So Big

by Edna Ferber

  “How can you work with all this crowd around?”

  “Oh,” said Dallas in that deep restful leisurely voice of hers, “there are always between twenty and thirty”—she slapped a quick scarlet line on the board, rubbed it out at once—“thousand people in and out of here every hour, just about. I like it. Friends around me while I’m slaving.”

  “Gosh!” he thought, “she’s——I don’t know—she’s——”

  “Shall we go?” said Paula.

  He had forgotten all about her. “Yes. Yes, I’m ready if you are.”

  Outside, “Do you think you’re going to like the picture?” Paula asked. They stepped into her car.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Can’t tell much about it at this stage, I suppose.”

  “Back to your office?”

  “Sure.”

  “Attractive, isn’t she?”

  “Think so?”

  So he was going to be on his guard, was he! Paula threw in the clutch viciously, jerked the lever into second speed. “Her neck was dirty.”

  “Crayon dust,” said Dirk.

  “Not necessarily,” replied Paula.

  Dirk turned sideways to look at her. It was as though he saw her for the first time. She looked brittle, hard, artificial—small, somehow. Not in physique but in personality.

  The picture was finished and delivered within ten days. In that time Dirk went twice to the studio in Ontario Street. Dallas did not seem to mind. Neither did she appear particularly interested. She was working hard both times. Once she looked as he had seen her on her first visit. The second time she had on a fresh crisp smock of faded yellow that was glorious with her hair; and high-heeled beige kid slippers, very smart. She was like a little girl who had just been freshly scrubbed and dressed in a clean pinafore, Dirk thought.

  He thought a good deal about Dallas O’Mara. He found himself talking about her in what he assumed to be a careless offhand manner. He liked to talk about her. He told his mother of her. He could let himself go with Selina and he must have taken advantage of this for she looked at him intently and said: “I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met a girl like that.”

  “I’ll ask her if she’ll let me bring you up to the studio some time when you’re in town.”

  It was practically impossible to get a minute with her alone. That irritated him. People were always drifting in and out of the studio—queer, important, startling people; little, dejected, shabby people. An impecunious girl art student, red-haired and wistful, that Dallas was taking in until the girl got some money from home; a pearl-hung grand-opera singer who was condescending to the Chicago Opera for a fortnight. He did not know that Dallas played until he came upon her late one afternoon sitting at the piano in the twilight with Bert Colson, the blackface comedian. Colson sang those terrible songs about April showers bringing violets, and about mah Ma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-my but they didn’t seem terrible when he sang them. There was about this lean, hollow-chested, sombre-eyed comedian a poignant pathos, a gorgeous sense of rhythm—a something unnameable that bound you to him, made you love him. In the theatre he came out to the edge of the runway and took the audience in his arms. He talked like a bootblack and sang like an angel. Dallas at the piano, he leaning over it, were doing “blues.” The two were rapt, ecstatic. I got the blues—I said the blues—I got the this or that—the somethingorother—blue—hoo-hoos. They scarcely noticed Dirk. Dallas had nodded when he came in, and had gone on playing. Colson sang the cheaply sentimental ballad as though it were the folksong of a tragic race. His arms were extended, his face rapt. As Dallas played the tears stood in her eyes. When they had finished, “Isn’t it a terrible song?” she said. “I’m crazy about it. Bert’s going to try it out to-night.”

  “Who—uh—wrote it?” asked Dirk politely.

  Dallas began to play again. ‘H’m? Oh, I did.” They were off once more. They paid no more attention to Dirk. Yet there was nothing rude about their indifference. They simply were more interested in what they were doing. He left telling himself he wouldn’t go there again. Hanging around a studio. But next day he was back.

  “Look here, Miss O’Mara,” he had got her alone for a second. “Look here, will you come out to dinner with me some time? And the theatre?”

  “Love to.”

  “When?” He was actually trembling.

  “To-night.” He had an important engagement. He cast it out of his life.

  “To-night! That’s grand. Where do you want to dine? The Casino?” The smartest club in Chicago; a little pink stucco Italian box of a place on the Lake Shore Drive. He was rather proud of being in a position to take her there as his guest.

  “Oh, no, I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by people who’re pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they’re there because they are all interested in golf, or because they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires—everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend’s house, of course.” A rarely long speech for her.

  “Perhaps,” eagerly, “you’ll dine at my little apartment some time. Just four or six of us, or even——”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Would you like the Drake to-night?”

