“And why was that?” went on Mr. Vorst.
“Oh … I don’t know. I thought it’d be interesting work and a fellow’d get around.” Bob looked at his father lazily, still eating. His grey eyes gave no secrets away, but his mother, eating toast and sipping her own orange juice at the other end of the table, looked at him and thought: He was down in the Polak quarter in Morgan the other day again, I wonder if he saw something down there that made him want to be a doctor? I don’t like him going down there. I’m scared he’ll catch something in that dirty place.
“Well, it certainly is interesting work but it’s hard work, too,” she remarked. “Look at Doc Roberts. He’s only as old as Dad but he looks seventy, and he never gets a chance to go out anywhere or see his folks or eat a meal in comfort, he’s everlastingly hopping up to answer a call. He’ll kill himself one of these days.”
“But he must like it or he wouldn’t have stuck it for thirty years, right here on Main,” said Bob.
“Ah, but you won’t do that, Bob. You’ll get ahead, get out into the world, go places, be a great surgeon, perhaps,” teased his father.
“Make a fortune,” said his mother, smiling at him.
“Swell chance anybody’s got of making a fortune nowadays,” said Lou, who had grown into a fresh little girl of thirteen with a cool manner and a mind of her own.
Everybody groaned, and Irene began to chant: “Prosperity-is-just-around-the-corner … around-the-corner …” until the others joined in and there was uproar.
An Englishman looking at the delightful faces of these three American children, would have at once noticed their openness. They looked blown clean, as though pure winds were always sweeping over their eyes, clear as water, and their high cheekbones dropping Indian-straight to their generous mouths. They looked younger than English boys and girls of the same age, young as the Archtype of Youth, and their very clothes had a flying, casual appearance that suggested swift movement over great spaces of country.
Impossible to picture a tightly-buttoned-up young American!
The life they led had given them this look. None of them had ever felt the soft, mournful, mysterious hands of the ancient Past reaching out from buildings five hundred years old; rising from fields where the plough turns up a green Roman coin in the purple earth, subduing the mind with wonder. When they thought of forests, these rolled in their fancy from the dark pines of Vermont to the giant redwoods of California two thousand miles away; and when they thought of the sea they saw the mighty waves of Cape Race and the indolent ripples lapping the smallest bayou of Florida; and because they could drive along splendid roads for a thousand miles before they reached the coast, and because they lived in a county the size of Yorkshire that was only part of a state the size of half England, they had never known what it was to feel crowded.
Also, for two generations these young people and their cousins the Viners had enjoyed such a good time that young English people of moderate fortune can hardly imagine just how good it was. There were always plenty of them to do things together in a gay familiar crowd, because both Viners and Vorsts had a tradition of large families and lived up to it; and the three newspapers had earned money steadily for the Vorsts for three generations, just as their two hardware stores had earned it for the Viners, and if neither family was rich judged by American standards, by both English and American standards they were comfortable, which is better. There was always something going on; a dance, a picnic, somebody’s birthday, a wedding, a christening, a shower for the latest bride, movie-parties and drives out to the country club to dance on Saturday evenings; and the two families, as the aristocracy of the little town, lived in one another’s pockets and enjoyed together every pleasure that their social position could give.
Some trace of this happiness and liberty had passed into their young faces, giving them the look which in England is found only in the faces of children in country families who have grown up with horses and dogs. But in these American faces there was also a faint exciting look of the Indian. It was so faint that sometimes it was not there, and it was never more than a hint, a shadow, but behind it waved the woods of Virginia and the tomahawk glittered. It was stronger in Bob’s face than in Irene’s or Lou’s, because his cheekbones were the highest of the three.
“Come on, Lou. Pay up.” Irene handed her the moneybox into which everybody who mentioned the Depression had to put a dime. At the end of the week the box was emptied and the money given to charity.
“I’ll pay up, but I think it’s crazy,” said Lou, paying up. Her pocket money had just been raised to half a dollar a week and every cent was precious. “What good can a few dimes do among all those millions of people out of work and broke?”
