Every morning between eight-thirty and nine a boy from the Élite
Garage on Twenty-sixth Street brought the Payson electric to the door.
He trundled it up to the curb with the contempt that it deserved.
Your self-respecting garage mechanic is contemptuous of all electric
conveyances, but this young man looked on the Payson's senile vehicle
as a personal insult. He manipulated its creaking levers and balky
brakes as a professional pitcher would finger a soft rubber ball--thing
beneath pity. As he sprang out of it in his jersey and his tight
pants and his long-visored green cap he would slam its ancient door
behind him with such force as almost to set it rocking on its four
squat wheels. Then he would pass round behind it, kick one of its
asphalt-gnawed rubber tires with a vindictive boot and walk off
whistling back to the Élite Garage. Lottie had watched this performance
a thousand times, surely. She was always disappointed if he failed to
kick the tire. It satisfied something in her to see him do it.
This morning Lottie was up, dressed, and telephoning the Élite Garage
before eight o'clock. She wanted to make an early start. She meant to
use the electric in order to save time. Without it the trip between the
Payson's house on Prairie Avenue and the Kemp's on Hyde Park Boulevard
near the lake was a pilgrimage marked by dreary waits on clamorous
corners for dirty yellow cars that never came.
Early as she was Lottie had heard Aunt Charlotte astir much earlier.
She had not yet come down, however. Mrs. Payson had already breakfasted
and read the paper. After Mrs. Payson had finished with a newspaper its
page-sequence was irrevocably ruined for the next reader. Its sport
sheet mingled with the want ads; its front page lay crumpled upon Music
and the Drama. Lottie sometimes wondered if her own fondness for a
neatly folded uncrumpled morning paper was only another indication of
chronic spinsterhood. Aunt Charlotte had once said, as she smoothed
the wrinkled sheets with her wavering withered fingers, "Reading a
newspaper after you've finished with it, Carrie, is like getting the
news three days stale. No flavour to it."
Lottie scarcely glanced at the headlines as she drank her coffee this
morning. Her mother was doing something or other at the sideboard. Mrs.
Payson was the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room
where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things
at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to
the point of frenzy. She lifted dishes and put them down. She rattled
silver in the drawer. She tugged at a sideboard door that always stuck.
She made notes on a piece of wrapping paper with a hard pencil and
tapping sounds. All interspersed with a spasmodic conversation carried
on in a high voice with Hulda in the kitchen, the swinging door of the
pantry between them.
"Need any rice?"
"W'at?"
"Rice!"
"We got yet."
More tapping of the pencil accompanied by a sotto voce murmur--"Soap
... kitchen cleanser ... new potatoes ... see about electric light
bulbs ... coffee----" she raised her voice again: "We've got plenty of
coffee I know."
Silence from the kitchen.
"Hulda, we've got plenty of coffee! I got a pound on Wednesday."
Silence. Then--"He don't last over Sunday."
"Not--why my dear young woman----" the swinging door whiffed and
whoofed with the energy of her exit as she passed into the kitchen to
do battle with the coffee-toper.
Lottie was quite unconscious of the frown that her rasped nerves had
etched between her eyes. She was so accustomed to these breakfast
irritations that she did not know they irritated her. She was even
smiling a little, grimly amused.
It was a lowering Chicago March morning, gray, foggy, sodden, with
a wet blanket wind from the lake that was more chilling than a walk
through water and more penetrating than severe cold. The months-old
soot-grimed snow and ice lay everywhere. The front page predicted
rain. Not a glint of sunlight filtered through the yellow pane of the
stained-glass window in the Payson dining room. "Ugh!" thought Lottie
picturing the downtown streets a morass of mud trampled to a pudding
consistency. And yet she smiled. She was to have the morning alone; the
morning from eight until almost noon. There was Gussie to interview.
There was Judge Barton to confer with--dear Emma Barton. There was poor
Jennie to dispose of. There was work to do. Real work. Lottie rose from
the table and stood in the pantry doorway holding the swinging door
open with one foot as she was getting into her coat.
