Chapter 15

Cass had become embarrassed over calling up her boarding-house and having Tracy or Wilma answer, “Who do you want? Who? Oh. Who wants her? Oh!” followed by a shadow of a giggle, and a half-heard: “It’s the Judge again. Can you beat it!” So in early July, to invite her to the Svithiod Summer Festival, at which he would be the guest-speaker and say a lot of enthusiastic things about Swedish–Americans, which might impress a girl with a fancy for high words, he wrote a note to her.

She answered, and for the first time he saw her writing.

Now to an expert, her script may have looked like that of any trained stenographer, correct and round, but to Cass this was a secret message from the captive princess in her tower. On the envelope, he was “The Hon. Cass Timberlane.” His name had never looked so stately. Could he really be that monumental object to HER? Or, sudden jagged thought, did she consider the title pompous?

Her T was bold, like a knight riding, and the o was precise yet sweet, not too unlike a kiss. (That sentimentality he strongly thrust from him, and shamefacedly took back again.) The square envelope and the letter-sheet were of good linen, with a small square “VM” which, his thumb told him, was printed. (Splendid! Engraving would have been extravagant for her.)

Of the letter itself, of her first letter to him, he still had not read a word. He was shy about it. He might know now whether she loved him or considered him a bumbler. Then, breathing deep, he plunged:

“Dear Cass.”

—That’s good. Not “Dear Judge.” She thinks of me as a friend, anyway. Of course “Darling Cass” would have been better.

“Darn it, I have a date for your evening with the Vikings—”

—Hard luck. Certainly is hard luck. She won’t hear me make my speech. I’d hoped she would. Still, her letter is cordial—oh, it’s more than cordial, it’s really affectionate. And some originality to the writing. Not stilted.

The letter continued:

“So I shall not be able to hear you. But I know you will be wonderful. Call me up soon. Sincerely yours, Jinny.”

—She really wants me to go on telephoning her! And she signs it “Jinny,” not “Virginia” or “Virginia Marshland.” She does like me!

During his first five readings of the masterpiece, he twice decided that she liked him, once that she loved him furiously, once that this was merely a routine answer with all the romantic flavor of payment of a gas-bill, and once that she was bored by him and intended, on his evening of oratory, to go off dancing with some treacherous swine like Eino Roskinen.

He did nothing so puerile as to keep the letter in whatever pocket was nearest to his heart; he merely thought about it. He contented himself with locking it up in the steel box that contained his will, his passport, a picture of his mother, a certificate for a hundred shares of the late Overture Silver Mining Company, and a photograph of his former wife, in a 1929 hat, which he did not remember owning.

—Hm. Funny-looking hat. I wonder if the present-day hats would look just as—Lord, I’d forgotten Blanche was so beautiful. But she looks so calculating and possessive, where Jinny is like a living brook. Poor Blanche. I’ll bet her new English inlaws snub her. Huh!

He had many walks with Jinny, on Sunday afternoons, and he discovered that he did not know the city of which he was supposed to be a leader. They found a lath-and-mud slum, with starved widows and children living like war-victims upon property belonging to his friend Henry Grannick, second richest man in town. On Jinny’s initiative, he went for the first time in two years into the museum at the Wargate Memorial, which was three and three-quarters minutes’ walking-time from his chambers, and they saw the Indian war-bonnets, the models of fur-trader’s canoes, and were swollen and proud with their own history.

They chattered all the while. The buffet-supper had given them more of a common background, and they talked of “Chris” and “Roy” as well as of “Tracy,” for they were true Midwesterners in referring to everybody up to the age of ninety-eight by his given name.

They were as garrulous as two old friends at the Poor House, and all through it he was unceasingly on the point of proposing to her, yet never quite daring to. In her bright young ruthlessness, she might dismiss him forever.

He was constantly stirred up by her iconoclastic though slightly second-hand political creeds. As a mild and benevolent Republican, who had to be a politician once every six years, however little he liked cigars and the histories of Coolidge and Harding, he collided with the fact that, early conditioned by her father’s sympathy with the Farmer–Labor Party, encouraged later by Eino’s internationalism, Jinny was Young Revolution at the inquiring age.

As they explored the city’s unrecognized slums, she wondered aloud about the competence of the Prutts and Grannicks to control a city, while she denounced the local “isolationists” and insisted that America must join in the war against Germany, which had just invaded Russia.

She was probably disappointed at the readiness with which Cass agreed with all her challenges; she was probably unable to understand that the Judge Timberlane who seemed to her so conservative was considered by his neighbors, by his colleague Judge Blackstaff, as a riskily radical young man.

He agreed that America is only at the beginning of democracy; that the super-salesman, with the stigmata of his early toughness or rusticity blandished away by barber and manicure girl, stands with the workman whose face is pitted with soot and grease only at the saloon, the polling-booth, and the grave.

