So Big (29 page)

“Talking?” The smile faded from Selina's face.

“Goodness knows I'm not strait-laced. You can't be in this day and age. If I had ever thought I'd live to see the time when——Well, since the war of course anything's all right, seems. But Paula has no sense. Everbody knows she's insane about Dirk. That's all right for Dirk, but how about Paula! She won't go anywhere unless he's invited. Of course Dirk is awfully popular. Goodness knows there are few enough young men like him in Chicago—handsome and successful and polished and all. Most of them dash off East just as soon as they can get their fathers to establish an Eastern branch or something. . . . They're together all the time, everywhere. I asked her if she was going to divorce Storm and she said no, she hadn't enough money of her own and Dirk wasn't earning enough. His salary's thousands, but she's used to millions. Well!”

“They were boy and girl together,” Selina interrupted, feebly.

“They're not any more. Don't be silly, Selina. You're not as young as that.”

No, she was not as young as that. When Dirk next paid one of his rare visits to the farm she called him into her bedroom—the cool, dim shabby bedroom with the old black walnut bed in which she had lain as Pervus DeJong's bride more than thirty years ago. She had a little knitted jacket over her severe white nightgown. Her abundant hair was neatly braided in two long plaits. She looked somehow girlish there in the dim light, her great soft eyes gazing up at him.

“Dirk, sit down here at the side of my bed the way you used to.”

“I'm dead tired, Mother. Twenty-seven holes of golf before I came out.”

“I know. You ache all over—a nice kind of ache. I used to feel like that when I'd worked in the fields all day, pulling vegetables, or planting.” He was silent. She caught his hand. “You didn't like that. My saying that. I'm sorry. I didn't say it to make you feel bad, dear.”

“I know you didn't, Mother.”

“Dirk, do you know what that woman who writes the society news in the Sunday
Tribune
called you today?”

“No. What? I never read it.”

“She said you were on the
jeunesse dorée.”

Dirk grinned. “Gosh!”

“I remember enough of my French at Miss Fister's school to know that that means gilded youth.”

“Me! That's good! I'm not even spangled.”

“Dirk!” her voice was low, vibrant. “Dirk, I don't want you to be a gilded youth, I don't care how thick the gilding. Dirk, that isn't what I worked in the sun and cold for. I'm not reproaching you; I didn't mind the work. Forgive me for even mentioning it. But, Dirk, I don't want my son to be known as one of the
jeunesse dorée.
No! Not my son!”

“Now, listen, Mother. That's foolish. If you're going to talk like that. Like a mother in a melodrama whose son's gone wrong. . . . I work like a dog. You know that. You get the wrong angle on things, stuck out here on this little farm. Why don't you come into town and take a little place and sell the farm?”

“Live with you, you mean?” Pure mischievousness.

“Oh, no. You wouldn't like that,” hastily. “Besides, I'd never be there. At the office all day, and out somewhere in the evening.”

“When do you do your reading, Dirk?”

“Why—uh——”

She sat up in bed, looking down at the thin end of her braid as she twined it round and round her finger. “Dirk, what is this you sell in that mahogany office of yours? I never did get the hang of it.”

“Bonds, Mother. You know that perfectly well.”

“Bonds.” She considered this a moment. “Are they hard to sell? Who buys them?”

“That depends. Everybody buys them—that is . . .”

“I don't. I suppose because whenever I had any money it went back into the farm for implements, or repairs, or seed, or stock, or improvements. That's always the way with a farmer—even on a little truck farm like this.” She pondered again a moment. He fidgeted, yawned. “Dirk DeJong—Bond Salesman.”

“The way you say it, Mother, it sounds like a low criminal pursuit.”

“Dirk, do you know sometimes I actually think that if you had stayed here on the farm——”

“Good God, Mother! What for!”

“Oh, I don't know. Time to dream. Time to—no, I suppose that isn't true any more. I suppose the day is past when the genius came from the farm. Machinery has cut into his dreams. He used to sit for hours on the wagon seat, the reins slack in his hands, while the horses plodded into town. Now he whizzes by in a jitney. Patent binders, ploughs, reapers—he's a mechanic. He hasn't time to dream. I guess if Lincoln had lived to-day he's have split his rails to the tune of a humming, snarling patent wood cutter, and in the evening he'd have whirled into town to get his books at the public library, and he'd have read them under the glare of the electric light bulb instead of lying flat in front of the flickering wood fire. . . . Well. . . .”

