So Big · Chapter 15 (1/2)

XV

“Run along!” said Selina, when he called her on the farm telephone. “It’ll do you good. You’ve been as grumpy as a gander for weeks. How about shirts? And you left one pair of flannel tennis pants out here last fall⁠—clean ones. Won’t you need⁠ ⁠…”

In town he lived in a large front room and alcove on the third floor of a handsome old-fashioned three-story-and-basement house in Deming Place. He used the front room as a living room, the alcove as a bedroom. He and Selina had furnished it together, discarding all of the room’s original belongings except the bed, a table, and one fat comfortable faded old armchair whose brocade surface hinted a past grandeur. When he had got his books ranged in open shelves along one wall, soft-shaded lamps on table and desk, the place looked more than livable; lived in. During the process of furnishing Selina got into the way of coming into town for a day or two to prowl the auction rooms and the secondhand stores. She had a genius for this sort of thing; hated the spick-and-span varnish and veneer of the new furniture to be got in the regular way.

“Any piece of furniture, I don’t care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character,” Selina said. “A good deal like human beings. I’d rather have my old maple table, mellow with age and rubbing, that Pervus’s father put together himself by hand seventy years ago, than all the mahogany library slabs on Wabash Avenue.”

She enjoyed these rare trips into town; made a holiday of them. Dirk would take her to the theatre and she would sit entranced. Her feeling for this form of entertainment was as fresh and eager as it had been in the days of the Daly Stock Company when she, a little girl, had been seated in the parquet with her father, Simeon Peake. Strangely enough, considering the lack of what the world calls romance and adventure in her life, she did not like the motion pictures. “All the difference in the world,” she would say, “between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theatre. My, yes! Like fooling with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.”

She developed a mania for nosing into strange corners of the huge sprawling city; seemed to discover a fresh wonder on each visit. In a short time she was more familiar with Chicago than was Dirk⁠—for that matter, than old Aug Hempel who had lived in it for over half a century but who never had gone far afield in his pendulum path between the yards and his house, his house and the yards.

The things that excited her about Chicago did not seem to interest Dirk at all. Sometimes she took a vacant room for a day or two in Dirk’s boarding house. “What do you think!” she would say to him, breathlessly, when he returned from the office in the evening. “I’ve been way over on the northwest side. It’s another world. It’s⁠—it’s Poland. Cathedrals and shops and men sitting in restaurants all day long reading papers and drinking coffee and playing dominoes or something like it. And what do you think I found out! Chicago’s got the second largest Polish population of any city in the world. In the world!”

“Yeh?” Dirk would reply, absently.

There was nothing absentminded about his tone this afternoon as he talked to his mother on the telephone. “Sure you don’t mind? Then I’ll be out next Saturday. Or I may run out in the middle of the week to stay over night⁠ ⁠… Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Be sure and remember all about Paula’s new house so’s you can tell me about it. Julie says it’s like the kind you read of in the novels. She says old Aug saw it just once and now won’t go near it even to visit his grandchildren.”

The day was marvellously mild for March in Chicago. Spring, usually so coy in this region, had flung herself at them head first. As the massive revolving door of Dirk’s office building fanned him into the street he saw Paula in her long low sporting roadster at the curb. She was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class Chicago was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class America was dressed in black. Two years of war had robbed Paris of its husbands, brothers, sons. All Paris walked in black. America, untouched, gayly borrowed the smart habiliments of mourning and now Michigan Boulevard and Fifth Avenue walked demurely in the gloom of crêpe and chiffon; black hats, black gloves, black slippers. Only black was “good” this year.

Paula did not wear black well. She was a shade too sallow for these sombre swathings even though relieved by a pearl strand of exquisite colour, flawlessly matched; and a new sly face-powder. Paula smiled up at him, patted the leather seat beside her with one hand that was absurdly thick-fingered in its fur-lined glove.

“It’s cold driving. Button up tight. Where’ll we stop for your bag? Are you still in Deming Place?”

He was still in Deming Place. He climbed into the seat beside her⁠—a feat for the young and nimble. Theodore Storm never tried to double his bulk into the jackknife position necessary to riding in his wife’s roadster. The car was built for speed, not comfort. One sat flat with the length of one’s legs stretched out. Paula’s feet, pedalling brake and clutch so expertly, were inadequately clothed in sheer black silk stockings and slim buckled patent-leather slippers.

“You’re not dressed warmly enough,” her husband would have said. “Those shoes are idiotic for driving.” And he would have been right.

