So Big
Page 22
From the start he was a success. Within one year he was so successful that you could hardly distinguish him from a hundred other successful young Chicago business and professional men whose clothes were made at Peel’s; who kept their collars miraculously clean in the soot-laden atmosphere of the Loop; whose shoes were bench-made; who lunched at the Noon Club on the roof of the First National Bank where Chicago’s millionaires ate corned-beef hash whenever that plebeian dish appeared on the bill of fare. He had had a little thrill out of his first meal at this club whose membership was made up of the “big men” of the city’s financial circle. Now he could even feel a little flicker of contempt for them. He had known old Aug Hempel, of course, for years, as well as Michael Arnold, and, later, Phillip Emery, Theodore Storm, and others. But he had expected these men to be different.
Paula had said, “Theodore, why don’t you take Dirk up to the Noon Club some day? There are a lot of big men he ought to meet.”
Dirk went in some trepidation. The great grilled elevator, as large as a room, whisked them up to the roof of the fortress of gold. The club lounge furnished his first disappointment. It looked like a Pullman smoker. The chairs were upholstered in black leather or red plush. The woodwork was shiny red imitation mahogany. The carpet was green. There were bright shining brass cuspidors in the hall near the cigar counter. The food was well cooked. Man’s food. Nine out of every ten of these men possessed millions. Whenever corned beef and cabbage appeared on the luncheon menu nine out of ten took it. These were not at all the American Big Business Man of the comic papers and of fiction—that yellow, nervous, dyspeptic creature who lunches off milk and pie. They were divided into two definite types. The older men of between fifty and sixty were great high-coloured fellows of full habit. Many of them had had a physician’s warning of high blood pressure, hardening arteries, overworked heart, rebellious kidneys. So now they waxed cautious, taking time over their substantial lunches, smoking and talking. Their faces were impassive, their eyes shrewd, hard. Their talk was colloquial and frequently illiterate. They often said “was” for “were.” “Was you going to see Baldwin about that South American stuff or is he going to ship it through without?” Most of them had known little of play in their youth and now they played ponderously and a little sadly and yet eagerly as does one to whom the gift of leisure had come too late. On Saturday afternoon you saw them in imported heather green golf stockings and Scotch tweed suits making for the links or the lake. They ruined their palates and livers with strong cigars, thinking cigarette smoking undignified and pipes common. “Have a cigar!” was their greeting, their password, their open sesame. “Have a cigar!” Only a few were so rich, so assured as to smoke cheap light panatellas. Old Aug Hempel was one of these. Dirk noticed that when he made one of his rare visits to the Noon Club his entrance was met with a little stir, a deference. He was nearing seventy-five now; was still straight, strong, zestful of life; a magnificent old buccaneer among the pettier crew. His had been the direct and brutal method—swish! swash! and his enemies walked the plank. The younger men eyed him with a certain amusement and respect.
These younger men whose ages ranged from twenty-eight to forty-five were disciples of the new system in business. They were graduates of universities. They had known luxury all their lives. They were the second or third generation. They used the word “psychology.” They practised restraint. They knew the power of suggestion. Where old Aug Hempel had flown the black flag they resorted to the periscope. Dirk learned that these men did not talk business during meal time except when they had met definitely for that purpose. They wasted a good deal of time, Dirk thought, and often, when they were supposed to be “in conference” or when their secretaries said primly that they were very busy and not to be disturbed until three, they were dozing off for a comfortable half hour in their private offices. They were the sons or grandsons of those bearded, rugged, and rather terrible old boys who, in 1835 or 1840, had come out of County Limerick or County Kilkenny or out of Scotland or the Rhineland to mold this new country in their strong hairy hands; those hands whose work had made possible the symphony orchestras, the yacht clubs, the golf clubs through which their descendants now found amusement and relaxation.
Dirk listened to the talk of the Noon Club.
“I made it in eighty-six. That isn’t so bad for the Tippecanoe course.”
“. . . boxes are going pretty well but the Metropolitan grabs up all the big ones and the house wants names. Garden dosen’t draw the way she used to, even in Chicago. It’s the popular subscription that counts.”
“. . . grabbed the Century out of New York at two-forty-five and got back here in time to try out my new horse in the park. She’s a little nervous for city riding but we’re opening the house at Lake Forest next week——”
“. . . pretty good show but they don’t send the original companies here, that’s the trouble . . .”
