They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the
river bank, 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. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie,
but she was wise in feminine wiles.
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 fried chicken and
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 brass bed, and a mahogany table in the
parlour, 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 loving me
and thinking of me? And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body 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 prob'ly 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.
Nix!"
It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago.
Which brings us to 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 wet 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. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess."
"Tha' so? Mine, too. 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 goods; 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. For the maternal may be strong at twenty.
* * * * *
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 châteaux. 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 Y.M.C.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. Bleedin' France! Ha! That's rich, that is." She thrust
her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's goin' over
there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' 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 helpin' 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 for this girl who could bridge
the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin'
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
château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its
façade. 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 to
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. Twenty craves someone to tell it how wonderful it is.
And Nap Ballou told her.
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 the hatpins out of 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: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin'
'em things, and givin' 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, trained to
think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks 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.
"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood
there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden
she ran to her pa--"
"Both comin' at once, like that--"
"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? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I
come in in the middle of the reel, 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 aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet--"
"The news come only last evenin' 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 pretence 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 picnicking 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 watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake.
She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled white kid 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, lack-lustre 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. Alcohol-atrophied muscles do not take kindly
to rowing.
Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, good enough,
considerin' the company."
He laughed, admiringly, at that and said she was a card.
When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had
supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, 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, half-heartedly. 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."