“Where shall we go?” They hesitated, looking at each other, and in their smile the strangeness vanished.
“I don’t care. Anywhere, if you’re along,” he said. “Oh, Helen, it sure is great to see you again! You look like a million dollars, too.” His approving eye was upon her new clothes.
“I’m glad you like them,” she said, radiant. “That’s an awfully nice suit, Paul.” Happiness came back to her in a flood and putting out her hand, she picked a bit of thread from his dear sleeve. “Well, where shall we go?”
“We’ll get something to eat first,” he said practically. “I’m about starved, aren’t you?” She had not thought of eating.
They breakfasted in a little restaurant on waffles and sausages and coffee. The hot food was delicious, and the waiter in the soiled white apron grinned understandingly while he served them. Paul gave him fifteen cents, in an offhand manner, and she thrilled at his careless prodigality and his air of knowing his way about.
The whole long day lay before them, bright with limitless possibilities. They left the suitcase with the cashier of the restaurant and walked slowly down the street, embarrassed by the riches of time that were theirs. Helen suggested that they walk awhile in the capitol grounds; she had supposed they would do that, and perhaps in the afternoon enjoy a car-ride to Oak Park. But Paul dismissed these simple pleasures with a word.
“Nothing like that,” he said. “I want a real celebration, a regular blowout. I’ve been saving up for it a long time.” He struggled with this conscience. “It won’t do any harm to miss church one Sunday. Let’s take a boat down the river.”
“Oh, Paul!” She was dazzled. “But—I don’t know—won’t it be awfully expensive?”
“I don’t care how much it costs,” he replied recklessly. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”
They went down the shabby streets toward the river, and even the dingy tenements and broken sidewalks of the Japanese quarter seemed to them to have a holiday air. They laughed about the queer little shops and the restaurant windows, where electric lights still burned in the clear daylight over pallid pies and strange-looking cakes. Helen must stop to speak to the straight-haired, flat-faced Japanese babies who sat stolidly on the curbs, looking at her with enigmatic, slant eyes, and she saw romance in the groups of tall Hindu laborers, with their bearded, black faces and gaily colored turbans.
It was like going into a foreign land together, she said, and even Paul was momentarily caught by the enchantment she saw in it all, though he did not conceal his detestation of these foreigners. “We’re going to see to it we don’t have them in our town,” he said, already with the air of a proprietor in Ripley.
“Now this is something like!” he exclaimed when he had helped Helen across the gangplank and deposited her safely on the deck of the steamer. Helen, pressing his arm with her fingers, was too happy to speak. The boat was filling with people in holiday clothes; everywhere about her was the exciting stir of departure, calls, commands, the thump of boxes being loaded on the deck below. A whistle sounded hoarsely, the engines were starting, sending a thrill through the very planks beneath her feet.
“We’d better get a good place up in front,” said Paul. He took her through the magnificence of a large room furnished with velvet chairs, past a glimpse of shining white tables and white-clad waiters, to a seat whence they could gaze down the yellow river. She was appalled by his ease and assurance. She looked at him with an admiration which she would not allow to lessen even when the boat edged out into the stream and, turning, revealed that he had led her to the stern deck.
Her enthusiastic suggestion that they explore the boat aided Paul’s attempt to conceal his chagrin, and she listened enthralled to his explanations of all they saw. He estimated the price of the crates of vegetables and chickens piled on the lower deck, on their way to the city from the upper river farms. It was his elaborate description of the engines that caught the attention of a grimy engineer who had emerged from the noisy depths for a breath of air, and the engineer, turning on them a quizzically friendly gaze, was easily persuaded to take them into the engine-room.
Helen could not understand his explanations, but she was interested because Paul was, and found her own thrill in the discovery of a dim tank half filled with flopping fish, scooped from the river and flung there by the paddle wheel. “We take ’em home and eat ’em, miss,” said the engineer, and she pictured their cool lives in the green river, and the city supper-tables at which they would be eaten. She was fascinated by the multitudinous intricacies of life, even on that one small boat.
It was a disappointment to find, when they returned again to the upper decks, that they could see nothing but green levee banks on each side of the river. But this led to an even more exciting discovery, for venturesomely climbing a slender iron ladder they saw beyond the western levee an astounding and incredible stretch of water where land should be. Their amazement emboldened Paul to tap on the glass wall of a small room beside them, in which they saw an old man peacefully smoking his pipe. He proved to be the pilot, who explained that it was flood water they saw, and who let them squeeze into his tiny quarters and stay while he told long tales of early days on the river, of floods in which whole settlements were swept away at night, of women and children rescued from floating roofs, of cows found drowned in treetops, and droves of hogs that cut
