Dirk had not seen her in months. She telephoned him unexpectedly one Friday afternoon in his office at Hollis & Sprague’s.
“Come out and spend Saturday and Sunday with us, won’t you? We’re running away to the country this afternoon. I’m so sick of Bleeding Belgium, you can’t imagine. I’m sending the children out this morning. I can’t get away so early. I’ll call for you in the roadster this afternoon at four and drive you out myself.”
“I am going to spend the weekend with Mother. She’s expecting me.”
“Bring her along.”
“She wouldn’t come. You know she doesn’t enjoy all that velvet-footed servitor stuff.”
“Oh, but we live quite simply out there, really. Just sort of rough it. Do come, Dirk. I’ve got some plans to talk over with you … How’s the job?”
“Oh, good enough. There’s very little building going on, you know.”
“Will you come?”
“I don’t think I—”
“I’ll call for you at four. I’ll be at the curb. Don’t keep me waiting, will you? The cops fuss so if you park in the Loop after four.”
XV
“Run along!” said Selina, when he called her on the farm telephone. “It’ll do you good. You’ve been as grumpy as a gander for weeks. How about shirts? And you left one pair of flannel tennis pants out here last fall—clean ones. Won’t you need …”
In town he lived in a large front room and alcove on the third floor of a handsome old-fashioned three-story-and-basement house in Deming Place. He used the front room as a living room, the alcove as a bedroom. He and Selina had furnished it together, discarding all of the room’s original belongings except the bed, a table, and one fat comfortable faded old armchair whose brocade surface hinted a past grandeur. When he had got his books ranged in open shelves along one wall, soft-shaded lamps on table and desk, the place looked more than livable; lived in. During the process of furnishing Selina got into the way of coming into town for a day or two to prowl the auction rooms and the secondhand stores. She had a genius for this sort of thing; hated the spick-and-span varnish and veneer of the new furniture to be got in the regular way.
“Any piece of furniture, I don’t care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character,” Selina said. “A good deal like human beings. I’d rather have my old maple table, mellow with age and rubbing, that Pervus’s father put together himself by hand seventy years ago, than all the mahogany library slabs on Wabash Avenue.”
She enjoyed these rare trips into town; made a holiday of them. Dirk would take her to the theatre and she would sit entranced. Her feeling for this form of entertainment was as fresh and eager as it had been in the days of the Daly Stock Company when she, a little girl, had been seated in the parquet with her father, Simeon Peake. Strangely enough, considering the lack of what the world calls romance and adventure in her life, she did not like the motion pictures. “All the difference in the world,” she would say, “between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theatre. My, yes! Like fooling with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.”
She developed a mania for nosing into strange corners of the huge sprawling city; seemed to discover a fresh wonder on each visit. In a short time she was more familiar with Chicago than was Dirk—for that matter, than old Aug Hempel who had lived in it for over half a century but who never had gone far afield in his pendulum path between the yards and his house, his house and the yards.
The things that excited her about Chicago did not seem to interest Dirk at all. Sometimes she took a vacant room for a day or two in Dirk’s boarding house. “What do you think!” she would say to him, breathlessly, when he returned from the office in the evening. “I’ve been way over on the northwest side. It’s another world. It’s—it’s Poland. Cathedrals and shops and men sitting in restaurants all day long reading papers and drinking coffee and playing dominoes or something like it. And what do you think I found out! Chicago’s got the second largest Polish population of any city in the world. In the world!”
“Yeh?” Dirk would reply, absently.
There was nothing absentminded about his tone this afternoon as he talked to his mother on the telephone. “Sure you don’t mind? Then I’ll be out next Saturday. Or I may run out in the middle of the week to stay over night … Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Be sure and remember all about Paula’s new house so’s you can tell me about it. Julie says it’s like the kind you read of in the novels. She says old
