# So Big/Chapter 15

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 second-hand 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 ever 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 absent-minded 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 jack-knife 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 house-coats.”
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 to-day 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 anæmic 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 week-end. 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 oughtn’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 mach to do with this, as Dirk’s ​partner. Paula played with Emery, a bold shrewd game.
Theodore Storm came in at ten and stood watching them. When the guests had left the three sat before the fire. “Something to drink?” Storm asked Dirk. Dirk refused but Storm mixed a stiff highball for himself, and then another. The whiskey brought no flush to his large white impassive face. He talked almost not at all. Dirk, naturally silent, was loquacious by comparison. But while there was nothing heavy, unvital about Dirk’s silence this man’s was oppressive, irritating. His paunch, his large white hands, his great white face gave the effect of bleached bloodless bulk. “I don’t see how she stands him,” Dirk thought. Husband and wife seemed to be on terms of polite friendliness. Storm excused himself and took himself off with a word about being tired, and seeing them in the morning.
After he had gone: “He likes you,” said Paula.
“Important,” said Dirk, “if true.”
“But it is important. He can help you a lot.”
“Help me how? I don’t want——”
“But I do. I want you to be successful. I want you to be. You can be. You've got it written all over you. In the way you stand, and talk, and don’t talk. In the way you look at people. In something in the way you carry yourself. It’s what they call force, I suppose. Anyway, you’ve got it.”
“Has your husband got it?”
“Theodore! No! That is——”
​“There you are. Ive got the force, but he’s got the money.”
“You can have both.” She was leaning forward. Her eyes were bright, enormous. Her hands—those thin dark hot hands—were twisted in her lap. He looked at her quietly. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t look at me that way, Dirk.” She huddled back in her chair, limp. She looked a little haggard and older, somehow. “My marriage is a mess, of course. You can see that.”
“You knew it would be, didn’t you?”
“No. Yes. Oh, I don’t know. Anyway, what's the difference, now? I’m not trying to be what they call an Influence in your life. I’m just fond of you—you know that—and I want you to be great and successful. It’s maternal, I suppose.”
“I should think two babies would satisfy that urge.”
“Oh, I can’t get excited about two pink healthy lumps of babies. I love them and all that, but all they need is to have a bottle stuffed into their mouths at proper intervals and to be bathed, and dressed and aired and slept. It’s a mechanical routine and about as exciting as a treadmill. I can’t go round being maternal and beating my breast over two nice firm lumps of flesh.”
“Just what do you want me to do, Paula?”
She was eager again, vitally concerned in him. “It’s all so ridiculous. All these men whose incomes are thirty—forty—sixty—a hundred thousand a year usually haven’t any qualities, really, that the five-thousand​a-year man hasn’t. The doctor who sent Theodore a bill for four thousand dollars when each of my babies was born didn’t do a thing that a country doctor with a Ford wouldn’t do. But he knew he could get it and he asked it. Somebody has to get the fifty-thousand-dollar salaries—some advertising man, or bond salesman or—why, look at Phil Emery! He probably couldn’t sell a yard of pink ribbon to a schoolgirl if he had to. Look at Theodore! He just sits and blinks and says nothing. But when the time comes he doubles up his fat white fist and mumbles, ‘Ten million,’ or ‘Fifteen million,’ and that settles it.”
Dirk laughed to hide his own little mounting sensation of excitement. “It isn’t quite as simple as that, I imagine. There’s more to it than meets the eye.”
“There isn’t! I tell you I know the whole crowd of them. I've been brought up with this moneyed pack all my life, haven’t I? Pork packers and wheat grabbers and pedlers of gas and electric light and dry goods. Grandfather’s the only one of the crowd that I respect. He has stayed the same. They can’t fool him. He knows he just happened to go into wholesale beef and pork when wholesale beef and pork was a new game in Chicago. Now look at him!”
“Still, you will admit there’s something in knowing when,” he argued.
Paula stood up. “If you don’t know I'll tell you. Now is when. I’ve got Grandfather and Dad and Theodore to work with. You can go on being an architect if you want to. It’s a fine enough ​profession. But unless you’re a genius where'll it get you? Go in with them, and Dirk, in five years——”
“What!” They were both standing, facing each other, she tense, eager; he relaxed but stimulated.
“Try it and see what, will you? Will you, Dirk?”
“I don’t know, Paula. I should say my mother wouldn’t think much of it.”
“What does she know! Oh, I don’t mean that she isn’t a fine, wonderful person. She is. I love her. But success! She thinks success is another acre of asparagus or cabbage; or a new stove in the kitchen now that they’ve brought gas out as far as High Prairie.”