She lay back, looked up at him. “Dirk, why don't you marry?”

“Why—there's no one I want to marry.” “No one who's free, you mean?”

He stood up. “I mean no one.” He stooped and kissed her lightly. Her arms went round him close. Her hand with the thick gold wedding band on it pressed his head to her hard. “Sobig!” He was a baby again.

“You haven't called me that in years.” He was laughing.

She reverted to the old game they had played when he was a child. “How big is my son! How big?” She was smiling, but her eyes were sombre.

“So big!” answered Dirk, and measured a very tiny space between thumb and forefinger. “So big.”

She faced him, sitting up very straight in bed, the little wool shawl hunched about her shoulders. “Dirk, are you ever going back to architecture? The war is history. It's now or never with you. Pretty soon it will be too late. Are you ever going back to architecture? To your profession?”

A clean amputation. “No, Mother.”

She gave an actual gasp, as though icy water had been thrown full in her face. She looked suddenly old, tired. Her shoulders sagged. He stood in the doorway, braced for her reproaches. But when she spoke it was to reproach herself. “Then I'm a failure.”

“Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I'm happy. You can't live somebody else's life. You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn't just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something glorious was always hidden just around the corner. You said you had lived that way and it hadn't worked. You said——”

She interrupted him with a little cry. “I know I did. I know I did.” Suddenly she raised a warning finger. Her eyes were luminous, prophetic. “Dirk, you can't desert her like that!”

“Desert who?” He was startled.

“Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She'll turn on you some day. Some day you'll want her, and she won't be there.”

Inwardly he had been resentful of this bedside conversation with his mother. She made little of him, he thought, while outsiders appreciated his success. He had said, “So big,” measuring a tiny space between thumb and forefinger in answer to her half-playful question, but he had not honestly meant it. He thought her ridiculously old-fashioned now in her viewpoint, and certainly unreasonable. But he would not quarrel with her.

“You wait, too, Mother,” he said now, smiling. “Some day your wayward son will be a real success. Wait till the millions roll in. Then we'll see.”

She lay down, turned her back deliberately upon him, pulled the covers up about her.

“Shall I turn out your light, Mother, and open the windows?”

“Meena'll do it. She always does. Just call her. . . . Good-night.”

He knew that he had come to be a rather big man in his world. Influence had helped. He knew that, too. But he shut his mind to much of Paula's manoeuvring and wire pulling—refused to acknowledge that her lean, dark, eager fingers had manipulated the mechanism that ordered his career. Paula herself was wise enough to know that to hold him she must not let him feel indebted to her. She knew that the debtor hates his creditor. She lay awake at night planning for him, scheming for his advancement, then suggested these schemes to him so deftly as to make him think he himself had devised them. She had even realized of late that their growing intimacy might handicap him if openly commented on. But now she must see him daily, or speak to him. In the huge house on Lake Shore Drive her own rooms—sitting room, bedroom, dressing room, bath—were as detached as though she occupied a separate apartment. Her telephone was a private wire leading only to her own bedroom. She called him the first thing in the morning; the last thing at night. Her voice, when she spoke to him, was an organ transformed; low, vibrant, with a timbre in its tone that would have made it unrecognizable to an outsider. Her words were commonplace enough, but pregnant and meaningful for her.

“What did you do to-day? Did you have a good day? . . . Why didn't you call me? . . . Did you follow up that suggestion you made about Kennedy? I think it's a wonderful idea, don't you? You're a wonderful man, Dirk; did you know that? . . . I miss you. . . . Do you? . . . When? . . . Why not lunch? . . . Oh, not if you have a business appointment . . . How about five o'clock? . . . No, not there . . . Oh, I don't know. It's so public . . . Yes . . . Good-bye. . . . Good-night. . . . Good-night. . . .”