If he was distinctly more leftwing than Jinny thought, he was distinctly less so than he thought. He innocently considered himself, even after election-day, democratically one with the farmer, the section-hand, the pants-presser, yet he had always been so occupied with members of the Federal Club and the dwellers on Ottawa Heights that he was as detached from his constituents as any country squire. A kind man, a just judge, an honest citizen who believed that there must be plenty of public schools and no graft in the water supply, he had not yet gone many years beyond the Good Old Massa dynasty. And golf at the country club is a sweet odor in the nostrils and a dependable anesthetic.

In the fresh air that Jinny always bore about her, he wanted to defy his own ancestral cautions. She did not know, possibly he did not know, how much he enjoyed cutting loose and being more of an outlaw than he was. Later he was to believe that he might really have become the rebel whom in these honied months he enjoyed impersonating, if Jinny had really been the bold economic Amazon she considered herself. It has always been the masculine version: “She did not tempt me enough, so I did not eat.”

Meantime, more innocent than ever, he made love not apropos of swords and roses, but of the poll tax, the school system, and German bombers.

In July she went home to Pioneer Falls for her two-weeks’ vacation, and he begged for an invitation to come up for three days. Her mother wrote to him, welcomingly.

He had always liked his assignments to hold court at Pioneer Falls, county-seat of Mattson County, because from the windows of the court room he could see the re-echoed heavens of Lake Bruin. Here there were none of the wild river valleys of the Grand Republic country. The falls of the Sorshay River were only three feet high, a sporting ground for minnows. A wedge of the old hardwood country had been thrust northward from the base of the state to Pioneer Falls, and the trees were not pine and poplar but oak and maple and ironwood and basswood. Most of them had been cleared away by the fine, high, destructive industry of the frontiersmen, and the country was now an upland wheat prairie, and Pioneer Falls a characteristic grain-belt village. The streets were flat but sheltered by spacious elms and maples that had been planted by the Yankee and German settlers.

The Marshland house was white and comfortable and simple, except for an upstairs balcony with a triangular window behind it, and Jinny’s father, Lester the druggist, was simple and comfortable, and Mrs. Marshland a darling. They wore baggy clothes and loved their friends and they thought that Judge Timberlane was a tremendous man and that their “little daughter” was a “mighty lucky girl to have him take an interest in her and her art career.” That he could ever marry her or be her lover seemingly did not occur to them.

He was embarrassed by their friendly desire to have him hold forth like a pedagogue upon her talents—and her unpunctuality, to have him give her measured advice about how to become a real big-city cartoonist or a dress designer. He was even more embarrassed by the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Marshland were only fifty-three or -four, somewhat nearer to his own age than was Jinny. He kept hinting that he belonged to her generation, not theirs, but Jinny bedeviled him by mocking, at family dinner (fried chicken and asparagus and peas from our own garden), “I wish you three would now straighten me out about the Polish question and the use of lipstick.”

“Don’t play with your food, Jinx,” said Mrs. Marshland fondly, at every meal.

Cass and Jinny picnicked on a bluff overlooking Lake Bruin, in an old pasture of short worn grass and scattered oaks. Their table was a slab of rock, splashed orange with lichens; their divan the springy moss. They were idle and relaxed and in love, and they did play with their food, with the hard-boiled eggs, the finger rolls, the lemon-meringue pie eaten with fingers which were vulgarly wiped on the flower-starred moss.

He looked like a woodsman, in laced boots and breeches and mackinaw shirt of black and red and yellow. She wore moccasin shoes, with slacks, but she made up for it by wearing a tight sweater.

Reclining on the moss, replete and exquisitely sleepy, he argued, “Put your head on my shoulder.”

She looked mute and sulky; then she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and lay still. His arm was about her and it may have been by accident that his hand touched the unbelievable smoothness of her naked waist under the sweater. He snatched his hand away, but his finger-tips kept the memory of that living satin, the tender warmth of her soft side. In some panic he knew that he was afraid of her and shocked by himself, but he protested, “Don’t be such a prude. Of course you love touching her. That’s what it’s all about.”

But any ideas he might have had about trying to betray her seemed wondrously absurd.

He slipped his hand again about her unbodiced waist, and she let it lie there warmly a moment before she detached it, gentle and unoffended. And that was all that happened of fleshly love-making. Yet now, with her head against his shoulder, they had been converted, united, sanctified.

“Darling!” he said only, and kissed her lightly, and her head settled back in contentment.