"I'll be back by noon, mother, surely. Perhaps earlier. Then we'll go
right over to your buildings and collect the rents and market on the
way back."
"Oh," said Mrs. Payson only. Her mouth was pursed.
"For that matter, I think it's so foolish to bother about Sunday
dinner. We always get up later on Sunday, and eat more for breakfast.
Let's just have lunch this once. Let's try it. Forget about the leg of
lamb or the roast beef----"
Mrs. Payson raised her eyebrows in the direction of the listening
Hulda. "I'll leave that kind of thing to your sister Belle--this new
idea of getting up at noon on Sunday and then having no proper Sunday
dinner. We've always had Sunday dinners in this house and we always
will have as long as I'm head of the household."
"Well, I just thought----" Lottie released the swinging door. She came
back into the dining room and glanced at herself in the sideboard
mirror. Lottie was the kind of woman who looks well in the morning.
A clear skin, a clear eye, hair that springs cleanly away from the
temples. This morning she looked more than usually alert. A little
half-smile of anticipation was on her lips. The lowering weather, her
mother's dourness, Hulda's slightly burned toast--she had allowed none
of these things to curdle the cream of her morning's adventure. She was
wearing her suit and furs and the small velvet hat whose doom Belle had
pronounced the evening before. As she drew on her gloves her mother
entered the dining room.
"I'll be back by noon, surely." Mrs. Payson did not answer. Lottie went
down the long hall toward the front door. Her mother followed.
"Going to Belle's?"
"Yes. I'll have to hurry."
At the door Mrs. Payson flung a final command.
"You'd better go South Park to Grand."
Lottie had meant to. It was the logical route to Belle's. She had taken
it a thousand times. Yet now, urged by some imp of perversity, she
was astonished to hear herself saying, "No, I'm going up Prairie to
Fifty-first." The worst possible road.
She did not mind the wet gray wind as she clanked along in the
little box-like contrivance, up Prairie Avenue, over Thirty-first,
past gray stone and brick mansions whose former glory of façade and
stone-and-iron fence and steps showed the neglect and decay following
upon negro occupancy. It was too bad, she thought. Chicago was like a
colossal and slovenly young woman who, possessing great natural beauty,
is still content to slouch about in greasy wrapper and slippers run
down at heel.
The Kemps lived in one of the oldest of Hyde Park's apartment houses
and one as nearly aristocratic as a Chicago South Side apartment house
can be. It was on Hyde Park Boulevard, near Jackson Park and the lake.
When Belle had married she had protested at an apartment. She had never
lived in one, she said. She didn't think she could. She would stifle.
No privacy. Everything huddled together on one floor and everybody
underfoot. People upstairs; people downstairs. But houses were scarce
in Hyde Park and she and Henry had compromised on an apartment much too
large for them and as choice as anything for miles around. There were
nine rooms. The two front rooms were a parlour and sitting room but not
many years had passed before Belle did away with this. Belle had caused
all sorts of things to be done to the apartment--at Henry's expense,
not the landlord's. Year after year partitions had been removed; old
fixtures torn out and modern ones installed; dark woodwork had been
cream enamelled; the old parlour and sitting room had been thrown
into one enormous living room. They had even built a "sun-parlour"
without which no Chicago apartment is considered complete. As it eats,
sleeps, plays bridge, reads, sews, writes, and lounges in those little
many-windowed peep-shows all Chicago's family life is an open book to
its neighbour.