Dirk said nothing.

Her manipulation of the wheel was witchcraft. The roadster slid in and out of traffic like a fluid thing, an enamel stream, silent as a swift current in a river. “Can’t let her out here,” said Paula. “Wait till we get past Lincoln Park. Do you suppose they’ll ever really get rid of this terrible Rush Street bridge?” When his house was reached, “I’m coming up,” she said. “I suppose you haven’t any tea?”

“Gosh, no! What do you think I am! A young man in an English novel!”

“Now, don’t be provincial and Chicago-ish, Dirk.” They climbed the three flights of stairs. She looked about. Her glance was not disapproving. “This isn’t so bad. Who did it? She did! Very nice. But of course you ought to have your own smart little apartment, with a Jap to do you up. To do that for you, for example.”

“Yes,” grimly. He was packing his bag⁠—not throwing clothes into it, but folding them deftly, neatly, as the son of a wise mother packs. “My salary’d just about keep him in white linen housecoats.”

She was walking about the living room, picking up a book, putting it down, fingering an ash tray, gazing out of the window, examining a photograph, smoking a cigarette from the box on his table. Restless, nervously alive, catlike. “I’m going to send you some things for your room, Dirk.”

“For God’s sake don’t!”

“Why not?”

“Two kinds of women in the world. I learned that at college. Those who send men things for their rooms and those that don’t.”

“You’re very rude.”

“You asked me. There! I’m all set.” He snapped the lock of his bag. “I’m sorry I can’t give you anything. I haven’t a thing. Not even a glass of wine and a⁠—what is it they say in books?⁠—oh, yeh⁠—a biscuit.”

In the roadster again they slid smoothly out along the drive, along Sheridan Road, swung sharply around the cemetery curve into Evanston, past the smug middle-class suburban neatness of Wilmette and Winnetka. She negotiated expertly the nerve-racking curves of the Hubbard Woods hills, then maintained a fierce and steady speed for the remainder of the drive.

“We call the place Stormwood,” Paula told him. “And nobody outside the dear family knows how fitting that is. Don’t scowl. I’m not going to tell you my marital woes. And don’t you say I asked for it.⁠ ⁠… How’s the job?”

“Rotten.”

“You don’t like it? The work?”

“I like it well enough, only⁠—well, you see we leave the university architectural course thinking we’re all going to be Stanford Whites or Cass Gilberts, tossing off a Woolworth building and making ourselves famous overnight. I’ve spent all yesterday and today planning how to work in space for toilets on every floor of the new office building, six stories high and shaped like a drygoods box, that’s going up on the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Ashland, west.”

“And ten years from now?”

“Ten years from now maybe they’ll let me do the plans for the drygoods box all alone.”

“Why don’t you drop it?”

He was startled. “Drop it! How do you mean?”

“Chuck it. Do something that will bring you quick results. This isn’t an age of waiting. Suppose, twenty years from now, you do plan a grand Gothic office building to grace this new and glorified Michigan Boulevard they’re always shouting about! You’ll be a middle-aged man living in a middle-class house in a middle-class suburb with a middle-class wife.”

“Maybe”⁠—slightly nettled. “And maybe I’ll be the Sir Christopher Wren of Chicago.”

“Who’s he?”

“Good G⁠⸺, how often have you been in London?”

“Three times.”

“Next time you find yourself there you might cast your eye over a very nice little structure called St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’ve never seen it but it has been very well spoken of.”

They turned in at the gates of Stormwood. Though the trees and bushes were gaunt and bare the grass already showed stretches of vivid green. In the fading light one caught glimpses through the shrubbery of the lake beyond. It was a dazzling sapphire blue in the sunset. A final turn of the drive. An avenue of trees. A house, massive, pillared, porticoed. The door opened as they drew up at the entrance. A maid in cap and apron stood in the doorway. A man appeared at the side of the car, coming seemingly from nowhere, greeted Paula civilly and drove the car off. The glow of an open fire in the hall welcomed them. “He’ll bring up your bag,” said Paula. “How’re the babies, Anna? Has Mr. Storm got here?”

“He telephoned, Mrs. Storm. He says he won’t be out till late⁠—maybe ten or after. Anyway, you’re not to wait dinner.”

Paula, from being the limp, expert, fearless driver of the high-powered roadster was now suddenly very much the mistress of the house, quietly observant, giving an order with a lift of the eyebrow or a nod of the head. Would Dirk like to go to his room at once? Perhaps he’d like to look at the babies before they went to sleep for the night, though the nurse would probably throw him out. One of those stern British females. Dinner at seven-thirty. He needn’t dress. Just as he liked. Everything was very informal here. They roughed it. (Dirk had counted thirteen servants by noon next day and hadn’t been near the kitchen, laundry, or dairy.)

