Years of Grace · Part I · II · Chapter 1 2 2 (1/2)

II

Jane woke next morning in a state of great excitement. For a minute she couldn’t quite recollect, as she lay in her big walnut bed with the early sunshine streaming in her east window, just what was going to happen that was so very nice. She felt strangely entangled by dreams that she couldn’t remember. Happy dreams, though, and vivid, but lost even as she tried to clutch after them. Then she knew. André was back. André still⁠—liked her. She was going to see André that evening at Muriel’s party.

Jane sprang from her bed and ran to the window. It was a lovely day. The sky was bright and blue above the willow tree. The tree itself was waving, silvery green, in the soft September breeze. There would be a moon that evening. She had looked it up in the weather report in the paper, the night before.

André would like the World’s Fair. He would like those vast white buildings standing stark in the moonbeams. And the twinkling lights on restless, moving water. And the terrace at the restaurant. And the music. And the crowds. It would be fun to see him see it.

Soon after breakfast she was called to the telephone. At the sound of Muriel’s voice Jane was awfully afraid that something dreadful had happened. But no, the party was getting better and better. Flora had called up Muriel to say that her father had come home from New York unexpectedly that morning. As his wife was in Galena he wanted to join the party. He had asked if Mr. Lester would let him take them all down to the fair grounds in the tally-ho.

The tally-ho! Even Muriel had thought that that would be magnificent. The Furnesses’ coach and four was quite the most splendid vehicle that Jane and Muriel had ever seen. They weren’t asked to ride on it very often. Mr. Furness had bought it only that summer and Flora herself seldom went on the elegant parties that he drove up the lake to the end of the pavement, or down to Washington Park, with the clatter of prancing hoofs and the jingle of chain harness and the toot of the triumphant horn. Mr. Furness was quite a judge of horseflesh. He always sat on the box seat, very plump and straight, his short arms stiffly outstretched to hold the four yellow reins, his whip cocked at the proper horse show angle, and his high hat cocked too, just a little bit, over his fat puffy face and great pale eyes. It was always fun to stand in the yard with Flora to watch his parties start out from under the porte-cochère. Tall, frock-coated, high-hatted gentlemen helping beautiful billowing ladies to climb up the little steps to the top of the coach in their voluminous silken flounces. Beautiful billowing ladies, blushing at the display of slender ankles. Flora’s mother was always the most beautiful and billowing and blushing of all.

And this afternoon he was coming to pick them all up at five o’clock and Jane and Isabel must be ready at the window, for Flora’s father never liked to be kept waiting, holding his pawing horses, at anyone’s door. Jane assured Muriel earnestly that she would be on the front steps. Of course she would. She didn’t even want to miss seeing the coach swing around the corner, clattering and jingling and tooting⁠—the Furnesses’ new coach⁠—to pick her up to drive all the way down to Jackson Park with André, to show him the World’s Fair.

At four o’clock Jane began very seriously dressing for the party. She solemnly considered the possibility of borrowing Isabel’s curling tongs, but the sight of her sister, standing nervously in petticoat and combing jacket, heating the tongs in question for her own use at the gas jet beside her rosewood bureau, dissuaded her from the thought. Isabel didn’t like to be bothered when she was dressing.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me,” she said irritably, when her mother came in, conversationally minded, and sat sociably down on the sofa. Mrs. Ward rose obediently and almost ran into Jane at the door. They walked together down the hall. All the family had learned it was better never to disturb Isabel. But her voice floated out to them, down the passage.

“Shall I wear the blue or the green?” she called abstractedly. Jane’s mother turned back, with interest.

“The green, I think, dear.”

Jane went into her own bedroom. She wouldn’t borrow the curling tongs. She would rough up her hair by running her comb through it the wrong way. That, after all, would be safer. Jane had never used curling tongs. It would be better not to experiment for such an important party.

At a quarter to five Jane came out of her front door and looked anxiously up the street. It was perfectly empty, save for one yellow ice-wagon that was waiting, halfway down the block. The big white horses stood patiently, their noses in feedbags. Their flanks were just a little yellow, as if the paint from the wagon had run into them. The iceman was a long time delivering the ice. Jane knew him well. He was a friend of Minnie’s.

