1919 (16 page)

When she wasn't reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sally Emerson. She didn't feel well most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people's bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Margaret told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn't tell them how horrid it made her feel inside. She read the Bible and looked up
uterus
and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn't stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom till she found a bottle marked P
OISON
that had some kind of laudenum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musically traurig about dying, but she couldn't seem to get the rhymes right and finally fell asleep with her head on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chilly in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she'd keep the bottle and kill herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better.

That fall Margaret and Adelaide went to Vassar. Eveline would have liked to go east too but everybody said she was too young though she'd passed most of her college board exams. She stayed in Chicago and went to artclasses and lectures of one sort or another and did churchwork. It was an unhappy winter. Sally Emerson seemed to have forgotten her. The young people around the church were so stuffy and conventional. Eveline got to hate the evenings at Drexel Boulevard, and all the vague Emerson her father talked in his rich preacher's boom. What she liked best was the work she did at Hull House. Eric Egstrom gave drawingclasses there in the evenings and she used to see him sometimes smoking a cigarette in the back passage, leaning against the wall, looking very Norse, she thought, in his grey smock full of bright fresh dabs of paint. She'd sometimes smoke a cigarette with him exchanging a few words about Manet or Claude Monet's innumerable haystacks, all the time feeling uneasy because the conversation wasn't more interesting and clever and afraid somebody would come and find her smoking.

Miss Mathilda said it was bad for a girl to be so dreamy and wanted her to learn to sew.

All Eveline thought about that winter was going to the Art Institute and trying to paint pictures of the Lake Front that would be colored like Whistlers but be rich and full like Millet drawings. Eric didn't love her or else he wouldn't be so friendly and aloof. She'd had her great love; now her life was over and she must devote herself to art. She began to wear her hair screwed up in a knot at the nape of her neck and when her sisters said it was unbecoming she said she wanted it to be unbecoming. It was at the Art Institute that her beautiful friendship with Eleanor Stoddard began. Eveline was wearing her new grey hat that she thought looked like something in a Manet portrait and got to talking with such an interesting girl. When she went home she was so excited she wrote George, who was at boarding school, about it, saying she was the first girl she'd met who really seemed to
feel
painting, that she could
really
talk about things with. And then too she was
really
doing something, and so independent and told things so comically. After all if love was going to be denied her she could build her life on a
beautiful friendship.

Eveline was getting to like to so much in Chicago, she was really disappointed when the time came to leave for the year's trip abroad that Dr. Hutchins had been planning for his family for so many years. But New York and getting on the
Baltic
and making out the tags for their baggage and the funny smell of the staterooms made her forget all about that. They had a rough trip and the boat rolled a good deal, but they sat at the captain's table and the captain was a jovial Englishman and kept their spirits up so that they hardly missed a meal. They landed in Liverpool with twentythree pieces of baggage but lost the shawlstrap that had the medicinechest in it on the way down to London and had to spend their first morning getting it from the Lost and Found Office at St. Pancras. In London it was very foggy. George and Eveline went to see the Elgin marbles and the Tower of London and ate their lunches in A B C restaurants and had a fine time riding in the tube. Dr. Hutchins only let them stay ten days in Paris and most of that time they were making side trips to see cathedrals. Notre Dame and Rheims and Beauvais and Chartres with their bright glass and their smell of incense in cold stone and the tall grey longfaced statues nearly made Eveline a Catholic. They had a first class compartment reserved all the way to Florence and a hamper with cold chicken in it and many bottles of Saint Galmier mineral water and they made tea on a little alcohol lamp.

That winter it rained a lot and the villa was chilly and the girls squabbled among themselves a good deal and Florence seemed to be full of nothing but old English ladies; still Eveline drew from life and read Gordon Craig. She didn't know any young men and she hated the young Italians with names out of Dante that hung around Adelaide and Margaret under the delusion that they were rich heiresses. On the whole she was glad to go home with mother a little earlier than the others who were going to take a trip to Greece. They sailed from Antwerp on the
Kroonland.
Eveline thought it was the happiest moment of her life when she felt the deck tremble under her feet as the steamer left the dock and the long rumble of the whistle in her ears.

