Part 2

For physically, she got tired of it herself. Thank Heaven the rush which had been accumulating for weeks would be over this evening! It was an added misfortune that the old friend visiting in Elgin had 'phoned that Emily must come to see her this very afternoon, or miss her altogether. So here she and Martha, in the midst of the preparations, were slipping across counties together, as if distance was nothing. And truly to Martha Kenworthy it was nothing worth raising an eyelash excitedly about. They slipped silently by cornfields, with straight little lines of green checking away geometrically for level miles. They slipped by alfalfa-green fields, clover-green fields, oat-green fields, wheat-green fields, farmhouses, high loads of balancing hay, milk trucks. The sun was hot. The air was clear. The sky was blue. And on the horizon magnificently distant, beyond those subtle sloping fields, rose towering white and blooming higher, in puff upon puff and fold upon fold, huge white culminating clouds of dreams. Emily, lulled almost to unconsciousness, saw a black one rising ominously among them.

* * * * * * * * *

"Look at that!" she murmured, breaking a fragrant silence.

Martha looked.

"We should worry!" she replied. She was right, of course. Nothing less than an earthquake could spoil the climax of the women's triumph now.

The growth of their conception, the building of their dream into concrete foundations and that perfect dancing floor, was a thing that every woman who had had a hand in it was wondering over this week, and Emily had more reason than most of them to wonder. For she was by nature less a committee woman than any of them. She had to think out every step of her participation in it, to believe she was really part of it. She always forgot even her most important motives, and puzzled afterwards over all the reasons for her actions which at the time had seemed obvious. In her early married life she had been too poor and too busy to consider the women's club. Besides, it had been bullied then by the aunt whose house Emily had escaped from by marriage. And after the aunt died, and Emily moved again into the good house her grandfather and aunt had been rebuilding for some seventy years, she had not wanted to take her place in the circle which might, she suspected, be discussing the gossip about her husband's speculation with some money her aunt had intrusted to him. And she had had a baby then, soon after she had come back to the house, a poor little starving son who kept her and Bob bending over him night and day for nearly two years. And then Jim had come to them, bringing his tragic son. And her old girlish love for him had risen like a flood, like a flood that never burst its dam, but pushed and pounded there against it--till Jim died.

Life had collapsed then. Just collapsed. It had no content at all. She had come to realize that most of the years of her married life had been given their value by her love of her first lover, her husband's brother. From the day he took his departure from town until the next time he came to see his mother, she had lived in anticipation of the days when he would be about the house, "jollying" in his charming way, his frail and doting mother, and playing about with Martha, and every minute, under his discreet and brotherly words, loving her, the girl he had so incredibly missed marrying. There had been for her then that certainty, and besides that, some place in the depth of her mind a vague, foolish, romantic, unacknowledged hope of some time, some place, loving him altogether. She had to believe that that little hope had been the mainspring of her life. For, after his death, without it, she couldn't go on, she had thought desperately. Life had stopped.

And just then that woman, Mrs. Benton, who had lived in the next block for years, suddenly strode into Emily's consciousness, in the same way that a few years before she had landed with a running jump in the defenseless mind of the community. Mrs. Benton had had an only daughter who had been drowned. She had brooded over the fact for a while, and then risen and said she was going to have every child in that inland town taught to swim. As a memorial to that daughter she would make the town a swimming beach. She had bought a wooded stretch of the river bank. She had dammed the river. She had made a great dark bottomless swimming place for the strong lads, and little clear wading pools for the toddlers. She had made sunny diving places and shady diving places and steep gravel banks and grassy inclines, and dressing rooms of varieties. And all summer she stationed guards there and instructors, and got Johnnie Weismuller to come down to her yearly water festivals, to do his stunts and encourage the winners of all the water races. It was impossible to imagine a swimming beach more skillfully managed. The Rotarians had to acknowledge that the beach was the town's best booster. Who could deny that farmers came now to trade in that town, with their Fords and their Cadillacs packed full of eager bathing suits who had been kept in order the whole week by the promise of a swim on Saturday?

After that, she had gone on to improve the city and ruin the temper of the taxpayers. She had built and she had paved and she had investigated, she had reformed and she had tested laws, and she had hoisted taxes. Men said horrid things about Mrs. Benton. They said, "she was out to raise municipal hell," and that she was "just too damned efficient to live." And when a small boy, a mere little unconsidered Hicks child, quarreling with his playmate, cried, "You needn't think you can go Bentoning around my back yard," they took up the verb derisively and put it into all the male mouths of the county, where it lives to this day.

