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Title: Cass Timberlane (1945)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200291.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: April 2002
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Title: Cass Timberlane (1945)
Author: Sinclair Lewis

A NOVEL OF HUSBANDS AND WIVES




The scene of this story, the small city of Grand Republic in
Central Minnesota, is entirely imaginary, as are all the
characters.

But I know that the characters will be "identified," each of them
with several different real persons in each of the Minnesota cities
in which I have happily lingered: in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winona,
St. Cloud, Mankato, Fergus Falls and particularly, since it is only
a little larger than "Grand Republic" and since I live there, in
the radiant, sea-fronting, hillside city of Duluth.

All such guesses will be wrong, but they will be so convincing that
even the writer will be astonished to learn how exactly he has
drawn some judge or doctor or banker or housewife of whom he has
never heard, or regretful to discover how poisonously he is
supposed to have described people of whom he is particularly fond.

SINCLAIR LEWIS




1


Until Jinny Marshland was called to the stand, the Judge was
deplorably sleepy.

The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic had
been yawning its way through testimony about a not very interesting
sidewalk.  Plaintiff's attorney desired to show that the city had
been remarkably negligent in leaving upon that sidewalk a certain
lump of ice which, on February 7, 1941, at or about the hour of
9:37 P.M., had caused the plaintiff to slip, to slide, and to be
prone upon the public way, in a state of ignominy and sore pain.
There had been an extravagant amount of data as to whether the lump
of ice had been lurking sixteen, eighteen, or more than eighteen
feet from the Clipper Hardware Store.  And all that May afternoon
the windows had been closed, to keep out street noises, and the
court room had smelled, as it looked, like a schoolroom.

Timberlane, J., was in an agony of drowsiness.  He was faithful
enough, and he did not miss a word, but he heard it all as in sleep
one hears malignant snoring.

He was a young judge: the Honorable Cass Timberlane, of the Twenty-
Second Judicial District, State of Minnesota.  He was forty-one,
and in his first year on the bench, after a term in Congress.  He
was a serious judge, a man of learning, a believer in the majesty
of the law, and he looked like a tall Red Indian.  But he was
wishing that he were out bass-fishing, or at home, reading Walden
or asleep on a cool leather couch.

Preferably asleep.

All the spectators in the room, all five of them, were yawning and
chewing gum.  The learned counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Hervey
Plint, the dullest lawyer in Grand Republic, a middle-aged man with
a miscellaneous sort of face, was questioning Miss Hatter.  He was
a word-dragger, an uh'er, a looker to the ceiling for new thoughts.

"Uh--Miss Hatter, now will you tell us what was the--uh--the
purpose of your going out, that evening--I mean, I mean how did you
happen to be out on an evening which--I think all the previous
testimony agrees that it was, well, I mean, uh, you might call it
an inclement evening, but not such as would have prevented the, uh,
the adequate cleaning of the thoroughfares--"

"Jekshn leading quest," said the city attorney.

"Jekshn stained," said the Court.

"I will rephrase my question," confided Mr. Plint.  He was a
willing rephraser, but the phrases always became duller and duller
and duller.

Sitting above them on the bench like Chief Iron Cloud, a lean
figure of power, the young father of his people, Judge Timberlane
started to repeat the list of presidents, a charm which usually
would keep him awake.  He got through it fairly well, stumbling
only on Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore, as was reasonable,
but he remained as sleepy as ever.

Without missing any of Miss Hatter's more spectacular statements,
His Honor plunged into the Counties of Minnesota, all eighty-seven
of them, with their several county-seats:


Aitkin--Aitkin
Anoka--Anoka
Becker--Detroit Lakes
Beltrami--Bemidji


He had reached "Olmsted--Rochester" when he perceived that Miss
Hatter had gone back to her natural mummy-case, and the clerk was
swearing in a witness who pricked His Honor into wakefulness.

--How did I ever miss seeing her, in a city as small as this?
Certainly not four girls in town that are as pretty, he reflected.

The new witness was a half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or
-four, not tall, smiling, lively of eye.  The light edged gently
the clarity of her cheeks, but there was something daring in her
delicate Roman nose, her fierce black hair.  Her gray suit
indicated prosperity, which in Grand Republic was respectability.

--Be an exciting kid to know, thought Timberlane, J., that purist
and precisionist and esteemed hunter of ducks, that chess-player
and Latinist, who was a man unmarried--at least, unmarried since
his recent and regrettable divorce.

The young woman alighted on the oak witness-chair like a swallow on
a tombstone.

Counselor Plint said gloomily, "Will you please just give us your,
uh, your name and profession and address, please?"

"Jinny Marshland--Virginia Marshland.  I'm draftsman and designer
for the Fliegend Fancy Box and Pasteboard Toy Manufacturing
Company, and a kind of messenger--man of all work."

"Residence, please."

"I live up in Pioneer Falls, mostly.  I was born there, and I
taught school there for a while.  But you mean here in Grand
Republic?  I live with Miss Hatter, at 179 1/2 West Flandrau
Street."

Profoundly, as one who doubts the eternal course of the planets,
Mr. Plint worried, "You board with Miss Hatter?"

"Yes, sir."

Jinny and Judge Cass Timberlane looked at each other.  He had been
approving her voice.  He loved his native city of Grand Republic,
and esteemed the housewifery and true loyal hearts of its 43,000
daughters, but it disturbed him that so many of them had voices
like the sound of a file being drawn across the edge of a sheet of
brass.  But Miss Marshland's voice was light and flexible and
round.

--I WOULD fall for a girl merely because she has fine ankles and a
clear voice, I who have maintained that the most wretched error in
all romances is this invariable belief that because a girl has a
good nose and a smooth skin, therefore she will be agreeable to
live with and--well, make love to.  The insanity that causes even
superior men (meaning judges) to run passionately after magpies
with sterile hearts.  This, after the revelations of female
deception I've seen in divorce proceedings.  I am corrupted by
sentimentality.

Mr. Plint was fretting his bone.  "Now, uh, Miss--Miss Marshland.
Oh, yes, precisely.  Now as I was saying, Miss Marshland, several
people have testified that there was a party--anyway, there were
several guests at the Hatter residence that evening, and there was
more or less eating and drinking, and what we want to know is, was
there any sign--uh--I mean any sign of intoxicating beverages being
consumed, I mean, particularly by Miss Hatter herself?"

"No, she drank a coke.  I might take a cocktail sometimes, but I'm
sure Miss Hatter never touches a drop."

Charles Sayward, the city attorney, was roused from slumber to
protest, "I move the testimony be stricken, as hearsay and
irrelevant."

Judge Timberlane said gravely, "I must grant that motion, Mr.
Sayward, but don't you think you're being a little technical?"

"It is my humble understanding of court procedure, Your Honor, that
it is entirely technical."

(On the Heather Club golf course they called each other "Charles"
and "Cass.")

"On the other hand, Mr. City Attorney, you know that here in the
Middlewest we pride ourselves on being less formal than the stately
tribunals of Great Britain and our traditional East.  I may be so
bold as to say that even in court, we're almost human, and that on
a day like this--you may not have noticed it, Mr. City Attorney,
but it is somewhat somnolent--then we frequently permit any
testimony that will give this jury--"  He smiled at the honest but
bored citizens, "an actual picture of the issue.  However," and now
he smiled at Jinny, "I think you'd better confine yourself to
answering the questions, without comment, Miss Marshland.  Motion
granted.  Continue, Mr. Plint."

As Jinny went on, without noticeably obeying the Court's command,
Cass felt that the court-room air was fresher, that there might
actually be some life and purpose to court proceedings.  She was
perhaps twenty-four to his forty-one, but he insisted that Jinny
and he were young together, and in antagonism to the doddering Mr.
Plint, the cobwebbed and molding Charles Sayward (who was thirty-
five, by the records) and the Assyrian antiquity of the jury.

He wanted to lean over the sharp oak edge of his lofty desk and
demand of Jinny, "See here.  You know the jury will give the Hatter
woman approximately half of whatever she's suing for, no matter
what nonsense we grind out.  Let's go off and forget all this.  I
want to talk to you, and make it clear that I can be light-minded
and companionable."

But it came to him that this would not be the way to impress Jinny.
She thought that he was a judge and a venerable figure; she
probably thought that he was more columnar than her young suitors
with their dancing and babble.  He straightened, he placed his
right forefinger senatorially against his cheek, he cleared his
throat, and for her, glancing down to see if he was successfully
fooling her, he pretended that he was a judge on a bench.

She was explaining, to Mr. Plint's prompting, that she boarded at
Miss Hatter's, along with Tracy Oleson (secretary to that
industrial titan, Mr. Wargate), Lyra Coggs the librarian, Eino
Roskinen, and three other young people.  They were artistic and
pretty refined.  No indeed, they never got drunk, and if Tilda
Hatter slipped on any ole lump of ice, that lump of ice was meant
to be slipped on.  Yes, she liked working for the Fliegend Company.
She wasn't, she beamed, much of a draftsman, but Mr. and Mrs.
Fliegend were so kind.  She liked it better than schoolteaching;
you had to be so solemn in school.

She was not loquacious so much as gay and natural.  It was all
fantastically irregular, but City Attorney Sayward had given up
trying to check her, and he looked up at Judge Timberlane with
humorous helplessness.  The jury yearned over her as though they
were her collective parent, and Counselor Plint had a notion,
though he didn't know how in the world it had come about, that she
was a useful witness.

Only George Hame, the court reporter, was unmoved, as he made his
swift symbols in a pulpy-looking notebook.  To George, all accents
and all moods, the shrieks of the widows of murdered bootleggers,
the droning of certified accountants explaining crooked ledgers,
the grumble of Finnish or Polish homesteaders, were the same.  What
was said never seemed the important thing to George, but whether he
got it all down.  The judge, his captain, could be unprofessionally
enlivened by an unnecessary girl witness, after only five months on
the bench, but George did not believe in women.  He had a wife
unremittingly productive of babies, for whose assembly-belt
production he felt only accidentally responsible, and after sixteen
years of court reporting, all witnesses, pretty or otherwise, were
to him merely lumps of potato in a legal hash that was nourishing
but tedious.

Jinny Marshland finished her testimony, smiled at Cass, smiled at
Tilda Hatter, and slipped out of the court room like a trout
flicking down a stream.  The case reverted to mumbling, and the
Judge reverted to the list of Minnesota counties and to a
sleepiness which made his shoulders ache, his eyes feel dusty and
swollen.  With his right hand, the large hand of a woodsman or a
hunter, he gravely stroked the lapel of his dark-gray jacket,
smoothed his painfully refined dark-blue tie, as he repeated:


Otter Tail County--Fergus Falls
Pennington--Thief River Falls
Pine--Pine City
Pipestone--Pipestone


Till half an hour ago he had been proud of the court room; of his
high oak desk, jutting into the room like a prow, with a silken
American flag, topped with a small gold eagle, erected beside the
Judge's leather chair.  He had been proud of the carved seal of
Minnesota on the oak paneling behind the bench; of the restful
dark-gray plaster walls; of the resplendently shiny oak benches,
though they were hard upon the restless anatomy of the aching
public.  He had felt secure and busy, for this was his workshop,
his studio, his laboratory, in which he was an artist-scientist,
contributing to human progress and honor.

Now it was a stuffy coop, absurdly small for a court room, barely
able to hold eighty people when crowded.  Such portions of the
Eternal Law as were represented by the Statutes of the State of
Minnesota seemed dreary today, and he wanted to be out in the May
breeze, walking with Jinny Marshland.

Cass was considered a conscientious judge, but he adjourned today
at five minutes before the usual four o'clock.  He could eat no
more bran.

Before he could hasten out into the open air, however, he still had
half an hour of chamber work.  He was rather proud of Chambers No.
3, Radisson County Court House.  On his election, when he had taken
the room over, it already looked scholarly and solid, with a cliff
of law-books, a long oak table, a council of black leather chairs,
and he had added the framed photographs of Justices Holmes,
Cardozo, and Brandeis . . . and of the historic bag of ducks that
Dr. Roy Drover and he had shot in 1939.  On his portly desk was a
handsome bronze inkwell which he never used, and a stupendous
bronze automatic cigar-lighter--a gift--which he had always
disliked.

He had to sign an injunction, to talk with a Swede who desired to
be naturalized.  Young Vincent Osprey, who overlaid with a high
Yale Law School gloss a dullness almost equal to that of Mr. Hervey
Plint, brought in a woman client, on the theory that she wanted
wholesome advice about her coming divorce suit.  She did not want
advice; she wanted to get rid of her present spouse so that she
could marry another with a more powerful kiss.  But in most
judicial districts of Minnesota, domestic-relations procedure is as
fatherly and informal as a physician's consultation, and Cass held
forth to her.

"Mrs. Nelson, a woman or a man has only four or five real
friendships in his whole life.  To lose one of them is to lose a
chance to give and to trust.  Am I being too discursive?"

"I t'ink so."

"Well look, Mrs. Carlson--"

"Mrs. Nelson."

"--Nelson.  Look.  In a divorce, the children are terrified.  Have
you any children?"

"Not by Nelson."

Judge Timberlane glanced at Mr. Osprey and shook his head.  The
lawyer yelped, "All right, Mrs. Nelson, you skip along now.  That's
all His Honor has to say."

When they were alone, Cass turned to Osprey, and it was to be seen
that Osprey was his admirer.

"No use, Vince.  Let it go through.  I figure she's hot to gallop
to another marriage-bed.  Otherwise I'd give her a red-hot lecture
on the humiliations of divorce.  I will facilitate any divorce, in
case of cruelty--or extreme boredom, which is worse--but, Vince,
divorce is hell.  Don't you ever divorce Cerise, no matter how
extravagant you say she is."

"You bet your life I wouldn't, Chief.  I'm crazy about that girl."

"You're lucky.  If it weren't for my work, my life would be as
empty as a traitor's after a war.  Ever since Blanche divorced me--
why, Vince, I have nobody to show my little tin triumphs to.  I
envy Cerise and you.  And I don't seem to find any girl that will
take Blanche's place."

As he spoke, Cass was reflecting that, after all, Jinny Marshland
was just another migratory young woman.

"But what about Christabel Grau, Chief?  I thought you and she were
half engaged," bubbled Vincent Osprey.

"Oh, Chris is a very kind girl.  I guess that's the trouble.  I
apparently want somebody who's so intelligent that she'll think I'm
stupid, so independent that she'll never need me, so gay and daring
that she'll think I'm slow.  That's my pattern, Vince; that's my
fate."



2


The city of Grand Republic, Radisson County, Minnesota, eighty
miles north of Minneapolis, seventy-odd miles from Duluth, has
85,000 population.

It is large enough to have a Renoir, a school-system scandal,
several millionaires, and a slum.  It lies in the confluent valleys
where the Big Eagle River empties into the Sorshay River, which
flows west to the Mississippi.

Grand Republic grew rich two generations ago through the uncouth
robbery of forests, iron mines, and soil for wheat.  With these
almost exhausted, it rests in leafy quiet, wondering whether to
become a ghost town or a living city.  The Chamber of Commerce says
that it has already become a city, but, in secret places where the
two bankers on the school board cannot hear them, the better
schoolteachers deny this.

At least there is in Grand Republic a remarkable number of private
motor cars.  It was a principal cause of his reputation for
eccentricity that Cass Timberlane, on amiable spring days, walked
the entire mile and a quarter from the court house to his home.

He climbed up Joseph Renshaw Brown Way to Ottawa Heights, on which
were the Renoir and the millionaires and most of the houses
provided with Architecture.

He looked down on the Radisson County Court House, in which was his
own court room, and he did not shudder.  He was fondly accustomed
to its romanticism and blurry inconvenience.

It had been built in 1885 from the designs of an architect who was
drunk upon Howard Pyle's illustrations to fairy tales.  It was of a
rich red raspberry brick trimmed with limestone, and it displayed a
round tower, an octagonal tower, a minaret, a massive entrance with
a portcullis, two lofty flying balconies of iron, colored-glass
windows with tablets or stone petals in the niches above them, a
green and yellow mosaic roof with scarlet edging, and the
breathless ornamental stairway from the street up to the main
entrance without which no American public building would be
altogether legal.

Cass knew that it was as archaic as armor and even less comfortable,
yet he loved it as a symbol of the ancient and imperial law.  It
was his Westminster, his Sorbonne; it was the one place in which he
was not merely a male in vulgar trousers, but a spiritual force
such as might, with a great deal of luck and several hundreds of
years, help to make of Grand Republic another Edinburgh.

He had, too, an ancestral proprietary right in this legal palace,
for his father had started off his furniture business (wholesale as
well as retail, and therefore noble) by providing most of the
chairs and desks for the court house.

When he had reached Varennes Boulevard, circling along the cliffs
on top of Ottawa Heights, Cass could see the whole city, the whole
valley, with the level oat and barley fields on the uplands beyond.
The Big Eagle River came in from the south, bearing the hot
murmurous air from the great cornfields, from the country of the
vanquished Sioux; the Sorshay River, which had been called the
Sorcier by the coureurs de bois, two hundred years ago, wound from
a northern darkness of swamp and lakes and impenetrable jackpine
thickets, the country of the tawny Chippewas.

At the junction of the rivers was the modern city, steel and cement
and gasoline and electricity, as contemporary as Chicago if but
one-fortieth the size and devoid of the rich raucousness of the
Loop.  The limestone magnificence of the Wargate Memorial
Auditorium and the titanic Blue Ox National Bank Building (no less
than twelve stories), the carved and educated granite of the
Alexander Hamilton High School, the Pantheon of the Duluth & Twin
Cities Railroad Station, the furnaces and prodigious brick sheds of
the Wargate Wood Products Corporation plant and a setting of
smaller factories, were all proofs of the Chamber of Commerce's
assertion that in a short time, perhaps twenty years or twenty
centuries, Grand Republic would have a million inhabitants.

But beyond the tracks, along the once navigable Sorshay River, the
wooden warehouses and shaky tenements were so like the frontier
village of seventy-five years ago that you imagined the wooden
sidewalks of the 1860's and the streets a churning of mud, with
Chippewa squaws and Nova Scotia lumbermen in crimson jackets and
weekly murder with axe handles.  Very untidy.

Indeed Mrs. Kenny Wargate, Manhattan-born and cynical daughter-in-
law of the Ruling Family, asserted that Grand Republic had leaped
from clumsy youth to senility without ever having a dignified
manhood.  She jeered, "Your Grand Republic slogan is: tar-paper
shanty to vacant parking lot in three generations."

But Judge Timberlane and his friends, loving the place as home,
believed that just now, after woes and failures and haste and waste
and experiment, Grand Republic was beginning to build up a kind of
city new to the world, a city for all the people, a city for
decency and neighborliness, not for ecclesiastical display and
monarchial power and the chatter of tamed journalists and
professors drinking coffee and eating newspapers in cafes.  And if
so many of the pioneers had been exploiters and slashers of the
forest, the Wargates had been and now were builders of industries
that meant homes and food for hundreds of immigrant families from
the fiords, from New England hills.

Cass often pondered thus as he walked along Varennes Boulevard.  As
he rounded a curve of the bluff-top, he could look northward, and
there, at the city's edge, was the true Northland, in the stretches
of pine and birch and poplar that framed the grim eye of Dead Squaw
Lake.  And he loved it as he could never love the lax and steamy
and foolishly laughing isles he had once seen in the Caribbean.



Through all of his meditation ran his startled remembrance of Jinny
Marshland on the witness stand.  He was still indignant that in a
city so small as Grand Republic he had never seen her.

But he knew that, for all his talk at public dinners about
Midwestern Democracy, the division between the proprietors and the
serfs was as violent in Grand Republic as in London.  The
truckdriver might call Boone Havock, the contractor, "Boone," when
they met in the Eitelfritz Brauhaus (as with remarkable frequency
they did meet), but he would never enter Boone's house or his
church, and as for Boone's asylum, the Federal Club, neither the
truckdriver nor any Scandinavian or Finn with less than $10,000
income nor any recognizable Jew whatever would be allowed even to
gawk through the leaded-glass windows (imported).

Even Lucius Fliegend, Jinny's Jewish employer, that fine and
sensitive old man, could not belong to the Federal Club, but had to
play his noontime chess in the Athletic Club.  And as a professing
member of Democracy, Cass was ashamed that not since he had been
elected judge had he once been in the Athletic Club.

He would remedy that right away.  Tomorrow.

He was abnormally conscious of the universal and multiple
revolution just then, in the early 1940's, from sulfa drugs and
surrealism and semantics to Hitler, but he was irritated by all the
Voices, by the radio prophets and the newspaper-column philosophers.
He had had two competent years in Washington as a Member of
Congress.  Sick of the arguments, he had refused to be re-elected,
yet now that he was back in his native town, sometimes he missed
the massacres in the Coliseum, and felt a little bored and futile.

And ever since his divorce from the costly and clattering Blanche,
he had been lonely.  Could a Jinny Marshland cure his loneliness,
his confusions in the skyrocketing world?

Then he rebuked himself.

Why should a charming girl, probably a dancer to phonographs, have
any desire to cure the lonelinesses of forty-year-old single
gentlemen?  There was tenderness and loyalty in Jinny, he felt, but
what would she want with a judge whom she would find out not to be
a judge at all but another gaunt and early-middle-aged man who
played the flute?  Thus he raged and longed as he neared his house.
It is understood that the newer psychiatrists, like the older
poets, believe that patients do fall in love at first sight.



Cass's house was sometimes known as "Bergheim" and sometimes as
"the old Eisenherz place."  It had been built as a summer
residence--in those days it had seemed to be quite out in the
country--by Simon Eisenherz, greatest of the Radisson County
pioneers, in 1888, and purchased by Cass's father, Owen Timberlane,
in 1929.  Owen had died there, less than a year later, leaving it
jointly to his wife, Marah, and to Cass, along with a local fortune
of forty or fifty thousand dollars.

The house was somber and somehow tragic, and when Cass's mother
died there, also, and he took Blanche, his wife, to it, she had
hated it as much as he himself loved it.  As a boy he had
considered it the wonderful castle, the haunt of power and beauty,
which no ordinary mortal like a Timberlane could ever hope to own
complete.  He still felt so.

George Hame, his court reporter, said that Bergheim was a wooden
model of the court house, and it did have a circular tower and an
octagonal conservatory, now called the "sun room."  It was painted
a dark green, merely because it had always been painted dark green.
Over the porches there were whole gardens of jig-saw blossoms, and
two of the windows were circular, and one triangular, with ruby
glass.  Cass admitted everything derisive that was said about this
monstrosity, and went on loving it, and explaining that if you
opened all of the windows all of the time, it wasn't airless
inside--not very--not on a breezy day.

As he came up the black-and-white marble walk to the bulbous
carriage-porch, a black kitten, an entire stranger, was sitting on
a step.  It said "meow," not whiningly but in a friendly mood, as
between equals, and it looked at Cass in a way that dared him to
invite it in for a drink.

He was a lover of cats, and he had had none since the ancient and
misanthropic Stephen had died, six months before.  He had a lively
desire to own this little black clown, all black, midnight black,
except for its sooty yellow eyes.  It would play on the faded
carpets when he came home from the court room to the still
loneliness that, in the old house, was getting on his nerves.

"Well, how are you, my friend?" he said.

The kitten said she was all right.  And about some cream now--?

"Kitten, I can't steal you from some child who's out looking for
you.  It wouldn't be right to invite you in."

The kitten did not answer anything so naive and prudish.  It merely
said, with its liquid and trusting glance, that Cass was its god,
beyond all gods.  It frisked, and dabbled at a fly with its tiny
black paw, and looked up at him to ask, "How's that?"

"You are a natural suborner of perjury and extremely sweet,"
admitted Cass, as he scooped it up and took it through the huge oak
door, down the dim hallway to the spacious kitchen and to Mrs.
Higbee, his cook-general.

Mrs. Higbee was sixty years old, and what is known as "colored,"
which meant that she was not quite so dark of visage as Webb
Wargate after his annual Florida tanning.  She was graceful and
sensible and full of love and loyalty.  She was in no way a comic
servant; she was like any other wholesome Middle-Class American,
with an accent like that of any other emigree from Ohio.  It must
be said that Mrs. Higbee was not singularly intelligent; only
slightly more intelligent than Mrs. Boone Havock or Mrs. Webb
Wargate; not more than twice as intelligent as Mrs. Vincent Osprey.
She was an Episcopalian, and continued to be one, for historic
reasons, though she was not greatly welcomed in the more
fashionable temples of that faith.  Judge Timberlane depended on
her good sense rather more than he did on that of George Hame or
his friend Christabel Grau.