They began to meet rather furtively, in out-of-the-way places. They would lunch in department store restaurants where none of their friends ever came. They spent off afternoon hours in the dim, close atmosphere of the motion picture palaces, sitting in the back row, seeing nothing of the film, talking in eager whispers that failed to annoy the scattered devotees in the middle of the house. When they drove it was on obscure streets of the south side, as secure there from observation as though they had been in Africa, for to the north sider the south side of Chicago is the hinterland of civilization.

Paula had grown very beautiful, her world thought. There was about her the aura, the glow, the roseate exaltation that surrounds the woman in love.

Frequently she irritated Dirk. At such times he grew quieter than ever; more reserved. As he involuntarily withdrew she advanced. Sometimes he thought he hated her—her hot eager hands, her glowing asking eyes, her thin red mouth, her sallow heart-shaped exquisite face, her perfumed clothing, her air of ownership. That was it! Her possessiveness. She clutched him so with her every look and gesture, even when she did not touch him. There was about her something avid, sultry. It was like the hot wind that sometimes blew over the prairie—blowing, blowing, but never refreshing. It made you feel dry, arid, irritated, parched. Sometimes Dirk wondered what Theodore Storm thought and knew behind that impassive flabby white mask of his.

Dirk met plenty of other girls. Paula was clever enough to see to that. She asked them to share her box at the opera. She had them at her dinners. She affected great indifference to their effect on him. She suffered when he talked to one of them.

“Dirk, why don't you take out that nice Farnham girl?”

“Is she nice?”

“Well, isn't she! You were talking to her long enough at the Kirks' dance. What were you talking about?”

“Books.”

“Oh. Books. She's awfully nice and intelligent, isn't she? A lovely girl.” She was suddenly happy. Books.

The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should fall in love with and doesn't. The Farnham girl was one of the many well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest, clearheaded, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough eyes, clear skin, sensible medium hands and feet; skated well, danced well, talked well. Read the books you have read. A companionable girl. Loads of money but never spoke of it. Travelled. Her hand met yours firmly—and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.

But when Paula showed you a book her arm, as she stood next you, would somehow fit into the curve of yours and you were conscious of the feel of her soft slim side against you.

He knew many girls. There was a distinct type known as the North Shore Girl. Slim, tall, exquisite; a little fine nose, a high, sweet, slightly nasal voice, earrings, a cigarette, luncheon at Huyler's. All these girls looked amazingly alike, Dirk thought; talked very much alike. They all spoke French with a pretty good accent; danced intricate symbolic dances; read the new books; had the same patter. They prefaced, interlarded, concluded their remarks to each other with, “My deah!” It expressed, for them, surprise, sympathy, amusement, ridicule, horror, resignation. “My
deah!
You should have seen her! My
deeah!
”—horror. Their slang was almost identical with that used by the girls working in his office. “She's a good kid,” they said, speaking in admiration of another girl. They made a fetish of frankness. In a day when everyone talked in screaming headlines they knew it was necessary to red-ink their remarks in order to get them noticed at all. The word rot was replaced by garbage and garbage gave way to the ultimate swill. One no longer said “How shocking!” but, “How perfectly obscene!” The words, spoken in their sweet clear voices, fell nonchalantly from their pretty lips. All very fearless and uninhibited and free. That, they told you, was the main thing. Sometimes Dirk wished they wouldn't work so hard at their play. They were forever getting up pageants and plays and large festivals for charity; Venetian fêtes, Oriental bazaars, charity balls. In the programme performance of these many of them sang better, acted better, danced better than most professional performers, but the whole thing always lacked the flavour, somehow, of professional performance. On these affairs they lavished thousands in costumes and decorations, receiving in return other thousands which they soberly turned over to the Cause. They found nothing ludicrous in this. Spasmodically they went into business or semi-professional ventures, defying the conventions. Paula did this, too. She or one of her friends were forever opening blouse shops; starting Gifte Shoppes; burgeoning into tea rooms decorated in crude green and vermilion and orange and black; announcing their affiliation with an advertising agency. These adventures blossomed, withered, died. They were the result of post-war restlessness. Many of these girls had worked indefatigably during the 1917-1918 period; had driven service cars, managed ambulances, nursed, scrubbed, conducted canteens. They missed the excitement, the satisfaction of achievement.