No sooner had the beach become a success beyond any expectation, than Mrs. Benton had addressed the women's club. "Our children," she said, "swim now from June to October _de luxe_; and from October to June they dance--how? Behind the Greek's candyshop, where those obscene pictures were found, in the old hall that has no ventilation, or the old opera house controlled by bootleggers. Why should the women not build a winter gathering-place for their children equal to the summer center?" The women had said, "We will." "I wish I could afford to do it all myself," she said. And the plan they made knocked the breath out of their menfolk. Why, demanded husbands, couldn't they listen to common sense and build an ordinary hall? They didn't want a cheap hall. Why couldn't they build it in the town park? It was too low there, and hot and crowded. Why must it be built on the hill across the river from the beach, to which no paved road led, and no bridge was convenient? They some way liked that hill. Why not pave a road and build a bridge and make a great new municipal parking place, which had to be done sooner or later? The city council refused to have any such white elephant forced upon them. White elephant, indeed, the women echoed, Mrs. Benton leading them. A mere kitten for the baby to play with.

If the council wouldn't accept it, very well. The women's club would build it to suit itself, would manage it, and endow it. And through four years of opposition and complications they had worked steadily on, straight to the dedication of the hall which now, full of the morning delphiniums, waited for its evening christening. And Emily was very tired.

For Mrs. Benton was clever enough to realize her own weaknesses, and in launching the dancing-center plan she had felt the need of some one to pour oil on the waters she troubled. And there was Emily Kenworthy, just at hand, who was, as Johnnie Benton said, a "natural born oil-can," an easy-going woman who got along with anyone, even that cranky old servant that bossed her around. So Mrs. Benton had pounced upon Emily. And Emily had submitted, with misgivings, welcoming any relief from the vacancy of life she had suffered since Jim's death. The strife of it all was nothing to Emily. She had never found stimulus in overcoming opposition. She had no respect for committees, no interest in rules of order. Blue prints made her yawn, and the very idea of signing her name to a contract oppressed her. From the first she had seen the project merely as a toy for Martha, a patch of sunlight in her daughter's background. It had been only her interest in Martha and all those children about her that had kept Emily working away these five years, while one woman after another had resigned in fury.

Emily had been so unhappy as a child that her mind enjoyed playing with the idea of a beautiful gathering-place all lighted and shining by a multitude of happy boys and girls. She had always liked the children who played about with Martha. And since that summer during the war, when Jim's son, that dear, befuddled, tragic Bronson, had carried the burden of his unnecessary sorrow all those weeks unsuspected beneath her very eyes, she had never passed a half-grown lad on the street without a second wondering look at him. How could a town be stupid, she often wondered, having in it a world esoteric, unexplored, unimagined for the most part by adults, very jungles of young terror hiding adolescent beds of precious ore. "How do you come to know all the children in town?" women asked Emily more than once. "They can't _all_ come to see Martha." But if you're interested, you do get to know them some way. They run errands, they deliver groceries, they come about selling tickets to high-school plays, they spray the apple trees in the spring, they borrow books--they just some way hang about. At least that was Emily's explanation.

The whole community she had come to think of as a nursery for Martha and her kind. Her grandfather, to be sure, had laid out the main street of the town, and Bob had adorned one corner of it recently with a huge yawning garage, but the real importance to Emily of those streets was the fact that Martha and her friends strolled along them towards their sundaes. Her grandfather had planted the trees about the house. But Emily had come to esteem them because they had afforded high swings for little girls. Emily had first seen Jim Kenworthy under the willow that leaned out over the river where her back yard meets the water. Bob had proposed to her in that very spot. But now that tree was precious because Martha's boat was generally anchored there. And when Bob talked of sawing off that lower limb, to build a new garage, she had risen in arms because Martha had as a child spent hours in that broad seat it made. She had never been allowed herself to climb trees, but Martha had spent whole mornings there, and soon, in not many years, well--who could tell, maybe Martha's own boys and girls would be hiding their treasures in those lovely soft hollow places within reach of young hands. She couldn't just say to Bob that she was saving that very low limb for her grandchildren, could she? And she never exactly said to Mrs. Benton that she was working for the community hall because she didn't want Martha to dance only out there in the country club aloof from the life of the town. Emily had been taught to consider the Western town a place scarcely worthy of her Eastern breeding. She wasn't going to have any such nonsense as that with Martha. She'd send her East to school, but she was to feel herself altogether Western. And it was high time she did, too, since she was the fourth generation to live in the West.

However, whatever the motives, whatever the difficulties, the work had been accomplished. Day by day, all the spring putting in whole mornings over the finishing of it, they had labored away, and they would be infinitely relieved when it was over to-morrow. Emily was weary with it all. The car rolled along, smoothly, as usual, when Martha took it over the bad roads, and, musing sleepily, she thought of all the women had done, and wondered pleasantly why this old friend she was going to see had decided so suddenly to return to her home that Emily must come to see her a few minutes that very afternoon. She was almost asleep when she heard Martha's voice, a rather stern tone of it:

"Mother!"