Belle's front room was a carefully careless place--livable,
inviting--with its books, and lamps, and plump low chairs mothering
unexpected tables nestled at their elbows--tantalising little tables
holding the last new novel, face downward; a smart little tooled
leather box primly packed with cigarettes; a squat wooden bowl,
very small, whose tipped cover revealed a glimpse of vivid scrunchy
fruit-drops within. Splashes of scarlet and orange bitter-sweet in
lustre bowls, loot of Charley's autumn days at the dunes. A roll
of watermelon-pink wool and a ball of the same shade in one corner
of the deep davenport, with two long amber needles stuck through
prophesied the first rainbow note of Charley's summer wardrobe. The
grand piano holding a book of Chopin and a chromo-covered song-hit
labeled, incredibly enough, Tya-da-dee. It was as unlike the Prairie
Avenue living room as Charley was unlike Mrs. Carrie Payson. Belle had
recently had the sun-parlour done in the new Chinese furniture--green
enameled wood with engaging little Chinese figures and scenes painted
on it; queer gashes of black here and there and lamp shades shaped
like some sort of Chinese head-gear; no one knew quite what. Surely
no Mongolian--coolie or mandarin--would have recognised the origin of
anything in the Chinese sun-parlour.
Gussie answered the door. An admirable young woman, Gussie, capable,
self-contained, self-respecting. Sprung from a loose-moraled slovenly
household, she had, somehow, got the habit of personal cleanliness and
of straight thinking. Gussie's pastry hand was a light, deft, clean
one. Gussie's bedroom had none of the kennel stuffiness of the average
kitchen-bedroom. Gussie's pride in her own bathroom spoke in shining
tiles and gleaming porcelain.
"Oo, Miss Lottie! How you are early! Mrs. ain't up at all yet. Miss
Charley she is in bathtub."
"That's all right, Gussie. I came to see you."
Gussie's eyes were red-rimmed. "Yeh ... Jennie...." She led the way
back to the kitchen; a sturdy young woman facing facts squarely. Her
thick-tongued speech told of her Slavic origin. She went on with her
morning's work as she talked and Lottie listened. Hers was a no-good
family. Her step-father she dismissed briefly as a bum. Her mother was
always getting mixed up with the boarders--that menace of city tenement
life. And now Jennie. Jennie wasn't bad. Only she liked a good time.
The two brothers (rough, lowering fellows) were always a-jumping on
Jennie. It was fierce. They wouldn't let her go out with the fellas.
In the street they yelled at her and shamed Jennie for Jennie's crowd
right out. They wanted she should marry one of the boarders. Well, say,
he had money sure, but old like Jennie's own father. Jennie was only
seventeen. All this while Gussie was slamming expertly from table to
sink, from sink to stove.
"Seventeen! Why doesn't she leave home and work out as you do, Gussie?
Housework."
Jennie, it appeared was too toney for housework. "Like this Jennie is."
Gussie took a smudged envelope from her pocket and opened it with damp
fingers. With one blunt finger-tip she pointed to the signature. It was
a pencil-scrawled letter from Jennie to her sister and it was signed,
flourishingly, "Jeannette."
"Oh," said Lottie. "I see."
Jennie, then, worked by factory. She paid board at home. She helped
with the housework evenings and Sundays. But always they yelled at her.
And then Jennie had taken one hundred dollars and had run away from
home.
"Jennie is smart," Gussie said, in conclusion, "she is smart like
machine. She can make in her head figgers. She finished school, she
wanted she should go by business college for typewriter and work in
office, but ma and my brothers they won't let. They yell and they yell
and so Jennie works by factory."
It was all simple enough to Lottie. She had sat in many sessions of
Judge Barton's court. "You'd rather not go with me, Gussie?"
Gussie shook a vehement head. "Better you should go alone. Right away I
cry and yell for scared, Jennie she begin cry and yell, ma she begin
cry and----"
"All right, Gussie.... Whose hundred dollars was it?"
"Otto. He is big brother. He is mad like everything. He say he make
Jennie go by jail----"
"Oh, no, Gussie. He can't do that without Judge Barton, and she'll
never----"
Gussie vanished into her bedroom. She emerged again with a stout roll
of grimy bills in her hand. These she proffered Lottie. "Here is more
as fifty dollar. I save'm. You should give to judge he shouldn't send
Jennie to jail." Gussie was of the class that never quite achieves one
hundred dollars. Seventy--eighty--eighty-five--and then the dentist or
doctor.