“Every little helps and I like you children to think of others sometimes. Besides, it’s only a joke, just a little fun,” soothed Mrs. Vorst.
“Will you be just an ordinary doctor, Bob, like Doc Martin, or will you be a specialist?” asked Lou, changing the subject.
Lou did not like most jokes. This was not because she had no humour, but because her own ironical taste in jokes made her think the other kind silly. She very seldom teased her brothers and sister and did not laugh when they did, but she had chuckling fits over dry and rather malicious anecdotes about local unworthies relayed to her by Myron (who still told her “everything” as he used to when she was nine) and with one or two favoured girls at her school. And sometimes, when she could get Bob to herself, away from those great boys with their everlasting ball game, he and she had jokes together, her kind of joke, which Bob understood perfectly when he bothered to. Lou loved Bob. She thought him crazy, the way he believed everybody was swell and a great guy (she and Myron knew better!) but that only made her love him the more. And he was so strong, and kind, and always giving her dimes when she was broke, and not shutting her up when she began to tell him about things that interested her. Bob was the loveliest person in the world.
“I guess I’ll just be an ordinary doctor,” he answered her, going a little red as the attention of the breakfast table turned on him. “Like Doc Martin.”
“What … and stay down on Main for thirty years dosing kids for the bellyache and all the old cats for rheumatics? Ambitious, aren’t you?” drawled Irene.
“Oh, he won’t be like that after he’s qualified,” said his father confidently. “He’ll be ambitious enough then. That won’t be for another seven years, and by that time the country’ll be clear of the Depression and forging ahead again … it can’t last (all right, Sharlie, here’s your dime) … and there’ll be plenty of opportunities again for young men … if he still wants to be a doctor. Last month he wanted to be an ace flyer, I seem to remember.”
Bob grinned but said nothing. He carefully poured syrup on a waffle.
“Well, it’s the least crazy thing any of you have wanted to be up to now, and I’m glad one of you is sensible,” said Mrs. Vorst. “I think it’s a fine life work, and your Uncle Lewis’ll be pleased, too. You might go down South later on and room with them while you’re qualifying … for a while, anyway.” Her brother Lewis was a doctor in Louisiana.
“Well, there’s plenty of time to talk about it later, when he’s graduated.” Mr. Vorst got up from the table. “Ready, son?”
Bob drank up a great bowl of coffee, wiped his mouth, waved to his mother, pulled Lou’s forelock and dashed after his father, who would drop him at the High on his way to the offices of The Sentinel. Irene and Lou walked down the hill a little later under the lilacs looking over rail-fences, past the pleasant houses set back from the wide road, and calling for their cousin Helen, who also attended the High, on their way.
When they had all gone, Mrs. Vorst picked up the paper (not The Sentinel: The Sentinel did not have such good Women’s Features as the syndicated paper) and went over to a comfortable chair by the window, but although she sat down and turned at once to the article on Summer Luncheons she did not begin to read. Instead she stared out of the window and
thought about Boone.
Jeanette’s family had moved to Chicago six months ago, and Boone, with his father’s help, had got a job on a Chicago paper as a reporter so that he could be near her. He was drinking hard, and in debt, and not making good at his job. She would not marry him and she would not let him go. She had been engaged to him once and broken the engagement to engage herself to his best friend, and had broken that as well. Boone ran around with her hard-boiled, hard-drinking, hard-playing set, wretched as a dog in disgrace with its master, spoiling his own life and boring her and amusing her friends, while his mother and father were grieved and angered to the depth of their hearts. Sometimes, when he had hidden his torturing jealousy and let an evening pass without asking her to marry him, Jeanette told him that he was sweet.
