So Big

by Edna Ferber

  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 anaemic 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 much 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. I’ve 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 peddlers 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 ho
stilely.

  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 little 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 you 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.

  16

  As it turned out, Dirk was spared the necessity of worrying about the fit of his next dinner coat for the following year and a half. His coat, during that period, was a neat olive drab as was that of some millions of young men of his age, or thereabouts. He wore it very well, and with the calm assurance of one who knows that his shoulders are broad, his waist slim, his stomach flat, his flanks lean, and his legs straight. Most of that time he spent at Fort Sheridan, first as an officer in training, then as an officer training others to be officers. He was excellent at this job. Influence put him there and kept him there even after he began to chafe at the restraint. Fort Sheridan is a few miles outside Chicago, north. No smart North Shore dinner was considered complete without at least a major, a colonel, two captains, and a sprinkling of first lieutenants. Their boots shone so delightfully while dancing.

  In the last six months of it (though he did not, of course, know that it was to be the last six months) Dirk tried desperately to get to France. He was suddenly sick of the neat job at home; of the dinners; of the smug routine; of the olive-drab motor car that whisked him wherever he wanted to go (he had a captaincy); of making them “snap into it”; of Paula; of his mother, even. Two months before the war’s close he succeeded in getting over; but Paris was his headquarters.

  Between Dirk and his mother the first rift had appeared.

  “If I were a man,” Selina said, “I’d make up my mind straight about this war and then I’d do one of two things. I’d go into it the way Jan Snip goes at forking the manure pile—a dirty job that’s got to be cleaned up; or I’d refuse to do it altogether if I didn’t believe in it as a job for me. I’d fight, or I’d be a conscientious objector. There’s nothing in between for any one who isn’t old or crippled, or sick.”

  Paula was aghast when she heard this. So was Julie whose wailings had been loud when Eugene had gone into the air service. He was in France now, thoroughly happy. “Do you mean,” demanded Paula, “that you actually want Dirk to go over there and be wounded or killed!”

  “No. If Dirk were killed my life would stop. I’d go on living, I suppose, but my life would have stopped.”

  They were all doing some share in the work to be done.

  Selina had thought about her own place in this war welter. She had wanted to do canteen work in France but had decided against this as being selfish. “The thing for me to do,” she said, “is to go on raising vegetables and hogs as fast as I can.” She supplied countless households with free food while their men were gone. She herself worked like a man, taking the place of the able-bodied helper who had been employed on her farm.

  Paula was lovely in her Red Cross uniform. She persuaded Dirk to go into the Liberty Bond selling drive and he was unexpectedly effective in his quiet, serious way; most convincing and undeniably thrilling to look at in uniform. Paula’s little air of possession had grown until now it enveloped
him. She wasn’t playing now; was deeply and terribly in love with him.

  When, in 1918, Dirk took off his uniform he went into the bond department of the Great Lakes Trust Company in which Theodore Storm had a large interest. He said that the war had disillusioned him. It was a word you often heard uttered as a reason or an excuse for abandoning the normal. “Disillusioned.”

  “What did you think war was going to do?” said Selina. “Purify! It never has yet.”

  It was understood, by Selina at least, that Dirk’s abandoning of his profession was a temporary thing. Quick as she usually was to arrive at conclusions, she did not realize until too late that this son of hers had definitely deserted building for bonds; that the only structures he would rear were her own castles in Spain. His first two months as a bond salesman netted him more than a year’s salary at his old post at Hollis & Sprague’s. When he told this to Selina, in triumph, she said, “Yes, but there isn’t much fun in it, is there? This selling things on paper? Now architecture, that must be thrilling. Next to writing a play and seeing it acted by real people—seeing it actually come alive before your eyes architecture must be the next most fun. Putting a building down on paper—little marks here, straight lines there, figures, calculations, blueprints, measurements—and then, suddenly one day, the actual building itself. Steel and stone and brick, with engines throbbing inside it like a heart, and people flowing in and out. Part of a city. A piece of actual beauty conceived by you! Oh, Dirk!” To see her face then must have given him a pang, it was so alive, so eager.

  He found excuses for himself. “Selling bonds that make that building possible isn’t so dull, either.”

  But she waved that aside almost contemptuously. “What nonsense, Dirk. It’s like selling seats at the box office of a theatre for the play inside.”

  Dirk had made many new friends in the last year and a half. More than that, he had acquired a new manner; an air of quiet authority, of assurance. The profession of architecture was put definitely behind him. There had been no building in all the months of the war; probably would be none in years. Materials were prohibitive, labour exorbitant. He did not say to Selina that he had put the other work from him. But after six months in his new position he knew that he would never go back.