Lottie gave the girl's shoulder a little squeeze. "Oh, Gussie, you
funny dear child. The judge is a woman. And besides it isn't right to
bribe the----"
"No-o-o-o! A woman! In my life I ain't heard how a woman is judge."
"Well, this one is. And Jennie won't go by jail. I promise you."
Down the hall sped a figure in a pongee bathrobe, corded at the waist,
slim and sleek as a goldfish. Charley.
"I heard you come in. Finished? Then sit and talk sociable while I
dress. You can speed a bit on the way downtown and make it. Step on the
ol' batteries. Please! Did you fix things with Gussie?"
"Yeh," Gussie answered, comfortably, but she wore a puzzled frown. "She
fix. Judge is woman. Never in my life----"
"Gussie, ma'am, will you let me have my breakfast tray in the
sun-parlour? It's such a glummy morning. That's a nice girl. About five
minutes."
And it wasn't more than five. Lottie, watching Charley in the act of
dressing wondered what that young woman's grandmother or great-aunt
would have thought of the process. She decided that her dead-and-gone
great-grandmother--that hoop-skirted, iron-stayed, Victorian lady all
encased in linings, buckram, wool, wire, merino, and starch--would have
swooned at the sight. Charley's garments were so few and scant as to be
Chinese in their simplicity. She wore, usually, three wispy garments,
not counting shoes and stockings. She proceeded to don them now. First
she pulled the stockings up tight and slick, then cuffed them just
below the knee. This cuff she then twisted deftly round, caught the
slack of it, twisted that rope-like, caught the twist neatly under a
fold, rolled the fold down tight and hard three inches below the knee
and left it there, an ingenious silken bracelet. There it stayed, fast
and firm, unaided by garter, stay, or elastic. Above this a pair of
scant knickers of jersey silk or muslin; a straight little shirt with
straps over the shoulders or, sometimes, just a brassière that bound
the young breasts. Over this slight foundation went a slim scant frock
of cloth. That was all. She was a pliant wheat-sheaf, a gracile blade,
a supple spear (see verses "To C.K." in _Poetry Magazine_ for
February, signed Jesse Dick). She twisted her hair into a knot that,
worn low on the neck, would have been a test for anyone but Charley.
She now pursed her lips a little critically, and leaned forward close
to her mirror. Charley's lips were a little too full, the carping said;
the kind of lips known as "bee-stung." Charley hated her mouth; said it
was coarse and sensual. Others did not think so. (See poem "Your Lips"
in _Century Magazine_, June.)
"There!" she said and turned away from the mirror. The five minutes
were just up.
"Meaning you're dressed?"
"Dressed. Why of----"
"Sketchy, I calls it. But I suppose it's all right. You're covered,
anyway. Only I hope your grandmother'll never witness the sight I've
seen this morning. You make me feel like an elderly Esquimau sewed up
for the winter."
Charley shrugged luxuriously. "I hate a lot of clothes."
Her tray awaited her on the table in the sun-parlour--fruit, toast,
steaming hot chocolate. "I've got to go," Lottie kept murmuring and
leaned in the doorway watching her. Charley attacked the food with
a relish that gave you an appetite. She rolled an ecstatic eye at
the first sip of chocolate. "Oo, hot! Sure you won't have some?" She
demolished the whole daintily and thoroughly. As she sat there in
the cruel morning light of the many-windowed little room she was as
pink-cheeked and bright-eyed and scrubbed-looking as a Briggs boy ready
for supper. You could see the fine pores of her skin.
Lottie began to button her coat. Charley chased a crumb of toast around
her plate. "What, if any, do you think of him?"
Lottie had seen and met shoals of Charley's young men. "Suitors" was
the official South Side name for them. But Charley had never asked
Lottie's opinion of one of them.
"Charming youngster. I grew quite mooney, after you'd gone, thinking
about him, and trumped mother's ace. He doesn't look like a poet--that
is, poet."
"They never do. Good poets, I mean. I've often thought it was all for
the best that Rupert Brooke--that Byron collar of his. Fancy by the
time he became forty ... you really think he's charming?"