Mrs. Higbee took the black kitten, tickled it under the chin, and
remarked.  "Our cat?"

"I'm afraid so.  I've stolen it."

"Well, I understand a black cat is either very good luck or very
bad luck, I forget which, so we can take a chance on it.  What's
its name?"

"What is it?  A her?"

"Let's see.  Um, I think so."

"How about 'Cleo'?  You know--from Cleopatra.  The Egyptians
worshiped cats, and Cleopatra was supposed to be thin and dark and
uncanny, like our kitten."

But he was not thinking of Queen Cleopatra.  He was thinking of
Jinny Marshland, and the thought was uneasy with him.

"All right, Judge.  You, Cleo, I'm going to get those fleas off you
right away tomorrow, and no use your kicking."

Cass marveled, "Has she got fleas?"

"Has--she--got--fleas!  Judge, don't you ever take a real good look
at females?"

"Not often.  Oh, Mrs. Higbee, you know I'm dining out tonight--at
Dr. Drover's."

"Yes.  You'll get guinea hen.  And that caramel ice cream.  And
Miss Grau.  You won't be home early."

"Anything else I ought to know about the party?"

"Not a thing. . . .  Will you look at that Cleo!  She knows where
the refrigerator is, already!"



In Cass's set, which was largely above the $7000 line, it was as
obligatory to dress for party dinners as in London, and anyway, he
rather liked his solid tallness in black and white.  He dawdled in
his bedroom, not too moonily thinking of Jinny yet conscious of
her.  A bright girl like that would do things with this room which,
he admitted, habit and indifference and too much inheritance of
furniture had turned into a funeral vault.  It was a long room with
meager windows and a fireplace bricked-up years ago.

The wide bed was of ponderous black walnut, carved with cherubs
that looked like grapes and grapes that looked like cherubs, and on
it was a spread of yellowed linen.  The dresser was of black walnut
also, with a mortuary marble slab; the wardrobe was like three
mummy-cases on end, though not so gay; and littered over everything
were books on law and economics and Minnesota history.

"It is a gloomy room.  No wonder Blanche insisted on sleeping in
the pink room."

He heard a friendly, entirely conversational "Meow?" and saw that
the gallant Cleo had come upstairs to explore.  All cats have to
know about every corner of any house they choose to honor, but
sometimes they are timid about caves under furniture.  There have,
indeed, been complaining and tiresome cats.  But Cleo talked to him
approvingly about her new home.

For so young and feminine a feline, she was a complete Henry M.
Stanley.  She looked at the old bedspread and patted its fringe.
She circulated around under the old Chinese teakwood chair, in
which no one had ever sat and which no one even partly sane would
ever have bought.  She glanced into the wardrobe, and cuffed a
shoelace which tried to trip her.

She said, "All right--fine" to Cass, and went on to the other
rooms.

In that stilly house he continued to hear her jaunty cat-slang till
she had gone into the gray room, the last and largest of the six
master's-bedrooms.  Then he jumped, at a long and terrified moan.
He hurried across the hall.  Cleo was crouched, staring at the bed
upon which had died his mother, that silent and bitter woman
christened Marah Nord.

The tiny animal shivered and whimpered till he compassionately
snatched it up and cuddled it at his neck.  It shivered once more
and, as he took it back to his own den, it began timidly to purr,
in a language older than the Egyptian.

"Too many ghosts in this house, Cleo.  You must drive them out--you
and SHE.  I have lived too long among shadows."



3


Bound for Dr. Drover's and the presumable delights of dinner, he
walked down Varennes Boulevard, past the houses of the very great:
the red-roofed Touraine chateau of Webb Wargate, the white-pillared
brick Georgian mansion (with a terrace, and box-trees in wine jars)
of the fabulous contractor, Boone Havock, and the dark granite
donjon and the bright white Colonial cottage (oversize) in which
dwelt and mutually hated each other the rival bankers Norton Trock
and John William Prutt.

On his judge's salary, without the inheritance from his father,
Cass could never have lived in this quarter.  It was the Best
Section; it was Mayfair, where only Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, and the more Gothic Methodists--all Republicans
and all golf-players--lived on a golden isle amid the leaden surges
of democracy.

He turned left on Schoolcraft Way, into a neighborhood not so
seraphic yet still soundly apostolic and Republican, and came to
the square yellow-brick residence of his friend, Dr. Roy Drover.
Roy said, and quite often, that his place might not be so fancy as
some he knew, but it was the only completely air-conditioned house
in town, and it had, in the Etruscan catacombs of its basement, the
most powerful oil furnace and the best game-room, or rumpus room--
with a red-and-silver bar, a billiard table, a dance-floor, and a
rifle-range--in all of Grand Republic, which is to say in all of
the Western Hemisphere.

With the possible exception of Bradd Criley the lawyer, Dr. Drover
was Cass's closest friend.

Roy was two years older than Cass, who was two years older than
Bradd, and it is true that in boyhood, four years make a
generation, yet from babyhood to college days, Cass and Roy and
Bradd had formed an inseparable and insolently exclusive gang, to
the terror of all small animals within hiking distance of Grand
Republic.  They did such pleasurable killing together; killing
frogs, killing innocent and terrified snakes, killing gophers, and
later, when they reached the maturity of shot guns, killing ducks
and snipe and rabbits.  Like Indians they had roamed this old
Chippewa Indian land, familiars of swamp and crick (not creek),
cousins to the mink and mushrat (not muskrat), heroes of swimming
hole and ice-skating and of bobsledding down the long, dangerous
Ottawa Heights.  And once, finding a midden filled with stone
slivers, they had been very near to their closest kin, the unknown
Indians of ten thousand years ago, who came here for stone weapons
when the last glacier was retreating.

Growing older, they had shown variations of civilization and
maturity.  Bradd Criley had become a fancy fellow, wavy-haired and
slick about his neckties, a dancing man and a seducer of girls,
adding industry to his natural talents for the destruction of
women.  Cass Timberlane had gone bookish and somewhat moral.  Only
Roy Drover, graduating from medical school and becoming a neat
surgeon, a shrewd diagnostician, a skillful investor of money and,
before forty, a rich man, had remained entirely unchanged, a savage
and a small boy.

He preferred surgery, but in a city as small as Grand Republic, he
could not specialize entirely, and he kept up his practice as a
physician.

At forty-three, Dr. Drover looked fifty.  He was a large man, tall
as Cass Timberlane and much thicker, with a frontier mustache, a
long black 1870-cavalryman mustache, a tremendous evangelical
voice, and a wide but wrinkled face.

In a way, he was not a doctor at all.  He cared nothing for people
except as he could impress them with his large house, his log
fishing-lodge, named "Roy's Rest," in the Arrowhead Lake Region,
and his piratical airplane trips to Florida, where he noisily
played roulette and, taking no particular pains to conceal it from
his wife, made love to manicure girls posing as movie actresses and
completely fooling the contemptuously shrewd Dr. Drover.

When Roy was drunk--that did not happen often, and never on a night
before he was to operate--he got into fights with doormen and taxi-
drivers, and always won them, and always got forgiven by the
attendant policeman, who recognized him as one of their own hearty
sort, as a medical policeman.

He played poker, very often and rather late, and he usually won.
He read nothing except the Journal of the American Medical
Association, the newspapers, and his ledger.  Because he liked to
have humble customers call him "Doc," he believed that he was a
great democrat, but he hated all Jews, Poles, Finns, and people
from the Balkans, and he always referred to Negroes as "darkies" or
"smokes."

He said loudly, "Speaking as a doctor, I must tell you that it is a
scientifically proven fact that all darkies, without exception, are
mentally just children, and when you hear of a smart one, he's just
quoting from some renegade white man.  Down South, at Orlando, I
got to talking to some black caddies, and they said, 'Yessir, Mr.
White Man, you're dead right.  We don't want to go No'th.  Up
there, they put you to work!'  All the darkies are lazy and dumb,
but that's all right with me.  They'll never have a better friend
than I am, and they all know it, because they can see I understand
'em!"

Roy's most disgusted surprise had been in meeting a New York
internist who told him that in that Sidon there was an orchestra
made up of doctors, who put their spare time in on Mozart instead
of duck-hunting.

From land investments, which he made in co-operation with Norton
Trock, Roy had enough capital to make sure that his two sons would
not have to be driven and martyred doctors, like him, but could
become gentlemanly brokers.

Roy and his pallid wife, Lillian, were considered, in Grand
Republic, prime examples of the Happy Couple.

She hated him, and dreaded his hearty but brief embraces, and
prayed that he would not turn the two boys, William Mayo Drover and
John Erdmann Drover, into his sort of people, Sound, Sensible,
Successful Citizens with No Nonsense about Them.



Cass Timberlane knew, in moments of mystic enlightenment, that
whether or not Roy Drover was his best friend, there was no
question but that Roy was his most active enemy.

He had for years mocked Cass's constant reading, his legal
scruples, his failure to make slick investments, and his shocking
habit of listening to Farmer-Laborites.  After Cass had become a
judge, Roy grumbled, "I certainly wish I could make my money as
easy as that guy does--sitting up there on his behind and letting
the other fellows do the work."  Tonight, Cass sighed that Roy
would certainly ridicule Jinny Marshland, if he ever met that young
woman.

But Roy had been his intimate since before he could remember.
There had never been any special reason for breaking with him and,
like son with father, like ex-pupil with ex-teacher, Cass had an
uneasy awe of his senior and a longing--entirely futile--to make an
impression on him.  Cass's pride in being elected to Congress and
the bench was less than in being a better duck-shot than Roy.



There were present, for dinner and two tables of bridge, the
Drovers, Cass, Christabel Grau, the Boone Havocks, and the Don
Pennlosses.

Chris Grau was the orphaned daughter of a wagon-manufacturer.  She
was much younger than the others, and she was invited as an extra-
woman partner for Cass.  She was a plump and rather sweet spinster
of thirty-two who, until the recent taking off, had suffered from
too much affectionate mother.  She not only believed that in the
natural course of events Cass would fall in love with her and marry
her, but also that there is any natural course of events.  Rose
Pennloss, wife of the rather dull and quite pleasant Donald, the
grain-dealer, was Cass's sister, but Cass and she liked each other
and let each other alone.

It was Boone Havock and his immense and parrot-squawking wife
Queenie who were the great people, the belted earl and terraced
countess, of the occasion; they were somewhat more energetic and
vastly more wealthy than Dr. Drover, and it was said that Boone was
one of the sixteen most important men in Minnesota.

He had started as a lumberjack and saloon-bouncer and miner and
prizefighter--indeed, he had never left off, and his success in
railroad-contracting, bridge-building, and factory-construction was
due less to his knowledge of how to handle steel than to his
knowledge of how to battle with steel-workers.  But he owned much
of the stock in the genteel Blue Ox National Bank, and he was
received with flutters in the gray-velvet and stilly office of the
bank-president, Norton Trock.

Queenie Havock had the brassiest voice and the most predictable
anti-labor prejudices in Grand Republic; her hair looked like
brass, and her nose looked somewhat like brass, and she was such a
brass-hearted, cantankerous, vain, grasping, outrageous old brazen
harridan that people describing her simply had to add, "But Queenie
does have such a sense of humor and such a kind heart."

It was true.  She had the odd and interesting sense of humor of a
grizzly bear.



For a town which was shocked by the orgies of New York and
Hollywood, there was a good deal of drinking in Grand Republic.
All of them, except Chris Grau and Roy Drover, had three cocktails
before dinner.  Roy had four.

Throughout dinner, and during vacations from the toil of bridge,
the standard conversation of their class and era was carried on.
If Cass and his sister, Rose, did not chime in, they were too
accustomed to the liturgy to be annoyed by it.

This was the credo, and four years later, the war would make small
difference in its articles:

Maids and laundresses are now entirely unavailable; nobody at all
has any servants whatsoever; and those who do have, pay too much
and get nothing but impertinence.

Strikes must be stopped by law, but the Government must never in
any way interfere with industry.

All labor leaders are crooks.  The rank and file are all virtuous,
but misled by these leaders.

The rank and file are also crooks.

Children are now undisciplined and never go to bed till all-hours,
but when we were children, we went to bed early and cheerfully.

All public schools are atrocious, but it is not true that the
teachers are underpaid, and, certainly, taxes must be kept down.

Taxes, indeed, are already so oppressive that not one of the
persons here present knows where his next meal or even his next
motor car will come from, and these taxes are a penalty upon the
industrious and enterprising, imposed by a branch of the Black Hand
called "Bureaucracy."

America will not get into this war between Hitler and Great
Britain, which will be over by June, 1942.

But we are certainly against Fascism--because why?--because Fascism
just means Government Control, and we're against Government Control
in Germany OR in the United States!  When our Government quits
interfering and gives Industry the green light to go ahead, then
we'll show the world what the American System of Free Enterprise
can do to provide universal prosperity.

Boone Havock can still, at sixty, lick any seven Squareheads in his
construction gangs; he carries on his enterprises not for profit--
for years and years that has been entirely consumed by these taxes--
but solely out of a desire to give work to the common people.  He
once provided a fine running shower-bath for a gang in Kittson
County, but none of the men ever used it, and though he himself
started with a shovel, times have changed since then, and all
selfless love for the job has departed.

Dr. Drover also carries on solely out of patriotism.

The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a woman who has so
betrayed her own class that she believes that miners and Negroes
and women are American citizens, ought to be compelled by law to
stay home.

We rarely go to the movies, but we did just happen to see a pretty
cute film about gang-murder.

The Reverend Dr. Quentin Yarrow, pastor of St. Anselm's P.E., is a
fine man, very broad-minded and well-read, and just as ready to
take a drink or shoot a game of golf as any regular guy.

Jay Laverick, of the flour mills, is a fine man, a regular guy,
always ready to shoot a game of golf or take a drink, but he has
been hitting up the hard stuff pretty heavy since his little wife
passed away, and he ought to remarry.

Cass should certainly remarry, and we suspect that it is Chris
Grau, also present, whom Cass has chosen and already kissed--at
least.

You can't change human nature.

We don't fall for any of these 'isms.

While we appreciate wealth--it shows that a man has ability--maybe
Berthold Eisenherz, with his brewery and half the properties on the
Blue Ox Range that are still producing iron ore, and this damn
showy picture of his by some Frenchman named Renoir, is TOO
wealthy.  He never shoots golf or shoots ducks, which looks pretty
queer for a man rich as that.  What the devil does he do with
himself?

Some of these smart-aleck critics claim that Middlewestern
businessmen haven't changed much since that book--what's its name?--
by this Communist writer, Upton Sinclair--"Babbitt," is it?--not
changed much since that bellyache appeared, some twenty years ago.
Well, we'd like to tell those fellows that in these twenty-odd
years, the American businessman has changed completely.  He has
traveled to Costa Rica and Cuba and Guatemala, as well as Paris,
and in the Reader's Digest he has learned all about psychology and
modern education.  He's been to a symphony concert, and by
listening to the commentators on the radio, he has now become
intimate with every branch of Foreign Affairs.

"As an ex-Congressman, don't you think that's true?" demanded Don
Pennloss.

"Why, I guess it is," said Cass.



He had tried to bring into the conversation the name of Jinny
Marshland, but he had found no links between her and taxes or Costa
Rica.  Now he blurted, "Say, I had a pleasant experience in court
today."

Roy Drover scoffed, "You mean you're still working there?  The
State still paying you good money for just yelling 'Overruled!'
every time a lawyer belches?"

"They seem to be.  Well, we had a pretty dull sidewalk case but one
witness was an unusually charming girl--"

"We know.  You took her into your chambers and conferred with her!"
bellowed Boone Havock.

"He did not.  He's no fat wolf like you, you lumberjack!" screamed
Queenie.

"Good gracious, I didn't know it was so late.  Quarter past eleven.
Can I give you a lift, Cass?" said Chris Grau.



4


"I'll drop you at your house, and if you ask me very prettily, I'll
come in for a night-cap," said Chris, outside the Drovers'.

"No, I'll tell you:  I'll drive you home in your car, and then walk
back to my house."

"Walk?  Back?  At this time of night?  Why, it's almost two miles!"

"People have walked two miles."

"Not unless they were playing golf."

"All right, I'll borrow a cane from Roy and a condensed-milk can
and knock it all the way back."

"Cassy, you are the most contrary man living!"

He hated being called "Cassy," like a slave in Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and he did not want Chris at his house.  For the hour or two
before he went to bed, late as usual, he wanted to be alone.  He
had to look after the welfare of his new friend, Cleo.  He wanted
to think, at least to think of what it was that he wanted to think
about.  And, like most men who sometimes complain of being lonely,
he just liked to be alone.

Chris did not go on teasing him.  He had to admit that, fusser and
arranger and thwarted mother though she was, Chris liked to do
whatever her men wanted.

At thirty-two, Christabel Grau was a round and soft and taffy-
colored virgin with strands of gray.  If Jinny Marshland was like
Cleo, a thin and restless and exciting young cat, Chris was the
serene tabby cuddled and humming on the hearth.

As they drove to her home, she speculated, with an unusual
irritation, "Didn't you think they were dull tonight?"

"I thought they talked about as usual."

"No, you didn't.  For some reason, you were sizing them up tonight,
and that started me noticing that--Oh, they're all darlings, and so
smart--my, I bet there isn't a doctor at the Mayos' that's as
clever as Roy--but they always make the same jokes, and they're so
afraid of seeming sentimental.  Roy wouldn't ever admit how he
loves his collection of Florida shells, and of course Boone is as
moony as a girl about his Beethoven records, and Queenie says he'll
sit by himself for hours listening to 'em, even the hard quartets,
and he's read all the lives of the composers, but he pretends he
just has the records to show off.  We're all so scared of getting
out of the groove here, don't you think?"

"Yes--yes," said Cass, who hadn't heard a word.

"But I do love Grand Republic so."

"Yes."



Chris lived on the top floor of her ancestral mansion on Beltrami
Avenue South, in the old part of town, in the valley.  And on that
street Cass had been born.  Forty years ago it had been the citadel
of the select residential district, where dwelt all that was rich
and seemly.  Cass's present home, Bergheim, was aged, but the other
houses on Ottawa Heights had been built since 1900.  These new
mansions did well in the matter of Mount Vernon pillars and lumpy
French-farmhouse towers, but they were plain as warehouses compared
with the Beltrami Avenue relics, which had an average of twenty-two
wooden gargoyles apiece, and one of which exhibited not only a
three-story tower but had a Tudor chimney running through it.

Many of these shrines had been torn down to save taxes, and others
turned into a home for nuns, a home for pious Lutheran old ladies,
a business college, a Y.W.C.A.  In seventy years, the Belgravia of
Grand Republic had been built and become an historic ruin, and men
whose own frail tissues had already lasted more than eighty years,
looking upon a granite castle now become a school for the anxious
daughters of improbable gentry, whispered in awe, "Why, that house
is old as the hills--almost seventy-five years old!"

But Chris Grau, after her mother's death, had thriftily remodeled
their three-story-and-basement residence into seven apartments,
keeping the top floor for herself and renting the rest.  "Chris is
an A 1 business-woman," said Roy Drover, and Roy would know.

Cass was "just coming in for a second, for one drink," but he felt
relaxed, he felt at home, and wanted to linger in that room,
feminine yet firm, lilac-scented, with soft yellow walls and chairs
in blue linen, with many flowers and a Dutch-tile fireplace and all
the newest new books about psychology and Yugo-Slavian prime
ministers, many of which Chris had started to read.

She mixed a highball for him, without talking about it.  She had
excellent Bourbon--she was a good and intelligent woman.  She sat
on the arm of his chair, a chair that was just deep enough for him;
she smoothed his hair, without ruffling it, she kissed his temple,
without being moist, and she slipped away and sat casually in her
own chair before he had time to think about whether he had any
interest in caresses tonight.

"Yes, we were all awfully obvious, tonight," she meditated.  "Why
didn't you bawl us out?"

"I'm not an uplifter, Chris.  People are what they are.  You learn
that in law-practice.  I haven't the impertinence to tell old
friends how I think they ought to talk."

"You pretend to be nothing but scholarship and exactness, but
you're really all affection for the people you know."

"You'll be saying I'm a sentimentalist next, Chris."

"Well, aren't you?  You even love cats."

"Hate 'em!"

--Why did I lie like that?

"Cassy, I--Oh, I'm sorry, CASS!"

--She even sees when I'm offended, without my having to rub her
nose in it.  I could be very solid and comfortable if I married
her.  She'd give warmth to that chilly old house.  We belong
together; we're both Old Middlewest, informal but not rackety.
Let's see:  Chris must be nine years younger than I am, and--

She was talking on:  "Speaking of uplift, I'll never give up hoping
that some day you'll be a United States Senator or on the Supreme
Court Bench.  There isn't a man in the United States who has more
to give the public."

"No, no, Chris, that's sheer illusion.  I'm simply a backwoods
lawyer.  You know, any legal gent looks considerably larger and
brighter, up there on the bench."

"I won't have you--"

"Besides, I feel lost in Washington.  One brown rabbit doesn't mean
much in that menagerie of cassowaries."

"What IS a cassowary?"

"Eh?  Damned if I know.  I think it's a bird."

"I'll look it up, right now."

"Not now.  I really want to talk to you."

"Well, it's about time!"

They smiled, secretly and warmly.  She seemed to him as intimate
and trusty as his own self when she went on:

"Maybe it was because Blanche was so ambitious that you disliked
Washington.  An impossible wife for you!"

"I didn't dislike the place--people walking under the trees in the
evening, like a village.  It's just that I have some kind of an
unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic--
help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens.  It's
this northern country--you know, stark and clean--and the brilliant
lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward--it may be a new
kind of land for a new kind of people, and it's scarcely even
started yet."

"Oh, I know!"

--She loves this place, too.  She has roots, where Blanche has
nothing but aerial feelers.  Hm.  She's thirty-two.  She could
still have half a dozen children.  I'd like children around me, and
not just Mrs. Higbee and Cleo and a radio and a chessboard.

Chris came, not too impulsively, to kneel before him and clasp both
his hands, as she said trustingly:

"Of course you know best.  The only reason why I'd like to see you
in the Senate is that Grand Republic would be so proud of you!"
Her eyes were all his, her voice was gentle, and her lips were not
far from his.  "Though maybe that's silly, Cass, because I guess
the town couldn't be any prouder of you than it is already--no
prouder than I am, right now!"

There was a scent of apple-blossoms about her.  He leaned forward.
Without moving, she seemed to be giving herself to him.  Her hand
was at her soft bosom and her lips lifted.

Then, from far off, he heard the wailing of a frightened kitten,
gallant but hard-pressed.

Without willing it, he was on his feet, blurting good night,
hastening home to the small black absurdity of Cleo.



5


His panic was gone before he had stepped like a soldier eight
blocks in that nipping northern air and begun to mount the Heights.
The streets were friendly with the fresh-leaved elms and maples for
which Grand Republic was notable; the cherries were in blossom, and
the white lilacs and mountain ash.

There were dark groves along the way, and alleys that rose sharply
and vanished around curves, there were gates in brick walls and
hedges; a quality by night which was odd and exciting to Cass
Timberlane, a life to be guessed at, not too plain.  This was no
prairie town, flat and rectangular, with every virtue and crusted
sin exposed.

As he climbed, he could see the belated lights of farmhouses on the
uplands across the valley, the lights of buses down on Chippewa
Avenue, and in simplicity he loved his city now instead of fretting
that its typical evening conversation was dull--as dull as that of
Congressmen in the cloakroom or newspaper correspondents over the
poker table.  But he fretted over himself and his perilous single
state, with nervousness about the fact that Chris Grau was likely
at any time to pick him up and marry him.

--No, I'll never marry again.  I'd never be a good husband.  I'm
too solemn--maybe too stuffy.  I'm too devoted to the law.

--Am I?

--I must get married.  I can't carry on alone.  Life is too
meaningless when you have no one for whom you want to buy gifts, or
steal them.

--If I did marry, I think that this time I could make a go of it.
I understand women a LITTLE better now.  I shouldn't have minded
Blanche's love of tinsel, but just laughed at her.  And Chris
thinks of other people.  With her, I'd be happier and happier as
the years went by--

--Lord, that sounds so aged!  It was her youth that I liked so much
in that girl on the witness-stand yesterday--or today, was it?
What was her name again--Virginia something? . . .  Curious.  I
can't see her any more!