Jane sat down on the top step, carefully turning up the skirt of her blue foulard frock so that she wouldn’t soil it. The mellow afternoon sunlight slanted down the quiet street. The grass plots looked yellow-green behind their iron palings. The elm trees were just a little brown and rusty with the decline of summer, but they still hung plume-like and ponderous, almost meeting over the cedar block pavement. The big red brick and brown stone houses stood tranquilly in their wide yards. Down at the corner was a grey brick block of five high-stooped residences. Jane’s mother had thought it was dreadful when they were built, five years before.

“Eyesores!” she had said. She declared they spoiled the street. She thought it would be horrible to live in them and share a party wall with a neighbor. “Dark as a pocket,” was her phrase. Jane’s father had advanced the theory that, with the rise of real estate values, they’d live to see the yards built up all around them.

“You might as well say,” Jane’s mother had said incredulously, “that we’ll all be living in flats before we die⁠—one on top of the other like sardines in a box.”

They had all laughed at that. Jane didn’t know anyone who lived in a flat except André.

The iceman came out of the house down the street, suggestively wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He hung up the ice tongs at the back of the wagon, then stepped around to take off the horses’ nosebags and climbed up over the wheel to the driver’s seat.

“Gittap!” he said. His voice echoed down the quiet block. The horses lumbered awkwardly into motion. Jane waved at him as he went by.

Suddenly the coach swung around the corner, a warning fanfare sounding on the horn.

“Isabel!” screamed Jane. It seemed terribly important not to keep Mr. Furness waiting a single second. Isabel appeared at the door. She looked very blond and pretty in her bright green dress. She had borrowed their mother’s black silk cape. She shaded her eyes against the western sun and waved cheerfully to Rosalie as the coach drew up at the door.

The groom sprang down with incredible alacrity and took up his position at the bridle of the prancing roan leaders. The horses arched their pretty necks and pawed the cedar pavement. The chain harness jingled and the smart red rosettes on their bridles fluttered with their restless motion. Jane and Isabel ran down the steps.

The coach was a chaos of festive colour and movement. Mrs. Lester had her purple parasol and Muriel her bright red frock and Flora her pale blue one. Rosalie looked lovely in rose-coloured taffeta, sitting with Mr. Furness on the box seat, but leaning back to talk to Freddy Waters, on the row behind her. Jane realized with relief that Edith had not come. But Bob and Teddy were there, and Robin Bridges for Isabel. André was on the back seat, close by the little platform where the groom stood up to blow the horn. Jane scrambled up over the back wheel to sit beside him, while Robin was helping Isabel up the little steps.

“Where’s Jane?” said Mrs. Lester, bewildered.

“I’m here!” piped Jane, brushing the dust off her flounces.

Mr. Furness waved his whip and flicked it over the shoulders of the leaders. The little groom sprang back, under peril of instant dissolution. The horses plunged and started. The groom climbed up behind Jane and André. In a minute they were trotting smartly down Pine Street and the wind was blowing freshly in Jane’s face, blowing her hair across her pink cheeks as she laughed up at André, terribly happy to be driving like this, right under the boughs of the elm trees, high up in the air, almost on a level with the second stories of the houses, laughing at André, with a whole evening before her that was going to be such fun.

The sun had long been set when they reached the fair grounds. They all climbed down from the coach and strolled in the gathering twilight past the glimmering, glamorous buildings, through the jostling, pleasure-bent crowd until they reached the restaurant.

“Let’s eat on the terrace,” said Rosalie. The September night was very mild. Mr. Furness found a waiter who made one long table out of five so all twelve of them could sit together. Jane sat between André and Freddy Waters. Freddy didn’t speak to her once, all through the meal, he was so busy talking to Rosalie on his other side and answering the sallies of Isabel from across the table. André didn’t say much, either.

“Is this like Paris?” Jane asked him. She meant the terrace and the candlelit tables and the sky overhead, with just the largest stars gleaming faintly through the yellow glow of the fair grounds.

“Something,” said André. “Paris is really just like itself.” Jane felt a little disappointed. She had hoped so much that it was.

The moon came up before the meal was over, a little lopsided, just past the full, enormous and very clear, out of the waters of the lake. It made a silver path from the horizon to the very foot of the terrace.

“There’s nothing like that in Paris,” said André solemnly. Jane felt a little better about Chicago. When dinner was over they started for the Midway. The crowds were dreadful there, but Jane loved the side shows. Rosalie had her fortune told and so did Isabel and so did Muriel. But Mr. Furness didn’t want Flora to touch the dirty gypsy and Jane didn’t want to hear her fortune with André there and Muriel at hand to giggle, Muriel had even giggled at Freddy Waters when the gypsy found a blond young man in Rosalie’s pink palm.