"So does your mother. Last night she was enthusiastic--about his work."
"M-m-m. Mother's partial to young poets."
Between Charley and her mother there existed an unwritten code.
Charley commanded whole squads of devoted young men in assorted sizes,
positions, and conditions. Young men who liked country hikes and
wayside lunches; young men who preferred to dance at the Blackstone
on Saturday afternoons; young men who took Charley to the Symphony
concerts; young men who read to her out of books. And Mrs. Henry
Kemp, youngish, attractive, almost twenty years of married life with
Henry Kemp behind her, relished a chat with these slim youngsters. A
lean-flanked graceful crew they were, for the most part, with an almost
feline co-ordination of muscle. When they shook hands with you their
grip drove the rings into your fingers. They looked you in the eye--and
blushed a little. Their profiles would have put a movie star to shame.
Their waists were slim as a girl's (tennis and baseball). They drove
low-slung cars around Hyde Park corners with death-defying expertness.
Nerveless; not talkative and yet well up on the small-talk of the
younger set--Labour, Socialism, sex, baseball, Freud, psychiatry,
dancing and--just now--the War. Some were all for dashing across to
join the Lafayette Escadrille. Belle Kemp would have liked to sit and
talk with these young men--talk, and laugh, and dangle her slipper on
the end of her toe. Charley knew this. And her mother knew she knew. No
pulling the wool over Charley's eyes. No pretending to play the chummy
young mother with her. "Pal stuff."
So, then, "M-m-m," said Charley, sipping the last of her chocolate.
"Mother's partial to young poets."
Lottie had to be off. She cast a glance down the hall. "Do you suppose
she's really asleep still? I'd like to talk to her just a minute."
"You might tap once at the door. I never disturb her in the morning.
But I don't think she's sleeping."
Another code rule. These two--mother and daughter--treated one another
with polite deference. Never intruded on each other's privacy. Rarely
interfered with each other's engagements. Mrs. Kemp liked her breakfast
in bed--a practice Charley loathed. Once a week a strapping Swedish
damsel came to the apartment to give Mrs. Kemp a body massage and what
is known as a "facial." You should have heard Mrs. Carrie Payson on the
subject. Belle defended the practice, claiming that it benefited some
obscure digestive ailment from which she suffered.
Lottie tapped at Belle's door. A little silence. Then an unenthusiastic
voice bade her enter. Belle was in bed, resting. Belle looked her age
in bed in the morning. Slightly haggard and a little yellow.
"I thought it must be you."
"It is."
Belle rolled a languid eye. "I woke up feeling wretched. How about this
Gussie business?"
"I'm just going downtown. It'll turn out all right, I think."
"Just arrange things so that Gussie won't be upset for Tuesday. You
wouldn't think she was nervous, to look at her. Great huge creature.
But when she's upset! And I do so want that luncheon to be just right.
Mrs. Radcliffe Phelps----"
Lottie could not restrain a little smile. "Oh, Belle."
Belle turned her head pettishly on the pillow. "Oh, Belle!" she
mimicked in an astonishingly un-grown-up manner. Indeed, she sounded
amazingly like the school-girl of Armour Institute days. "You're more
like mother every day, Lottie." Lottie closed the door softly.
Charley was waiting for her at the end of the hall. "Don't say I didn't
warn you. Here--I'll give you a chocolatey kiss. Are you lunching
downtown? There's a darling new tea-room just opened in the Great
Lakes Building----"
"I've promised to be home by noon, at the latest."
"What for?"
"To take mother marketing and over to the West Side----"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake!"
"You have your job, Charley. This is mine."
"Oh, is it? Do you like it?"
"N-n-no."
"Then it isn't."
Lottie flung a final word at the door. "Even a free untrammelled spirit
like you will acknowledge that such a thing as duty does exist, I
suppose?"
Charley leaned over the railing to combat that as Lottie flew
downstairs. "There is no higher duty than that of self-expression."
"Gabble-gabble!" laughed Lottie, at the vestibule door.
"Coward!" shouted Charley over the railing.