In law-school, at the University of Minnesota, Cass had listened to
a lecture by that great advocate, Hugo Lebanon of Minneapolis, had
gone up glowingly to talk with him, and had been invited to dinner
at the Lebanon marble palace on Lake of the Isles.  There was a
tall, pale, beautiful daughter named Blanche.

So Cass married the daughter.

She was emphatic about being a pure Anglo-Saxon who went right
back, even if Warwickshire remained curiously unstirred about her
going right back, to a gray stone house in Warwick.  She was the
more vigorously pure about it because there were whispers of Jewish
blood.  She found it hard to put up with the mongrel blood of the
furniture-dealing Timberlanes, and she was revolted when Cass
estimated that through his father, he was three-eighths British
stock, one-sixteenth French Canadian, and one-sixteenth Sioux
Indian--whence, he fondly believed, came his tall, high-cheeked
spareness--and through his mother he was two-eighths Swedish, one-
eighth German, one-eighth Norwegian.

Blanche did not, after the magnitude and salons of Minneapolis,
much like Grand Republic.  When she came there as a bride, in 1928,
the Renoir had not yet arrived, so there was no one to talk to.

She encouraged Cass to run for Congress; she served rye, with her
own suave hands, to aldermen and county commissioners.  Cass and
she attained Washington, and she loved it like a drunkard, and
loved the chance of meeting--at least of being in the same populous
rooms with--French diplomats and Massachusetts senators and
assorted Roosevelts.  When Cass felt swamped, as a lone
representative among more than four hundred, when he longed for the
duck pass and his law-office and the roaring of Roy Drover, when he
refused to run for re-election, Blanche rebelled.  She was not
going back to listen to Queenie Havock shrieking about her love-
life, she shouted, and Cass could not blame her, though he did sigh
that there were also other sounds audible in Grand Republic.

There was a mild, genial Englishman, Fox Boneyard, an importer of
textiles, who lived in New York but was often about Washington; he
had the unfortunate illusions about beautiful American women that
Englishmen sometimes do have, and he also had more money than the
Honorable Cass Timberlane.

Blanche married him.

During the divorce, Cass did have sense enough to refuse to pay
alimony to a woman who was marrying a richer man, and who had never
consented to having children.  But he still loved Blanche enough to
hate her, and to hate convulsively the sight of a coat she had left
behind, and the wrinkles in it that had come from her strong
shoulders.  He underwent the familiar leap from partisanship and
love to enmity and a sick feeling that he had been betrayed.

He grimly finished his last days in Congress, and then quite
dramatically went to pieces.  He was a feeling man, and with a
whisky breath and unshaved, he was an interesting figure in water-
front cafes in Trinidad and Cartagena, and to his white cruel love
he paid the tribute of being sick in toilets and talking to other
saintly idiots about having lost his soul.

But even love for Blanche could not keep Cass Timberlane at this
romantic business for more than two months, and after another six,
most of them sedately spent in and about the Temple in London, he
returned to the affection of Grand Republic, and practised law for
three more years before he was elected to the bench.

Election was not easy.  The routine politicians disliked him
because he had left Congress, because he could not be guided, and
because he made fun of all clauses in political speeches beginning
with "than whom."  The churches, particularly the Lutherans, who
were powerful in Radisson County, disapproved of him because he had
been divorced.  The Republicans were doubtful about him because he
had been amiable with Farmer-Labor leaders, and the Farmer-
Laborites distrusted him because he lived in a large house.  In
fact, there was really no reason for his being elected except that
he was known to be honest, courageous, and learned, and that he had
once lent a grateful and active Norwegian farmer five dollars.

But he was a judge now, and the district had the fixed habit of
him, and if he would only marry a sound churchwoman, like
Christabel Grau, and give a little more attention to the Chamber of
Commerce and to his bridge game, he might go on forever, a sound
and contented Leading Citizen.



6


He was thinking of Chris Grau as he entered the long hallway of
Bergheim, lit only by a bogus-ancient pierced-brass lamp.  Then
Cleo, the midnight-colored kitten, was galloping up to him, warming
his ankles, purring frantically, and with that ecstatic rhythm
there came back to him Jinny Marshland's name and the vision of her
face that he had lost: the surprising smallness of her face, the
absurd hawk nose, the jaunty hair hanging to her shoulders, the
bright curiosity in her eyes, her plunging youthful walk.

He lifted Cleo and thought how light Jinny would be to lift.  Cleo
sat in his lap while he worked out a chess-problem for nightcap;
she moaned only a little when he played the flute for a moment; and
when he put her back into the box filled with clipped paper that
Mrs. Higbee had provided behind the kitchen stove, Cleo made a
business of curling round and sleeping, as a cat who belonged there
and liked it.

"A very sound kitten," Cass pronounced, and went comfortably up to
bed, pleasant in the thought that tomorrow the kitten would be
here, that some time this week he could most certainly see Jinny.

He awoke rigid under the familiar torture which some dozen times a
year the mysterious Enemy inflicted upon him: the torture of being
bored by the too-frequent presence of his own self, bored to cold
emptiness by the inescapable and unchanging sight and sound of Cass
Timberlane, a man whom he usually respected, sometimes found
slightly funny, but of whose complaints and futile plans, round and
round in the mind, of whose demands for incessant attention, of
whose mirrored gawky face, of whose heavy voice, a murky cloud
forever in the air about him, he was sick to a state of fury.
Could he never get away from that man?  Was he condemned forever to
awaken to the sight of that thick brown plowman's-hand on the
blanket, to the intrusiveness of that man's inevitable whining
daydream:  "I will find my companion; I'll go on a journey
somewhere and I'll find her; I'll tell her about Grand Republic and
she'll want to come here, and we'll have a real family, with trust
and serenity, and I'll be a judge that--people will say, 'His court
is the model of fairness and mercy,' and she will be glad of it;
SHE--"

Oh, so that intrusive man was going to fall in love now, was he,
with his "Look at me!  How exciting I am!"  If he could only forget
the name and essence of Cass Timberlane and be blissfully
submerged, not in some rainbow-striped Oversoul but in the
tenderness of one other person.

Then he was sick of being sick of too-much-self, and with the
bright thought of Jinny he drove out his tired brooding upon his
brooding.

She actually did exist.  He had seen her.  In her was tolerant
friendship, and in her fresh cheeks and young bosom there was
promise of salvation by passion.  With her he could escape into the
refuge of the Quiet Mind, away equally from the lonely Cass and
from a world of booming politics and oratory.

Was Jinny too young for him?  Nonsense!  He was only forty-one, and
stronger than any of these jazz-mad youngsters.  And she would make
him still younger, along with her.

He went to sleep in dreams of a Jinny to whom, actually, he had
never said anything whatever except, "I think you'd better confine
yourself to answering the questions, without comment, Miss
Marshland."

There was nothing of the repining hermit in the Cass who leaped up
in the morning, greeted Cleo, who considered his toes very funny,
had a shower-bath and a scrupulous shave (telling himself, as
always, that the electric razor was a very fine Modern Invention),
greeted Mrs. Higbee, wolfed griddle cakes and sausages, and tramped
out upon the fresh May morning and the courts of law.

George Hame, his court-reporter, greeted him filially, though
George was only three years younger, and filled his inkwell and his
water carafe and opened his mail.

The mail was of the usual: sixteen widows who had been cheated, of
whom seven sounded as though they ought to have been; and sixteen
organizations which desired the Judge to send in a little
contribution.

The other two judges of the district came in cordially:  Judge
Stephen Douglas Blackstaff, the Old Roman, and Judge Conrad
Flaaten, who was Lutheran but gay.  Judge Blackstaff wanted a
cigarette and Judge Flaaten wanted advice, and between them and the
mail and George Hame's admiration, Cass felt like his own man
again, resolute and happy in his workshop.

When he marched out into the court room and the bailiff pounded his
table and the nine persons present, besides the jury and the
officers of court, all made motions somewhat like rising in his
honor, then all the dread of too-much-self had gone out of Cass,
along with much of his excitement about a stray young woman named
Marshland, and he was again the tribal chieftain on his leather
throne.

The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic was
concluded, and her many friends will be pleased to know that the
jury was out for only sixteen minutes and awarded her $200 out of
the $500 for which she had sued.  Judge Timberlane reflected that
Miss Hatter was almost certain to put on a spread for Jinny and her
other boarders, with Bourbon, Coca-Cola, liverwurst, stuffed
olives, and chocolate layer cake.

He went for lunch not to the proper Federal Club, where bankers and
lawyers and grain-dealers sat around being high-class, but to the
Athletic Club, which admitted Jews and Unitarians.  He hoped to see
Lucius Fliegend, the pasteboard-toy manufacturer, Jinny's boss.

On his way he went along Chippewa Avenue and saw the humble
magnificence of the town's business center: the up-rearing
limestone and aluminum of the Blue Ox National Bank, the bookshop
that with a building of imitation half-timber tried to suggest the
romance and antiquity of England, the one complete department
store, Tarr's Emporium, with four vast floors crammed with
treasures from Burma and Minneapolis, and the Bozard Beaux Arts
Women's Specialty Shops, which everyone said was just as smart as
New York or Halle Brothers of Cleveland.

Among the bustling citizens who looked like everybody else on every
principal avenue from Bangor to Sacramento, there were trout-
fishermen in high boots and Finnish section-hands and Swedish corn-
planters from the prairie.

Grand Republic was metropolitan-looking in its black-glass and
green-marble shop fronts, its uniformed traffic policemen with Sam
Browne belts and pistol holsters, its florists' windows and La
Marquise French Candy Shop, but it was small enough so that he was
greeted--usually as "Judge," often as "Cass," occasionally as
"Jedge"--five times on every block, while the Policemen touched
their caps in salute.  Grand Republic was small enough so that a
Mrs. George Hame had at least met a Mrs. Webb Wargate, and ventured
to say, in church lobby, "Well, how is your boy Jamie doing in
school, Mrs. Wargate?"  It was small enough so that the Judge could
know how the whole city worked, but it was also small enough so
that Harley Bozard, coming out of his shop, already knew that Cass
had taken Chris Grau home last evening, and leered, "What's this I
hear you're going to drive into the matrimonial slew again, Cass?"

It was all friendly; it restored his soul.  He was too used to them
to note the hideousness of a black old stone hotel with massive
portals and torn lace curtains, and the car-parking lots that were
like sores on the wholesome limbs of the streets, or to reflect
that the only design for planning the city had always been the
dollar-sign.  What of that, when he could be greeted "H' are you,
old boy!" by Frank Brightwing, the real-estate man, who was
melodiously drunk on every Saturday evening and on every Sunday
morning, at the Baptist Church, was as unaffectedly pious and
hopeful as the cherubs he so much resembled.

The moment Cass was inside the railroad-station noisiness of the
Athletic Club, he hunted up Lucius Fliegend, a gentle person with a
thin beard, who might have been a professor of Greek.

He confessed, "Lucius, I'm ashamed that I haven't been around here
lately, looking for a game of chess."

"You young fellows, you politicians, don't appreciate chess.  In
the good old days here, the lumbermen and the gamblers in iron-
leases used to go out and steal a million dollars and come home and
drink a quart of red-eye and sit down to six hours of chess.  Now,
they steal only a thousand, and then play bridge and drink gin, a
lady's drink.  Will you choose your pawn?"

After the game (which Lucius won), Cass spoke abruptly, for this
was an honest and understanding man.  "Yesterday in court I saw a
young lady who says she works for you.  Miss Marshland.  I'd like
to really meet her."

"Jinny is a lovely girl.  Erica and I are fond of her.  She is
ambitious, but not in the sharp, bitter way of so many of these
young career women.  She's quite a good draftsman.  She has a nice
fantastic taste--she does some very funny pasteboard dolls for me.
And she's beautiful, but she's also a frail, over-engined girl who
will either burn herself out or fall in love with some appealing
scamp who'll break her heart, unless some solid man traps her
first."

"But would she LIKE a solid man?"

"I doubt it.  And, though he'd find it interesting, I don't know
how much he'd enjoy nursing a young black panther."

"She's probably already engaged."

"I don't think so; merely has a lot of young men friends.  But with
all her fire, she's domestic.  Her father is a druggist up here in
Pioneer Falls, a pleasant fellow.  He taught Jinny her Latin at the
age of ten.  Of course she forgot it at the age of twelve.  She's a
good girl and--"

"When will you invite us to dinner together?"

"Some time soon."

"No!  Much sooner than that!"

"Very well.  Next Saturday evening, provided Jinny isn't out
canoeing with some handsome young man."

"Excellent!"

He was thinking of that "handsome young man" and astonished to find
in himself a jealousy not coy but bitter and real.  He hated
jealousy and all its rotten fruits, as he had seen them in court,
hated that sour suspiciousness which ferments in love, yet over a
girl to whom he had once said just fourteen words, he was mildly
homicidal toward an imaginary young man.

"I seem to be falling in love," he thought profoundly.



7


Cass was disappointed when Mrs. Fliegend telephoned to him not to
dress for dinner.  He would have liked to show Jinny how stately he
could be.  But she reported that Jinny was "so thrilled to meet
you; she thinks you were wonderful on the bench--so wise--and of
course Lucius and I do, too, Judge."

He stroked Cleo, and sounded like her.

After pondering on precedents, he decided that it was far enough on
in the spring for him to wear his white-flannel suit, with the tie
from Marshall Field's.  While he put these on, gravely, as though
he were studying a brief, he wondered how much he was going to like
Jinny.  So far, he merely loved her.

Would she be one of these Professional Youths?  Would she reek with
gum and with the slang suitable to it:  "Oh boy!" and "No soap" and
"That's what you think"?

"Oh, quit it!" he said, aloud--and Cleo promised that she would.

He was so elegant tonight that he drove to the Fliegends', instead
of walking.

The Fliegends' bulky old brown house was on South Beltrami, a block
from Chris Grau's.

He felt guilty of disloyalty to Chris in loving young Jinny, but he
felt even wickeder as he reflected that though he had been born
only three blocks from the Fliegends', he had not been in their
house since boyhood, and could not remember its rooms.  Probably
Chris and Bradd Criley and Boone Havock had never been inside it.
In "The Friendly City," as we call it, we don't shoot Jews and
Catholics and Socialists and saints.  We just don't go calling on
them.

Then Mrs. Fliegend was beaming on him at the door, while he
imagined her saying, "You phony politician!  You've never
condescended to come to our house till you wanted us to play
procurers for you.  You, the great Anglo-Saxon judge and gentleman--
you Sioux bastard!  Get out!"

Mrs. Fliegend must have wondered why Judge Timberlane seemed so
pleased by her mild greeting.

Looking past his hosts into the square living-room which made up
half the first floor, he saw no Jinny, but only a great blankness
where she should have been.

--Maybe she isn't coming?  Ditched me for that young man in the
canoe?

Mrs. Fliegend was soothing him, "Oh, she'll be here, Judge!"

--Is my youthful romance as obvious as all that?

Remembering it only from childhood, he had expected the interior of
the Fliegend house to be Oriental and over-rich.  But it was the
elder German and Yankee pioneers who had satin-brocaded walls and
Tudor fireplaces.  Here, the walls were of white paneled wood,
dotted with old maps of Minnesota and portraits of its early
heroes:  Ramsey, Sibley, Steele, Pike, Taliaferro.

"I didn't know you were such a collector of Minnesota items," said
Cass.

--That sounded fatuous and condescending.  I didn't mean to be.

Lucius explained, "I was born in Minnesota, in Long Prairie, and my
father before me, near Marine Mills, where my grandfather settled.
He fought through the Civil War, in the Third Minnesota.  We are of
the old generation."

Cass was meditating upon his rare gifts of ignorance when Jinny
Marshland flew into the room.

She was no wild little hawk now, but a young lady.  Her hair was
put up, sleek and tamed, and she wore a dress of soft black with,
at her pleated black girdle, one silver rose.  She was quick-moving
and friendly, and her greeting was almost excessive:  "I'm
terrified to meet you, Judge, after seeing you in court.  I thought
you were going to send me to Stillwater for contempt.  You won't
now, will you?"

Yet no spark came to him from her, and she was just another pretty
girl, another reed bending to the universal south wind.

The other guests, a couple who came in with shy bumptiousness, made
him feel as guilty at his neglect of them as had the Fliegends.
They were Dr. Silbersee, refugee Jewish eye-ear-throat specialist
from Vienna, 'cellist in the amateur double-quartet that was Grand
Republic's only musical wonder, and his wife Helma, who was equally
serious about the piano, Apfelkuchen, and the doctrines of the
post-Freudian psychoanalysts.

Cass had been fretting all week, after his session with Chris Grau,
that the local conversation was dull.  He had wished, for the
benefit of his unconscious protegee Jinny, to exhibit what he
conceived to be a real European conversazione, complete with Rhine
wine and seltzer.  He got it, too, this evening, and he didn't care
much for it.  He realized again, as he had in Washington and in
waterfront dives in Trinidad, that most conversation is dull.
Aside from shop-talk, which includes the whispering of lovers,
anything printed, a time-table or the rich prose of a tomato-catsup
label, is more stimulating than any talk, even the screaming of six
economists and an intellectual actress.

At dinner, the Fliegends and the Silbersees said that this fellow
Hitler was no good, that it had been warm today, that it might be
warmer tomorrow, that Toscanini was a good conductor, that rents in
Grand Republic were very high just now, and that there was a Little
Armenian Restaurant in Milwaukee.

It was, in perfection, New York, minus the taxi horns, and still
Cass was not satisfied, and, so far as he could see, neither was
Jinny.

At first, as the conversation took fire, she hadn't so much as a
chip to throw into it.  She sat mute, with her hands folded small
and flat and meek, and she had no observations on the subject of
Debussy, regarding which Lucius had represented her as highly
eloquent.  Cass decided that she was stupid, and that there wasn't
much to be said for himself either.

But he noticed how quickly her dark eyes turned from speaker to
speaker; how she weighed, and did not think very much of, her
ponderous elders.  Slowly he was hypnotized by her again; he felt
her independence and her impatience to do things.  Restless under
this middle-aged droning, he wanted to be on her side.  And he was
a little afraid of her.

But he made a good deal of progress in his romance.  To his
original fourteen words of address to her, he had now added sixty-
seven others, including, "No, no, you weren't late.  I think I was
ahead of time.  I guess my watch is fast."  No flowery squire could
have said it more colorfully.

The Fliegends were lenient hosts, and after dinner (roast goose and
potato pancakes, such heavenly stuff as Grand Republic rarely
knew), they wedged the Silbersees in beside the grand piano, and
sent Cass and Jinny "out to see the garden."

Like most houses in Grand Republic, where the first settlers
huddled together instead of taking ten acres for each garden, the
Fliegend abode was too close to its neighbors.  But they had
planted cedar hedges, and made a pool surrounded with wicker
benches that were, surprisingly, meant to be sat upon.  Cass and
Jinny did sit upon them, and he did not in the least feel that he
was sitting upon a pink cloud.  He was anxious to find out, while
still posing as a big superior man, whether Jinny considered him a
stuffy old party.

"Nice dinner," he said.

"Wasn't it?"

"This, uh, this Roy Harris they were talking about--do you know his
music?"

"Just a little."

"Uh--"

"I've just heard some of it played."

"Yes, uh--I guess--I guess Dr. Silbersee is a very fine musician."

"Yes, isn't he."

"Yes."

"You've heard him play, Judge?"

"Yes, uh--oh yes, I've heard him play.  A very fine 'cellist."

"Of course I don't know music well enough to tell, but I think he
must be and--"

Then it broke:

"Jinny!  Were you bored tonight?"

"How?"

"Our pompous talk."

"Why, I thought it was lovely talk.  I was so interested about the
conductors:  Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter."

"Oh.  You like musicians?"

"Love 'em.  If I really knew any.  But one thing did bother me."

"What?"

"I thought YOU were bored.  I was watching you, Judge."

"And I was watching you."

"Two kids among the grown-ups!"

They both laughed very much, and he was grateful for being included
in her conspiracy of youth.

The silent Jinny talked enough now.  "I thought they were all so
nice, and oh boy! are they ever learned!  I guess the people in
Vienna must be like them.  But I wanted to hear YOU talk."

"Why?"  It was too flagrant even to be called "fishing."

"I wanted to know how do criminals get that way, and can you help
them, and--I'll bet they're awed by you."

"Not much."

"I would be.  I was sort of disappointed by the court room, though.
I thought there'd be a whole mob, holding their breaths, and
sixteen reporters writing like mad, but they were--oh, as if they
were waiting for a bus.  But then when I looked at you--honestly,
you scared me, Judge!"

"Now, now!"

"You DID!"

"How could I?  Judge Blackstaff might, but I'm just a hometown
lawyer."

"You are not a home-town lawyer!  Oh, I mean you are, of course,
but I mean--you aren't ANY home-town lawyer!"  She sounded proud of
him, and eager.  "On the bench, you looked as if you knew
everything, and maybe you might be kind of sorry for me, for having
murdered my Aunt Aggie and stolen the sewing-machine oil-can, but
you'd put me away for ten years, for the good of society.  Wouldn't
you?"

"No, I'm afraid I'd resign from the bench first, Jinny."

"M!"  She sounded gratified, and with some energy he kept himself
from seizing her hand.  It was fated that he should now take the
next step, with "You came by bus, didn't you?  May I drive you
home?"

He, it seemed, might.

He said good night to the Fliegends and Silbersees with a feeling
of having enlarged his knowledge of Grand Republic.  When Jinny was
beside him in his car, the major purposes of his life seemed to
have been accomplished, even if he could express the ultimate glory
only by a hesitating, "It was a very pleasant evening, didn't you
think?"



8


The boarding-house of Miss Tilda Hatter was the hobohemia of Grand
Republic.  It occupied the two upper floors of a senile brick
building near Paul Bunyan Avenue, in a land of railroad sidings and
six-man factories.  On the ground floor of the building was the
Lilac Lady Lunchroom: T. Hatter, Prop., at whose counter and four
tousled tables eternal and poetic Youth could drink coffee and eat
blueberry pie a la mode, with ice cream disgustingly but sweetly
melting down into the blue-smeared debris, and talk about the high
probability of their going to Minneapolis and singing on the radio,
or going to Chicago and studying interior decorating.

Above the restaurant were a dozen bedrooms, with one bath, and a
living-room agreeably littered with skis, skates, unstrung tennis
rackets, stenographers' note-books, manuals on air-conditioning and
gas-engine construction, burnt-out portable radio sets, empty
powder compacts, empty gin bottles, and the Poetic Works of John
Donne, with the covers missing.  These upper rooms were reached by
a covered wooden outside staircase.

The building had once been a dry-goods store and once the offices
of a co-operative farmers' insurance company, and once a butcher-
shop with a fancy-house above it, in which two young ladies had
murdered the melancholy butcher.  But now it was all orderly as a
Y.W.C.A., and rather like it in the excessive amount of cigarette-
smoking.

As Cass and Jinny drove up to it, she insisted, "You must come up a
minute and say hello to Miss Hatter.  She's convinced the jury gave
her all that money only because you told them to, and she's one
person that really worships you."

"Meaning that somebody else doesn't?"

His wheedling tone, the distractedness with which he turned his
face toward her and so ran the car up on the curb as he was
parking, were not to be distinguished from the large idiocies of
any other injudicious young lover.  She answered only, "You'd be
surprised!  Come, it's one flight up."

He had a daring hope that this girl, so desirable, with her bright
face and young breast, did see him as the great man scattering
nobility from the high throne of the bench.  He knew that he wasn't
anything of the kind, but merely a business umpire in a dusty hall.
Yet if she could have such faith in him, she might lift him to
whatever greatness she imagined in him.  With solemnity and love he
followed her up the flat-sounding steps and into the boarding-house
salon.

Miss Hatter was mixing a heady beverage of gin, Coca-Cola, creme de
rose, and tea, standing at a sloppy pine table, while four young
people sat near her on the floor--not because there were no chairs
but because they were at the age and intellectual claimancy when
one does sit on the floor.

Miss Hatter screamed, "Oh, Judge!"  As though he were a bishop or a
movie star.  "Jinny said she'd try to get you to drop in, but I
never dreamed she WOULD!"

--So this young woman had planned to have me drive her home.  Am I
gratified or do I feel let down?  Anyway, she looks so charming, in
fact, well, so aristocratic in her little black dress and that one
silver rose, among these hit-or-a-miss yearners here.