His room, when he reached it, he thought pretty awful. A great square chamber with narrow leaded windows, deep-set, on either side. From one he could get a glimpse of the lake, but only a glimpse. Evidently the family bedrooms were the lake rooms. In the DeJong code and class the guest had the best but evidently among these moneyed ones the family had the best and the guest was made comfortable, but was not pampered. It was a new angle for Dirk. He thought it startling but rather sensible. His bag had been brought up, unpacked, and stowed away in a closet before he reached his room. “Have to tell that to Selina,” he thought, grinning. He looked about the room, critically. It was done in a style that he vaguely defined as French. It gave him the feeling that he had stumbled accidentally into the chamber of a Récamier and couldn’t get out. Rose brocade with gold net and cream lace and rosebuds. “Swell place for a man,” he thought, and kicked a footstool⁠—a fauteuil he supposed it was called, and was secretly glad that he could pronounce it faultlessly. Long mirrors, silken hanging, cream walls. The bed was lace hung. The coverlet was rose satin, feather-light. He explored his bathroom. It actually was a room, much larger than his alcove bedroom on Deming Place⁠—as large as his own bedroom at home on the farm. The bath was done dazzlingly in blue and white. The tub was enormous and as solid as if the house had been built around it. There were towels and towels and towels in blue and white, ranging in size all the way from tiny embroidered wisps to fuzzy all-enveloping bath towels as big as a carpet.

He was much impressed.

He decided to bathe and change into dinner clothes and was glad of this when he found Paula in black chiffon before the fire in the great beamed room she had called the library. Dirk thought she looked very beautiful in that diaphanous stuff, with the pearls. Her heart-shaped face, with its large eyes that slanted a little at the corners; her long slim throat; her dark hair piled high and away from her little ears. He decided not to mention it.

“You look extremely dangerous,” said Paula.

“I am,” replied Dirk, “but it’s hunger that brings this look of the beast to my usually mild Dutch features. Also, why do you call this the library?” Empty shelves gaped from the wall on all sides. The room was meant to hold hundreds of volumes. Perhaps fifty or sixty in all now leaned limply against each other or lay supine.

Paula laughed. “They do look sort of sparse, don’t they? Theodore bought this place, you know, as is. We’ve books enough in town, of course. But I don’t read much out here. And Theodore!⁠—I don’t believe he ever in his life read anything but detective stories and the newspapers.”

Dirk told himself that Paula had known her husband would not be home until ten and had deliberately planned a tête-à-tête meal. He would not, therefore, confess himself a little nettled when Paula said, “I’ve asked the Emerys in for dinner; and we’ll have a game of bridge afterward. Phil Emery, you know, the Third. He used to have it on his visiting card, like royalty.”

The Emerys were drygoods; had been drygoods for sixty years; were accounted Chicago aristocracy; preferred England; rode to hounds in pink coats along Chicago’s prim and startled suburban prairies. They had a vast estate on the lake near Stormwood. They arrived a trifle late. Dirk had seen pictures of old Phillip Emery (“Phillip the First,” he thought, with an inward grin) and decided, looking at the rather anemic third edition, that the stock was running a little thin. Mrs. Emery was blonde, statuesque, and unmagnetic. In contrast Paula seemed to glow like a sombre jewel. The dinner was delicious but surprisingly simple; little more than Selina would have given him, Dirk thought, had he come home to the farm this weekend. The talk was desultory and rather dull. And this chap had millions, Dirk said to himself. Millions. No scratching in an architect’s office for this lad. Mrs. Emery was interested in the correct pronunciation of Chicago street names.

“It’s terrible,” she said. “I think there ought to be a Movement for the proper pronunciation. The people ought to be taught; and the children in the schools. They call Goethe Street ‘Gerty’; and pronounce all the s’s in Des Plaines. Even Illinois they call ‘Illinoise.’ ” She was very much in earnest. Her breast rose and fell. She ate her salad rapidly. Dirk thought that large blondes oughn’t to get excited. It made their faces red.

At bridge after dinner Phillip the Third proved to be sufficiently the son of his father to win from Dirk more money than he could conveniently afford to lose. Though Mrs. Phil had much to do with this, as Dirk’s partner. Paula played with Emery, a bold shrewd game.