  “It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let’s go to the Blackstone. I’ll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.”

  They went to the Blackstone. The head waiter knew him. “Good evening, Mr. DeJong.” Dirk was secretly gratified. Then, with a shock, he realized that the head waiter was grinning at Dallas and Dallas was grinning at the head waiter. “Hello, André,” said Dallas.

  “Good evening, Miss O’Mara.” The text of his greeting was correct and befitting the head waiter of the French room at the Blackstone. But his voice was lyric and his eyes glowed. His manner of seating her at a table was an enthronement.

  At the look in Dirk’s eyes, “I met him in the army,” Dallas explained, “when I was in France. He’s a grand lad.”

  “Were you in—what did you do in France?”

  “Oh, odd jobs.”

  Her dinner gown was very smart, but the pink ribbon strap of an under-garment showed untidily at one side. Her silk brassiere, probably. Paula would have—but then, a thing like that was impossible in Paula’s perfection of toilette. He loved the way the gown cut sharply away at the shoulder to show her firm white arms. It was dull gold, the colour of her hair. This was one Dallas. There were a dozen—a hundred. Yet she was always the same. You never knew whether you were going to meet the gamin of the rumpled smock and the smudged face or the beauty of the little fur jacket. Sometimes Dirk thought she looked like a Swede hired girl with those high cheek bones of hers and her deep-set eyes and her large capable hands. Sometimes he thought she looked like the splendid goddesses you saw in paintings—the kind with high pointed breasts and gracious gentle pose—holding out a horn of plenty. There was about her something genuine and earthy and elemental. He noticed that her nails were short and not well cared for—not glittering and pointed and cruelly sharp and horridly vermilion, like Paula’s. That pleased him, too, somehow.

  “Some oysters?” he suggested. “They’re perfectly safe here. Or fruit coctail? Then breast of guinea hen under glass and an artichoke——”

  She looked a little worried. “If you—suppose you take that. Me, I’d like a steak and some potatoes au gratin and a salad with Russian——”

  “That’s fine!” He was delighted. He doubled that order and they consumed it with devastating thoroughness. She ate rolls. She ate butter. She made no remarks about the food except to s
ay, once, that it was good and that she had forgotten to eat lunch because she had been so busy working. All this Dirk found most restful and refreshing. Usually, when you dined in a restaurant with a woman she said, “Oh, I’d love to eat one of those crisp little rolls!”

  You said, “Why not?”

  Invariably the answer to this was, “I daren’t! Goodness! A half pound at least. I haven’t eaten a roll with butter in a year.”

  Again you said, “Why not?”

  “Afraid I’ll get fat.”

  Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You’re just right.”

  He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure, lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it. She was looking a little haggard, too.

  “The theatre’s next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don’t have to leave here until after eight.”

  “That’s nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.

  “You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.”

  “Why did you give it up, then?”

  “Nothing in it.”

  “How do you mean—nothing in it?”

  “No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung on——”

  “And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.”

  He was a little nettled. “I wasn’t a banker—at first. I was a bond salesman.”

  Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula’s brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I’d rather,” Dallas said, slowly, “plan one back door of a building that’s going to help make this town beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.”

  He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn’t go dubbing along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I wanted——”

  “Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and go into bonds?”

  “Well—she—I don’t know that she exactly——” He was too decent—still too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that.”

  “You said you were going to let me meet her.”

  “Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you’d even—would you drive out to the farm with me some day? She’d like that so much.”

  “So would I.”

  He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn’t stand not knowing any longer.

  “I think you’re a nice young man.”

  That was terrible. “But I don’t want you to think I’m a nice young man. I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven’t I got that you think I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that I’m really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject.

  “Well, if you’re asking for it. I do demand of the people I see often that they possess at least a splash of splendour in their makeup. Some people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like Sam Huebch. But some people are all just a nice even pink without a single patch of royal purple.”

  “And that’s me, h’m?”

  He was horribly disappointed, hurt, wretched. But a little angry, too. His pride. Why, he was Dirk DeJong, the most successful of Chicago’s younger men; the most promising; the most popular. After all, what did she do but paint commercial pictures for fifteen hundred dollars apiece?”

  “What happens to the men who fall in love with you? What do they do?”

  Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “They usually tell me about it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then they seem to feel better and we become great friends.”

