Chapter 21

Boyish and open-faced, blond and wavy-haired, a controlled drinker, a careful but quick-minded lawyer, Cass’s old friend Bradd Criley was a pleasant fellow as well as the most valued dinner-guest and bridge-partner in Grand Republic. He was a bachelor, and he never toyed with any woman over forty nor with any girl under eighteen— unless he was sure he would not be found out. He said to men, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been so busy” and to women, “You’re so beautiful tonight.” He said, possibly he believed, that Cass was the soundest judge on the Minnesota bench.

He came snowily in one evening when Cass was giving Jinny a lesson in chess; he insisted on reading till the game was finished; and afterward, as they talked, they three became a firm trio.

With his skillful teasing, he brought out from Jinny her opinions on immortality and Gregory Marl—neither quite favorable—and he made them laugh with his stories of the great, somber, dumb Wargate Family, which his firm, Beehouse, Criley, and Anderson represented. Jinny popped corn for them, pretty and flushed as she knelt by the fireplace, and brought cider from the kitchen, and faintly sang a cradle song. Bradd, when he left them together, shook hands with Cass and said in his frank, fresh voice, “Your Honor, I submit that you two are the nicest family in Radisson County.”

Next day, at the Club, he continued: “Cass, when are you going to marry this girl? Let me tell you: if you don’t, I will!”

“I’m crazy to. But she’s turned me down flat.”

“Nonsense. Keep asking her. I can see she’s crazy about you and comfortable with you. Naturally—she’s still a kid—she wants to show some independence.”

“You don’t think she’s too young for me?”

“No! Got a wise head on her lovely shoulders. Ask her, boy. You’ll get a reversal of the previous verdict. But if you don’t get busy—I’ll give you three months, and if you haven’t got her pledged then, I’m in the ring. I would be now, but I haven’t a chance. She thinks you’re a solid investment and I’m a flash gold-stock. Wonder how she guessed!”

Bradd’s encouragement roused him.

Winter night at Bergheim, a northwest wind driving spears of snow from Dakota and Saskatchewan, and in the library, Cass and Jinny toasting and serene.

He laid down his Life of Lord Birkenhead and spoke plain:

“That’s the sixth cigarette you’ve smoked this evening, Jin.”

“Oh yas?”

“How many do you smoke a day?’

“I dunno. Twenty, maybe.”

“How long have you smoked?”

“Since I was seven.”

“M?”

“Cornsilk. In the Marshland barn.”

“Well, I’ll try not to nag. I’m not much of a reformer. I admire revolutionists more than I do reformers. The greatest reformer living is Mr. Hitler, who is trying to reform all Europe. But still—Jinny, you have such fresh lips.”

“That’s Higgins’s Sans Merci lipstick.”

“Nonsense. I’ve kissed you when your lips were damp and bare after we’d been swimming. Such sensitive lips and such a clear throat and sound lungs—I hate to see ’em messed up, hate to see you spoil ’em just for an unconvincing pose of being worldly.”

“Maybe I will cut ’em now—maybe.”

“Come sit on my lap.”

She did not, as once, roost there awkwardly, but lay gently against him, one hand holding his lapel, while he urged:

“Now this is a trial. You are judge and I’m the defendant AND his attorney. Now Your Honor, I represent the man Timberlane, a lout and slow-witted, but fervently in love with you.”

“With the judge? Why, Cass!”

“Now play fair.”

“Okay, Counselor. Is this the accused that I see? Does he have to stand so close? Let me look at him. No. He doesn’t look so slow, and I’m not too certain about his fervor. After all my experience on the bench, I’d say he was just in love with the picture of himself as a lover.”

“No, the fellow is not a romantic. He really thinks about what his young woman wants.”

“His what?”

“All right, all right, monkey! His inamorata. His sweet lamb. His perambulatory dream. His virgin immaculate. His princess of the dark tower, and stormy as sunset were her lips, a stormy sunset on doomed ships, and she gathers all things mortal with pale immortal hands and she does not walk in the fields with gloves. His tragic fate, tortuous as the River Vye. His—Oh, Jinny, I’m afraid I have to be serious. You know that I love you utterly.”

Her arms gently circled his neck, but after a selfless quiet she sat up on his knee, a hand on each of his shoulders, mocking and combative again.

“I still say I’m not sure you know what you want, Cass.”

“I want to see you at breakfast, fresh in gingham.”