Miss Hatter was going on:  "Folks, this is Judge Timberlane.  My,
this is an honor.  I'll say it is!"

Jinny introduced her four companions of the arts as they sulkily
rose and dusted their knees.  They were not too young--twenty-four
to thirty--but the placid disregard of them by Grand Republic still
kept them youthful and belligerent.  They were Lyra Coggs,
assistant city librarian, Wilma Gunton, head of the cosmetics
department at Tarr's Emporium, Tracy Oleson, secretary to powerful
Webb Wargate and a young man who seemed to Cass interesting enough
to be looked at with suspicion, Eino Roskinen, aged twenty-four,
butter-maker at the Northward Co-operative Dairy but, as Jinny
explained, a born theater director.

Eino was a darkly serious young Finn; he looked at Jinny with what
Cass nervously saw to be the greatest fondness and at Cass with the
greatest dislike, so that Cass felt like an old windbag, though he
had as yet said nothing more than, "Well!  Good evening."

--So the struggle for her has started already.  And I'm not going
to give her up even to you, my Byronic young friend.

He was certain that Eino was an evil whelp, who meant no good to
Jinny.  He sat on a chair, near Miss Hatter, the only other person
of his age and uncomfortable dignity, while all five of the young
people were on the floor, chattering--especially the Jinny who had
been so silent at the Fliegends':

"You know, Judge, we think we have an intellectual center here.
Oh, we're tremendous.  Wilma is going to New York to start a
cosmetics company there--green lip-sticks--as soon as she can save
enough money to ride there in a box-car.  But our star is Eino.  He
has Theories.  He says that the new America isn't made up of
British stock and Irish and Scotch, but of the Italians and Poles
and Icelanders and Finns and Hungarians and Slovaks.  People like
you and me are the Red Indians of the country.  We'll either pass
out entirely or get put on reservations, where we can do our Yankee
tribal dances and wear our native evening clothes undisturbed.
Isn't that the idea, Eino?"

"Not entirely, Jinx.  We may allow full citizenship to some of the
Yankee tribesmen, if they learn the principles of cooperation and
give up their medicine-men--pastors they call 'em, I believe.  But
judges, now--I don't know about them.  They're too corrupted by the
native voodoo.  I don't know whether they can learn to speak the
American language."

"Don't you dare to say anything against Judge Timberlane!" screamed
Miss Hatter, and wondered why they all laughed at her, though
Cass's contributory laughter was on the pale side.

He was deciding, with a thrill of reality, that he hated Eino.

--That fatuous young pup!  Daring to call her "Jinx."  Or even
"Jinny," for that matter.  "Miss Virginia" is good enough for you,
my friend.  You and your Hunkies!  Just try bucking us Yankees!
By--the--way, my friend, do you happen to know that I'm scarcely
Yankee at all, that I'm part Scandinavian and part Sioux?  Of
course you don't!  And it makes me sick, when I wonder whether this
Eino has ever dared to put his arms around Jinny or kiss her lips.
Sick!

All the while he knew that he did not mean any of it, that Eino was
probably an excellent fellow.

--Funny.  I never was jealous like this about Blanche.  Wonder
where she is now.  I'll bet she's keeping that poor English husband
of hers busy digging out viscounts for her!



Miss Hatter, addressing him constantly as "Your Honor," was
explaining the wonderful things she was going to do with her
litigious $200, including false teeth for an aged cousin resident
in Beloochistan, Minnesota.  Tracy Oleson talked about canoe trips
in the Crane Lake country.  Jinny alleged that Dr. Silbersee had
once absently tried to remove tonsils from his 'cello.  But Eino
was scornful and still.

Cass was a friendly villager, and accustomed to friendliness from
others.  Even the forger whom he condemned to the state
Penitentiary seemed to feel that it was all very reasonable, and
Cass was dismayed now to feel hostility in the Eino to whom he was
entirely hostile!  Suddenly Cass wanted to run off to the security
of slippers and Cleo and a chess-problem.  In a wondrously nervous
state, between humble haughtiness and haughty humbleness before a
dramaturgic butter-maker, he tacked successfully for an hour, and
he was rewarded, when he said that it was time to go, by Jinny's
coming down the outside staircase with him.

The step at the foot of the stairs was no romantic site; it was a
scuffed and scabby plank which creaked.  In the small yard outside,
an old hen of a maple tree perched amid patchy short grass, and the
rusty old iron fence smelled of rusty old iron.  Across the street,
a man in a lighted upper window stood scratching himself.

But she was in the half-darkness with him; he saw her throat above
the soft black dress, he caught the scent of her hair, surely a
different scent from any other in the world.  She was herself
different from anyone else, a complete individual, courageous and
joyful and yet so fragile that she must be protected.  He held her
hand, and quaked with the feeling of it.  There was no doubt now,
he decided, that he was utterly in love with her, that her small
dim presence was a vast blazing temple.  She was not something that
he had imagined in his loneliness.  She was life.

He stumbled, "Look, Jinny.  Have you ever been to the Unstable for
dinner?"

"Just once."

"Like it?"

"It's fun."

"Will you dine with me there, next Tuesday or Wednesday?"

"I'd be glad to--say Tuesday."

The fact that she had chosen the earlier day was enough to send him
home singing "Mandalay," with much feeling and no tune.

After one in the morning, he sat in his leather chair and Cleo sat
on the hearth.  He was posing for himself a legal question:  Was he
trying to seduce Jinny?

That would be extremely agreeable, if it could be accomplished, and
not much more criminal than setting fire to a children's hospital.
Reputable men did do it.  It was obvious, he thought, that she was
a little too young and too spirited to marry him, and even if she
would accept him, would it not be a wickedness to introduce her in
that dullest of all sets in Grand Republic, to which, by habit, he
belonged?  He had seen girls, lively and defiant, marry
householders on Ottawa Heights, and within ten years become faintly
wrinkled at the neck, and given to stating as rigidly as their own
horrid grandmothers that all servants are thankless brutes.

And how well did Jinny understand him?  Would she be able to endure
it if he took off the grave judicial manner which he wore for
protection, and betrayed himself as a Midwestern Don Quixote, one-
sixteenth Sioux and one-sixteenth poet: a bridge-player who thought
that bridge was dull, a Careful Investor who sympathized with
hoboes, a calm and settled householder who envied Thoreau his cabin
and Villon his wild girls?

"I ought to marry some woman who likes what I'm trying to do.
Though I suppose I ought to find out first just what I am trying to
do!"

He ended his brooding with a cry that made Cleo leap protesting
into the air:

"I do love that girl so!"



9


The Unstable had been a stable and it had been a speakeasy and now
it was the local Pre-Catelan, nine miles out of town, on the bank
of the Big Eagle River, facing the rugged bluffs.  The interior was
in bright green, with chairs of polished steel and crimson
composition tables decorated with aluminum blossoms, in semi-
circular booths, and it had an orchestra of piano, saxophone,
violin, and drum.  By day, piano was a dry-goods clerk, saxophone
was a Wargate warehouse-hand, violin was a lady hair-dresser, and
drum was asleep.  Its food was the standard Steak & Chicken, but
its whisky was excellent.  Its most pious contribution to living
was that in this land where autumn too often trips on the heels of
spring and, except on picnics, people dine inside, it did have
outdoor tables, not of composition but of honest, old-fashioned,
beer-stained pine.

At such a table, in a grape-arbor, Cass and Jinny had dined slowly,
looking at each other oftener than at the crisp chicken, the fresh
radishes.  They had talked of their childhoods, and they seemed
united by fate when they found that he had, as a boy, hunted
prairie chickens in the vast round of wheat stubble just beyond her
native village of Pioneer Falls.

He urged, "You know what I'd like most to do, besides learning a
little law and maybe having a farm way up in the hills above the
Sorshay Valley?  I'd like to paddle a canoe, or at least my half of
the canoe, from New York City to Hudson's Bay, by way of the Hudson
and the Great Lakes and the old fur-trappers' trail at Grand
Portage, up here on Lake Superior.  It would take maybe six months,
camping out all that time.  Wouldn't that be exciting?"

"Ye-es."

"Do you think you'd like to go along?"

"I don't know--I'm afraid I've never planned anything like that."

"You can come in imagination, can't you?"

"Oh--maybe.  Provided we could go to New Orleans--in imagination!--
to rest up afterward, and live in the French Quarter in a flat with
an iron balcony, and eat gumbo.  Could we do that?"

"Why not!"

They saw that they need not all their lives stick to courts and
factories and city streets, but actually do such pleasant,
extravagant things . . . if they shaped life together.

He cried, "Approval from the higher court!  Look!"

The moon had come out from a black-hearted, brazen-edged cloud, to
illuminate the wide barley-fields on the uplands across the river,
with one small yellow light in a farmhouse, and the fantastically
carved and poplar-robed bluffs of the Big Eagle.  Wild roses gave
their dusty scent, and inside the rackety roadhouse, the jukebox
softly played Jerome Kern.  It was everything that was most
Christmas-calendar and banal:  June, moon, roses, song, a man and a
girl; banal as birth and death and war, banal and eternal; the
Perfect Moment which a man knows but a score of times in his whole
life.  All respectable-citizen thoughts about whether they should
be married, and should they keep the maple bedstead in the gray
room, were burned out of him, and he loved the maid as simply and
fiercely as any warrior.  He ceased to be just Cass Timberlane; he
was a flame-winged seraph guarding the gentle angel.  They floated
together in beauty.  They were not doing anything so common as to
hold hands; it was their spirits that reached and clung, made
glorious by the moment that would die.

When the moon was gone under a marbled cloud and the music ceased
and there was only silence and lingering awe, she whispered, so low
that he was not quite sure that she had said it, "That frightened
me!  It was too beautiful.  'On such a night--'  Oh, Cass!"

She was chatty and audible enough afterward, and she carefully
called him "Judge," but he knew that they were intimates.

As they drove home she prattled, "Judge, I have an important
message.  Tilda Hatter wants to give a party for you at the
boarding-house--all of us do, of course."

"Except Eino, who objects?"

She giggled.  "But don't you think his objection is flattering?
I've only heard him object before to Henry James and Germany and
stamp-collecting. . . .  You will come?  You'll love Lyra Coggs."

"I'm sure I will.  She's a great girl. . . .  What are you
snickering at?"

"You do try so hard not to be the judge, tolerating us noisy
brats!"

"I swear that's not so.  Surely you're onto me by now.  More than
anything else, I'm still the earnest schoolboy that wants to learn
everything.  And there's so much you can teach me.  I certainly
don't regard myself as aged, at only forty-one, but still YOU--you
were born the year of the Russian revolution, you've always known
airplanes and the radio.  I want to understand them as you do."

"And the things _I_ want to learn!  Biology and hockey and
Swedish!"

"How about anthropology and crop-rotation?"

"Okay.  And fencing and flower-arrangement and gin-rummy and
Buddhism."

"Do most of the kids at Miss Hatter's want to learn anything?  They
sound smug to me."

"They are not!  If you knew how we talk when we're alone!  Oh,
maybe too much slang and cursing and talk about sex."

He winced.  He did not care for the picture of Eino Roskinen
"talking about sex" with a helpless Jinny . . . if she was
helpless.

"But that's because we're sick of the pompous way that all you
older people go on, over and over, about politics and affairs in
Europe and how you think we drink too much."

"Well, don't you?"

"Maybe.  But WE know how to handle OUR liquor."

"I doubt it."

"So do I!"  She laughed, and he was in love with her again, after a
measureless five seconds during which he had detested her for the
egotism of youth.  She piped on, "But I do think we're a terribly
honest lot."

"You don't think I'm the kind of politician that hates honesty?"

She said her "Oh, you're different," and the good man found the
wisdom to stop talking and to feel the magic of having her there
cozily beside him: her smooth arms, her hands folded in her lap,
her thin corn-yellow dress and the small waist belted with
glittering jet whose coolness his hand wanted to follow.  She was
there with him, this girl who was different from any female since
Eve, and he was thus sanctified. . . .  And did it really matter
when she unfolded the fairy hands and smoked her seventh cigarette
that evening?

Didn't the vestal Chris smoke too much?

The intrusion of Chris worried him.  She had no hold on him but--
well--if Chris saw him driving with this girl, there would be
trouble.

--Why should there be trouble?  I'm independent of her and of
everybody else--well, maybe not of Jinny.

He said aloud, "What about your drafting at Fliegends'?  I suppose
you want to go study in Paris, and become a famous artist."

"No, I have no real ideas.  I'm just a fair workman, at best.  I'll
never have what they call a 'career.'"

He was so little Feminist as to be pleased.

As they drove up to Miss Hatter's he wound up all the tinsel of his
thoughts in one bright ball and tossed it to her:  "I certainly
have enjoyed this evening!"

She answered with equal poesy, "So have I!"

He tentatively kissed her hand.  She could not have noticed it, for
she said only, "You'll come to our party, week from Thursday,
then?"

"Yes, sweet.  Good night."



10


The surprising objects that you see when you leave your own Grand
Republic and go traveling--pink snakes and polar bears--are nothing
beside what you find when you stay at home and have a new girl and
meet her friends, whose resentment of you is only less than your
amazement that there are such people and that she likes them.

At Tilda Hatter's party, Cass was first uncomfortable because he
was the only Elder Statesman present and the young people showed
their independence by unduly ignoring him.  Then the gods presiding
over that form of torture called social gatherings switched to the
opposite ordeal, and he found himself the rival of another
celebrity, of whom, just to be difficult, the bright young people
did make much.

Besides the boarders, Jinny, Eino, Tracy Oleson, and the efficient
Miss Gunton and Miss Coggs, there were present a couple of
schoolteachers, the leftist county agricultural agent, and a young
Norwegian-American grain expert who had once run for the
Legislature.  They sat tremendously upon the floor and talked, and
all of them, including Jinny, to Cass's delicate distress, had
Bourbon highballs.

Their talk was tempestuous.  They said that America should join
Great Britain in its war against Germany, but that many of the Rich
Guys on Ottawa Heights were Isolationists.  They said that it was
okay--that was how they put it--for a man and a woman to live
together without clerical license.  Cass was shocked when he heard
the pure young novice, Jinny, chirping, "Old people today are just
as afraid of Sex as their grandfathers were."

They all looked at Cass, but forbiddingly did not ask him what he
thought.  Eino Roskinen, squatted beside Jinny, drew her toward
him, and she leaned with her back against his shoulder, and Cass
violently did not notice.

He did not understand their family words and jokes.  One of them
had only to say "Hail the Hippopotamus!" for the whole tribe to
guffaw.  He was not too old for them--he was perhaps eight years
older than Wilma or Tracy--but he felt too bookish, too
responsible, too closely shaved, too alone.

He had become used to his de facto banishment when Lucius and Erica
Fliegend and Sweeney Fishberg came in.

Sweeney Fishberg was perhaps the most remarkable man in the cosmos
of Grand Republic and surrounding terrain.

He was an attorney, of liberal tastes, equally likely to take a
labor-union case for nothing or to take the most fraudulent of
damage suits for a contingent fee which, to the fury of his Yankee
wife, he was likely to give to a fund for strikers--any strikers on
any strike.  He was a saint and a shyster; part Jewish and part
Irish and part German; he had once acted in a summer stock company,
and once taught Greek in a West Virginia college; he was a Roman
Catholic, and a mystic who bothered his priest with metaphysical
questions; he was in open sympathy with the Communist Party.

For twenty years, ever since he had come to Grand Republic from his
natal Massachusetts at the age of thirty, he had been fighting all
that was rich and proud and puffy in the town, and he had never won
a single fight nor lost his joy in any of them, and he was red-
headed and looked like a Cockney comedian.  He was nine years older
than Cass, and no lawyer in the district ever brought such doubtful
suits into court, yet no lawyer was more decorous, more co-
operative with the judge, and Cass believed that Sweeney had thrown
to him all the votes he could influence in Cass's elections as
congressman, judge, and member of the Aurora Borealis Bock Beer and
Literary Association.

It was Sweeney Fishberg who was Cass's rival as celebrity of the
evening and who led the hazing.

Pretending not to know that Cass had even heard of them, Sweeney
and the Fliegends and Tracy Oleson and the county agent agreed that
Dr. Roy Drover was a butcher, that Bradd Criley was a Fascist, and
that the Reverend Dr. Lloyd Garrison Gadd, Cass's distant cousin
and his pastor, was a "phony liberal" who loved the wage-workers
but underpaid his cook.  It was clear to Cass that he was being
drawn, but whenever he wanted to be angry, he remembered that this
was the malice with which Roy and Bradd talked of Sweeney Fishberg
and would have talked of Mr. Fliegend had they ever considered him
important enough to mention.  With prayer and resolution, Cass got
through his hazing, and all of them began to look at him in a fond
and neighborly way--all but Eino.  Not Eino, ever.

On the ground of helping mix the highballs, Cass followed Jinny to
the kitchen, a coop shocking with dirty dishes.  He spoke savagely.
"Did you plan to have all those Robespierres gang up on me?"

"Not really.  And they've often ganged up on me, for what they
think is my innocence."

"Are you in love with that Roskinen?  Now, please, I don't mean to
sound rude, but I must know.  Are you engaged to him or anything?"

"Not anything."

"Are you engaged to anybody?"  His arm circled her shoulder.

"Not just now.  Don't, Cass.  You're choking me."

"I almost could choke you when you let that Roskinen--Oh, I suppose
he's a decent-enough boy, but I'm furious when you let him maul
you, put his hand on your breast."

She flared, as if she hated him, "You have a vile mind!"  But when
he jerked back like a slapped five-year-old, she softened.
"Honestly, darling, it doesn't mean a thing, with a colt like Eino,
but if you want me to act like a lady, I'll try, and how I dread
it!"

He kissed her, long and seriously, surprised by the soft fleshiness
of her lips.  She squeezed away from him with an embarrassed
"Well!" and fled from him, carrying back into the living-room the
still-unwashed glasses she had brought with her.  As Cass leaned
against the untidy sink, overwhelmed, feeling guilty but assuring
himself that she had responded to his kiss, Eino Roskinen came in,
glaring.

"Now this is going to be melodrama," Cass thought protestingly.

Eino was in his uniform as a young radical: dark jacket, soft
shirt, small black bow tie; and he was militant.

"I want to ask you something, sir."

"Need you call me 'sir'?"

"Maybe.  Look.  I'm very fond of Virginia.  I'm kind of her
brother.  I notice you hanging around her, and you don't belong
down here in the slums."

"Slums?"

"I guess they're that to you.  You belong on the Heights.  I want
to know what the idea is.  I guess, aside from your being a judge,
that you could break me in two--you're a sporting gent, I suppose.
But if I found out that you were just having a little fun trying to
make her, I'd take a chance on killing you."

"Eino, that's funny."

"How?"

"Because that's the way I've been thinking about you!  I'm in love
with Jinny.  I want to marry her, if I can.  You're in love with
her, too?"

"And how!  Except when she gets frivolous when I talk about the
principles of co-operative distribution."  Eino sighed.  "But I
can't marry anybody, for years."

"So--"

"Oh, you probably win.  You would!"

"Eino!"  The boy was astonished by Cass's fervor.  "There's nobody
else to whom I can say this.  I worship that girl, and I hope
you'll be my friend as you are hers."

"Okay," said Eino, tragically.

Cass said good-bye to her at one-thirty, in the presence of the
entire underground.  Before going to bed, he spent half an hour in
stroking Cleo and wanting to telephone to Jinny.  But he held off
till next evening and then demanded, Would she take a walk with him
tomorrow evening?

Yes.  Without reservations.

He hoped the Bunch hadn't been too hard on him after he had crawled
away--

"Judge, you never crawled!"

"CASS!"

"Cass."

"Tomorrow at eight?  And a movie afterwards?"

"AND a movie.  And a caramel sundae."

With that telephone conversation, touching on the deeper issues of
life and passion, he felt satisfied.  He was irritated but too
canny to say anything about it when Mrs. Higbee (with the aid of
Cleo) brought him an evening toddy and looked ribald and knowing.

"I can't run this big house all by myself," inwardly complained
Cass, who never yet had run it.



11


Bergheim, Cass's house, the old Eisenherz country place, looked out
over the bluffs.  It had neither a city nor a suburban aspect, but
suggested a comfortable village.  At the back, where the grass was
more like an ancient pasture than a prim lawn, there was a green-
painted wooden well, and the white-painted stable, with its pert
cupola, suggested a print of the 1880's and long gentlemen with
whiskers and driving-gloves, lace ladies with parasols, and spotted
coach-dogs with their tails aloft in that fresher breeze.  But what
to Cass had always been, still was, a last touch of European
elegance in Bergheim was that it had Walnut-colored Venetian
blinds.

Across the street from Cass was the abode of Scott and Juliet Zago,
who had for years been notorious as being happily married.  They
called their house, which displayed fake half-timbering, and wavy
shingles imitating thatch, sometimes "The Playhouse" and sometimes
"The Doll's House," Juliet, you see, being the doll.  She was
thirty-five to Scott's fifty, but she let people think that the gap
was ten years greater.  She was the chronic child-wife; she talked
baby-talk and wriggled and beamed and poked her forefinger at
things; and she often pretended to be the big sister of her two
small daughters.

Scott dealt in insurance, and he made jokes and made puns.  Juliet
read all the books about China and Tibet and gave you her condensed
version of them--not much condensed, at that--with her own system
of pronunciation of Chinese proper names.

Yet Cass, who disliked puns and was readily sickened by baby-talk,
did not detest the Zagos, and theirs was the only house in the
neighborhood to which Cleo ever wandered.  For they were the
kindest of neighbors, as affectionate as parakeets.

On one side of Cass's place lived the Perfect Prutts.

John William Prutt, the father, was a banker; the most first-rate
second-rate banker in the entire state.  He was president of the
Second National Bank.  It could just as well have been called the
First National Bank, since the institution once so named had
perished, but Mr. Prutt's bank would have to be a second, never a
first nor yet a last.  He was fifty years old and always had been.
He was perfect; in everything that was second-class he was perfect.
He was a vestryman, but not the leading vestryman, of St. Anselm's
Church; he had been a vice-president but never the president of the
Federal Club.  He was tall and solemnly handsome, and he never
split an infinitive or a bottle.

His wife, Henrietta Prutt, his son, Jack Prutt, his daughter,
Margaret Prutt, his dog, Dick Prutt, and even his Buick car, the
Buick of the Prutts, were as full of perfection and Pruttery as
John William Prutt himself.

The Prutts lived in a supposedly little white Colonial cottage that
had somehow grown into a huge white Colonial army-barracks, yet
still breathed the purity of Jonathan Edwards, and just beyond it,
in a hulk of grim dark native stone, lived another banker, Norton
Trock, who collected china and sounded like a lady.

On the other side of Cass's house was the blindingly white,
somewhat Spanish and somewhat packing-box, stucco residence of
Gregory Marl, owner of the presumably liberal and Independent
Republican newspapers, the Banner and the Evening Frontier, with
the Sunday Frontier-Banner, the only English-language newspapers in
Grand Republic.  He was a large, quiet, secretly industrious man of
thirty-five; he had inherited the paper but had raised their
circulations; he was a rose-grower and a Bermuda yachtsman.  The
star of his household, and a bright and menacing November star, was
his wife Diantha, who was on every committee in town, and who knew
something and talked a great deal about painting and the drama and
a mystery called Foreign Affairs.  But her major art was as
hostess, and as the Marls had no children, Diantha could spend
weeks in planning a party.  She was the rival of Madge Dedrick as
the general utility duchess and Mrs. Astor of the city.

Madge Dedrick, relict of Sylvanus Dedrick, the lumber baron, lived
a little beyond the Prutts, in a handsome, high-pillared Georgian
house that had exactly the same lines (condensed) as Boone Havock's
and did not in the least look like it.  Madge's half-dozen small
flower-gardens looked like gardens of flowers, while Mr. Havock's
looked like paper posies, the larger size, bought last night and
pinned on crooked in the darkness.

At seventy, Mrs. Dedrick was small and soft-voiced, powdery of
cheek, with tiny plump hands and great powers, held shrewdly under
control, of derision and obscenity.  Now living with her was her
tall, doe-eyed, aloof, divorced daughter, Eve Dedrick Champeris,
who had been reared in Grand Republic, Farmington, New York,
Cannes, and Santa Barbara, and who had divorced the charming Mr.
Raymond Champeris on the good, old-fashioned grounds of drinking
like a sot and passing out at costly parties.  It seemed like such
a waste of champagne, Eve explained.