  “But don’t you ever fall in love with them?” Pretty damned sure of herself. “Don’t you ever fall in love with them?”

  “I almost always do,” said Dallas.

  He plunged. “I could give you a lot of things you haven’t got, purple or no purple.”

  “I’m going to France in April. Paris.”

  “What d’you mean! Paris. What for?”

  “Study. I want to do portraits. Oils.”

  He was terrified. “Can’t you do them here?”

  “Oh, no. Not what I need. I have been studying here. I’ve been taking life-work three nights a week at the Art Institute, just to keep my hand in.”

  “So that’s where you are, evenings.” He was strangely relieved. “Let me go with you some time, will you?” Anything. Anything.

  She took him with her one evening, steering him successfully past the stern Irishman who guarded the entrance to the basement classrooms; to her locker, got into her smock, grabbed her brushes. She rushed down the hall. “Don’t talk,” she cautioned him. “It bothers them. I wonder what they’d think of my shop.” She turned into a small, cruelly bright, breathlessly hot little room, its walls whitewashed. Every inch of the floor space was covered with easels. Before them stood men and women, brushes in hand, intent. Dallas went directly to her place, fell to work at once. Dirk blinked in the strong light. He glanced at the dais toward which they were all gazing from time to time as they worked. On it lay a nude woman.

  To himself Dirk said in a sort of panic: “Why, say, she hasn’t got any clothes on! My gosh! this is fierce. She hasn’t got anything on!” He tried, meanwhile, to look easy, careless, critical. Strangely enough, he succeeded, after the first shock, not only in looking at ease, but feeling so. The class was doing the whole figure in oils.

  The model was a moron with a skin like velvet and rose petals. She fell into poses that flowed like cream. Her hair was waved in wooden undulations and her nose was pure vulgarity and her earrings were drugstore pearls in triple strands but her back was probably finer than Helen’s and her breasts twin snowdrifts peaked with coral. In twenty minutes Dirk found himself impersonally interested in tone, shadows, colours, line. He listened to the low-voice instructor and squinted carefully to ascertain whether that shadow on the model’s stomach really should be painted blue or brown. Even he could see that Dallas’s canvas was almost insultingly superior to that of the men and women about her. Beneath the flesh on her canvas there were muscles and beneath those muscles blood and bone. You felt she had a surgeon’s knowledge of anatomy. That, Dirk decided, was what made her commercial pictures so attractive. The drawing she had done for the Great Lakes Trust Company’s bond department had been conventional enough in theme. The treatment, the technique, had made it arresting. He thought that if she ever did portraits in oils they would be vital and compelling portraits. But oh, he wished she didn’t want to do portraits in oils. He wished——

  It was after eleven when they emerged from the Art Institute doorway and stood a moment together at the top of the broad steps surveying the world that lay before them. Dallas said nothing. Suddenly the beauty of the night rushed up and overwhelmed Dirk. Gorgeousness and tawdriness; colour and gloom. At the right the white tower of the Wrigley building rose wraithlike against a background of purple sky. Just this side of it a swarm of impish electric lights grinned their message in scarlet and white. In white:

  TR
ADE AT

  then blackness, while you waited against your will. In red:

  THE FAIR

  Blackness again. Then, in a burst of both colours, in bigger letters, and in a blaze that hurled itself at your eyeballs momentarily shutting out tower, sky, and street:

  SAVE MONEY

  Straight ahead the hut of the Adams Street L station in midair was a Venetian bridge with the black canal of asphalt flowing sluggishly beneath. The reflection of cafeteria and cigar-shop windows on either side were slender shafts of light along the canal. An enchanting sight. Dirk thought suddenly that Dallas was a good deal like that—like Chicago. A mixture of grandeur and cheapness; of tawdriness and magnificence; of splendour and ugliness.

  “Nice,” said Dallas. A long breath. She was a part of all this.

  “Yes.” He felt an outsider. “Want a sandwich? Are you hungry?”

  “I’m starved.”

  They had sandwiches and coffee at an all-night one-arm lunch room because Dallas said her face was too dirty for a restaurant and she didn’t want to bother to wash it. She was more than ordinarily companionable that night; a little tired; less buoyant and independent than usual. This gave her a little air of helplessness—of fatigue—that aroused all his tenderness. Her smile gave him a warm rush of pure happiness—until he saw her smile in exactly the same way at the pimply young man who lorded it over the shining nickel coffee container, as she told him that his coffee was grand.