"Well?"

"I don't often criticize you, do I now?"

"Not very often. I suppose you're a rather tolerant daughter, as daughters go. What have I done now?" Emily yawned.

"I was just thinking about things. Both dad and Uncle Jim lived in this town when you were a girl, didn't they?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Why didn't you marry Uncle Jim, then?"

Emily sat up.

"Why, Martha Kenworthy! What put such an idea into your head?"

"_Dad_ puts it there, of course. It's been there for years, off and on. I didn't tell you what was in my head, when I was a kid."

"Oh, you didn't, didn't you?" The idea of her saying that!

"No, I didn't dare. I----"

"Martha!" Emily expostulated.

"Well, I didn't. I've often wondered about it. I told Maggie once I liked Uncle Jim most, and she said bad little girls who said things like that died in their sleep. It seems to me--of course I was just a little kid then--some way, I had sort of an affinity for Uncle Jim. Funny you never had. I wonder sometimes---- Do you suppose if he was living now I would still be so crazy about him?"

"Yes. Why not?"

"Oh, well, you know, mother, you do feel different about your forbears when you're grown up. Dad didn't used to seem--so--odious when I was a kid."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Martha," Emily answered, carelessly. She would not seem to take this seriously.

"I don't see why. Maybe Uncle Jim would have bored me just as much. Of course you always _taught_ me to love dad when I was little. I simply had to, you might say. You used to say he never had any time to play with me. But when you come to think of it, he had loads more time than ever Uncle Jim did. He was only here sometimes, when he came to see grandma. But some way, when I look back at it, it seems as if he played with me for years, almost."

"Well, of course he did play with you whenever he came. He said it was a rest for him. He was always tired. He enjoyed fooling about with you."

"I know it. Do you remember the day he rolled up his trousers and took me wading on his shoulder? There could have been hardly any water in the river then, before it was dammed, but I thought I would have drowned if I went near it. And he played he was sinking, and ran round and round splashing, and told me I had saved his life. I didn't know whether I really had or not. Gee! mother!" Martha chuckled reminiscently. "I'll bet I would just love him if he was living."

"I'm sure you would."

"I asked you, in the first place, why you didn't marry him instead of father. You would have if you'd consulted me about it, all right. I bet I wasn't more than eight when I began to think about that. He wouldn't have been always jawing me every time I came in sight."

Emily was wide awake now.

"Why, child, I don't know, exactly. He was older than I was--a little bit. What you remember of him--all his ways of playing with you--wouldn't necessarily make a girl prefer him. You don't ever think what sort of fathers these lads would make for children, do you? These boys that play about with you."

Martha looked at her mother in indignation.

"Well, I should say I _do_! I'm going to have a first-class father for _my_ children!" This was what Emily delighted in, Martha's frank way of discussing things unembarrassed with her. There was never a grown woman she could have said a thing like that to when she was a girl! "If anybody asks me to marry him," Martha continued---"I don't mean like Johnnie and these boys--I mean in earnest----"

"Do these boys ask you to marry them?"

"Oh, you know, mother. They'd ask anybody just to try it. Johnnie's got to practice on someone----

"But suppose someone should accept him--now--I mean----"

"Oh, well, the risk would be all her own," Martha said, serenely. "If anybody asked me seriously, I'd say to him: 'Let me hear you sing backwards. Let me see you go upstairs rabbit and come down alligator.' And if he couldn't play games nicely, like Uncle Jim, I'd say there's nothing doing."

Emily laughed at the absurdity of the child.

"I'm glad to hear it," she said railingly. And then she added: "You'll wait a long time before you come across one like him. There isn't one in a million."

Martha turned and looked at her mother with deliberate curiosity.

"I should have thought you would just love him, mother!"

"I did. We all did. He had such lovely ways."

"You'd never imagine dad belonged to the same family."

"Anybody could see they did. They're very much alike. Martha, you don't do your father justice. You wait till you get into trouble and you'll see whether he's a good friend or not."

"Yes. Well, maybe I won't get into trouble. There's no certainty. I know now very well what he'd do. He'd do anything he could for me because I'm your little pet."

"You're a ridiculous child, Martha."

"I know that. You say that whenever you don't want to acknowledge I've hit the nail on the head."

"I said plainly your dad is of another temperament."

"I'll say he is!"