He had a feeling that she possessed him; that her hot eager hands held him though they stood apart and eyed each other almost hostilely.
As he undressed that night in his rose and satin room he thought, “Now what’s her game? What’s she up to? Be careful, Dirk, old boy.” On coming into the room he had gone immediately to the long mirror and had looked at himself carefully, searchingly, not knowing that Paula, in her room, had done the same. He ran a hand over his close-shaved chin, looked at the fit of his dinner coat. He wished he had had it made at Peter Peel’s, the English tailor on Michigan Boulevard. But Peel was so damned expensive. Perhaps next time. . .
As he lay in the soft bed with the satin coverlet over him he thought, “Now what’s her lit-tle game!”
He awoke at eight, enormously hungry. He ​wondered, uneasily, just how he was going to get his breakfast. She had said his breakfast would be brought him in his room. He stretched luxuriously, sprang up, turned on his bath water, bathed. When he emerged in dressing gown and slippers his breakfast tray had been brought him mysteriously and its contents lay appetizingly on a little portable table. There were flocks of small covered dishes and a charming individual coffee service. The morning papers, folded and virgin, lay next this. A little note from Paula: “Would you like to take a walk at about half-past nine? Stroll down to the stables. I want to show you my new horse.”
The distance from the house to the stables was actually quite a brisk little walk in itself. Paula, in riding clothes, was waiting for him. She looked boyish and young standing beside the sturdy bulk of Pat, the head stableman. She wore tan whipcord breeches, a coat of darker stuff, a little round felt hat whose brim curved away from her face.
She greeted him. “I’ve been out two hours. Had my ride.”
“I hate people who tell you, first thing in the morning, that they’ve been out two hours.”
“If that’s the kind of mood you’re in we won’t show him the horse, will we, Pat?”
Pat thought they would. Pat showed him the new saddle mare as a mother exhibits her latest offspring, tenderly, proudly. “Look at her back,” said Pat. “That’s the way you tell a horse, sir. By the length ​of this here line. Lookut it! There’s a picture for you, now!”
Paula looked up at Dirk. “You ride, don’t you?”
“I used to ride the old nags, bareback, on the farm.”
“You'll have to learn. We'll teach him, won’t we, Pat?”
Pat surveyed Dirk’s lean, flexible figure. “Easy.”
“Oh, say!” protested Dirk.
“Then I'll have some one to ride with me. Theodore never rides. He never takes any sort of exercise. Sits in that great fat car of his.”
They went into the coach house, a great airy white-washed place with glittering harness and spurs and bridles like jewels in glass cases. There were ribbons, too, red and yellow and blue in a rack on the wall; and trophy cups. The coach house gave Dirk a little hopeless feeling. He had never before seen anything like it. In the first place, there were no motors in it. He had forgotten that people rode in anything but motors. A horse on Chicago’s boulevards raised a laugh. The sight of a shining brougham with two sleek chestnuts driving down Michigan Avenue would have set that street to staring and sniggering as a Roman chariot drawn by zebras might have done. Yet here was such a brougham, glittering, spotless. Here was a smart cream surrey with a cream-coloured top hung with fringe. There were two-wheeled carts high and slim and chic. A victoria. Two pony carts. One would have thought, seeing this room, that the motor vehicle had never been invented. ​And towering over all, dwarfing the rest, out-glittering them, stood a tally-ho, a sheer piece of wanton insolence. It was in perfect order. Its cushions were immaculate. Its sides shone. Its steps glistened. Dirk, looking up at it, laughed outright. It seemed too splendid, too absurd. With a sudden boyish impulse he swung himself up the three steps that led to the box and perched himself on the fawn cushioned seat. He looked very handsome there. “A coach and four—isn’t that what they call it? Got any Roman juggernauts?”
“Do you want to drive it?” asked Paula. “This afternoon? Do you think you can? Four horses, you know.” She laughed up at him, her dark face upturned to his.
Dirk looked down at her. “No.” He climbed down. “I suppose that at about the time they drove this hereabouts my father was taking the farm plugs into the Haymarket.”
Something had annoyed him, she saw. Would he wait while she changed to walking things? Or perhaps he’d rather drive in the roadster. They walked up to the house together. He wished that she would not consult his wishes so anxiously. It made him sulky, impatient.
She put a hand on his arm. “Dirk, are you annoyed at me for what I said last night?”
“No.”
“What did you think when you went to your room last night? Tell me. What did yow think?”
​“I thought: “She’s bored with her husband and she’s trying to vamp me. I'll have to be careful.’”
Paula laughed delightedly. “That's nice and frank. . . What else?”
“I thought my coat didn’t fit very well and I wished I could afford to have Peel make my next one.”
“You can,” said Paula.