Diantha Marl tempted society with high intellectual conversation
plus string quartets and dynamite cocktails; Madge and Eve Dedrick
with cool Rhine wines in a low-lit, satin-paneled room filled with
silver and crystal and cushions and exquisite legs and lively
spitefulness, so that the Wargates, who had ten times as much
money, politely accepted the invitations of both Diantha and the
Dedricks.



On all these rulers of Grand Republic Cass meditated, while he
fretted the question of whether Jinny would really like being
lifted from her boarding-house to the stuffy elegance of Ottawa
Heights.  He wanted to persuade himself that she would like Boone
Havock and Eve Champeris better than Eino Roskinen and Sweeney
Fishberg.  It was hard to play Prince to the Cinderella when he
suspected that all the windows in Castle Charming were glued shut.
He conducted extensive imaginary conversations with her, trying to
give both sides, which is likely to be confusing.

"Scott and Juliet--jolly people--wonderful at an outdoor barbecue,"
he heard himself informing Jinny, who snapped back, "Silly pair of
clowns!"

"Gregory and Diantha Marl--leaders in public thought."

"Scared conservatives throwing calico babies to the union wolves!"

"Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick and Frank Brightwing--very amusing
fellows."

"That's something LIKE it.  Just let me meet them, and you keep the
others."

--Now what kind of a mind have I got, to give a nonexistent
antagonist the best of an argument?  As I'm making the whole thing
up anyway, why don't I have Jinny vanquished and humble and
adoring?



If he ever married Jinny, he would have to lure in new dinner-
guests without offending the old ones, and then, probably, Jinny
would not like the novelties.  He thought of a party at which he
introduced the Rev. Dr. Evan Brewster, Negro pastor of an unpainted
Baptist church in the North End, and Ph.D. of Columbia, to Dr.
Drover and Eve Champeris, and how bored Dr. Brewster would be by
their patter and how much danger there would be that Jinny would
too openly agree.

Then, "Oh dry up!" said Cass to his imagination.

When the spring term of court was over, he was free for all summer,
except for special sessions and a few days in the outlying towns of
the district.  They wound up with a solemn meeting of Judges
Blackstaff, Flaaten, and Timberlane _in re_ the portentous
question: should the judges of this district, when on the bench,
wear silk robes, as in Minneapolis?

The three dignitaries sat about the long oak table in Judge
Blackstaff's chambers, smoking unaccustomed cigars, the gift of
their host, and grew red-faced with the ardor of their debate.

"It's a matter of dignity," maintained Judge Blackstaff, looking
more than usual like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  "I don't hold
with these English wigs and heavy robes, but I do think we have to
show the public, which is so irreverent and flippant today, all
jazz and comic strips, that we represent the sanctity of Justice."

"Dignity, hell!" Judge Flaaten protested.  "Every time some Norske
or Svenske saw me in a black-silk nightshirt, it would cost me ten
votes.  Besides, robes are hot."

Judge Timberlane put in, "Not very, Conrad.  They can be quite
light.  Besides, Grand Republic is the coolest city in the state
south of Duluth.  Besides, do you want to have the boys on the
bench in Minneapolis go on laughing at us as a bunch of farmer
j.p.'s?"

"I don't care a damn what they laugh at as long as the voting
Lut'erans like us," insisted Judge Flaaten.  He glared at Judge
Blackstaff.  "Steve, this is a serious matter.  Are we going to
yield up the high principles of common democracy to the bawds--uh--
the gauds of the outworn Old World?"

"Hurray!" breathed Judge Timberlane.

"Cass, can't you be serious?" worried Judge Blackstaff.  "This is a
special court of protocol, which may go far to determine the
standing of the judiciary in Grand Republic for all time to come.
Write your votes on the yellow pads, boys, and fold 'em--and give
me back those pencils when you get done with 'em.  It's a caution
the way my pencils get stolen!"

Silk robes for district judges won by two to one, and when autumn
came, none of them more proudly showed his robe to his relatives
than Judge Flaaten.  Judge Timberlane did not care so much.  There
was only one person for whom he wanted to wear his robe, and by
prodigious chicanery he lured her into the court to see it.  But--
such is life--she only laughed.



12


The select golf-and-tennis association of Grand Republic was the
Heather Club, three miles from the business center, on a peninsula
reaching out from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake.  Surrounding
it was the smart new real-estate development called the Country
Club District, habitat of such gilded young married couples as the
Harley Bozards, the Don Pennlosses, the Beecher Filligans, and the
playground of Jay Laverick, the town's principal professional Gay
Bachelor, who happened to be a widower.  The houses were Spanish,
like Hollywood, or French, like Great Neck, and the Heather club-
house was a memory of Venice, with balconies, iron railings, and a
canal thirty-six feet long.

To the Heather Club in late June Cass came for one of the famous
Saturday Evening Keno Games.  Keno (a sport beloved by the more
aged and pious Irishwomen also) consists in placing a bean upon a
number called out by some swindler unknown, through an unseen loud-
speaker, and after you have breathlessly placed enough beans upon
enough numbers, you fail to get the prize.  It is not so
intellectual as chess or skipping the rope, but it is a favorite
among Grand Republic's leading citizens, who gather at the Heather
Club on every Saturday evening in summer, to drink cocktails and
play keno and then drink a lot more.

With only one cocktail in him, Cass was deaf to the joys of keno
this evening, and he wished that he were deaf to the crackling
voices about him at the dozen long tables, as he somberly put down
his beans.  Roy Drover's shouts of "Send us a thirty-two, baby,
send us a thirty-two, come on, baby, come on, hand us a thirty-two"
merely rivaled Queenie Havock's parrot shrieks and Norton Trock's
high giggling, while Eve Champeris had a flushed mild imbecility
about her lily face.  Delia Lent, a purposeful lady though rich,
sat beside Cass, babbling about trout-fishing, but presently he
could hear nothing that she said.  All the hundred voices were
woven into a blanket of sound that covered Cass and choked him.

Abruptly, while Mrs. Lent stared at his lack of manners, Cass
bolted from the table, charged toward the bar.  He would have to
have a quantity of drinks, if he was going to survive these
pleasures.  He passed an alcove in which two grim women, too
purposeful about gambling to waste time on keno, were hour after
hour yanking the handles of twenty-five-cent slot machines.  He
passed a deep chair in which sat two married people--not married to
each other.  He looked into the card room where Boone Havock, Mayor
Stopple, Judge Flaaten, Counselor Oliver Beehouse, and Alfred
Limbaugh, the hardware king, were playing tough poker in a refined
way.

Jinny's spirit walked with him derisively.

He had almost reached the forgetfulness to be found at the bar when
beyond it, in the Ladies' Lounge, he saw Chris Grau, having a
liqueur with Lillian Drover.  He stopped, in cold guiltiness, and
the imaginary Jinny fled.

He had not seen Chris for ten days, and as she looked at him, all
her kindness in her good brown eyes, he shivered.  But he
obediently chain-ganged into the lounge.  Lillian Drover rose,
tittering, in washed-out imitation of her husband's humor, "I guess
I better leave you two young lovers alone, if I know what's good
for me."

Chris's smile indicated that that would be fine.

The Ladies' Lounge, which had been named that by Diantha Marl,
after having been christened the Rubens Room by the Milwaukee
architect-decorator who had done the club in the finest Moorish
style known in his city, was a harem, with grilled windows, a
turquoise-blue tiled floor, and a resigned fountain.  It was
suitable to the harem feeling that Chris should be wearing a loose-
throated lilac dress.

Cass sat facing her, with an entirely mechanical "Can I get you
another drink?"

"Not for me.  There's too much drinking here.  I'm glad you're so
sober.  But then, you always are.  It's these younger people that
are breaking down the bulwarks of society with their guzzling and
shrieking and indecent dancing."

"Now, now, Chris, the drunkest person here tonight is Queenie
Havock, and she's well over fifty, and I saw Bernice Claywheel, and
she must be over forty, out dancing on the terrace with Jay
Laverick as though she expected to eat him."

"Ye-es I know, but--You simply love the sweet young things, don't
you, Cassy--Cass."

"M?"

"I'm sure you had a wonderful time with your beautiful unknown at
the Unstable, two weeks ago!"

"Why, I--Yes I did!"

"And did you enjoy holding hands in the moonlight?"

He tried to be jaunty.  "Enjoyed it very much.  Especially as I
don't suppose I'll have another chance, alas!"

--Why don't you tell Chris to go to the devil?  She's not your
guardian.

"So you don't think you'll see her again, eh, Cass darling.
Honestly, now--honestLEE--you know I'm not the nagging sort of girl
that would even ask who she was, and certainly I'm not the kind
that would go around hinting and whispering that a man who isn't so
young any more--"

"What do you--"

"--is making a fool of himself over some young tramp.  I was just
teasing you about this girl.  Of course I KNOW you'd never fall for
her, whoever she is.  So let's not say anything more about it,
dear."

"I hadn't said anything at all!"

"That's what I say.  Honestly, I was just joking.  Now tell me:
will you get the Fleeber-Biskness case in the fall, or will they
settle it?"

Now the affaire Fleeber-Biskness was a fascinating controversy, to
Judge Timberlane, but it had not seemed so to the crass public.  It
was a conversion case, dealing with the possession of a warehouse
28' 7" X 62' 8".  Cass was glad once more to see what a sympathetic
brain Chris had and, as he looked at them again, what sleek legs.
As the palace of pleasure rang with the bacchanalia of keno, he
explained to this willing hearer the low tricks Mr. Biskness was
accused of having played with a carload of clay.  He stumbled as
she crossed her legs and he realized that, with innocent spinster
boldness, she had come without stockings.

This was in the prim pre-war era of 1941, when it is true that
bathing-suits had been reduced to an emphasized nudity, but when
perfect ladies still did not display naked legs in public rooms.
The Judge was a person of decorum and modesty, but he was
interested.

--Chris would give a lover such solid affection--probably much more
than a filly like Jinny Marshland.

Not unmindful of the careless lilac-colored skirt but determined to
be high-minded, he went on with the case, winding up, "You
understand, that's only Fleeber's version, and it's a matter of
record.  I'm not giving away any secrets."

"Sure.  I know you never tell tales out of court," said Chris,
fondly.

"If I ever did, you'd be the one person I could rely on.  What's
say we have a drink?"

"I'd love to," gurgled the strange woman in lilac.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives


THE ZEBRA SISTERS


The Quimber Girls, better known to the ribald of Grand Republic as
the Zebra Sisters, belonged to a real family, lively and devoted,
full of anecdotes that began with laughter and, "Oh, do you
remember the time when."  Their father, Millard Quimber, who was
still alive, aged eighty-one, was the city superintendent of
schools from 1895 to 1928.  He was referred to in the press as "one
of our greatest builders," because during his reign there had been
erected three red-brick school-buildings which looked like red-
brick school-buildings.  He was also known as a "profound scholar,"
because he continually quoted Bobby Burns and Henry Van Dyke and
the first two lines of the Iliad, almost in the original Greek.

His three daughters were named Zoe, Zora, and Zeta; they were born
between 1890 and 1900; they were fine, big, bouncing hussars of
women, hearty at winter sports, discursive about their husbands,
all philoprogenitive, all ardent Presbyterians, though with secret
desires to be Episcopalians and chic.  Their favorite words were
family, chickabiddies, earnest, expensive, womanly, jolly, and ice
cream.

Their several husbands were derisively referred to at the Heather
Club bar as the Brothers-in-Law, Incorporated.

Zoe, the youngest daughter, was married to Harold W. Whittick, the
owner of radio station KICH and of Whittick & Bruntz, a two-room
advertising agency which existed chiefly to tell a house-hungry
world about Wargate Wood Products.  When the chairman of a Rotary
Club luncheon at which Harold W. was to speak (about Progress)
asked him what to say in introduction, Harold W. wrote a
description of himself which may stand as modest and accurate:

"Not only the most streamlined but the most up-to-the-second
moderne citizen of Grand Republic."

But Harold W. was, as the chairman laughingly said--you know,
kidding him--not himself in Rotary, because he was National
Assistant Treasurer of the rival Streamlineup Club, a service
organization distinctive in that it had all the speeches BEFORE
lunch, when everybody was "still on his toes, full of ginger and
not of hash."

Zora, the middle Zebra, was fondly wed to Duncan Browler, first
vice president of the Wargate Corporation, in charge of
manufacture.  Unlike Harold W. Whittick, he did not make speeches.

The oldest, Zeta, was married to Alfred T. Umbaugh, a gentle and
predatory soul who admired his brother-in-law Harold and who, more
nearly than the other two husbands, endured the demands of his wife
that he be jolly and amorous.  He was the chief owner of the Button
Bright Chain of Hardware Stores, twenty-seven of them, all shiny
and yellow, scattered through Minnesota and the Dakotas, with one
far-flung outpost or consulate in Montana.  This imperial standing
made him, like Browler, eligible to the Federal and Heather Clubs.
Naturally, Whittick had also been admitted to those twin heavens,
but with a warning from the committee that he would do well not to
get oratorical and forward-looking after his fourth highball, and
while he was at the table of the blest, he was about ten feet below
the salt.

Harold, Duncan and Alfred were unlike in tempo, but they were all
true husbands to the Zebra.  All three of them were irritated by
their wives but never thought of quitting them, all of them had
sons and daughters, all were devoted to golf, fishing, musical-
comedy movies, motor boats, and Florida, and all of them had new
houses, in the Country Club District, of which they were fiercely
proud and for which they would have done murder.  None of them was
eccentric, except that Harold W. Whittick--just for a josh,
everybody said; to show off and try to be different--asserted that
he had once voted for a Democratic candidate for the presidency,
Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  And all of them, though grumblingly,
consented to be ruled and extensively discussed by The Family.

They all dined with Grampa Quimber every Sunday noon; and each
Thursday, one of the three sisters was hostess to the others and
their broods, with the one great-grandchild in The Family, that of
the Umbaughs, asleep upstairs.  At these feasts, Harold W. Whittick
usually told the story about the Irishman and the cigar-counter
girl; and there was a good deal of innocent laughter about the
time, in 1936, when Mr. Browler got drunk at an Elks' Convention
and bought a small red fire engine.

An unusual feature of the Zebra gatherings was the fifteenth-
century frankness with which the sisters reported on the
progressive feebleness of their husbands as lovers.  They were
rugged and healthy girls, and expected a lot, and did not get it.
However, they sighed, it was something that neither Harold W. nor
Alfred T. nor Duncan "ever so much as looked at any woman outside
the home."

That's what they thought.

The Brothers-in-Law, Inc. jointly made business trips to
Minneapolis, where they stayed at the magnificent Hotel Swanson-
Grand, with three connecting bedrooms and a parlor.  Of the uses to
which these rooms were put, the Sisters knew nothing.  The
Brothers-in-Law were stalwarts, pledged and reliable, and so were
their Grand Republic friends who managed to be in Minneapolis at
the same time.

Half an hour after the Brothers' arrival, the parlor was turned
into a complete bar.  Within half an hour more, the girls had
arrived--not traditional young blondes who glittered, nothing so
frigid and boring, but dependable young women of thirty, who worked
in offices and banks and stores, who understood hard liquor and
liked men.

By two next morning there was a tremendous amount of laughter and
communal undressing, to the nervous delight of such Grand Republic
visitors as Mayor Stopple, Harley Bozard, Jay Laverick, and Boone
Havock.

New York and Chicago and London visitors to Grand Republic,
particularly if they were journalists renowned for shrewdness,
concluded that Harold W., Alfred T., and Duncan were the most
conventional, most standardized, most wife-smothered and children-
nagged citizens of our evangelical land, but in truth they belonged
among the later Roman Emperors, and he that has never seen Duncan
Browler, elder of the Presbyterian Church, standing in his cotton
shorts, a lady telephone-supervisor clasped in his right arm, a
half-tumbler of straight Dainty Darling Bourbon Whisky waving in
his left hand, the while he sings "It's Time to Go Upstairs," has
only the shallowest notion of the variety of culture in our Grand
Republic, a city which, in different dialects, has also been called
Grand Rapids and Bangor and Phoenix and Wichita and Hartford and
Baton Rouge and Spokane and Rochester and Trenton and Scranton and
San Jose and Rutland and Duluth and Dayton and Pittsfield and
Durham and Cedar Rapids and Fort Wayne and Ogden and Madison and
Nashville and Utica and South Bend and Peoria and Canton and Tacoma
and Sacramento and Elizabeth and San Antonio and St. Augustine and
Lincoln and Springfieldill and Springfieldmass and Springfieldmo
and Ultima Thule and the United States of America.



13


Judge Timberlane had heard of middle-aged satyrs who worked their
will upon frail maidens by promising them riches and magenta-
colored cars but never introduced them to the respectable families
of their circles.  But the Judge himself wanted his entire world to
know his fleet Jinny.  He stopped in at Miss Hatter's, he discussed
with Tracy Oleson the import of wood pulp, then got Jinny aside to
whisper, "I'd like to have a buffet supper for you and have you
meet my friends--you needn't like 'em if you don't want to.  And
maybe you'd like to invite Tracy?  He's quite a bright fellow."

Perhaps he sounded condescending, without meaning to, for she
answered irritably, "I don't want to meet a lot of rich people
looking for somebody to snub!"

"But very few of them are rich and none of them are snobbish.  I
meant people like Abbott Hubbs, managing editor of the Banner.
I'll bet the owner, Greg Marl, doesn't pay him enough to afford
breakfast.  And my sister, Rose Pennloss, and my old chum, Bradd
Criley--good lawyer and the best dancer in town.  People that you'd
love, if you knew 'em."

"I don't want to be shown off, Cass.  I'm perfectly happy right
here where I am, and if I do ever get anywhere else, I want to do
it by myself."

It took him five minutes to persuade Cinderella that the glass
slipper was pretty and then, just to keep him entirely confused,
she said that she would love a party, and if she had sounded
grudging, it had been only because she was surprised.



The buffet-supper for her was to be at the Heather Club, which was
crowded only on Saturday evenings.  When he picked her up in his
car, she did not expect him to take Tracy Oleson, that muffler,
along with them; and she was not prudish when he suggested that, as
they were early, they could stop at his house on the way.  (It was
not on the way.)

At Bergheim she stepped out wonderingly under the wedding-cake
carriage-porch and pronounced, "Oh, I love it!  Like Walter Scott!"

She was wearing again the little black net dress in which she was
so pathetically grown-up, and the one silver rose.

Silent, head turning quickly to one side and the other, she
preceded him into the dolorous hall, into the drawing-room, which
was too long, too narrow, and too high, and in one corner
surprisingly darted off, under a varnished pine grill, into a
semicircular alcove which was the lowest story of the tower.  It
was an ill-lighted room, with wallpaper of Chinese pagodas and
bridges, with overcarved and unwieldy furniture upholstered in
plum-colored plush and ornamented with a Michigan version of
Chinese dragons; a room profuse in Chinese vases, Aztec pottery,
embossed brass coffee tables, Venetian glass lamps, and colored
photographs of Lake Louise; a room that was unutterably all wrong,
and yet was stately and a home.

Jinny stood in the middle and looked about, neither awed nor
ridiculing it, belonging to it as (Cass fondly believed) she would
belong to any setting she might encounter.

Then Cleo came bossily into the room on delicately haughty feet,
wanting to know who the deuce this was in her house.

Jinny gave a passionate little moan, a sound not so unlike a cat's,
soft and imploring, and knelt before Cleo, smoothing the side of
her jaw.  The kitten recognized her as one of the tribe, and spoke
to her in their language.  Jinny sat crosslegged then and Cleo
perched on her knee like a small brave statue.  Acrobatically, not
to disturb the kitten, Jinny reached out far for the evening purse
that she had dropped, looked up at Cass apologetically, and brought
out a tiny crystal model of a cat-goddess of the Nile.

"It's my talisman.  Dad gave it to me years ago, as a toy, but I
almost let myself believe that it was alive and now--I know it's
childish, but I always take it everywhere--you know, so it can see
the world and get educated, poor thing."

"What's its name?"

"Different names at different epochs.  All of them silly.  Just now
it hasn't one."

"Why not call it--The kitten is also an Egyptian national, and
named Cleopatra.  Why not call your statuette Isis?"

"Isis.  'Slim, undulant deity Isis, mistress of life.'  Okay.
Let's see if Cleo will have sense enough to recognize a high-class
goddess and worship it."

She placed the crystal Isis on a mat made of her handkerchief, on
the cabbage-rose carpet, and Cleo before the shrine.  They watched
gravely, Cass's hand on Jinny's shoulder, while Cleo walked three
times around the goddess, sniffing, then, with a careful paw,
pushed it over and glanced up at them, much pleased with herself.

"They're friends, anyway," said Jinny.

"Like us."

"Uh-huh."

He kissed her, without prejudice.

He herded her into the kitchen, and announced, "Mrs. Higbee, this
is my friend Miss Marshland.  The house is hers."

Well, Jinny smiled, Mrs. Higbee smiled, Cleo, sticking around and
quietly running everything from behind the scenes as usual, made a
sound that corresponded to smiling, and the augury was bright.

Then Cass remembered that Mrs. Higbee liked Chris Grau, also, and
that Chris would formidably be at the buffet-supper tonight.



They drove up to the Heather Country Club, which resembled the Home
of a Famous Movie Star, and Jinny was apparently delighted by its
yellow tile roof and its grilled windows and blue plaques set in
white plaster walls.  They crossed the clattering stone-floored
lobby to the outdoor terrace on which, this fine June night, the
supper was handsomely set out: a baked ham, with cloves stuck all
over its sugary bulk, lobster salad and chicken salad and cold
salmon, and an exuberant ice-cream mold decked with spun sugar.
These treasures were assembled, like a jovial combination of
Christmas and Fourth of July, on a long table at one end of the
thatch-roofed outdoor bar.  At the other end of the bar was the
real business: a case of Bourbon, half a case of Scotch, and a
cocktail-shaker of the size and menace of a trench-mortar, all
guarded by the club bartender, who knew all the amorous and
financial secrets of the members.  As to wine, most prominent
citizens of Grand Republic, including Cass, were unaware of it
except as something you nervously ordered on a liner.

There were to be twenty-six at the supper, and six tables, lacy and
silver-laid, were on the terrace, with Dead Squaw Lake swaying
beyond them, and the pine-darkened hills and the red-roofed yacht
club visible on the farther shore.

But none of this luxury did Cass behold.  What he saw was Chris
Grau, happily arranging the flowers, and her happiness chilled him.

He had not told Chris nor any one else that this supper was to be
the introduction of a Miss Virginia Marshland to his friends, and
it was assumed that this was another of the duty dinners which
unmarried favorites like Cass and Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick
give--the technical word is "throw"--now and then when their social
obligations have reached the saturation point.  Chris had insisted
that he let her order the supper, be the hostess.

She was busy now, in her fresh cream-colored linen dress, her
gaudiest costume jewelry, arranging the huge bunches of peonies.
At Cass's footstep, she looked up with a smile that went cold when
she saw him with an unknown wench who was too airy and much too
pretty.

The oratorical pride of the Bar Association could do no better
than:  "Chris--Miss Grau!  Miss Marshland--uh--Jinny Marshland."

Both women said "Jdoo" with good healthy feminine hatred, and Cass
was rather surprised.



In making up his list of guests, he had not been able to avoid
having Roy and Lillian Drover, though he did not expect Jinny to
like them.  He thought she might like his sister Rose and the Gadds
and Greg Marls and the Abbott Hubbses and the Avondene girls and
even the giggling Scott Zagos.  He was sure that she would like
Bradd Criley and once, a few days ago, before he had lost his
innocence, he had hoped that Jinny and Chris might "hit it off
nicely," having no sounder reason for that hope than that it would
be considerably more convenient for him if they did.  And Eve
Champeris, of Paris, California, and Grand Republic, the most
exquisite and linguistic woman in town--he himself had never been
comfortable with Eve, and he had invited her entirely to impress
Jinny.

He had been more daring than anyone can know who does not live
permanently in Grand Republic in leaving out Boone and Queenie
Havock--daring and sensible, since at one macaw scream from
Queenie, Jinny might very well have started walking home.  But the
Havock scion, Curtiss, he had invited.  Curtiss was a bulky,
cheerful, unmarried, somewhat oafish young man who was supposed to
work in the Blue Ox National Bank but who was more earnest about
fast driving and who was supposed, for reasons incomprehensible to
Cass, to be attractive to young women.