“Nobody wears gingham any more, and at breakfast, before coffee, I really AM a stormy sunset on doomed ships. Ships run for Port Arthur when they see me dooming at breakfast. So that’s out. What else?”

“I want to be able to come home from court and tell you how swell I was; how my rulings stood ’em in the aisle.”

Children of their earthy land and revolutionary time, flippant and colloquial and compelled to nervous banter, they were yet in a noble tradition of lovers, and there was more of tragic prince than of smug clown in his airy demand; and it was Ruth amid most alien corn who answered:

“I think you got something there.”

Then he was grave. “And I want children.” Blanche had been afraid of bearing children and she had always “put it off a while yet— till the right time.” Cass demanded, almost mournfully, “Do you want babies, Jin?”

“Yes. I love them.”

“I’m glad. And I want to travel with you.”

“I see. But not to kiss me.”

He answered that.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure,” she explained.

“But I haven’t asked what the things are you want, and whether I can give any of ’em to you, Jinny.”

She was silent, then: “I’m afraid you’ll learn I’m one of these changelings that can only give things to herself. I’m fond of you and grateful to you for liking me, but I have to travel by myself, for a while anyway. Maybe some day I can come back to you. . . . The cat that walks by herself, and she does get lonely in the night woods, but she has to see every shadow for herself and not be told by anyone what it’s the shadow of—tree or bear or hunter or maybe a ghost—shadow of a ghost. I have to look for myself.”

His “Darling!” was a sound of helplessness.

Then, so suddenly that it was almost pain, not joy to him, she said, “But that doesn’t mean that I may not marry you, before long, and go away now and then and come back to you when the woods get too scary.”

Arm around his neck again, she kissed him voluntarily, and on that there walked into the room Mr. John William Prutt, Mrs. Henrietta (Mrs. J. W.) Prutt, and their sound filial investments Mr. Jack Prutt and Miss Margaret Prutt, with ten thousand ancestral shades of correct and banking Prutts in superb gray Pruttery behind them.

“Oh!” said Mr. Prutt.

“Your maid didn’t explain—” said Mrs. Prutt.

Mr. Jack Prutt whistled.

Cass had felt Jinny’s body stiffen as she prepared to leap from his lap, but when the Prutts had spoken, she relaxed and stayed where she was, indolent and insolent, throbbing with laughter.

The Prutts bumped rigidly out. Cass put Jinny gently on her feet— fairly gently—and rushed after them to the hall, coughing, “We’re engaged, you know. . . You know. . . Engaged.”

Mrs. Prutt said reverently, “But alone? In your house? At night? Unchaperoned? Strange, Judge.”

“Very strange, I should think,” said Mr. Prutt, and they were gone.

Mrs. Higbee was wailing, “They walked by me like I was dirt, while I was trying to say, ‘The master’s in there kissing his girl.’ Just walked by me!”

“Nev’ mind,” hastened Cass, and galloped into the library, where Jinny stood fist-clenched and angry.

“I knew it all the time! I should never have come to your house! I’ll never be alone with you again. Oh, I don’t blame you, especially, Cass, but I never shall again!”

“But if you’re going to marry me—”

“I’ll never marry you! Don’t ever speak of it again!” She was in a panic, reasonless but overwhelming. Not for the first time had Pruttery been too powerful for a child of light.

“Sit on my lap again for a moment and quiet down and then I’ll drive you home.”

“No! No! I don’t want you to. I’ll take a bus.”

He had to use all the arts of the legal chambers to quiet her, to say “Now stop it!” as though he knew professional mysteries that she could never understand, before he coaxed her into his car. All the way to Miss Hatter’s he was awaiting the verdict of death to love. On the boarding-house step she said, “I guess this is good-bye forever. I don’t think I shall see you again.”

“Jinny!”

“Really.”

“I won’t take that. To say good-bye to you is to say good-bye to life.”

She was clear and a bit sardonic: “You’re the great legal star. You’ll get along all right. You always have.”

“If the legal star has to go on shining by John William Prutt’s permission, then I’ll chuck starring and everything else except being with you.”

“You mean you’d give up being a judge for me, if you ever had to?”

“I certainly do.”

“I wouldn’t want you to. Good night.”

She was gone.

He knew that hers was not merely the perverse rudeness of a lover. He had an excellent chance of losing her. Blanche had been right; he should never have let himself be baked into a pie of Pruttery and Roy Drover’s intolerance and the generous avidity of Chris and the Avondenes. The springtime days of companionship with Jinny were past, and he was afraid that she would never again come to bring April light into his dark old house.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

GILLIAN BROWN—VIOLET CRENWAY

Gillian Brown was a business woman, a career woman, but she was human, and she had decided that for such a premature phenomenon as herself, there were but five matrimonial choices: to marry a man who was her superior and who would either cheat her or leave her flat, to marry an inferior whom she would pet and despise, to marry an equal, which would happen only by a miracle comparable to Jonah and his also undependable marine companion, to lie unwed and rigid, or to have company. She had tried all five. The last seemed the most reasonable now, in the 1940’s, when she was assistant manager of Harley Bozard’s shop for women’s clothes, on Chippewa Avenue, Grand Republic.

With her men, some half-dozen of them, she was good-natured, tolerant of drunks up to a point, but scientific about finding out when that point had been reached. She made coffee for them, and she lent them an electric razor of the very best brand.

Gillian Brown, Mrs. St. George Brown, had been christened Mabel Chiddy, in White River Junction, Vermont, in 1898. She was the composite portrait of half the American Career Women. She wore smart suits with lace-trimmed blouses, her hair looked young, and so did her face, as far down as her mouth. She broadcast a weekly fashion report on Station KICH, and her voice was liquid chocolate, lazy and lenient, except when a salesgirl had talked back to her, or after she had had five drinks. Then it was liquid brass.

She was ambitious, and her ambition was to make enough money to buy a horsy country place near Chicago, next-door to a gentleman farmer who would look like an English colonel and would fall in love with her, permanently, not just on option. Then she would become “normal and domestic.”

The store was open on Saturdays, except in August, and on Saturday evenings she got drunk, but only introductorily, with The Girls, business women of her own fate. On Sunday mornings she lay and sighed that she would never have her country estate or her Colonel. On Sunday afternoons she got drunk in mixed company, and preferred to sing “Dixie.” On Sunday night she brought a male—almost any male, and chosen as often out of pity for his being starved as out of her own simple passions—home to her orderly flat, which was touchingly feminine in its china figurines of cats and lambs and Columbines.

In her bathroom were forty-three kinds of cosmetics. Many of them, she knew from selling them, were useless, but she liked the bottles. But she was always careful to get them wholesale.

She was shrewd, and preferred to be honest, and with equal reverence she read Catholic, Christian Science, and Unitarian magazines, 1890 novels about the indignantly virtuous daughters of widows, and treatises on playing the stock-market.

She admitted to having been married and divorced twice, and boasted of having lived in New York for three years and Paris for three weeks. Actually, she had gone through the valley of matrimonial humiliation three times, but the first had been to and from an aging Vermont farmer, when she was Mabel Chiddy and only seventeen.

Her latest attempt to escape had been St. George Brown, a Brooklyn dress-salesman, whom she was still supporting. She had helped to support all three of her husbands, and though they had varied from small and tidy to lank and furrowed, they belonged to the same pattern: they were all weak and fond of cards and liquor and they all held their heads sidewise.

She despised two things in women: taking alimony, which she regarded as a form of looting the conquered city, and the pretense that you are going to satisfy a man without intending to go through with it.

Therefore, though she associated with them, drank and snickered with them, she detested two women in Grand Republic: Sabine Grossenwahn, divorced niece of Boone Havock, whose Louisiana-plantation-style bungalow was known as “Alimony Hall,” and Violet Crenway, Mrs. Thomas Crenway.

Violet was as luscious and perfumed as her name, fetching of eye and uncommonly white of skin. She was renowned for raising funds for noble institutions: St. Anselm’s Church, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Republican Women’s League. She went into men’s private offices, wearing white gloves and a gardenia, looking around intently and panting a little, and the men sent their stenographers away and pushed a chair out for Violet and stood beside it. She came out with the gloves, the gardenia, the funds, and her virtue all intact, leaving the men surprised and blasphemous.

She said that she did adore men, the dear funny things, but wasn’t it amazing, their masculine vanity and the way they thought that every Girl who smiled at them expected to be kissed! She boasted that she could come nearer to being kissed without any casualties than any woman since Delilah—though in the comparison she did not mention Delilah but Joan of Arc.

Gillian Brown said that she was interested in being with Violet Crenway because she was the most evil woman in town, and said that among the men whom Violet teased was Mr. Thomas Crenway, and Mr. Crenway did not like it.

Gillian had reason to know how Tom felt about such things