Her mother didn't go down to the diningsaloon the first night out so that Eveline was a little embarrassed going in to table all alone and had sat down and started eating her soup before she noticed that the young man opposite her was an American and goodlooking. He had blue eyes and crisp untidy tow hair. It was too wonderful when he turned out to be from Chicago. His name was Dirk McArthur. He'd been studying a year at Munich, but said he was getting out before they threw him out. He and Eveline got to be friends right away; they owned the boat after that. It was a balmy crossing for April. They played shuffleboard and decktennis and spent a lot of time in the bow watching the sleek Atlantic waves curl and break under the lunge of the ship.

One moonlight night when the moon was plunging westward through scudding spindrift the way the
Kroonland
was plunging through the uneasy swell, they climbed up to the crowsnest. This was an adventure; Eveline didn't want to show she was scared. There was no watch and they were alone a little giddy in the snug canvas socket that smelt a little of sailors' pipes. When Dirk put his arm around her shoulders Eveline's head began to reel. She oughtn't to let him. “Gee, you're a good sport, Eveline,” he said in a breathless voice. “I never knew a nice girl who was a good sport before.” Without quite meaning to she turned her face towards his. Their cheeks touched and his mouth slid around and kissed her hard on the mouth. She pushed him away with a jerk.

“Hey, you're not trying to throw me overboard, are you?” he said, laughing. “Look, Eveline, won't you give me a little tiny kiss to show there's no hard feeling. There's just you and me tonight on the whole broad Atlantic.”

She kissed him scaredly on the chin. “Say, Eveline, I like you so much. You're the swellest girl.” She smiled at him and suddenly he was hugging her tight, his legs hard and strong against her legs, his hands spread over her back, his lips trying to open her lips. She got her mouth away from him. “No, no, please don't,” she could hear her little creaky voice saying.

“All right, I'm sorry. . . . No more caveman stuff, honest injun, Eveline. But you mustn't forget that you're the most attractive girl on the boat. . . . I mean in the world, you know how a feller feels.”

He started down first. Letting herself down through the opening in the bottom of the crowsnest she began to get dizzy. She was falling. His arms tightened around her.

“That's all right, girly, your foot slipped,” he said gruffly in her ear. “I've got you.”

Her head was swimming, she couldn't seem to make her arms and legs work; she could hear her little moaning voice, “Don't drop me, Dirk, don't drop me.”

When they finally got down the ladder to the deck Dirk leaned against the mast and let out a long breath, “Whee . . . you certainly give me a scare, young lady.”

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “It was silly of me to suddenly get girlish like that. . . . I must have fainted for a minute.”

“Gosh, I oughtn't to have taken you up there.”

“I'm glad you did,” Eveline said; then she found herself blushing and hurried off down the main deck to the first class entrance and the stateroom, where she had made up a story to explain to mother how she'd torn her stocking.

She couldn't sleep that night but lay awake in her bunk listening to the distant rhythm of the engines and the creaking of the ship and the seethe of churned seas that came in through the open porthole. She could still feel the soft brush of his cheek and the sudden tightening muscles of his arms around her shoulder. She knew now she was terribly in love with Dirk and wished he'd propose to her. But next morning she was really flattered when Judge Ganch, a tall whitehaired lawyer from Salt Lake City with a young red face and a breezy manner sat on the end of her deckchair and talked to her by the hour about his early life in the west and his unhappy marriage and politics and Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive party. She'd rather have been with Dirk, but it made her feel pretty and excited to see Dirk walk past with his nose out of joint while she listened to Judge Ganch's stories. She wished the trip would never end.

