“Now, listen, Mother. That’s foolish. If you’re going to talk like that. Like a mother in a melodrama whose son’s gone wrong. … I work like a dog. You know that. You get the wrong angle on things, stuck out here on this little farm. Why don’t you come into town and take a little place and sell the farm?”
“Live with you, you mean?” Pure mischievousness.
“Oh, no. You wouldn’t like that,” hastily. “Besides, I’d never be there. At the office all day, and out somewhere in the evening.”
“When do you do your reading, Dirk?”
“Why—uh—”
She sat up in bed, looking down at the thin end of her braid as she twined it round and round her finger. “Dirk, what is this you sell in that mahogany office of yours? I never did get the hang of it.”
“Bonds, Mother. You know that perfectly well.”
“Bonds.” She considered this a moment. “Are they hard to sell? Who buys them?”
“That depends. Everybody buys them—that is …”
“I don’t. I suppose because whenever I had any money it went back into the farm for implements, or repairs, or seed, or stock, or improvements. That’s always the way with a farmer—even on a little truck farm like this.” She pondered again a moment. He fidgeted, yawned. “Dirk DeJong—Bond Salesman.”
“The way you say it, Mother, it sounds like a low criminal pursuit.”
“Dirk, do you know sometimes I actually think that if you had stayed here on the farm—”
“Good God, Mother! What for!”
“Oh, I don’t know. Time to dream. Time to—no, I suppose that isn’t true any more. I suppose the day is past when the genius came from the farm. Machinery has cut into his dreams. He used to sit for hours on the wagon seat, the reins slack in his hands, while the horses plodded into town. Now he whizzes by in a jitney. Patent binders, ploughs, reapers—he’s a mechanic. He hasn’t time to dream. I guess if Lincoln had lived today he’d have split his rails to the tune of a humming, snarling patent wood cutter, and in the evening he’d have whirled into town to get his books at the public library, and he’d have read them under the glare of the electric light bulb instead of lying flat in front of the flickering wood fire. … Well. …”
She lay back, looked up at him. “Dirk, why don’t you marry?”
“Why—there’s no one I want to marry.”
“No one who’s free, you mean?”
He stood up. “I mean no one.” He stooped and kissed her lightly. Her arms went round him close. Her hand with the thick gold wedding band on it pressed his head to her hard. “Sobig!” He was a baby again.
“You haven’t called me that in years.” He was laughing.
She reverted to the old game they had played when he was a child. “How big is my son! How big?” She was smiling, but her eyes were sombre.
“So big!” answered Dirk, and measured a very tiny space between thumb and forefinger. “So big.”
She faced him, sitting up very straight in bed, the little wool shawl hunched about her shoulders. “Dirk, are you ever going back to architecture? The war is history. It’s now or never with you. Pretty soon it will be too late. Are you ever going back to architecture? To your profession?”
A clean amputation. “No, Mother.”
She gave an actual gasp, as though icy water had been thrown full in her face. She looked suddenly old, tired. Her shoulders sagged. He stood in the doorway, braced for her reproaches. But when she spoke it was to reproach herself. “Then I’m a failure.”
“Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I’m happy. You can’t live somebody else’s life. You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn’t just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something glorious was always hidden just around the corner. You said you had lived that way and it hadn’t worked. You said—”
She interrupted him with a little cry. “I know I did. I know I did.” Suddenly she raised a warning finger. Her eyes were luminous, prophetic. “Dirk, you can’t desert her like that!”
“Desert who?” He was startled.
“Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She’ll turn on you some day. Some day you’ll want her, and she won’t be there.”
Inwardly he had been resentful of this bedside conversation with his mother. She made little of him, he thought, while outsiders appreciated his success. He had said, “So big,” measuring a tiny space between thumb and forefinger in answer to her half-playful question, but he had not honestly meant it. He thought her ridiculously old-fashioned now in her viewpoint, and certainly unreasonable. But he would not quarrel with her.
“You wait, too, Mother,” he said now, smiling. “Some day your wayward son will be a real success. Wait till the millions roll in. Then we’ll see.”
She lay down, turned her back deliberately upon him, pulled the covers up about her.
“Shall I turn out your light, Mother, and open the windows?”
“Meena’ll do it. She always does. Just call her. … Good night.”
He knew that he had come to be a rather big man in his world. Influence had helped. He knew that, too. But he shut his mind to much of Paula’s manœuvring and wire pulling—refused to acknowledge that her lean, dark, eager fingers had manipulated the mechanism that ordered his career. Paula herself was wise enough to know that to hold him she must not let him feel indebted to her. She knew that the debtor hates his creditor. She lay awake at night planning for him, scheming for his advancement, then suggested these schemes to him so deftly as to make him think he himself had devised them. She had even realized of late that their growing intimacy