Especially for Jinny, he had asked Tracy Oleson, Fred Nimbus,
announcer at Station KICH, Lucius and Erica Fliegend, and to keep
the Fliegends from feeling chilled at the Heather Club, in which
they had not been present five times in ten years, he had invited
that intelligent young couple, Richard and Francia Wolke (the
Chippewa Avenue jewelers) who had NEVER been in the club.  Chris
had not seen his list and now, as she looked over the party, she
tenderly thought that she had never known her Cass to show so
superbly the trusting social ineptitude for which she loved him and
wanted to mother him.  Curtiss Havock would insult the glibly
handsome Fred Nimbus who would annoy Eve Champeris who would be
insolent to the Wolkes who would bite the Zagos who would nauseate
Dr. Drover who would be rude to the Hubbses who hated their bosses,
Gregory and Diantha Marl, while Chris herself would have been just
as glad if he had not invited Stella Avondene Wrenchard, that
impoverished and aristocratic young widow who was so resolutely
after Cass for herself that she went around saying, "I adore Chris--
poor dear."

And when Chris found that he had added this unknown young fly-by-
night called Miss Virginia Mushland or something, then she was
almost as irritated as she was tender.  So far as Chris could see,
he had done everything to insure his social ruin in Grand Republic
except to invite the local labor-organizers.

This Mushland doll was evidently too awkward and untutored to be of
any use, and Chris went ardently to work at what is called "making
the party a success."  While Cass filled the unwanted girl's plate
at the buffet and sat beside her at table, shamelessly beaming,
Chris maneuvered the guests to suitable tables, kept Curtiss Havock
from having too many drinks and the Fliegends from having too few,
had Jinny switch seats with Stella Avondene, to prevent scandal and
to keep Cass's errant fancies on the move, got Fred Nimbus, the
radio genius, to sing, got Fred Nimbus to make a comic speech, got
Fred Nimbus to start the dancing--with Jinny.

Chris saw to it that Jinny also danced with Bradd Criley, Curtiss
Havock, Dick Wolke, Greg Marl, and only twice with Cass, to the end
that Jinny, who had at first been embarrassed by the strangers, had
a lively evening and loved Cass for it--Cass, not Chris.

All this good sacrifice Chris made for Cass, and was sorry only
that he did not see it.

But Cass did see it, and he knew now how a burglar felt when he was
facing Judge Timberlane.

He understood Chris's loyalty and her plump charms.  He wondered
why the Fates should so arrange it that he could feel only amiable
toward Chris, who wanted him, and be wan and adoring with the Jinny
who as yet considered him merely another traveling-man.

With a jar he found that Jinny, too, was seeing everything that she
couldn't possibly see.  When, long after eleven, he had his second
dance with her--he had watched the match-unmaking Chris throw her
to such dogs as Fred Nimbus--Jinny said with an affection he had
never heard from her:

"Dear Cass, I am having such a gay time, thanks to you and to your
Miss Grau.  That nice woman.  She does try so hard to hate me, but
she doesn't know how.  She tried to snoot me by asking how I liked
'working in a factory,' but before she got through, I had her
longing to get off her chaise-longue and be big and brave and punch
a time-clock.  Cass, you are so good and so bungling.  You know I'm
just a stray cat, like Cleo.  I wouldn't want to--because I am so
fond of you--I wouldn't want to make any trouble between you and
Chris the girlfriend.  Honestly."

He made the suitable arguments.

He knew that, seen as just one of the "country-club bunch," he had
lost for her something of his dignity as a Public Figure, but he
also knew that she was now responsive to him.  He was proud of her
debut.  She had been so easy with even the most difficult of his
guests, with his over-inquisitive sister and with the roaring Roy
Drover.  Bradd Criley had informed him that Jinny was a "lovely,
intelligent girl, and a stepper."  That was news!



14


When the party had meandered to its quiet ending, when the older
pleasure-maddened citizens had gone home to bed and the stoutly
drinking remnant had moved indoors to escape the chill, Chris gave
up her impersonal rule as mistress of the revels and settled down
at a table with Cass, Jinny, Tracy Oleson, the inebriated Hubbses
and the soused Curtiss Havoc, and began to pay loving though
discouraged attention to Cass.

He was alarmed.  No more than any other man did he want to face the
unwed lioness robbed of her wish-dream cubs, the chronic wife who
resents the straying of her husband just as much when he is not yet
her husband.  He had hoped to slip away with Jinny, and perhaps be
invited in for an incautious moment.

Curtiss belched.  Hubbs said, "I agree."  "Then I'll take you
home," said Mrs. Hubbs.  Tracy rose.  "Judge, I can save you a
trip.  I'll drive Jinny back--I have my little bus here."

Treacherous as all sweethearts, Jinny babbled, "Oh, thank you,
Tracy.  Judge, I did have such a good time.  Thank you for inviting
me. . . .  Good night, Miss--uh--Miss Grau."

Cass was alone with Chris.

"I think they all enjoyed it, don't you, Chris?"

"Yes?"

"Due mostly to you, though.  You were the perfect hostess.  I was
amused the way you kept steering Curtiss away from the bar."

"Yes?"

"And I don't know how you ever managed to coax such a beautiful
supper out of the steward, and when you think--"

"Cass!"

"What is it, dear?"

"'Dear'!  Cass, have you fallen for that young female grasshopper,
that Marshland girl, at your age?"

"What d' you mean, 'At my age'?"

"I mean at your age!"

"I'm the second youngest district judge in Minnesota!"

"And probably you're THE youngest octogenarian.  I know you can
still play baseball and dance the tango, only you don't.  You like
the fireside and your books and chess."

"So I'm that picturesque figure, the venerable judge.  Why don't
you put in slippers, along with the fireside and the books--you
mean OLD books, that smell of leather!"

"Well, your books mostly do, don't they?  I just can't see you with
a gilt-and-satin copy of 'Mademoiselle Fifi,' or whatever it is
your Virginia reads."

"I'll tell you what she reads!  She reads Santayana and Willa
Cather and, uh, and Proust!  That's what she reads!"

"Does she?  I didn't suppose she could read.  She certainly doesn't
show any stains from it."

"Just because she doesn't go around showing off like a young
highbrow--"

"Oh, Cassy--Cass, I mean--I'm sorry.  I truly am.  The last thing
in the world I meant to do was to start scrapping with you."  They
were on a couch in the club lounge.  A bartender and four late
bridge-players and the two female slot-machine addicts were still
present, and he felt that otherwise Chris would crown her humility
by kneeling before him, as she went on:

"It's just that we started twenty years ago, when you were a
veteran of twenty and I was a worshiping brat of ten, no, eleven,
that could hide her reverence for you only by being saucy, and so I
got the miserable habit of jabbing at you and--Cass!  Do you take
this little Marshland girl seriously?  An exquisite little thing
she is, too, I must say, and probably fairly intelligent and even
virtuous, curse her!  I mean, damn her!  Do you think you're a
little in love with her?"

"I think I'm a good deal in love with her.  I agree with you in
saying 'damn her'!  I didn't want to be in an earthquake.  You're
dead right, my dear; I do prefer quiet.  But I'm simply God-
smitten."

She sighed then, sighed and was silent, and at last she talked to
herself aloud:

"If I had been more brazen, if I hadn't been so scrupulous, I could
have married you several years ago, my friend.  Right after
Blanche.  I'm the only person you've ever really talked to about
Blanche.  Isn't that true?"

"I suppose it is."

"And how she made fun of you and hurt you?  Maybe you like to get
hurt.  You're going about getting hurt again in just the right way.
Now don't tell me that your Virginia wouldn't want to hurt anybody!
I'm sure she wouldn't--intentionally.  It's just that all you
overimaginative men, who try to combine fancifulness with being
clock-watching executives, are fated to be hurt, unless you love
some kind-hearted, sloppy, adoring woman like me--the born
mistress!  Well, as Dad always said, 'Nun, so geht's.'  Good
night."

He would not run after her, and before he had stalked out to the
automobile entrance, she had driven away, in her fast, canary-
colored coupe.  He stood frozen, realizing that he was free of his
past.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives


DROVERS AND HAVOCKS


Roy Drover was born on a farm just at the edge of Grand Republic,
and his father was at once a farmer and a veterinarian.

When Roy was a medical student at the University of Minnesota, a
beer-drinker and a roarer by night but by day a promising
dissecter, he met the tall and swaying Lillian Smith, daughter of a
stationer who was refined, tubercular, and poor.  He saw that here
was the finest flower he was likely ever to acquire for the
decoration of a successful doctor's drawing-room.  Also, it tickled
his broad fancy to think of seducing (even if he could do it only
legally) anything so frail and sweet as Lillian.

She was overwhelmed by him, though she did break off the engagement
once when he used a certain four-letter word.  He reasonably
pointed out, however, that either she did not know what the word
meant, in which case she could not be shocked, or else she did
know, in which case she must have got over being shocked some time
ago.  She was conquered, though for years afterward she worried
about that logic.

By the time they had been married for five years and Roy had
practised for seven, Lillian's father was bankrupt, and Roy had the
daily pleasure of telling her that, though her "old man might be so
cultured and polite, he was mighty glad to get eighty bucks a month
from his roughneck son-in-law."  That pleasure continued for years
after her father had died.  At medical conventions or among
strangers in a West Coast Florida hotel, Roy would jovially shout,
"My ancestors were Vermont hill-billies, but my ball-and-chain
comes from the best stock in Massachusetts--such a good stock that
it's got pernicious anemia, and I've always had to give it a few
injections of gold."

He continued to feel physical passion for Lillian--as well as for
every gum-chewing hoyden that he picked up on his trips to Chicago,
and for a number of his chattier women patients.  Perhaps his
continued zest came from the fact that it amused him to watch his
wife shiver and reluctantly be conquered.  To her, the whole
business of sex had become a horror related to dark bedrooms and
loud breathing.  Sometimes in the afternoon, when Lillian was
giving coffee to quiet women like the Avondene girls or the
Methodist minister's wife, Roy would come rampaging in, glare at
her possessively, growl "H'are yuh" at the guests in a way which
said he wished they would get out of this, and as soon as they had
twittered away, he would rip down the zipper of her dress.

She often thought about suicide, but she was too blank of mind.
She was always reading the pink-bound books of New Thought leaders,
those thick-haired and bass-voiced prophets who produce theatrical
church-services in New York theaters, and tell their trembling
female parishioners that they can accomplish anything they wish if
they Develop the Divine Will Power and Inner Gifts. . . .
Sometimes Roy threw these books into the furnace.

Lillian never contradicted him.  She was mute even when he teased
her about her dislike for having dead mallards or pheasants drip
blood on her dress when she went hunting with him.

At the beginning of our history, the Drovers had been married for
thirteen years.  They had two sons, William Mayo and John Erdmann
Drover, aged eleven and nine.  Lillian was devoted to them, often
looked at them sadly, as though they were doomed.  She begged them
to listen while she read aloud from Kenneth Grahame and her own
girlhood copy of "The Birds' Christmas Carol," but the boys
protested, "Aw, can that old-fashioned junk, Mum.  Pop says it's
panty-waist.  Read us the funnies in the paper, Mum."

Like their father, the boys enjoyed killing things--killing snakes,
frogs, ducks, rats, sparrows, feeble old neighborhood cats.

When Roy and the boys were away, she stayed alone in a shuttered
room, in a house that rustled with hate, in a silence that
screamed, alone with a sullen cook and a defiant maid.  She did not
read much, but she did read that all women are "emancipated" and
can readily become "economically independent."  She was glad to
learn that.

Roy and Lillian were often cited by Diantha Marl as "one of the
happiest couples, the most successful marriages, in Grand Republic;
just as affectionate as the Zagos, but not so showy about it."



The same authority, Diantha, publicly wondered whether Boone and
Queenie Havock, though by 1941 they had been married for thirty-
five years, would not "bust up," as the technical phrase was.
When, at their rich parties, Queenie got high and screamed that
Boone was a "chippie-chasing, widow-robbing old buzzard," he
frequently slapped her.  She was almost as large as he and even
louder, and she retorted spiritedly by spitting at him, and
sometimes when he was entertaining Eastern Financiers or other
visiting royalty, she yelled at him, "Oh, shutzen Sie die mouth,"
which she believed to be German.

But in private, with their great arms about each other, these
shaggy gods sat up all night making fun of their neat neighbors,
drinking and shouting and cackling like pirates.  When Boone was
almost indicted for stealing one hundred thousand acres of Eastern
Montana prairie, Queenie joyfully announced, "I'll come cook for
you in jail, you cutthroat!"

He answered admiringly, "You probably will, too, you catamaran, but
if you get any more finger-marks on my Cesar Franck symphony
records, I'll bust your ole head open."



Dr. Roy Drover often said, "My experience is that it's all nonsense
to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated
modern life on top of the fundamental clashes between the sexes.
Yessir!  It's all perfectly easy, if the husband just understands
women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles.  You
bet!"



15


Cass had become embarrassed over calling up her boarding-house and
having Tracy or Wilma answer, "Who do you want?  Who?  Oh.  Who
wants her?  Oh!" followed by a shadow of a giggle, and a half-
heard:  "It's the Judge again.  Can you beat it!"  So in early
July, to invite her to the Svithiod Summer Festival, at which he
would be the guest-speaker and say a lot of enthusiastic things
about Swedish-Americans, which might impress a girl with a fancy
for high words, he wrote a note to her.

She answered, and for the first time he saw her writing.

Now to an expert, her script may have looked like that of any
trained stenographer, correct and round, but to Cass this was a
secret message from the captive princess in her tower.  On the
envelope, he was "The Hon. Cass Timberlane."  His name had never
looked so stately.  Could he really be that monumental object to
HER?  Or, sudden jagged thought, did she consider the title
pompous?

Her T was bold, like a knight riding, and the o was precise yet
sweet, not too unlike a kiss.  (That sentimentality he strongly
thrust from him, and shamefacedly took back again.)  The square
envelope and the letter-sheet were of good linen, with a small
square "VM" which, his thumb told him, was printed.  (Splendid!
Engraving would have been extravagant for her.)

Of the letter itself, of her first letter to him, he still had not
read a word.  He was shy about it.  He might know now whether she
loved him or considered him a bumbler.  Then, breathing deep, he
plunged:

"Dear Cass."

--That's good.  Not "Dear Judge."  She thinks of me as a friend,
anyway.  Of course "Darling Cass" would have been better.

"Darn it, I have a date for your evening with the Vikings--"

--Hard luck.  Certainly is hard luck.  She won't hear me make my
speech.  I'd hoped she would.  Still, her letter is cordial--oh,
it's more than cordial, it's really affectionate.  And some
originality to the writing.  Not stilted.

The letter continued:

"So I shall not be able to hear you.  But I know you will be
wonderful.  Call me up soon.  Sincerely yours, Jinny."

--She really wants me to go on telephoning her!  And she signs it
"Jinny," not "Virginia" or "Virginia Marshland."  She does like me!

During his first five readings of the masterpiece, he twice decided
that she liked him, once that she loved him furiously, once that
this was merely a routine answer with all the romantic flavor of
payment of a gas-bill, and once that she was bored by him and
intended, on his evening of oratory, to go off dancing with some
treacherous swine like Eino Roskinen.

He did nothing so puerile as to keep the letter in whatever pocket
was nearest to his heart; he merely thought about it.  He contented
himself with locking it up in the steel box that contained his
will, his passport, a picture of his mother, a certificate for a
hundred shares of the late Overture Silver Mining Company, and a
photograph of his former wife, in a 1929 hat, which he did not
remember owning.

--Hm.  Funny-looking hat.  I wonder if the present-day hats would
look just as--Lord, I'd forgotten Blanche was so beautiful.  But
she looks so calculating and possessive, where Jinny is like a
living brook.  Poor Blanche.  I'll bet her new English in-laws snub
her.  Huh!



He had many walks with Jinny, on Sunday afternoons, and he
discovered that he did not know the city of which he was supposed
to be a leader.  They found a lath-and-mud slum, with starved
widows and children living like war-victims upon property belonging
to his friend Henry Grannick, second richest man in town.  On
Jinny's initiative, he went for the first time in two years into
the museum at the Wargate Memorial, which was three and three-
quarters minutes' walking-time from his chambers, and they saw the
Indian war-bonnets, the models of fur-trader's canoes, and were
swollen and proud with their own history.

They chattered all the while.  The buffet-supper had given them
more of a common background, and they talked of "Chris" and "Roy"
as well as of "Tracy," for they were true Midwesterners in
referring to everybody up to the age of ninety-eight by his given
name.

They were as garrulous as two old friends at the Poor House, and
all through it he was unceasingly on the point of proposing to her,
yet never quite daring to.  In her bright young ruthlessness, she
might dismiss him forever.

He was constantly stirred up by her iconoclastic though slightly
second-hand political creeds.  As a mild and benevolent Republican,
who had to be a politician once every six years, however little he
liked cigars and the histories of Coolidge and Harding, he collided
with the fact that, early conditioned by her father's sympathy with
the Farmer-Labor Party, encouraged later by Eino's internationalism,
Jinny was Young Revolution at the inquiring age.

As they explored the city's unrecognized slums, she wondered aloud
about the competence of the Prutts and Grannicks to control a city,
while she denounced the local "isolationists" and insisted that
America must join in the war against Germany, which had just
invaded Russia.

She was probably disappointed at the readiness with which Cass
agreed with all her challenges; she was probably unable to
understand that the Judge Timberlane who seemed to her so
conservative was considered by his neighbors, by his colleague
Judge Blackstaff, as a riskily radical young man.

He agreed that America is only at the beginning of democracy; that
the super-salesman, with the stigmata of his early toughness or
rusticity blandished away by barber and manicure girl, stands with
the workman whose face is pitted with soot and grease only at the
saloon, the polling-booth, and the grave.

If he was distinctly more leftwing than Jinny thought, he was
distinctly less so than he thought.  He innocently considered
himself, even after election-day, democratically one with the
farmer, the section-hand, the pants-presser, yet he had always been
so occupied with members of the Federal Club and the dwellers on
Ottawa Heights that he was as detached from his constituents as any
country squire.  A kind man, a just judge, an honest citizen who
believed that there must be plenty of public schools and no graft
in the water supply, he had not yet gone many years beyond the Good
Old Massa dynasty.  And golf at the country club is a sweet odor in
the nostrils and a dependable anesthetic.

In the fresh air that Jinny always bore about her, he wanted to
defy his own ancestral cautions.  She did not know, possibly he did
not know, how much he enjoyed cutting loose and being more of an
outlaw than he was.  Later he was to believe that he might really
have become the rebel whom in these honied months he enjoyed
impersonating, if Jinny had really been the bold economic Amazon
she considered herself.  It has always been the masculine version:
"She did not tempt me enough, so I did not eat."

Meantime, more innocent than ever, he made love not apropos of
swords and roses, but of the poll tax, the school system, and
German bombers.



In July she went home to Pioneer Falls for her two-weeks' vacation,
and he begged for an invitation to come up for three days.  Her
mother wrote to him, welcomingly.

He had always liked his assignments to hold court at Pioneer Falls,
county-seat of Mattson County, because from the windows of the
court room he could see the re-echoed heavens of Lake Bruin.  Here
there were none of the wild river valleys of the Grand Republic
country.  The falls of the Sorshay River were only three feet high,
a sporting ground for minnows.  A wedge of the old hardwood country
had been thrust northward from the base of the state to Pioneer
Falls, and the trees were not pine and poplar but oak and maple and
ironwood and basswood.  Most of them had been cleared away by the
fine, high, destructive industry of the frontiersmen, and the
country was now an upland wheat prairie, and Pioneer Falls a
characteristic grain-belt village.  The streets were flat but
sheltered by spacious elms and maples that had been planted by the
Yankee and German settlers.

The Marshland house was white and comfortable and simple, except
for an upstairs balcony with a triangular window behind it, and
Jinny's father, Lester the druggist, was simple and comfortable,
and Mrs. Marshland a darling.  They wore baggy clothes and loved
their friends and they thought that Judge Timberlane was a
tremendous man and that their "little daughter" was a "mighty lucky
girl to have him take an interest in her and her art career."  That
he could ever marry her or be her lover seemingly did not occur to
them.

He was embarrassed by their friendly desire to have him hold forth
like a pedagogue upon her talents--and her unpunctuality, to have
him give her measured advice about how to become a real big-city
cartoonist or a dress designer.  He was even more embarrassed by
the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Marshland were only fifty-three or 
-four, somewhat nearer to his own age than was Jinny.  He kept
hinting that he belonged to her generation, not theirs, but Jinny
bedeviled him by mocking, at family dinner (fried chicken and
asparagus and peas from our own garden), "I wish you three would
now straighten me out about the Polish question and the use of
lipstick."

"Don't play with your food, Jinx," said Mrs. Marshland fondly, at
every meal.

Cass and Jinny picnicked on a bluff overlooking Lake Bruin, in an
old pasture of short worn grass and scattered oaks.  Their table
was a slab of rock, splashed orange with lichens; their divan the
springy moss.  They were idle and relaxed and in love, and they did
play with their food, with the hard-boiled eggs, the finger rolls,
the lemon-meringue pie eaten with fingers which were vulgarly wiped
on the flower-starred moss.

He looked like a woodsman, in laced boots and breeches and mackinaw
shirt of black and red and yellow.  She wore moccasin shoes, with
slacks, but she made up for it by wearing a tight sweater.

Reclining on the moss, replete and exquisitely sleepy, he argued,
"Put your head on my shoulder."

She looked mute and sulky; then she rubbed her cheek against his
shoulder and lay still.  His arm was about her and it may have been
by accident that his hand touched the unbelievable smoothness of
her naked waist under the sweater.  He snatched his hand away, but
his finger-tips kept the memory of that living satin, the tender
warmth of her soft side.  In some panic he knew that he was afraid
of her and shocked by himself, but he protested, "Don't be such a
prude.  Of course you love touching her.  That's what it's all
about."

But any ideas he might have had about trying to betray her seemed
wondrously absurd.

He slipped his hand again about her unbodiced waist, and she let it
lie there warmly a moment before she detached it, gentle and
unoffended.  And that was all that happened of fleshly love-making.
Yet now, with her head against his shoulder, they had been
converted, united, sanctified.

"Darling!" he said only, and kissed her lightly, and her head
settled back in contentment.

It was a poet, not a very skillful one, who began talking:

"Dear Jinny, do you know how lovely you are to me?  I love your
eyes and your hair--it's very reckless today and it smells so newly
washed--and I love your childish fingers--do you suppose that
indelible-ink spot will ever come off?--and I love your riotous and
pretty undependable humor and your curiosity, like Cleo's about
everything, and your honesty and your disinterest in money-making
and your talisman, your crystal Isis--did you bring her back to
Pioneer Falls?"

"Certainly.  Wrapped in a lovely nightgown.  She insisted on
coming.  She's as fascinated by men and their line as I am."

"You don't think I'm merely following a 'line' in what I say, do
you?"

"No!  I think you're dear and good, and I think you really like
me."



They said nothing about being engaged, but like children they made
plans.

"Know what I'd like us to do, soon as the war between Great Britain
and Germany is over?" he urged.  "Sail for Norway and Sweden, which
are the source of so much of the life around here, and then go
through Finland and dip down into Central Europe and up to Moscow
and then China and especially India.  I've always been crazy to see
India, since I read Kipling as a boy."

"Wond'ful."

"And then we'll come back here and get settled down.  We'll live in
Grand Republic in the summer and fall--most beautiful Indian
Summers in the world--and have our winters in Beverly Hills and
Havana and Rio de Janeiro."

"So we're just going to be hoboes and wasters, are we?"

"Sure--in our dreams.  Look here, comrade, have we got to have
social significance even in our DREAMS?"

"I think I'll have to get a ruling on that.  Meanwhile, what are we
doing all this ON?"

"Can't I just as well dream myself two million dollars and a year's
leave from the bench, while I'm about it?"

"You're so heroic--in our dreams."

"Plans okay then?"

"Approved.  Cass, maybe we really COULD do some of those things,
even without being rich."

"Certainly."

"But why is it that nobody ever does do any of the things that he's
free to do?"

In that counsel of doom he was suddenly frightened out of his
spurious boyishness, and clutched her hand, as if to protect her.