Then they went to the Streets of Cairo and rode riotously on camels. Mrs. Lester sat on a green bench beside Mr. Furness and laughed herself into hysteria as the girls climbed timorously up on the leather saddles, clutching at petticoats in a vain attempt to cover protruding ankles, when the dreadful animals lurched clumsily to their feet and rocked away. It was like nothing else than an earthquake, Jane decided, as she clung desperately to the awkward humps.

Later Mrs. Lester shepherded them safely past the hoochee-coochee dances and the perils of the Dahomey Village to the more adequately clothed Esquimos, who tactfully volunteered upon question, as a tribute to the Chicago climate, that they felt the cold more on the Midway than in Labrador. The Ferris wheel loomed up before them in the night. They must all go up in that, Rosalie decided.

Jane stepped into one of the swinging cars in front of André. She had never been up in the Ferris wheel before. The compartments looked as small as bird cages when dangling in midair. Jane was surprised to see that they were really almost as big as street cars. She sat down with André in a corner seat. The car swayed slightly as the wheel started. They moved up and out, then stopped again while other cars were loading. They swung slowly around the huge circumference, starting and stopping at regular intervals. The ground fell away beneath them and Jane lost all sense of movement. The car seemed suspended motionless in midair, with the ground sliding sideways beneath it and the great steel trusses of the wheel revolving slowly past the window. It paused a moment as they reached the top of the circle. The lights of the fair grounds glittered brightly below them. Long lines of yellow street lamps radiated out in the darkness.

The illuminated cable-cars on Cottage Grove Avenue crawled like mechanical toys. The glow of the city was visible at the north but the stars overhead were lost in the radiance of the myriad gas-lamps of the Midway. The silver moon looked incredibly remote, hung halfway up the eastern sky.

Jane drew in her breath with a little gasp of delight. Why⁠—flying must be like this! They started slowly down again around the great wheel. The car swung out over the circle’s edge. It seemed horribly unsupported, hanging dizzily over an abyss. Jane shut her eyes quickly and groped for André’s hand. She felt a distinct shock of surprise when his fingers closed on hers.

“I⁠—I’m giddy,” she said faintly.

André took her hand in both his own.

“Keep your eyes shut,” he said practically. He moved a little nearer on the seat and his arm rested against her shoulder. “All right, now?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jane faintly, still not daring to look. André continued to hold her hand in his. The starting and stopping went on disquietingly.

“Aren’t we nearly there?” asked Jane.

“We go around twice,” said André. “The second time without stopping.”

“Can’t I get out?” asked Jane.

“No,” said André, “but it’s all right now. You can look.”

She did, and removed her hand from his as they moved slowly by the crowded landing platform and out and up once more into the heavenly vault.

“Shut your eyes again,” said André very capably as they began the descent. He took her hand as if a precedent had been established. Jane felt his fingers close reassuringly about her own. She was roused a moment later by a giggle from Muriel. She pulled her hand away and forgot to be dizzy in the heat of her indignation. Muriel was outrageous. The car stopped at the landing stage. Everyone crowded out.

They strolled back, now, for a look at the Court of Honour before picking up the coach at the gates. Mrs. Lester was tired and walked very slowly at Mr. Furness’s side. No one said much of anything. Even Rosalie and Isabel were silent. The lights from the Japanese teahouse on the Wooded Island glimmered across the pond. A few scattered gondolas were drifting softly in the moonlight. Jane watched their graceful motion.

“Have you ever been in Venice?” she asked.

“No,” said André.

“I went there on my wedding trip,” said Mrs. Lester.

“That’s what I mean to do,” said André.

Jane walked along in silence, looking very straight before her. She was a little startled by her own thoughts.

The Court of Honour was ablaze with light and crowded with people. The strains of a Strauss waltz, rising and falling with the light September breeze, fell faintly on their ears. John Philip Sousa was conducting his orchestra in the open air band stand.

“I’d like to see the MacMonnies fountain,” said André.

“Well⁠—there it is,” said Mrs. Lester wearily. She didn’t look as if she wanted so see much of anything any more. The party strolled over to the Grand Basin and leaned against the parapet of stucco. Mrs. Lester sank on a green bench. MacMonnies’s medieval barge, propelled by Arts and Sciences, with the figure of Time at the helm, rose sharply up before them in the moonlight, amid its misty jets of water. André stood silent at Jane’s side, looking at it intently.

“I like it,” he said.