirrings in the
thought of this limp and dripping bundle of corded muslin, bedraggled
pantalettes, and streaming, stringy hair.
Charlotte, put promptly to bed of course, with a pan at her feet and
flannel on her chest and hot broth administered at intervals--though
she was no whit the worse for her ducking--lay very flat and still
under the gay calico comfortable, her hair in two damp braids, her eyes
wide and thoughtful.
"But who was he?" insisted Mrs. Thrift, from the foot of the bed.
And "I don't know," replied Charlotte for the dozenth time.
"What did he look like?" demanded Isaac Thrift (hastily summoned from
his place of business so near the scene of the mishap).
"I--don't know," replied Charlotte. And that, bafflingly enough, was
the truth. Only sometimes in her dreams she saw his face again, white,
set, and yet with something almost merry about it. From these dreams
Charlotte would wake shivering deliciously. But she never told them.
During the next five years she never went to a dance, a sleigh-ride,
walked or rode, that she did not unconsciously scan the room or the
street for his face.
Five years later Charlotte was shopping on Lake Street in her
second-best merino, voluminously hooped. Fortunately (she thought
later, devoutly) she had put on her best bonnet of sage green velvet
with the frill of blond lace inside the face. A frill of blond lace is
most flattering when set inside the bonnet. She had come out of her
father's store and was bound for the shop of Mr. Potter Palmer where,
the week before, she had flirted with a plum-colored pelisse and had
known no happiness since then. She must feel it resting on her own
sloping shoulders. Of course it was--but then, Mr. Palmer, when he
waited on you himself, often came down in his price.
Chicago sidewalks were crazy wooden affairs raised high on rickety
stilts, uneven, full of cracks for the unwary, now five steps up, now
six steps down, with great nails raising their ugly heads to bite at
unsuspecting draperies. Below this structure lay a morass of mud, and
woe to him who stepped into it.
Along this precarious eminence Charlotte moved with the gait that
fashion demanded; a mingling of mince, swoop and glide. Her mind was on
the plum pelisse. A malicious nail, seeing this, bit at her dipping and
voluminous skirt with a snick and a snarl. R-r-rip! it went. Charlotte
stepped back with a little cry of dismay--stepped back just too far,
lost her footing and tumbled over the edge of the high boardwalk into
the muck and slime below.
For the second time in five years Jesse Dick's lounging habit served a
good purpose. There he was on Lake Street idly viewing the world when
he should have been helping to build it as were the other young men
of that hard-working city. He heard her little cry of surprise and
fright; saw her topple, a hoop-skirted heap, into the mire. Those same
ridiculous hoops, wire traps that they were, rendered her as helpless
as a beetle on its back. Jesse Dick's long legs sprang to her rescue,
though he could not suppress a smile at her plight. This before he
caught a glimpse of the face set off by the frill of blond lace. He
picked her up, set her on her feet--little feet in cloth-gaitered side
boots and muddied white stockings--and began gently to wipe her sadly
soiled second-best merino with his handkerchief, with his shabby coat
sleeve, with his coat-tail and, later, with his heart.
"Oh, don't--please--you mustn't--please--oh--" Charlotte kept
murmuring, the color high in her cheeks. She was poised at that
dangerous pinnacle between tears and laughter; between vexation and
mirth. "Oh, please----"
Her vaguely protesting hand, in its flutterings, brushed his blond
curly head. He was on his knees tidying her skirts with great deftness
and thoroughness. There was about the act an intimacy and a boyish
delicacy, too, that had perhaps startled her into her maidenly protest.
He had looked up at her then, as she bent down.
"Why, you're the boy!" gasped Charlotte.
"What boy?" No wonder he failed to recognize her as she did him. Her
mouth, at the time of the rescue five years before, had been wide open
to emit burbles and strangled coughs; her features had been distorted
with fright.
"The boy who pulled me out of the river. Long ago. I was going to
school. Rush Street. You jumped in. I never knew. But you're the boy. I
mean--of course you're grown now. But you are, aren't you? The boy, I
mean. The----"
She became silent, looking down at him, her face like a rose in the
blond lace frill. He was still on his knees in the mud, brushing at her
skirts with a gesture that now was merely mechanical; brushing, as we
know, with his heart in his hand.
So, out of the slime of the river and the grime of Lake Street had
flowered their romance.