They silently looked out from the shadowing oaks to the summer-
enchanted lake.  The farther shore was swampy and in the July light
was a gold-streaked utter green, with blackbirds bending down the
reeds.  There was peace over all the land, and their fear melted,
and suddenly she was telling him, as she never had, of her
childhood in the white house in the prairie village:

"I was such a serious kid, always so busy.  I had to keep track of
everything.  I had note-books and note-books; I put down the
temperature of my dolls, every day, like a hospital chart, and all
the bright things they said--I made 'em up, only sometimes I stole
'em from the other kids.  And I collected birds' eggs and made the
most elaborate notes on just which tree I'd found them in--I drew
plans of the trees, with lovely arrows pointing.  I was sure that
some day those notes would be terribly important to some
ornithologist.  I suppose I'm still the greatest living authority
on snipe around Peterson's Slew.

"And then as fast as I learned a hymn in Sunday School--I was a
Congregationalist like you--I wrote it down on a card, with my
notations about what words to come down hard on, like 'BRINGing in
the SHEAVES' only, I thought it was SHEETS.

"I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so they let me have the
attic all to myself, and up there I was the busiest man of affairs,
rushing from one thing to another: arranging my world-collection of
fans, two paper ones and one lace, and my gallery of movie stars,
and polishing a brass handle to something--I found it by the road,
and to this day I don't know what it was for--and writing down the
name of every new language that I heard of.  I got up to sixty-
seven, and I intended to learn them all, including Swahili and
Liukiu.

"And then pets--our old cat, Percival, and a lot of other cats and
dogs and rabbits and a pet squirrel and a very inappreciative
garter snake.  I used to have an animal drug store and try to cure
all their ailments with sugar-water.  I don't think I was so
successful.

"Maybe a lot of the things that I did were to educate the little
blue bromo Seltzer bottle, the forerunner of my Isis, that I
sneaked out and took everywhere so it could see what was going on.
Oh, I must have been almost as silly at ten as I am now.

"And I took lessons on the mandolin.  I could play 'Down Mobile'
and the Russian national anthem on it.  I was so busy and so
secret.  Nobody ever knew; Dad and Mother were swell about not
prying.  And sometimes I had the most money that ever was--an
entire penny.  I would go into Dad's store and he would pretend he
didn't know me, and he would advise me, very earnestly, and you'd
be surprised how many kinds of candy you could get then for a
penny: maybe one red and two striped and a licorice lozenge.  I'll
never have that much money again, never."

"No, there never are any pennies like that after you are ten," said
Cass.  "And now you're as old as I am.  I used to think of you as
eons younger, but now I feel as though we were the same age, except
that you aren't so cautious."

"And I think of you, Cass, as just my age, except that you have
more sense."

With an absorbed I-want-to-think expression, she wandered off,
along the shore, and he watched her sleepily.  She looked mature
and thoughtful, till, throwing up her arms, she started violently
hop-skipping, all by herself, singing what sounded like a jazz
version of Celeste Aida, and then she seemed to be all of ten
again, and he reached into his pocket for a penny to give her.



16


After the buffet-supper for Jinny, his sister Rose and Gregory Marl
said, "What a nice girl that was; like to see her again," but Cass
wondered that more people did not comment.  He need not have
wondered; they did.

Everybody in town--it being understood that everybody-in-town
includes some three hundred persons out of the 85,000--discussed
Jinny, by telephone, by letter, over the directors' table, or at
the Paul Bunyan Bar.  But they did not reveal this to Cass, for he
was a man not overfond of being tickled in the ribs.

But after he had ventured to Pioneer Falls, before he had yet
pressed, in a volume of Supreme Court digests, the buttercup that
Jinny had given him, then everybody concluded that they must rush
in and rescue him.

He was to play bridge at Boone Havock's, and before the fourth
player, Eve Champeris, arrived, Boone and Queenie, with her voice
like a flat trolley-wheel, set out to save him with the solicitude
of a couple of pigs eating their young.  That they had never yet
seen Jinny made them no less authoritative.

Boone struck:

"Sit down, Cass, and take a load off your feet.  Have a snort?
Don't be a fool; of course you will.  Now, Cass, I want you to
listen to me and don't go interrupting and shooting off your mouth
just because you think you're such a high-brow and a judge and all
that junk while me, I never got through fifth grade.  You haven't
any better friends in the world than me and Queenie."

"You're damn tootin'," confirmed Queenie, then remembered that she
was being refined and humanitarian this evening, and caroled, "Are
we ever!  Oh boy, I'll say we are!  A lot of bums are always
yessing you, Cass, because you're in politics, but me and Boone are
good-enough friends to tell you the truth.  You know.  For your own
good."

Cass had really come over to play bridge, not to have things done
for his good, and he was not a meek man.  But he was their
neighbor, he was used to them, and in a frontier civilization you
are not offended by a neighbor if he does nothing worse than throw
tomahawks.  He listened to Boone with only a slight biliousness.

"Cass, what's all this we hear about your going nuts over some
fifth-rate stenographer?"

"Some low-grade tart on the make," added Queenie, virtuously.
After all, Queenie had some background for her opinions on lowness.
Her father had kept some of the best saloons in Northern Minnesota.

"I don't know what you two are talking about, unless you mean Miss
Marshland, a brilliant young artist in whose career I have become
slightly interested."

"'Slightly' is good!" jeered Queenie.

Boone roared, "I don't suppose you take her out to that gyp-joint,
the Unstable, more than three times a week!"

"I do not!"

"I don't suppose her and you were snooping around those tenements
on South Greysolon Avenue!  You didn't tell each other they were 'a
disgrace,' and 'somebody ought to do something about 'em!'  Well, I
OWN those tenements, and if you want 'em I'd be glad to give 'em to
you and see what YOU can do with 'em!  Lot of Finns and Communists
and Poles and Svenskas in there, never pay their rent and use the
banisters for firewood!  But let that pass.  I'm so used to trying
to do something for this community and never get one word of thanks
that I don't even pay any attention to a lot of Red bellyaching,
and I don't care WHAT you said about Havock Haven.  But I do care
when I see an old friend making a fool of himself over a cute
little gold-digger that just hangs around to see what she can get
out of him--and then probably goes back to the boy-friend and they
laugh their heads off at the old goat!"

Cass broke.

"I wouldn't let you talk like this even if what you said were true,
but it isn't.  Miss Marshland is decidedly a lady.  No, that's a
bloodless word--she's an angel."

"Sweet little gold angel with blood in her eye!" screamed Queenie.

"You sleeping with her?" Boone grunted.

"I am not!  And even if--"

"Now don't go and get gentlemanly on us, son.  We're only trying to
help you.  You made a portion of a horse of yourself before,
marrying that high-hat Minneapolis snob with her phony Boston
accent, and we don't want you to do it again."

Cass must have said something confused and not impressive, for
Boone was unsquelched.

"There'd be some excuse for this new girl if you were doing a
little advanced necking with her, but if you're thinking about
marrying her--a cutie half your age--"

"She is not!"

"--that has an idea it would be swell to be Mrs. Judge Timberlane,
and expects you to stay up all night and dance with her, or sit
around and watch her dance with the younger guys, why, then you're
a worse fool than I thought you were, and I've always rated you
pretty high in damn foolishness ever since you gave up what might
of become a fifty-thousand-dollar law-practice to sit on your
dignity on the bench."

Queenie neighed, "Now you listen to me.  A woman's heart knows.
None of these young girls want to be of any help to their husbands.
They just get married for the excitement of it and for what they
can get out of it, the little tramps, and so immodest--showing
their knees!  If you GOT to get married, Cass--and I don't see why;
ain't there any lady clerks that know the answers in your court
house?--then why don't you pick out some dame of thirty-five
that'll stay home and take care of you, like I would?"

He did not, as he longed to then and all through the ordeal of
bridge, slap them and walk out.  But for a year it broke his habit
of the Havocks.

"He's spoiled--touchy as a pregnant woman," said Queenie Havock to
Eve Champeris, who said it to Chris who said it to Cass who said it
to himself.



He expected Roy Drover to be even more boisterous than the Havocks,
but Roy, when he caught Cass in the quiet reading-room of the
Federal Club, sounded like a physician, competent and impersonal:

"Son, I hear you've fallen for that pretty little monkey you
brought to the Country Club.  It's none of my business, but why
don't you try some ugly woman with a lot of passion, instead of one
of these anemic kids?  They haven't any gratitude.  I take it for
granted you don't intend to marry this chick--her a rank outsider,
that none of us know.  You're not THAT haywire!"

Cass tried to believe afterward that his retorts to Boone and Roy
and two or three other foul impugners and mongers had been in the
manner of a stately "Sir!" followed by a challenge.  It is
doubtful.  That would not have gone well with Radisson County duck-
hunters, especially when they loved him enough to risk his wrath.

The one gentle effort at his salvation was that of Stella Avondene
Wrenchard.

The Avondenes were a Family, fond and unshakable.  They were
impoverished aristocracy who were unconcerned about it so long as
they could be together in their old whitewashed brick house.  The
head of the family, Verne Avondene, had been born, in Grand
Republic, to a million dollars in timberlands which had been
acquired, possibly honestly, by his grandfather, the great Indian
agent, who seems in the histories to have had no Christian name
other than "Colonel."  Verne went to Yale and the English Cambridge
and was just looking into diplomatic careers when the family money
blew up.  He did not complain; the game had been worth any golden
candle, and he had a comforting knowledge of Balzac and Monet and
Old English balladry, even if he could not earn more than thirty-
five dollars a week.

That sum he received in the insurance office of Scott Zago, where
he was respectfully entitled "office manager," meaning clerk and
assistant bookkeeper.

His wife, still slim and beautiful at sixty-five, said that Verne
was the greatest gentleman, the most gallant lover, and the most
amusing companion in Grand Republic, and she was a fair judge.

Their two daughters lived with them.  Stella had married an
engineer, Tom Wrenchard, but had been widowed by an accident within
the year, and come home.  Her marriage had been so brief that most
people forgot it, and she was usually called "Miss Stella
Avondene."  She taught domestic science in the Alexander Hamilton
High School.  Her spinster older sister, Pandora, gentle and
affectionate and given to flowers and sketching and playing the
piano, which under her mild fingers sounded like a spinet, was in
charge of the children's department at the public library.  Both
girls treated their parents as their equals, and the low white
brick house was full of fudge, cats, new novels, Delius, water-
colors, charades, omelets, and other people's children.

Stella had always thought well of marrying Cass, but had stayed
home from hunting in loyalty to Chris Grau.  Now, she invented a
lovely theory: Chris had, probably for discreditable reasons,
jilted Cass, who in wan loneliness had turned to some pretty girl
or other who had no virtues.  Except in a state of solitary
madness, a steady man like Cass could never marry out of Our Class,
that ancient aristocracy of Grand Republic, hoary with tradition,
which had been going on now for more than seventy-five years.

Stella wanted to save him.

The Avondenes had him in for supper.  As they had a maid only when
Verne had had a lucky bet on the races--the last time had been in
1939--they did all the housework, and they let Cass help them wash
the dishes (which he did unexpectedly well, being a camper) while
they all sang "Sweet and Low."  Then Stella mended the lining of
his coat, poor girl.  As his own housekeeper, Mrs. Higbee, was very
inspective and efficient about that sort of thing, he suspected
that Stella had made the small rip in the lining herself, and he
loved her for it.

He might have married Stella then.  Perhaps he should have married
Stella, and grown peaceful to the point of Double Solitaire, but it
happened that either God or Cass Timberlane had made of Jinny
Marshland the eternal image of beauty walking with silver feet the
waves of dawn.  Dear Stella Avondene, teaching in your Sunday-
school class at St. Anselm's, and smiling, in the white kid gloves
you cleaned at home, singing and a little sad and very kind.  You
will never walk the waves at dawn.  Dear Stella!



He heard something of the town rumors about Jinny.  Apparently Mrs.
Webb Wargate had said that, though she honored Judge Timberlane and
would probably receive any ragtag of a wife that he might drag in,
yet she was regretful that such a man should be planning to marry a
girl whose real name was Marshandsky, whose father was a drunken
teamster on the Range, who had been a waitress in the Pineland
Hotel and an itinerant hired girl, and who was in general a threat
to the Best People of Grand Republic, so intimately related to the
Best People of Albany and Philadelphia and Hartford.

The early Minnesota had its families with the correct and rigid
manners, the Emersonian scholarship, of New England; with an
annotated Horace and a frivolous fiddle lying upon the pious parlor
organ.  It had its Romans like General Sibley and, in Grand
Republic, the Avondenes and Grannicks.  But lesser and brisker
tribes like the Wargates had taken their togas.

Cass considered the Wargate peerage.

Old Dexter Wargate had started out in Minnesota in 1881 by
conducting a hardware-store and selling nails across the counter to
lumberjacks and half-breeds.  He had married the daughter of Simon
Eisenherz, from Pennsylvania, who had come to Minnesota in 1854, to
acquire furs from the Indians in exchange for brass pots and
bootleg whisky, with some effect upon the number of murdered white
settlers, before he discovered how to steal millions of acres of
timberland.

Cass was not pleased when a family founded upon a whisky keg in a
log cabin felt superior to a girl crooning over her collection of
three fine fans in a village attic, secret and eager and alone--so
alone and helpless against the chatter at the cocktail-hour.

He had only one moment of treachery to Jinny: when he wondered
whether to others she was as clearly divine as she was to him.  He
remembered that the Juliet Zago who to him was a wiggling nuisance
was a fair young thing to her Scott, and that Boone Havock
seemingly felt no distress when his wife yelled like a buzz-saw.
Were there barbarians who might think that his Jinny had a touch of
the Zago whimsy, with her circulatory Isis?  To him, she would
forever be a flame, but could his friends see her glory?



He was aware that Jinny had a temper.  She was, he thought,
unconscious of what the Havocks and Wargates whispered, but if she
learned it, he was certain that she would reject him along with all
his clansmen forever.  He had not planned to venture upon any talk
of marriage until they should have had a year of building up a
common background.  But he felt now that he must not risk her
discovery of the gossip till she should be bound to him, protected
by him, and on an August evening when he was to take her to the
movies, he drove irresolutely toward her boarding-house with the
nervous intention of proposing to her.

The living-room at Miss Hatter's was empty.  When Jinny appeared,
ten minutes late as usual, he sat in the preposterous patent-rocker
of 1890, and ventured, "I think we've done all the traditional
things that lovers do, even moonlight and picnic by a brook, up to
a point."

"But we aren't lovers, Cass."

"We might be."

"M."

"So I want you to come sit on my lap."

"Oh, dear no.  That's very outmoded and reactionary, Judge."

"You sit on my lap!"

She did.  He felt the pleasure of her body's closeness, but he
found that he was remarkably uncomfortable.  She was heavier than
she looked, and there was extreme danger that the rickety chair
would fall over sidewise.  He wished that he could think of some
polite way of telling her that it would be all right now if she
went over and sat on the couch.  She sighed blissfully and moved
closer and his fingers tightened on her knee, and he was at once in
ecstasy and conscious that his right leg was cramped.

In that mingled state he said quietly, "Darling, you know how I
want to marry you."

"M."

"We must be married, and soon."

Silent.

"Will you?"

Silent and motionless.

"Jinny!  Please!"

She spoke as quietly as he, with no tint of blushing in her voice.
"No, Cass, it's impossible."

"Why?"

"We could never make a go of it.  I'm terribly fond of you, maybe
I'm a little in love with you, but if we were married it would be
too much of a strain."

"Difference in age?"

"Oh, you're not so much older.  I've almost fallen in love with men
much older than you--one antiquated buzzard of fifty, in Pioneer
Falls when I was a kid--an evangelist he was, and was he full of
It!  No.  You're really younger than Tracy or Eino or that Curtiss
Havock lug; there's something awfully young and touching about you.
But I never could stand your set, not even your sister, though
she's nice, or that caramel sundae, Mr. Criley.  They're all a
bunch of furnace-regulators and they talk about their Middlewestern
Hospitality but none of them invite Mr. Fliegend to their houses.
I couldn't do it, I honestly couldn't.  But--"

She was actually traditional enough to wind up with, "But let's be
the best of friends."

He pushed back her chin with angry fingers and kissed her angrily,
and she relaxed to it; a kiss long and confessing.  Then, to his
shock and to the danger of his flopping over in the patent-rocker,
she sprang from his lap and stood smoothing her hair, murmuring,
"Somebody--"

There were footsteps.  By the time Eino Roskinen came in, Jinny was
sedately sitting on the couch and Cass had straightened his
summertime blue bow-tie.

Jinny twittered, "Oh, Eino, the Judge wants to hear about the new
state dairy regulations.  He was just asking me."

Eino was distressingly informed and accurate, and he produced a
fireworks-display of figures until Cass, to his annoyance, really
became interested.  But he felt flat and baffled.  How could he
persuade Jinny of the joys of a life-time of furnace-regulation?
He bravely put her out of his mind forever--forever until they sat
at the movie and her hand slipped unasked into his.

So the lover started all over again his daily task of being
crushed.



17


He had, for Jinny, dinner at his house, with Rose and Donald
Pennloss and Abbott and Hortense Hubbs.  Cleo went mad trying to
take care of them all.

Rose informed Cass, after dinner, "I do like your Marshland girl.
She's the cleverest of all your girls."

"WHAT girls?"

"Oh, you know.  How would _I_ know?  And Cass, she's so pretty!"
Then Cass loved his sister, whom he had not infrequently considered
a nuisance.

He had persuaded Jinny to bring in a portfolio of her Fliegend Toy
drawings, that his friends might see that Miss Jinny was not only
the most beautiful but the most talented young woman living, and he
pressed them on Hubbs.

Abbott Hubbs was the neurotic, young-old newspaperman who hated
newspapers, who drank too much and smoked too many cigarettes and
was too snappishly cynical, and in the privacy of his meager home,
read poetry aloud to his wife, who loved and slapped and, during
hangovers, nursed him.  He was always shaky, dropping cigarette
ashes on everything: a thin, wizened, black-haired, extraordinarily
honest and generous man, a victim of the days of war-bulletins and
smug syndicated columns and cameras and high finance in newspapers.

Jinny had prepared sketches for a pasteboard political Punch and
Judy show.  Hubbs looked at her piggish Mussolini, her melancholy
Hitler, her bulldog Churchill, her mocking Roosevelt, and he cried,
shaking ashes all over the sketches, "These are fine, these are
mighty fine.  Jinny, could I take some of 'em and show 'em to Greg
Marl, at the paper?"

Cass noted, along with his pride in this discovery of Jinny's
genius, that this was the first time that any of his friends had
addressed her as "Jinny."

Next day, Gregory Marl, large and soft and diplomatic spoke to him
at the Federal Club.

"We think well of Miss Marshland's drawings at the Banner office,
Cass, and we're losing our cartoonist.  He's going to enlist in the
Army--thinks America will get into the war, maybe by the middle of
1942."

"YOU don't believe that, do you, Greg?"

"Oh, no, not a chance.  We'll go on furnishing supplies to England,
but we'll never enter the war."

"Maybe we ought to."

"Maybe--but we won't.  But you never can persuade these crazy
youngsters like my cartoonist.  So I would like to talk to Miss
Marshland.  Does she understand reproduction processes?"

"Must--working at Fliegend's."

"Confidentially do you know what they're paying her?"

"Uh--thirty-five a week."

"Uh--I guess the Banner could hike that to forty-five."

Cass told himself that he was pleased that she could command all
this wealth.

When Jinny went worrying to Lucius Fliegend about the Banner offer,
Lucius insisted on her taking this nobler job.



On her last afternoon at the factory, in late August, they gave
Jinny a riotous party, with speeches by Mr. Fliegend, B. Ogden
Hathawick, the shipping clerk, the society reporter of the Grand
Republic Banner, and District Judge Cass Timberlane.

Her first cartoon for the Banner depicted an American eagle
meditatively though rather acrobatically scratching its beak with a
claw, as it gazed at a two-headed eagle with two crowns.  Spirited
and original, felt Cass, and he made it the occasion for taking her
to dinner at the Unstable.

Where hitherto she had worked on the Southwest Side, now her office
was in the center of town, only three and a half blocks from the
court house, and as his fall term opened, Cass was demanding that
she lunch with him, at Charley's or Oscar's or the Pineland or the
Ladies' Annex of the Federal, at least three days a week.  But she,
who a month ago had been a flying-haired working girl with
gingerbread and an apple for lunch in a flowery pasteboard box, was
now a gray-suited, demurely coiffed young career-woman, and Cass
was heavy with worry and a certain jealousy as he found that she
had no longer to depend on him to meet the Important Factors in the
Commercial and Professional Life of Our City, but was invited to
lunch by Abbott Hubbs, Curtiss Havock, Fred Nimbus, the announcer,
and Dick Wolke, the jeweler.  When he met her now, it was as likely
to be she who had the "inside track on the news"--she called it
that--news about Norton Trock's extra-legal speculations or Bernice
Claywheel's lovers or the more secret plans of the Turkish Army.

To his tenderness for her Cass added wondering admiration of her
knowledge.  She knew just how much false hair Madge Dedrick wore,
and precisely what plans, in a secluded tent on the African desert,
British agents were making. . . .  Hubbs had told her, and Cass
mustn't let it go any further.

She reported all her professional triumphs, and Cass was proud but
worried, as they walked in the chilly September evenings, with the
first of the Northern Lights like a gigantic glass chandelier
swaying in the ceiling of the heavens.

He was in a trance of absolute love, and such practicalities as
marriage seemed trivial.  He wanted nothing except what she might
want.  His responsibility as a judge, his devotion to his friends,
his zest in hunting and swimming, his reverence for learning, these
must remain in him, for they were indestructible parts of him, but
they were minor and obvious facts, not worth noting, compared with
his worship for this slight, swift-walking girl.

But he did not think of her only in terms of divinity, of altars
and silver wings.  He hoarded a bus-transfer ticket that had been
crumpled in her hot hand, a pencil sketch of himself which she had
made on a paper napkin.

The Quiet Mind that he had always sought he had found now in
Jinny's cool presence.  She was to him not lovely flesh alone,
though wholesomely and urgently she was that as well, but peace and
reality.  With her, he might never accomplish strange adventures,
but with her the commonplace life of a Grand Republic lawyer might
become as beautiful as sunrise on a prairie slew.



The rumor that "Judge Timberlane has fallen for some skirt or other
and is going to get hitched" had spread from Ottawa Heights to the
distant wilderness fully five minutes' drive away, where dwelt
nobody at all except the clerks and factory workers and repairmen
and women and children who made up nine-tenths of the population of
Grand Republic.

Into the mind of everyone who wanted everyone else to do something
beneficial for all the rest of the people and do it right away came
the same inspiration.  If Judge Timberlane was going to be married
again, and apparently this time to a tempting little piece who
would keep him absorbed, then he would be less affable about giving
contributions, making speeches, sitting on committees, signing
broadsides, and listening to the local Adam Smiths read aloud, from
mimeographed sheets, their plans to bring about international peace
by having the Lenin Institute of Moscow, the University of Berlin,
and the University of Indiana combine.  They must get to him at
once, and if George Hame had not been agile at the corridor door of
the Judge's chambers, they probably would have done so.

They had to be content with writing to him, though they would have
preferred to bolt in and shout, "I know you're a busy man and I
just want three minutes of your time," and then stay for three
eloquent hours.

Daily Cass had letters from organizations to keep us out of the
war, to get us into the war, to support the labor unions, the
manufacturers' unions, the farmers' unions, and the Dickens
Fellowship, and crusades to glorify the American mother or to
persuade her to stop talking.

He felt guilty about all of them but instead of answering them,
now, he went out to lunch with Jinny.



He had little of her fantastic imagination, whereby, in her Banner
cartoons, Rumania became a sinister cat like her own Isis, but he
nourished that imagination in her, along with every happiness and
tranquility.  He looked at her cartoons even before the European
war headlines or the court notices, and when she had failed, as
unfortunately she frequently did, he winced, and prayed for her
success.  Oh, yes, he did sometimes pray, to a Liberal Congregational
God who was interested in world peace and the welfare of
share-croppers.

He walked with Jinny, they played poker at Miss Hatter's--Tracy
Oleson had the astuteness about straights to be expected from a
Wargate Corporation man--and once, when a carnival came to town,
Cass and Jinny attended it and shot rifles at clay ducks and had
their weights guessed and their photograph taken, arm in arm.