Back in Chicago she saw a lot of Dirk McArthur. He always kissed her when he brought her home and he held her very tight when he danced with her and sometimes used to hold her hand and tell her what a nice girl she was, but he never would say anything about getting married. Once she met Sally Emerson at a dance she'd gone to with Dirk she had to admit that she wasn't doing any painting, and Sally Emerson looked so disappointed that Eveline felt quite ashamed and started talking fast about Gordon Craig and an exhibition of Matisse she'd seen in Paris. Sally Emerson was just leaving. A young man was waiting to dance with Eveline. Sally Emerson took her hand and said: “But, Eveline, you mustn't forget that we have high hopes of you.” And while she was dancing everything that Sally Emerson stood for and how wonderful she used to think her came sweeping through Eveline's head; but driving home with Dirk all these thoughts were dazzled out of her in the glare of his headlights, the strong leap forward of the car on the pickup, the purr of the motor, his arm around her, the great force pressing her against him when they went around curves.

It was a hot night, he drove west through endless identical suburbs out into the prairie. Eveline knew that they ought to go home, everybody was back from Europe now and they'd notice how late she got in, but she didn't say anything. It was only when he stopped the car that she noticed that he was very drunk. He took out a flask and offered her a drink. She shook her head. They'd stopped in front of a white barn. In the reflection of the headlights his shirtfront and his face and his mussed up hair all looked chalky white. “You don't love me, Dirk,” she said. “Sure I do, love you better'n anybody . . . except myself . . . that's a trouble with me . . . love myself best.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair, “You're pretty silly, do you know it?” “Ouch,” he said. It was starting to rain so he turned the car around and made for Chicago.

Eveline never knew exactly where it was they smashed up, only that she was crawling out from under the seat and that her dress was ruined and she wasn't hurt only the rain was streaking the headlights of the cars that stopped along the road on either side of them. Dirk was sitting on the mudguard of the first car that had stopped. “Are you all right, Eveline?” he called shakily. “It's only my dress,” she said. He was bleeding from a gash in his forehead and he was holding his arm against his body as if he were cold. Then it was all nightmare, telephoning Dad, getting Dirk to the hospital, dodging the reporters, calling up Mr. McArthur to get him to set to work to keep it out of the morning papers. It was eight o'clock of a hot spring morning when she got home wearing a raincoat one of the nurses had lent her over her ruined evening dress.

The family was all at breakfast. Nobody said anything. Then Dad got to his feet and came forward, with his napkin in his hand, “My dear, I shan't speak of your behavior now, to say nothing of the pain and mortification you have caused all of us. . . . I can only say it would have served you right if you had sustained serious injuries in such an escapade. Go up and rest if you can.” Eveline went upstairs, doublelocked her door and threw herself sobbing on the bed.

As soon as they could, her mother and sisters hurried her off to Santa Fé. It was hot and dusty there and she hated it. She couldn't stop thinking of Dirk. She began telling people she believed in free love and lay for hours on the bed in her room reading Swinburne and Laurence Hope and dreaming Dirk was there. She got so she could almost feel the insistent fingers of his hands spread over the small of her back and his mouth like that night in the crowsnest on the
Kroonland.
It was a kind of relief when she came down with scarlet fever and had to lie in bed for eight weeks in the isolation wing of the hospital. Everybody sent her flowers and she read a lot of books on design and interior decorating and did watercolors.

When she went up to Chicago for Adelaide's wedding in October she had a pale mature look. Eleanor cried out when she kissed her, “My dear, you've grown stunningly handsome.” She had one thing on her mind, to see Dirk and get it over with. It was several days before they could arrange to meet because Dad had called him up and forbidden him to come to the house and they had a scene over the telephone. They met in the lobby of The Drake. She could see at a glance that Dirk had been hitting it up since she'd seem him. He was a little drunk now. He had a sheepish boyish look that made her feel like crying. “Well, how's Barney Oldfield?” she said, laughing. “Rotten, gee you look stunning, Eveline. . . . Say
The Follies of 1914
are in town, a big New York hit. . . . I got tickets, do you mind if we go?” “No, it'll be bully.”