“I wish she’d die, I do. She’s just bad,” thought Sharlie Vorst, swishing the sheets of the newspaper together and getting up with a desperate movement. All the others are lovely, and doing so well (dear Bob, with his funny old notion of being a doctor! But I’m glad about that, I really am). Irene so pretty and all set to marry in a year or two, and Lou so clever with her dress-designing … we’d all be so happy, I’m sure, if it weren’t for that old Depression and Boone.
She folded the paper and went to see the hired girl about lunch.
There had been a vague plan that in the evening Helen and Bob should play tennis with Irene and her latest young man, so about six o’clock Helen, in white and carrying her racquet, strolled up the drive of the Vorst home, wondering why no one seemed to be about. When she found all the big cool lower rooms empty, she went round the drive to the lawn back of the house, sat down under the big elm where she had listened so prettily to old Miss Cordell’s chatter at the Vorsts’ homecoming party nearly four years ago, and stared dreamily round the garden while she waited for someone to turn up. She was just sixteen; only last week her parents had given a big party for her birthday.
How many thousands of times it has been written or recalled with a smiling sigh: Yes … she was the prettiest girl in the village … in the town … for miles around … we were all in love with her! It must be one of the oldest sentences in the world, and is so full of poetry that it is not possible to imagine a world in which those words could not strike an answering note from the human heart. One day, long years ahead, they would be said of Helen Viner, but they would be followed by a thought which does not often follow the sigh given to the memory of a Beauty: she was a darling. Already in the hearts of her friends at school, of her own people, and of everyone who knew her in Vine Falls, her legend was growing, and she was loved as only those are loved who are good as well as beautiful.
At sixteen she could have lived the life that most sub-debs (and many older women) dream of, for college boys lay about in heaps at her feet and she never had to buy her own candy or movie tickets or flowers; she did not know what it was to get through a dance without at least six cut-ins, and could choose her escort for every free evening weeks ahead. It was this kind of popularity that had spoiled Jeanette Waldron and was fast spoiling Irene Vorst. Because they had had to make themselves just a bit cuter than Nature had meant them to be, they felt so relieved when the popularity came that they rushed at it and got drunk on it. All the women’s supplements told girls to Play Up to Your Type when once you had found out what your type was, and the Irenes and Jeanettes feverishly played up, but Helen never troubled to be anybody but herself, and in spite of this, was adored.
This made other sub-debs who did not know her feel bitter, at first. Well, I throw in my hand. Hell, what’s the use? was the sub-deb’s first thought on meeting Helen. And strangely enough, when after a little while they realized that Helen was not a sly, deep beau-and-date poacher but a serious and artistic student of the Drama who was far more interested in that than in grabbing every man in sight, the other sub-debs were not comforted. To have all that beauty and to use it was human; to have it and not use it was divine, and therefore maddening. If she had not been such a lovely person they would have hated her.
She lived nearly as full a life at sixteen as some Englishwomen do at forty, for she enjoyed the exercising of her own gifts as much as she enjoyed dancing and parties. She designed some of her own clothes and made them expertly, she painted a little and wrote (the Prologue to the Vine Falls Pageant held last summer was by Helen) and sometimes had poems about Nature in The Sentinel, The Inquirer and The Citizen, and once even in a literary quarterly published in Virginia.
It was hoped by her father and mother, her uncle and aunt Vorst and all her other relations, that she would marry her cousin Bob. They had grown up almost next door to one another, and had enjoyed berry-parties, coasting parties, picnics and dances and skating together since they could walk. Nothing could be more suitable in a few years than their marriage.
Vorsts and Viners had been marrying one another for the past sixty years. It was a tradition. Naturally, as the Viner girls grew up, they began to look with distaste upon their Vorst boy cousins, swearing to themselves and to a few chosen friends that nothing, nothing in earth or heaven could persuade them to even think for one instant of marrying that dumb, crazy, creature, while the boys did not think about it at all. But that with dancing together in the moonlight in summer, and going skating together in winter, and riding in the glorious fall woods, and going on camping parties together in the spring … somehow the Vorst girl and the Viner boy would find that they had quite a crush on each other, sweetened by common memories, and before they knew where they were they had discovered that it would be delightful, as well as in the family tradition, to marry.