It was a poet, not a very skillful one, who began talking:

“Dear Jinny, do you know how lovely you are to me? I love your eyes and your hair—it’s very reckless today and it smells so newly washed—and I love your childish fingers—do you suppose that indelible-ink spot will ever come off?—and I love your riotous and pretty undependable humor and your curiosity, like Cleo’s about everything, and your honesty and your disinterest in money-making and your talisman, your crystal Isis—did you bring her back to Pioneer Falls?”

“Certainly. Wrapped in a lovely nightgown. She insisted on coming. She’s as fascinated by men and their line as I am.”

“You don’t think I’m merely following a ‘line’ in what I say, do you?”

“No! I think you’re dear and good, and I think you really like me.”

They said nothing about being engaged, but like children they made plans.

“Know what I’d like us to do, soon as the war between Great Britain and Germany is over?” he urged. “Sail for Norway and Sweden, which are the source of so much of the life around here, and then go through Finland and dip down into Central Europe and up to Moscow and then China and especially India. I’ve always been crazy to see India, since I read Kipling as a boy.”

“Wond’ful.”

“And then we’ll come back here and get settled down. We’ll live in Grand Republic in the summer and fall—most beautiful Indian Summers in the world—and have our winters in Beverly Hills and Havana and Rio de Janeiro.”

“So we’re just going to be hoboes and wasters, are we?”

“Sure—in our dreams. Look here, comrade, have we got to have social significance even in our DREAMS?”

“I think I’ll have to get a ruling on that. Meanwhile, what are we doing all this ON?”

“Can’t I just as well dream myself two million dollars and a year’s leave from the bench, while I’m about it?”

“You’re so heroic—in our dreams.”

“Plans okay then?”

“Approved. Cass, maybe we really COULD do some of those things, even without being rich.”

“Certainly.”

“But why is it that nobody ever does do any of the things that he’s free to do?”

In that counsel of doom he was suddenly frightened out of his spurious boyishness, and clutched her hand, as if to protect her.

They silently looked out from the shadowing oaks to the summer-enchanted lake. The farther shore was swampy and in the July light was a gold-streaked utter green, with blackbirds bending down the reeds. There was peace over all the land, and their fear melted, and suddenly she was telling him, as she never had, of her childhood in the white house in the prairie village:

“I was such a serious kid, always so busy. I had to keep track of everything. I had note-books and note-books; I put down the temperature of my dolls, every day, like a hospital chart, and all the bright things they said—I made ’em up, only sometimes I stole ’em from the other kids. And I collected birds’ eggs and made the most elaborate notes on just which tree I’d found them in-I drew plans of the trees, with lovely arrows pointing. I was sure that some day those notes would be terribly important to some ornithologist. I suppose I’m still the greatest living authority on snipe around Peterson’s Slew.

“And then as fast as I learned a hymn in Sunday School—I was a Congregationalist like you—I wrote it down on a card, with my notations about what words to come down hard on, like ‘BRINGing in the SHEAVES’ only, I thought it was SHEETS.

“I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so they let me have the attic all to myself, and up there I was the busiest man of affairs, rushing from one thing to another: arranging my world-collection of fans, two paper ones and one lace, and my gallery of movie stars, and polishing a brass handle to something—I found it by the road, and to this day I don’t know what it was for—and writing down the name of every new language that I heard of. I got up to sixty-seven, and I intended to learn them all, including Swahili and Liukiu.

“And then pets—our old cat, Percival, and a lot of other cats and dogs and rabbits and a pet squirrel and a very inappreciative garter snake. I used to have an animal drug store and try to cure all their ailments with sugar-water. I don’t think I was so successful.

“Maybe a lot of the things that I did were to educate the little blue bromo Seltzer bottle, the forerunner of my Isis, that I sneaked out and took everywhere so it could see what was going on. Oh, I must have been almost as silly at ten as I am now.

“And I took lessons on the mandolin. I could play ‘Down Mobile’ and the Russian national anthem on it. I was so busy and so secret. Nobody ever knew; Dad and Mother were swell about not prying. And sometimes I had the most money that ever was—an entire penny. I would go into Dad’s store and he would pretend he didn’t know me, and he would advise me, very earnestly, and you’d be surprised how many kinds of candy you could get then for a penny: maybe one red and two striped and a licorice lozenge. I’ll never have that much money again, never.”

“No, there never are any pennies like that after you are ten,” said Cass. “And now you’re as old as I am. I used to think of you as eons younger, but now I feel as though we were the same age, except that you aren’t so cautious.”

“And I think of you, Cass, as just my age, except that you have more sense.”

With an absorbed I-want-to-think expression, she wandered off, along the shore, and he watched her sleepily. She looked mature and thoughtful, till, throwing up her arms, she started violently hop-skipping, all by herself, singing what sounded like a jazz version of Celeste Aida, and then she seemed to be all of ten again, and he reached into his pocket for a penny to give her.