“. . . in London. It’s a neat shade of green, isn’t it? You can’t get ties like this over here, I don’t know why. Got a dozen last time I was over. Yeah, Plumbridge in Bond Street.”
Well, Dirk could talk like that easily enough. He listened quietly, nodded, smiled, agreed or disagreed. He looked about him carefully, appraisingly. Waist lines well kept in; carefully tailored clothes; shrewd wrinkles of experience radiating in fine sprays in the skin around the corners of their eyes. The president of an advertising firm lunching with a banker; a bond salesman talking to a rare book collector; a packer seated at a small table with Horatio Craft, the sculptor.
Two years and Dirk, too, had learned to “grab the Century” in order to save an hour or so of time between Chicago and New York. Peel said it was a pleasure to fit a coat to his broad, flat tapering back, and trousers to his strong sturdy legs. His colour, inherited from his red-cheeked Dutch ancestors brought up in the fresh sea-laden air of the Holland flats, was fine and clear. Sometimes Selina, in pure sensuous delight, passed her gnarled, work-worn hand over his shoulders and down his fine, strong, straight back. He had been abroad twice. He learned to call it “running over to Europe for a few days.” It had all come about in a scant two years, as is the theatrical way in which life speeds in America.
Selina was a little bewildered now at this new Dirk whose life was so full without her. Sometimes she did not see him for two weeks, or three. He sent her gifts which she smoothed and touched delightedly and put away; fine soft silken things, hand-made—which she could not wear. The habit of years was too strong upon her. Though she had always been a woman of dainty habits and fastidious tastes the grind of her early married life had left its indelible mark. Now, as she dressed, you might have seen that her petticoat was likely to be black sateen and her plain, durable corset cover neatly patched where it had worn under the arms. She employed none of the artifices of a youth-mad day. Sun and wind and rain and the cold and heat of the open prairie had wreaked their vengeance on her flouting of them. Her skin was tanned, weather-beaten; her hair rough and dry. Her eyes, in that frame, startled you by their unexpectedness, they were so calm, so serene, yet so alive. They were the beautiful eyes of a wise young girl in the face of a middle-aged woman. Life was still so fresh to her.
She had almost poignantly few personal belongings. Her bureau drawers were like a nun’s; her brush and comb, a scant stock of plain white underwear. On the bathroom shelf her toothbrush, some vaseline, a box of talcum powder. None of those aids to artifice with which the elderly woman deludes herself into thinking that she is hoodwinking the world. She wore well-made walking oxfords now, with sensible heels the kind known as Field’s special; plain shirtwaists and neat dark suits, or a blue cloth dress. A middle-aged woman approaching elderliness; a woman who walked and carried herself well; who looked at you with a glance that was direct but never hard. That was all. Yet there was about her something arresting, something compelling. You felt it.
“I don’t see how you do it!” Julie Arnold complained one day as Selina was paying her one of her rar
e visits in town. “Your eyes are as bright as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” They were up in Julie’s dressing room in the new house on the north side—the new house that was now the old house. Julie’s dressing table was a bewildering thing. Selina DeJong, in her neat black suit and her plain black hat, sat regarding it and Julie seated before it, with a grim and lively interest.
“It looks,” Selina said, “like Mandel’s toilette section, or a hospital operating room just before a major operation.” There were great glass jars that contained meal, white and gold. There were rows and rows of cream pots holding massage cream, vanishing cream, cleansing cream. There were little china bowls of scarlet and white and yellowish pastes. A perforated container spouted a wisp of cotton. You saw toilet waters, perfumes, atomizers, French soaps, unguents, tubes. It wasn’t a dressing table merely, but a laboratory.
“This!” exclaimed Julie. “You ought to see Paula’s. Compared to her toilette ceremony mine is just a splash at the kitchen sink.” She rubbed cold cream now around her eyes with her two forefingers, using a practised upward stroke.
“It looks fascinating,” Selina exclaimed. “Some day I’m going to try it. There are so many things I’m going to try some day. So many things I’ve never done that I’m going to do for the fun of it. Think of it, Julie! I’ve never had a manicure! Some day I’m going to have one. I’ll tell the girl to paint my nails a beautiful bright vermilion. And I’ll tip her twenty-five cents. They’re so pretty with their bobbed hair and their queer bright eyes. I s’pose you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you they make me feel young.”
Julie was massaging. Her eyes had an absent look. Suddenly: “Listen, Selina. Dirk and Paula are together too much. People are talking.”
“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.”
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.