But Helen had not yet become aware that all her grown-up relations wanted her to marry Bob. She often thought seriously about marriage, but only to vow to herself that she did not want to marry for years and years, probably not until she was twenty-seven. She wanted her life to go on as it was now (but with an increasing knowledge of the Drama) for as long a time as her imagination could dream of. She was happy.
She lay back in the long chair staring dreamily at the leaves above her head … shade on shade of fresh transparent green, with not the faintest wind to move them, but birds were restless up there, orioles and robins going to and fro with straw for nests, darting between the still leaves and showering fresh chirrups over the quiet evening air. It would be lovely to live up there among the clean branches and cool leaves and to look down on the white hyacinths from above. They would look like eighteenth-century wigs.
“Hullo there!”
She looked down, and saw Bob coming over the lawn pulling off his white sweater.
“Hullo! Where’s everybody?”
“Walked out on us. Irene thought she’d rather dance, so of course her pet parlour-pink said so would he, and they’ve gone over to Roselands.”
He leaned both arms on a garden chair, looking down at her.
“Want to play?”
“We may as well, don’t you think, now we’re all changed?”
“I’d like to. Gosh, Helen, can you imagine … Irene’s probably going to marry that wet stick.”
“He’s a Red, too, isn’t he?”
“He’s a Pink. Hasn’t got the guts to be a Red.”
They were strolling across to the tennis court.
“Does she really like him?” She pulled off her white wool coat and bent to tighten her shoe-strings, looking up at him interestedly. He was winding up the net and frowning over it.
“I guess so. She’s funny that way. He gives me a pain. Gosh, Helen, this net’s awful. Myron ought to see to it.”
“Haven’t you played much this season?”
“Nope. Been too busy. So have you, I guess. I don’t seem to have seen you in weeks. How’s everything?”
“Oh, all right. I went in to Morgan last night to see the Eva le Gallienne show.”
“That must have been a big thrill,” he said, grinning at her with a touch of irony like Lou’s. Helen had a crush on Eva le Gallienne.
“O
h, Bob, it was wonderful!”
“I’m sorry I missed it. Looky, will you take this side, ’cause the sun’s on the other and I’m better than you, so that’ll be a handicap for me.”
“You are not better than me,” she smiled, going over to the other side of the court. She suddenly felt so happy that little wings seemed fluttering and dancing all over her body, and she threw her racquet up in the air and caught it again.
“We’ll see. You take first ball.”
She did, and served a double fault. Bob had suddenly grown serious; he did not like fooling at tennis, and she forgot her happiness and gave all her attention to the game.
Nevertheless, he beat her 6—1, 6—2, and when they at last stopped playing, he was inclined to be patronizing as he helped her into the white coat.
“You did very well, Helen.”
“Thanks,” she retorted.
“No, honest, I mean it. You’ve got a good service but you need practice. I wish I weren’t so busy, I’d coach you.” They were strolling back to the house, which still seemed deserted. It was about half-past seven.
“That’s kind of you but I’m pretty busy, too.”
“All right, don’t get mad. I only meant that you are good, only you need lots of practice and, of course, I’d always beat you because I’m so much stronger than you.”
“Are you?” They were making for the kitchen, where the ice-box was.
“Of course I am. Couldn’t I always beat you in a fight when we were kids?”
“Only because I used to hate getting all mussed up and you always rolled me in the dirt.”
“Gosh, doesn’t it seem queer? I wouldn’t do it now.” And he gave a droll look at her fresh white dress and unruffled hair.
“You’d better not try,” she said without coquetry, just coolly putting him at grubby-boy’s arm’s length; and perched herself on the table.
“I could, though.” Bob was a little irritated, and came over to her holding out a brown bulging arm above a rolled white shirt. “That’s muscle. Feel.”
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