"Isn't life too funny?" thought Emily. "Jim's boy has spoiled Bob for Martha, and Jim makes Bob seem uninteresting to Martha. Things go too much in circles in the family," she thought to herself. And Emily sat there, not listening closely to Martha's chatter. She was thinking about her startling question. _Could_ Martha really have wondered about that when she was eight? What was the use of imagining one saw into a child's mind! Had the child ever seen things on the face of her uncle or her mother that had made her wonder things she didn't yet dare to ask about? After all, Martha had been twelve when Jim died. An hour before Emily would have laughed at such an idea. And after all, suppose the child _did_ understand! If she did, she understood nothing dishonorable--nothing a girl nowadays might not meditate upon.

For girls nowadays--well, Bob the other night came into the dining room declaring violently he couldn't sit on the veranda with them. That Ellis girl had been saying--and Johnnie was there, and that beach guard he runs about with--she had said right in front of those men that she had to dramatize some part of the Bible next fall term, and she had chosen the fall of Jericho because of the harlot in it. And Martha had said, "Goodness! You can find a story with more than one harlot in it. Can't she, Johnnie?" And Johnnie had had the decency to say he didn't know. He hadn't been to Sunday school for a long time. Emily had been sure Martha had done it simply to shock Bob. She defended the girls. "I don't care what you say, Bob. It's a lot better than the way I was brought up. It's just a good thing that they talk so frankly with me about such things." And yet--once in a while--she had misgivings--not so much about Martha, of course--who was a good child--but about Eve, for instance, and other girls.

_Chapter Two_

"You go right over to the hall," Emily had said to Martha as they arrived home after five, "and I'll do your shoulder straps for you." She had gone upstairs, and presently hurried, in a comfortable mature way, to Martha's room. She opened the door, and almost blinked, for the uncompromising afternoon sun made even yet a startling welter of the purples and greens and creamy yellows before her. And then she said: "Oh! You here, Eve?" For in that whirl of gaudiness an auburn-haired, hawk-nosed, thin-faced girl sat in flesh-colored B.V.D.'s, on a black stool, with a dishpan half full of pitted cherries on the floor beside her, and in her lap a green bowl half full of moist seeds.

"I got tired of hanging around over there. I wasn't doing anything. They're just fooling around for somebody to come and make them get to work." It was no concession to Emily's sense of propriety that made her hitch a fallen shoulder strap into decorum. Eve could have pitted cherries in Martha's sitting room stark naked with serenity. She had gone into shrieks of laughter the other day when Emily had described the careful way in which she in her girlhood, in her own room, with no man in the house, had put her arms into her wrapper in her bed, and had the essential garment all ready to pull about her as soon as she had put her first foot on the floor.

Emily said to her now, "You needn't have done those cherries, Eve."

"Oh, well, I thought I'd better be doing something to make myself popular. Everybody else is working--or pretending to." Eve grinned ingratiatingly. "Somebody called up, too, just now. That friend of Martha's. That Wilton, I think his name is."

"Oh! Is HE here?"

"Yes. Came out for to-night. Don't you like him?"

"Yes. I like him. He's a nice boy. Clever, too."

"That's what Martha said." Eve seemed always incredulous about masculine brilliancy.

"Well, he's always got scholarships. He's earned his way, really, through college."

"Hum!" commented Eve. College honors were nothing to her.

"His father is the best barber in town, too," Emily continued.

Eve turned and looked at her quickly.

"The best what?"

"Barber. You know that shop all plate glass and shining enamel that makes all the rest of the street look dirty? That's his shop. That's where we go for shampoos."

Eve had been looking at Emily curiously, and the little grin had grown into a spreading smile.

"You're the limit, Mrs. Kenworthy!" she said, admiringly. Then she saw Emily's purpose in coming, and got up. She stretched up an arm, spread her dripping fingers gingerly apart, and brushed back her hair with the inside of her elbow. "I'll do those straps. I've almost finished. Wait a minute." And she started, apparently, towards the bathroom.

"Eve! Wait! I'll put your kimona on for you!"

"Oh! I'm sorry I forgot!"

"It's almost supper time. Bob may be home any time now."

And Emily wrapped about her shoulders a wisp of georgette. And when the girl took a step forward with all the sunlight shining through her, and Emily saw through the sheer thing long pink legs, she suddenly realized why Bob had said indignantly that he would as soon meet her naked in the hall as in that thing.

She laughed and said, "Eve, you really ought to have a thicker dressing gown!"

"I have got one," Eve assured her. "I had to get one. Dad wouldn't go on the Pullman with me till he saw I had one. I hate a lot of cotton flannels."

"Crêpe de Chine would do."

"I know it. But it's sort of dowdy--crêpe de Chine. Put Martha's on me. I'll bring my own Victorian down to-morrow."

Very quick to take a suggestion, properly made, Eve was. A gratifying girl to befriend, if a puzzling one. When Bob had grumbled that he didn't see any use sending a girl to college who didn't know enough to wear clothes, Emily had replied: