Chapter 25

That they should return to Grand Republic on an early January day when the sun came out after a snowstorm, that Mrs. Higbee should be at the door to greet the young chatelaine, that flowers should have come from Diantha Marl and Bradd Criley, and a shaker of already-mixed cocktails from Queenie Havock, that Jinny should coo, “Bergheim is an awfully stately old place, isn’t it!” was all so exactly the Judge’s idea of what was fitting that it bothered him. There was no responsible worrying to be done!

Cleo, now a proud young cat, came galloping hysterically downstairs when she heard their voices. Then she pretended that she didn’t even know them, but had just happened to be passing that way. In fact she stayed about for an hour, to make sure that they saw how she ignored them.

They were content, but they found the town in the war.

Even the citizens who six weeks before had said, “We’re going to mind our own business and not get into any war” were declaring, “We ought to have gone to Great Britain’s aid two years ago, but now we’re in, and we won’t quit till Hitler and Hirohito are wiped out.”

Eino Roskinen, Curtiss Havock, Jack Prutt, and Jamie Wargate, Webb’s second-oldest boy, were already in uniform as privates, and Tom Crenway, in escape from his anesthetically amorous Violet, was a major. Violet herself was the rival of Diantha Marl and Della Lent for leadership of women’s war activities: Red Cross, Civilian Defense, scrap-collection. Of the Brothers-inLaw, Inc., the spouses of the Zebra Sisters, Alfred Umbaugh was now a colonel in the department of supplies, and his Zeta was adequately managing his Button Bright Stores chain, while Harold W. Whittick, the advertising man, had taken over the patriotism of Grand Republic as once he had taken over its future.

All of these were anxious and faithful, but there was comedy in the case of that absentee warrior, Fred Nimbus of Station KICH.

On December 10, ult., young Mr. Nimbus had begun a biweekly series of radio stories about the adventures of the Marines, in which he was author, director, and star. They were so lively that even a few Marines liked them, and there was a general feeling abroad that Mr. Nimbus, in his studio, was the most daring warrior in the state and that upon hearing his voice, thousands of Japanese dashed up the palm trees.

All of this the Timberlanes learned as they were starting their career as a decorous and settled Young Couple.

Two days after their return, the cold wave struck; the thermometer was at ten, fifteen, twenty-two degrees below zero; all the separate lawns turned into one snowfield, as though the cold prairie had taken over the town; and snow-devils whirled across them. No matter how they wrapped in fur and wool, their foreheads could not be protected from the aching sting of the cold. But before Jinny could moan for the ease and freedom of the Florida warmth, Cass had her out on skis, flying down the Ottawa Hill, and they were triumphant and alive.

He expected Jinny to turn Bergheim into a magazine supplement, and he was financially armed for it. He had been living on his salary as judge and saving the three or four thousand dollars a year that came from the rents which he had inherited from his father.

“Go to it,” he said. “Kick out any of the old furniture that gets impertinent to you.”

“No. I’m not going to change hardly a thing.” She spoke with a new and matronly responsibility. “I’ll just refurnish my own room— which I love, by the way; it’s so light, with such a view over the valley. But the rest of the house, the old things belong to it.”

He admired and wondered.

“And then, too, all your friends will be expecting the child bride to raise Cain with the household gods, and it’s our duty to fool ’em.”

He wondered and adored.

“And why waste the money now? Some day soon we’ll get a lovely new modern house of our own, with no smell of Eisenherz furs and sauerkraut.”

He adored and fretted.

Her notion of a “lovely new house” would cost a great deal of money. But it did not occur to him to refuse.

She was as practical as laundry soap. Her newly decked room did have a flowery dressing-table with twenty-two small and rather redundant bottles and jars of cosmetics, urban and extremely expensive, but the walls betrayed the small-town girl in its sheaf of photographs and souvenirs: Jinny Marshland at six, with kitten; Cousin Joe Marshland, who was now an insurance agent in Gopher Prairie; Douglas Fairbanks as a movie bandit; Eino and Tracy in astounding straw hats; the program of the Pioneer Falls High School Commencement Exercises, May, 1934, silver print on scarlet paper, class motto “Per Aspera ad Astra,” salutatorian, Miss Virginia Marshland.

While her own retreat was being redecorated, she was generously invited to lodge with Cass, and when she crept into his room, her bare feet in woolly slippers like white rabbits, and slipped into his monumental bed, they clutched at each other with a stimulating feeling of danger and wickedness.

Lying with one leg impudently cocked in the air, her toes wriggling, she crooned, “I am Judge Timberlane’s little mistress.”

“Jinny!”

“And the proudest of his Circassian slaves. The concubines of the seven Kings of Blackstaff envy my breastplate of onyx and my Abyssinian lace slacks.”

“Why, Jinny!”

“Does it shock you when I say I’m your mistress?”

“Well, not—uh—not SHOCK me—”

“I see, Venerable. You mean it merely SHOCKS you!”

“Yes, it does!”

She giggled.

He was sorry when she grandly started to sleep in her own virtuous-looking narrow bed. Somehow he was afraid to go unbidden into her room, as she never was to enter his.

To her maidenly room he added one gift: a white fur rug. She used to sit with her folded bare feet deep in its fleecy warmth, and talk about immortality.

In the rooms other than her own, her practicality was evident. She had more floor-plugs put in, and replaced the old lamps, which resembled moth-eaten velvet mosques erected upon bronze crutches, with lamps of simple shafts and clear parchment shades. She dismissed teak thrones, and ponderous curtains that for generations had been the graveyards of flies and lightning-bugs. The house suddenly had more light and air and gaiety, and at night you did not fall over relics.

And she installed a popcorn shaker, an electric drink-mixer, an electric washing-machine, a set of dominoes. . . .

Her one Bohemian extravagance as an artist was a highly modernist design which she drew on the inside of the downstairs coat-closet door, in gold radiator-paint and two shades of red nail-polish. It showed two angels, one holding a banner lettered “C” and one with a “J,” joyfully flying together. It agitated the more sober citizenry, but to Cass it was a major work.

He had at last the chance to complete her instruction in chess.

It was an edifying and domestic sight: the large man in a doubtful brown-flannel dressing-gown and red slippers; the girl in quilted pink silk, with her small white woolly slippers; the board and the old ivory pieces which Cass’s father had bought in San Francisco; all before the fire in the library, where now a clearer light displayed the blue buckram set of “The World’s Most Distinguished Legal Orations, with Sketches of Leaders of the Bench and Bar, Profusely Illustrated.”

Jinny took to chess with zeal and lawlessness. She began with an eloquent prejudice against the rooks.

She was a true animist; she believed that all inanimate objects— gloves, flatirons, automobiles, stars, lilies, pork chops—had souls and that all animals had human intelligence; and furthermore she almost one-quarter believed in her own belief.

Brooding over the chessmen, she said that the rooks were smug-looking and flat-headed, with stubbly cropped hair, and she scolded them for loafing in the home rank all through the hottest of the game, and then sneaking out to kidnap some bishop who had been working hard and taking risks, and who looked so slim and neat and friendly.

She developed a surrealist criticism of the chess-rules. Why shouldn’t a king be able to castle under check?

“Because it’s the rule,” said Judge Timberlane.

“Why is it the rule?”

“Because it is!”

“Look, silly,” she explained. “The king, bless his poor scared heart—the way he has to skip around, with even these G.I. pawns threatening to bump him off all the time—and so when he’s in check, when he’s in danger and really NEEDS to castle, then you won’t let him! Why not?”

“Because it’s the—”

“Who ever made the rule?”

“Heavens, I don’t know. I suppose some old Persian.”

“Persians make rugs. They don’t make rules.”

“Well, this one did.”

“How do you know he was a Persian? How do you know he was old?”

“I don’t.” She was so spirited a debater, so much more belligerent an advocate than any Hervey Plint or Vincent Osprey, that by now he was half-serious.

“You don’t know? Then maybe there isn’t any such a rule! Maybe you just dreamed it.”

“Well, good Lord, all players keep it—”

“How do you know they do? Did you ever see Capablanca or Reuben Fine refuse to castle just because a king was being bullied by some mean bishop? (And I used to LIKE the bishops, silly girl that I was, but now I’m onto them.) Did you?”

“Of course I didn’t. I’ve never seen any master play.”

“There! Maybe there isn’t any such a rule. Maybe they only have it in Minnesota. We’re wonderful in Minnesota about wheat and iron and removing gall-stones, but what right have we got to dictate to the rest of the world about castling?”

“Dear idiot child, you’ll be asking next how I know you and I are really married, and who made up the marriage code.”

“I do ask it! How do you know we aren’t living in sin, according to the Mohammedans?”

“I—”

“Maybe I ought to walk right out of here, and go to living with Abby Tubbs or Jay Laverick or Senator Hudbury, or my sweet Bertie. What’s to prevent it?”

“Only me and a shotgun.”

“You see? You only believe in violence; you don’t believe in the rules of marriage—or of my not castling, either!”

“Just the same, you can’t castle.”

“Bully!”

“Get on with the game, and don’t be so reasonable. A girl that would criticize the corpus of chess-laws would criticize chastity.”

“I’m not sure that’s so hot, either.”

“Get on with the game!”

But the real debate—and he was never quite sure that there was not some reality at the core of her pretended rebellions against Authority—came when he first revealed to her, from among the more appalling secret human motives, that by creeping up to the eighth rank, his pawn had suddenly become a queen, and that she was thus about to be checkmated.

“That’s the most ridiculous claim I ever heard in my life! Why? Now don’t tell me it’s the rule. It can’t be. I know that pawn. It’s got a tiny nick in its head.” (This was true, though Cass had never noticed it.) “It’s an unusually stupid, uncooperative pawn. It NEVER could be a queen. Impossible! I won’t recognize the government!”

“Don’t you like rules, Jinny?”

“Well, I like you.”

“Let me be didactic, Jin.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say ‘Okay’!”

“Why not?”

“It sounds like a gum-chewer.”

“But I am a gum-chewer.”

“You are not, and you’re not going to be. Look. I don’t bully you about many things—I’d like to, but I’m too scared of you. But I want each of us to teach the other something of his attitude: me teach you that there’s satisfaction in being a sober grind and mastering even a game, like chess; and you teach me that there’s nothing legally wrong about letting go and just having a good time. Can’t we?”

They gravely shook hands on it, seeing before them the white highway of pious self-instruction whereon every day in every way they would get not only better but more blithe; assured that he would become a first-class grasshopper and she one of the most social-minded ants in the whole three-foot mountain.

She said, with a slight shade of reverence, “When you lecture me, you sound like a real judge on the bench.”

“Does it annoy you?”

“I love it. You know, pal, I’m not too sure I’m going to win this battle of marriage. I get around you by being the gay ‘ittle girl— the blasted little gold-digger!—but you’re too accurate and dependable for me.”

“And sometimes I’m fun, ain’t I?”

“Ye-es, sometimes—oh, quite often.”

“But you won’t lose the battle, Jin. The worthy blacksmith hasn’t much chance against Ariel.”

“You’re balled up in your mythology, Judge. Ariel was not a girl.”

“Which you distinctly are, my dear.”

There was something in the smile with which she acknowledged this alluring fact which made him blush. Then, like a cat, her head low and a little sidewise, she cautiously stalked a pawn with her queen’s bishop, and pounced.

Cass wondered where he had heard the theory that people, especially women, who are too devoted to animals are more callous toward human beings. Was it a folk tale or reasoned observation or spite, or all three? Remembering it, he was slightly worried, in a husbandly way, that Jinny was so ecstatic over all animals, from the mounted policemen’s horses and the elephant in Wargate Park Zoo to the lone goldfish in a bowl which she sheepishly brought home from the Five and Ten.

To Cleo she gave an attention which gratified that bland and conceited cat. She maintained that Cleo had to have the best liver, the sweetbread meant by Mrs. Higbee for the Master, and a menagerie of catnip mice. For Cleo she busily knitted a set of mittens, red mittens edged with yellow, each the size of a large thimble, for walks in the snow. When they were tried out, Cleo merely kicked off three of them, but the fourth she pounced on with a yell and chewed to pieces, while Jinny looked forlorn.

The gift of a gold string from some ancient Christmas package was Jinny’s greatest success. This was Cleo’s private string, daily rescued from the wood-box or a pan of batter or a toilet, and coiled beside her pink wicker basket, near the kitchen stove. She leaped into the air to clutch it, and furiously got snarled in it, and in it was suspended from the back of a chair. She spent hours hiding under curtains, wagging herself, trying to catch the string napping.

Jinny also acquired, within three months, a tragic-eyed cocker-spaniel pup named Alfred, who was terrified of Cleo, a canary which every night Cleo tried to eat, a depraved and miserable lizard, and two lambs made of wool and pretty inactive.

Jinny loved them all and tried to get them to love one another, with about the usual success of missionaries ever since Jonah.

Cass wished, sometimes, that in addition to the gay affection which Jinny gave him, he could have the yearning she poured on Cleo and on that faker and love-beggar, the dog Alfred.

Except when they differed over Jinny’s purloining the Master’s coming dinner for Cleo, Mrs. Higbee was Jinny’s ally in spoiling every mangy feline and hound in the neighborhood, and Cass always had a suspicion that somewhere in the labyrinthian basement of Bergheim the two women were concealing lost and very valuable pigeons, panthers, and hippopotami.

From his bedroom he heard them conspiring again, in Jinny’s cave.

“Miss Jinny, now you got that new traveling clock, why don’t you let me have this red celluloid one for the kitchen? Kitchen clock don’t keep time.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Mrs. Higbee, I simply couldn’t! I’ve had my little red clock for four years. It came from Pioneer Falls with me, and it waked me every single morning when I was on the job at the factory. Its feelings would be dreadfully hurt if I exiled it to the kitchen.”

“Maybe something to that. We’ll get the Judge to buy us a new one.”

He came out of hiding to examine the two witches: “I’ll bet both of you believe in palmistry and astrology.”

“Doesn’t every nice woman?” challenged Jinny.

Mrs. Higbee reflected, “I don’t believe in any of those things. but it’s awful funny what you find in a person’s hand.”

The witches, primitive and powerful, looked at each other darkly, with contempt for the shallowness of this childish inquistor with his books and his pride in reasoning.

In early spring, Alfred the dog died suddenly of cat-fur, only a few weeks after his appearance in history. Cass expected hysteria from Jinny, and plans for a torchlight funeral, but she said absently. “He was such a nice pup; sorry he went. But, darling, let’s not have another dog for a while. I’m not sure—she’s too polite to show it—but I think Cleo is annoyed by dogs. They get so noisy when she merely wants to tease them a little.”

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

SABINE GROSSENWAHN

Years ago, when Boone Havock was not a railroad-builder but a saloon bouncer, a thoroughly worthless brother had followed him to Minnesota and there died in the odor of rye whisky, leaving a luscious-limbed and just slightly nymphomaniac daughter named Sabine in charge of Boone, who was very rigid and moral about women, that is, if they were his daughters or nieces. He sent Sabine to Sunday school, and in 1929, when she was eighteen, he shipped her East, to a fine rustling school in the Hudson Valley.

At a dance she met and in a dance she married one Ferdinand Grossenwahn, a fat, fifty-ridden New York stockbroker who was later known to Sabine’s friends as “Pore Ole Ferdy.” On the evening of her wedding-day, she slipped away for an hour with a handsome dancing-man whom she had met that afternoon, and when Ferdy found them and was stuffy about it, she slapped him.

As soon as she had succeeded in the new feminine career of lucratively divorcing her husband, she returned to Grand Republic, where her waved hair, delicate as a sea shell, her sables, and her fifteen-hundred-a-month alimony were greater rarities than in Manhattan.

Besides the alimony, Pore Ole Ferdy had given her a fifty-thousand-dollar cash bonus for leaving him in peace and dignity, and she built a house known throughout Minnesota as “Alimony Hall.” It was in the shape of a double L, and the leafy courtyard, on the bluff overhanging the Sorshay River valley, was full all summer long of ivy and syringa and rose-bushes, of glass-topped tables and plaid table-parasols and wheeled reclining-chairs like portable divans, with an outdoor grill and an outdoor bar; full of laughter and swing music on the phonograph and women who wanted sympathy and men who called it that. It is to be said for Sabine’s good nature that, provided they did not attack her own current young man, she was almost as willing to provide secluded rooms for her women friends and their affairs as for her own.

Most frequent of the Alimony Hall Set were Jay Laverick, Harley Bozard, Cousin Curtiss Havock, Bradd Criley, Fred Nimbus, Norton Trock—but he never bothered women—Gillian Brown, who despised Sabine, Cerise, consort of that earnest young legal prig, Vincent Osprey, and, somewhat disapprovingly, Rose Pennloss.

Norton Trock dated himself by quoting Omar Khayyam at their gatherings, but the talk ran oftener to adultery and gin than to wine and roses.

None of them, except Sabine, Harley, and Cousin Curtiss, who had met him briefly in New York, had ever seen Pore Ole Ferdy Grossenwahn, but they all talked as though he were their oppressive and ridiculous uncle. They referred to her alimony as “our income.” While Sabine and Gillian giggled, they debated whether Ferdy was worth more to them living or dead, for Sabine had assured them, “I honestly do think that if the old fool doesn’t get married again, he will at least have the decency to leave me everything in his will.”

They laughed while she told them about Ferdy’s fat amorousness, or read them his current letters, which betrayed him by such puerile phrases as, “Though I never could satisfy you & I sure was not worthy of your spiritual gifts and bright way of talking, you must admit that my solicitude for you is unwavering & sure can count on me always, dear babe o’ mine, for such financial assistance as able.”

During her affair with Fred Nimbus, who was a couple of years younger than herself and a fine athletic radio-announcer, it amused both of them that her stupid ex-husband would not even know that he was supporting her lover. “Mustn’t be jealous of Pore Ole Ferdy or talk naughty about him,” she whispered to Fred. “You don’t think he was romantic, but he certainly is contributing to a high-class romance now. So shut up and kiss me.”

Sabine was not so simple in her moods that she always ridiculed Pore Ole Ferdy. Sometimes for a whole week she spoke of him with repentant reverence: “All of you shut your traps about Ferdy. I’m not altogether sold on the idea that he wasn’t worthy of me. God knows he was hard to live with, and a cold fish, but he always treated me with the most scrup’lous honor, and in fact he’s a perfect gentleman, and I want to tell you that there’s no man on the Exchange that has a more prophetic sense about a bear-market than Ferdy.”

But sometimes, to show that she was no parasite weakling, she was resentful and firm with Ferdy. He once wrote that he was hard-up and would like to reduce her “income” for a month or two, and she had the courage and sense of responsibility to answer, “All this is a matter of court record, and if you haven’t got the dough now, that’s just too bad! And you better hustle around and get it, not do the cry-baby act! I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I think it might help you come to your senses if you took this right into court. You seem to forget you took on an OBLIGATION in our legal settlement, and I don’t intend to let you try and avoid it. I have been faithful to our agreement and I expect you to be the same.”

When Norton Trock explained the idea of the matriarchy to her, Sabine said, “Thank God that could never happen in America.”