In the belief that she had enjoyed somewhat rowdy sports like
bowling with Eino and Tracy, Cass conceived it to be his duty to
show himself boisterous, and he rode the merry-go-round with her,
boldly reaching for the brass ring, while the electors of Radisson
County stood in a circle yelling, "Ride 'em, Judge" and "Good boy,
Judge; you got it."  He looked triumphantly at Jinny, on a gold and
aquamarine unicorn beside him, but her face was compressed and
disapproving.

He got off the merry-go-round as soon as possible.  "I thought
you'd enjoy roughhousing with me," he puzzled.

"It isn't dignified.  Nor for a judge."

"But I thought you didn't like it when I was too dignified."

"I don't, but still--People recognizing you and staring at you
cutting up monkeyshines!  Your own constituents!"

"Why, Jinny, I gained five votes for my next election every time
they saw me go round!"

"Yes--maybe--but still--"

He had thought that in Blanche he had encountered all the feminine
unreasonableness there was to know.  The student of precedents
sighed, "Overruled again."

The first occasion on which they were invited out together was a
dinner given by Rose Pennloss, with the playful Zagos, that
glittering semi-bachelor Jay Laverick and, to Cass's quaking, Chris
Grau.

The Pennloss house was as neat as a shop-window and as comfortable
as a hotel and no more affectionate than either.  The living-room,
scientifically the right size for a family of three, was filled
with maple reproductions of Colonial furniture, on a machine-made
handmade rug, with a New Art wallpaper depicting, with liberties,
the environs of Boston, all highly clean and shining, with one
relieving vulgarity in a rubbed red-leather couch on which Don took
his naps.  The excellent dinner, cooked by the excellent Swedish
maid and served on excellent china that, in a fainting gray, showed
the major churches of New England, tasted as the fine maple
furniture looked.

To Cass, social dinners were likely to be either hellish or dull.
This was hellish.

But Chris Grau, now first coming on Jinny and him as a recognized
couple, was cordial, was easily generous.  She asked Cass about the
health of Cleo, and she said to Jinny, "I look at your cartoons
every day, Miss Marshland.  I think they are extremely clever."

As he heard this, Cass suddenly knew that they were not
particularly clever, and he felt bleak.

He kept babbling, and Rose had a sorry tale of how little the
Reverend Dr. Gadd appreciated her spiritual yearnings, and the
Zagos bounced about and waved the stalks of vegetables in the air,
but Jinny was as strong as Chris.  She was wordless but merry-eyed,
and she listened to everybody exactly as though she were listening.

She even kept on smiling when Juliet Zago yelled, "Oh, oopsums, we
dot Baked Alaska for dessertums!"

Rose had thought not badly of Jinny, and looked at her now with
politeness, but she wanted to know quite a few fundamental things
about her religious beliefs, her virtue, her opinion of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and how cheaply she could buy clothes.

What, fretted Cass, could any man do against the secret hates and
grudging acceptances of women?

Not cowards in the windy forests of night can find such jumpy fears
as any lover.  When dinner was over, Rose's daughter, Valerie,
fifteen and fresh and excited, came in from a movie which she and
the current boy had been professionally viewing and judging.  She
clamped on Jinny as the only bright thing in this mildewed company.
The two girls, twenty-four and fifteen, slipped away and could be
heard laughing in the sun-room.  When Jinny was dragged back, to
make up the second table of bridge, she looked at Cass sulkily, and
he felt like a wicked old pasha.

He was unreasonably irritated that they expected him to be grateful
to them for accepting as possibly worthy of them the young Diana
clothed in light.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives


ROSE AND DON PENNLOSS


Cass Timberlane never at any time expected the marriage of his
sister and Don Pennloss to last for three months more.  He was
sorry; he liked them both, and in their informal and impersonal
house he was comfortable.  But Rose had ambitions for what she
called "a richer life," which meant, to her, music and travel and
new clothes and being the hostess to visiting lecturers, like
Diantha Marl, or living in a New York duplex, like Astra Wargate,
sister-in-law of Webb.

Her husband liked making love to her, liked having her around to
play rummy and hear his stories.  The trouble, or so Rose thought,
was that he was common in taste and dull in talk and a small
dreariness to look at.  She could not endure the heavy monotone of
his voice; he quarreled or made love or said the bacon was good or
denounced the unions in exactly the same basso, without
inflections.

Don was, at forty, a grain-dealer, president of the Aldpen Elevator
System, and he made nine thousand dollars a year and liked
carpentry, and when you asked him if he didn't think it was a hot
afternoon, he told you.  Always, invariably though Rose threatened
to scream, he had a nap on the red leather couch when he came home
from the office, and invariably he announced his purpose by saying,
"I think I'll take a little nap now."  Never a large nap.  Never a
medium-sized nap.  Always a little one.  And he snored.

On evenings when they were at home alone, he turned on the radio
and let it blast away through music, weather reports, lumber-market
reports, addresses about South American tariffs, and humorous
sketches in which celebrated radio artists said that their rivals--
really lovely friends of theirs--were no good at all.  Don rarely
heard any of it, as he read his newspaper and The Grain Gazette,
but if she wanted to turn it off he was angry.  He mourned, "Can't
a man do what he wants to even in his own house?  I don't stay out
nights chasing around with a bunch of chippies, and I think I might
have some consideration."

Rose frequently told Cass that her liveliest desire was to have Don
"stay out nights and chase his head off and let me have one quiet
evening to think in."

When Rose had married him sixteen years ago--he was twenty-four and
she was only twenty--she had reported to Cass, "Don's really the
most appealing boy, under his apparent solidity.  I'm the only one
who understands him.  He tugs at my heartstrings."

She complained about Don now rather too much; usually to Cass but
not rarely to an intimate lunch of women at the Heather Club.  But
she never complained to her daughter, Valerie, for whom she planned
vicarious careers as an actress or a newspaperwoman.

She said to Cass, in effect, "I want to live in New York and get to
know all the intellectuals.  But what is a woman who is still good-
looking at thirty-six but not beautiful enough to make a career of
it, clever enough to know she wouldn't be clever on any job, aware,
through reading, of all the glamor and luxuries of life but with no
money for them and no rich relatives to murder, active and yet
contemptuous of amateur charities and artistic trifling and
exhibitionistic sports, untrained in anything worth fifteen dollars
a week on the labor market and not even, after years of marriage, a
competent cook or nurse, no longer in love with her husband and
bored by everything he does--and he always does it!--and yet
unwilling to have the thrill of being vengeful toward him or of
hurting him intentionally, liking other men but not lecherous nor
fond of taking risks, possessing a successful daughter and too
interested in her to desert her--just what is this typical upper-
middle-middle-class American Wife to DO?"

When Cass scolded that she had never yet done anything to prove
that she was really superior to her cheerful and industrious
husband, and that Don might be bored also, Rose agreed so
angelically that Cass felt helpless.  And when he insisted that if
she really wanted to break away, she must quit talking, take a
plain job, study, thoroughly learn some occupation, she agreed just
as amiably, and did nothing.

She had once had something like a lover in St. Paul, a musician,
a pretentious fool who finally ran off with a weak-minded
grandmother, but Rose was still proud of having been caressed by
this cavalier.  Once, for two weeks, she had thought that she was
in love with the brutal powers of Dr. Roy Drover, but then the
doctor had gone trout-fishing.

She believed that she liked to listen to spirited conversations
between Men of Talent.  She asserted that she was "absolutely in
awe of geniuses, like Bernard Shaw and Henry Ford" and that she
"got such a profound thrill from hearing original points of view
expressed."  Actually, they never did get expressed when she was
around, because if she asked a deep question, she interrupted the
answer to it as soon as she had thought up another question.  Even
the most intellectual exhibit--say, Norton Trock explaining bank
clearances--became only a dark background for Rose's spiritual
fireworks.

All of this about Rose Pennioss is true, and none of it is quite
true, because along with her restlessness, which arose from her
feeling that nothing she was doing was important, she was a kind-
hearted and attractive woman and an unjealous mother, who would,
with a sturdier man, have become a good farm-wife.  And, loving
Cass, she was willing to believe as strongly as he that in Jinny
Marshland there was a witch-lamp and a knowledge of good and evil.



18


This October week, Cass had a wriggling heap of divorces in his
court, along with a good clean burglary and one lively carnal-
knowledge case.  He worked late in his chambers or at home, and all
week he did not once see Jinny.  Saturday, he went reluctantly off
on what was supposed to be a joyful duck-hunting stag, at Dr.
Drover's log hunting lodge near Lake Vermilion.

"Roy's Retreat" had cost a good many appendectomies for its
varnished logs, its fieldstone fireplace, and many a humble tonsil
had gladly sacrificed itself for the Navajo blankets, the Mexican
pottery, the rack of English shotguns, and the hotel-size
refrigerator.

The six hunters in the party were out on the duck-pass at four in
the morning on the day after their arrival.  They set out the
decoys and humped over, shivering, in the rain, watching the bleary
water, the thin tamaracks, as a wet dawn crawled over the swamp of
faded reeds.  Dr. Drover had two bottles of brandy with him, and
when they drove back to the lodge for breakfast, at nine, they had
only five mallards, but they had six beautiful jags.  Thereafter,
though Roy would occasionally go out and repel some savage duck
that seemed to menace them, they drank and played poker and talked
about women, and not about women in the kitchen or the polling-
booth.

The others were gentler men than Roy; they did not roar and they
liked novels and the theater, yet all of them, except Cass and
Gerald Lent, who had once lived in Europe and who was now the kept
husband and social secretary of Della Wargate Lent, belonged to the
Big Boys, the solid and hearty fellows, contemptuous of tenderness
toward any women except their mothers and their daughters, and
their talk about women, as about taxation, marched with the tread
of infantry on parade.

Though the biggest and by far the strongest among them, Cass often
had an exasperating feeling of inferiority to these virile
captains.  Like a small boy among scornful elder brothers, he
babbled things he did not especially want to say, he interrupted
them with uneasy questions that he did not particularly want
answered.  He told wavering anecdotes about the court room, and
even during them he thought, "This is a very dull story!"  He
chattered about Russia, about Judge Blackstaff, about the way to
cook cabbage, about every small subject that was sacred to him just
now because he had been discussing it with Jinny.

Roy belched, "Oh, shut up, Cass, you're just gossiping.  You get me
down.  How the hell a pansy like you, that plays the flute and
reads poetry and is nuts about every sixteen-year-old gal that hits
town and even gets chummy with these Farmer-Labor agitators that
want to overthrow the Government--how come you can still be the
best shot in town is clean beyond me.  By God, THAT'S injustice!"

That was Roy's way of showing his affection--and of showing what he
really thought.

In their talk of women, Roy and Greg Marl said nothing about their
own wives, and Bradd Criley had none, but Harley Bozard jeered that
his spouse, Karen, was completely frigid, and Marl let them know
how successfully, on a Pullman sleeper, he had seduced the wife of
a college president.

Gerald Lent ruefully reported, "If any of you boys think it's a
cinch to be idle and live on a rich wife like Della, that expects
you to yes her relatives and to get hot at two A.M., I wish you'd
try it.  I ever tell you about the time I had a row with her before
I went off to the Arrowhead?  When I came home, she'd put all my
pictures and clothes and the chest that I bought in Florence out on
the lawn, in the rain.  The meanest job I know of is to be the
little husband in the home, waiting for the big manly wife to come
from work.  No ditch-digger earns his keep as hard as I do.  I
wonder when I'll walk out on dear Della.  She'll be so surprised!
Hey, don't be so tightwad with that hootch."

Through it all the monkish Cass wanted only to repeat the awfully
bright things his Jinny had said.

He dared not even question her employer, Greg Marl, about her
progress as a cartoonist, lest the independent young woman hear of
it and think that he was interfering.

He was certain that these were his good friends and that he was
madly enjoying the drinking and the poker, but when they were all
out on the lake, one day earlier than he had intended to go, he
left a highly perjured note for them and drove back, on a red-gold
Minnesota October afternoon, to Grand Republic--to Jinny.

On the way, from a booth in a country store, he telephoned to her,
"Starting home--dine with me tonight?"  She was at the Banner
office, where ordinarily she was forbiddingly businesslike, but now
she squealed, "Darling!  I didn't expect you till tomorrow.  I'm so
glad!"

"I had a fine time hunting with the boys."

"The boys!  Grrrr!"

"I thought maybe I never would come home."

"So did I.  I was scared."

"Would you really care if I didn't come back?"

"I think I'd just die.  No, no, I wouldn't!  But--"

"Darling, I'm so--We dine, then?"

"Of course.  Why not?"

"Well--you know--I was afraid you might have a date with Eino or
Tracy or Abbott Hubbs."

"Those brats!  And if I did--so what!"

"You'd break it for me?"

By now, the ardor that in her surprise Jinny had betrayed had grown
more cautious, but she was still friendly as she answered, "I might
think about it, anyway."

"I'll be at Miss Hatter's at seven, then."

"I'll be all ready.  Seven sharp."

Which, in Jinny's time-schedule, meant ten minutes past seven, not
very sharp.

But for once, when he drove up she was out on a flimsy sort of
balcony, apparently ready, and she waved to him with a thrilling
"Be right down!"

He then waited, in his car, for seven minutes.  Four of them he
devoted to regretfully watching his fervor cool off, and three to
wondering whether she had, upstairs there, some rat of a suitor
whom she did not wish him to see.

As she came out of the covered outside stairway, his rapture sprang
up again, but now it was Jinny who was reasonlessly cool.  She said
"Hello" civilly, and nothing more, and slipped around the car and
into it before he could give her his hand.

The fatuous lover fretted, as he drove, "I did miss you so, Jinny.
No fun with the ducks.  You miss me?"

"I guess I did.  Yes, sure.  But I've been awful busy."

He had the sense to be still, on their way to the Unstable, or to
mutter about ducks, a subject devoid (in their case) of emotional
strain, and to tell her that Greg Marl had said, "Good little
draftsman, Jinny, and a good sport in the office."

Jinny glowed with "Oh, did he?"  Yet she was morose again when they
faced the excellent whitefish and fried apples at the Unstable, and
our poor friend was no longer wise.  He protested, "What's the
trouble, lamb?"

"Trouble?  I don't know what you mean by 'trouble'!"

"Well, you're so silent--"

"Good heavens, can't I ever be quiet a moment without being accused
of being deliberately unpleasant?"

"I didn't say you were unpleasant!  I never even thought such a--"

"Well, you certainly looked as if you did."

"Oh, Jinny, dear Jinny, what are you quarreling about?"

"I?  Quarreling?  Oh, this is too much!  I get so irritated when
you watch me and spy on me and try to find fault with every little
thing that I do or don't do and try and show how superior and--I
DO!"

He could only look at her like a mournful hound surprised by the
spitting of his friend the household kitten.  Jinny ran down.  She
laughed, she cried for a second--a tear absurdly dribbled down her
immaculate nose--and she whimpered:

"It's my old trick.  You'll have to beat me."

"M."

"When I was a kid, whenever I wanted something terribly and then
got it, so I was all excited and grateful--like Christmas or a
birthday or finally Mother got a dress for me that I was crazy
about--then I was scared to let on how happy I was, or maybe I was
afraid it would vanish if I believed in it too hard and showed how
much I wanted it.  So I'd fly off into a horrible little tantrum,
and the gladder I'd been, the worse I'd behave.  Believe me, it
didn't last long, it never did, and if Dad and Mother could just
get themselves to ignore it, I'd be all right.  But it did used to
surprise them and hurt them.  And now--I'm not so violent, but I'm
doing something like that to you, and you're so sweet!  I've been
vixenish tonight just because I WAS glad you'd come back early!  Do
you think you can put up with it?  I know I'll do it again.  Even
to you.  Can you endure such a horrible, childish frenzy?"

Why, of course he could.  Meant nothing at all.  Just nerves and
tiredness, from all her energy--Get right over it.  Certainly.
Fact, he'd enjoy her tantrums, if she was always so regretful and
generally lovely afterward.  And USUALLY, with MOST lovers, they
didn't just have little misunderstandings like this, but actually
QUARRELED, didn't they?  THEY were DIFFERENT!



19


The red maple leaves and the golden poplar among the pines, and the
innocent blue skies that were the autumnal glory of Grand Republic,
were gone.  Spring was a season too harsh and swift in Northern
Minnesota; it was the carnival of colored leaves and the serenity
of the long Indian Summer days that the natives of this land would
remember sadly, far off in tired Eastern cities.  With November,
the first snows had brought shouting cheerfulness to children with
sleighs and blasphemy to drivers trying to slide their cars up the
slippery roads to Ottawa Heights.

The city hunched its shoulders now to the long winter blast.  The
trees that had given a village gentleness to the long streets were
thin and shivering, and the houses were scattered and low, lonely
as the old frontier.

Reviving cocktail parties were gay, at the Wargates', Madge
Dedrick's, the Havocks', the Bozards', but Cass was not often
present.  The first scandal of his interest in a Young Outsider had
settled to an accepted routine, but his friends resented more than
ever his neglect of them, felt in it a slighting of the social
glories of their town, about which they were always very emphatic
and very insecure.

When he could not be with Jinny Cass preferred the habitualness and
the validity of his court room, where now the lights came on early
and they were snug and content about their business of sending
people to prison and were not disturbed by the invitation of green
river valleys and the liquid sound of small lake-waves around a
fisherman's scow.  Often, after court, he talked for half an hour
with George Hame, the court reporter, who apparently knew nothing
about Jinny, though he had seen her in these chambers, but who, if
he had known, would have assumed that any young thing was lucky to
get the Judge.

Cass saw Jinny daily, and he was disconsolate in discovering that
the course of true love runs in curlicues.  He had assumed that
persons so sensible as himself and Jinny would march sweetly and
directly onward from meeting to understanding to an altar and a
beautiful home and six beautiful children all superb in filial
devotion and swimming and arithmetic.  With Blanche, the progress
had been straight enough.  She had found his attentions flattering;
she had taught him to wear his clothes and his political opinions
well; she had met a richer man; and she had got out.  What could be
better charted?

But with Jinny, even his jealousies ran jaggedly.



He was dining with Jinny and Eino Roskinen in a booth at Shorty's
Fountain Cafe.  The prospect was of a forest of hats and overcoats
upon a skeleton tree, a woman in dreadful plaid winter slacks, and
a Coca-Cola poster showing a nearly naked bathing girl--the Folk
Art of America.  They were taking the Blue Plate Dinner: a pork
chop with apple sauce and French-fried potatoes and string beans
made of wood pulp, though afterward they indulged in "pie a la
mode," pie crowned with a hard little knob of ice cream.  It was an
abominable meal and a criticism on their whole civilization, but
Eino the torch-bearer did not, for once, perceive this as well as
the cautious judge.

Cass had wanted to treat these boarding-house starvelings to what
was here called a T-bone steak, but they had refused his patronage.
He was trying so hard to be one with them.  Eino now called him
"Cass," and the Judge winced every time he heard it, though it was
he who had suggested it.  To be youthful and chummy, he offered a
few remarks on football, which apparently bored them, and on the
fallacies of religion, which they dismissed as too elementary for
their advanced revolutionary standing.

Well, he had done his social duty, and he fell to musing, thinking
of an ethereal and more-than-human girl named Jinny, who was far
off somewhere and with whom he longed to be, flinging jests like
rainbow-hued balls of glass, reverently kissing her flawless
hands. . . .  Meanwhile he looked absently at the ink-spot on one
thin paw of Miss Marshland of the Grand Republic Banner.

He came out of his reverie to find that they were talking about the
local Little Theater, the Masquers.

"You ought to MAKE time for it, this winter, Jinx," Eino was
commanding.  "Personally I can't act--I'm too much the intellectual
type--but you have an energetic fakery that would make you a swell
actress."

Cass fumed that she did not resent this, but let him go on.  "Let
me tell you the theater could be the greatest instrument for the
implementation of social ideals that the world has ever known.  If
you'd quit sketching a little and reading a little and really go to
work and try for a part in the Masquers, you might accomplish
something."

"Eino!  Do you honestly think I could act?"

"Well, I'd coach you."

--He would, would he?  Aah!

--Is she already going back to that Eino?  I suspect she was pretty
fond of him when I came along, and then I was a novelty!  A
respectable lawyer prancing around making a comic spectacle of
himself over a girl young enough to be his--Well, she COULD be my
daughter, if I'd started begetting at sixteen.  Perfectly possible.
Curse it!

--Sure.  I merely offer her whatever dignities I may have, along
with all my adoration, and she flies off with the first tom fool
that guffaws at her--

--Now that's unfair.  She knew him some time before she ever knew
me, and anyway, she's merely a loyal friend of his, and he's a
fine, hard-working young--

--Does he have to keep on making that horrible noise, tapping on
the table with that crowbar of a finger?



When the children remembered that their Venerable Friend was still
present and tried to cheer up the poor old codger by giving him the
news that it had been cold today, he wanted to convince them that
he was still alive by croaking that, yes, it had been quite cold--
for November, that is--and he had noticed it all by himself.

(It had not, by the way, been particularly cold.)

Having thus done their duty by the nonagenarian and having given a
talented new actress to the stage, the happy young couple turned to
more personal confidences.  They said that Tracy Oleson was getting
to be as much of a stuffed shirt as Webb Wargate himself, but they--
they would just get off in corners and laugh about it.  They
illustrated, by laughing.

It was part of their creed and time that every so often Eino and
Jinny should say to each other, "What's cooking?" and that they
should show reverence for jazz and familiarity with such
contemporary maestri as Benny Goodman and Peewee Russell.  Cass
hoped Eino would never learn that he sometimes, in a melancholy and
amateurish way, tried to play Purcell airs on his flute.  This
practice he had begun in college vacations, and it had been
extraordinarily ill received by Roy Drover.

Jinny (or so Judge Timberlane believed) smiled guiltily at Eino
while she adjusted the straps of her brassiere--known at this time
as a "brazeer," or, coyly, as a "bra."  But he insisted that it was
not Jinny who was damp and treacherous.  She was innocent, but this
Roskinen was a wolf.

By God, he would protect this child, toward whom he himself had no
intentions save to teach her chess!  If Eino thought for one moment
that he wasn't suspected--

Eino was on his feet, saying with amiable brevity that he'd enjoyed
his dinner--leave you two capitalists to wallow in the movies--
g'night.  Then Jinny was clawing at Cass like an angry Cleo:

"Cass, my dear young brainless baby, I have never in all my life
seen such an exhibition of childish jealousy!"

"Me?"

"You, Honorable Timberlane, you!"

"But I disapprove of--I detest jealousy!"

"Then you detest yourself.  The way you kept glaring at Eino,
contradicting everything he said, but not decently, with words, but
with that horrible sniffy silence!  And when I yanked at my
shoulder-straps, you put on such a production of goggling at me and
then Eino that the poor lamb was thunderstruck.  And this after
he's given up all claim on me!  I'm simply not going to stand for
such insane jealousy!"

"Jinny!  I didn't know I was.  Maybe you're right.  I'm profoundly--"

"And all over poor Eino!  Now if you'd pick out my editor, Mr.
Hubbs, to be jealous over--"

"Hubbs?  He, too?"

"Oh, very much too.  He's what we call in the office a sweetie
pie."

Impishly, she waited for him to vomit over the phrase, but he was
being too seriously appalled that he should be another of the
jealous lovers who brought so much poison into his court.  He
muttered, "So I really seemed jealous?"

"And how!  And when you consider that I almost never see Eino any
more.  His mother has moved into town, and they've taken a shack
together, and he just drops in at Hatter's to see Tracy and Lyra--
not me.  The fact is--"  She wrinkled with a new worry as she went
on.  "I don't see enough of him, or the rest of my old bunch,
either, not even Lyra.  I'm so much at the office, and evenings I'm
likely to be out with you.  And you actually jealous of those eager
kids!  I've drifted away from them shamefully.  I give you all my
time, and then you humiliate me by this jealousy.  Oh, Cass, I
can't stand it, if you're going on like this!"

"My dear, I'm all humbleness.  I hadn't realized it.  I have only
the old excuse that my jealousy is the measure of my devotion to
you--and of my insecurity with you.  If we were really engaged, if
I could only be sure that I had you to do things for, then maybe I
wouldn't be so uncertain and so jealous."

"But I still don't see how you can be so touchy, and 'suspect me of
the worst'--whatever that means."

"And I don't see how you can endure driving me plain mad--and
ridiculous--by leaving me so baffled.  But no matter; even if you
do, I won't be jealous.  And don't tell me again that jealousy is
an insult to you.  I know it is!  So--I'm cured."

"Are you?"

"I think so--maybe."

They could laugh slightly, and everything was settled, and with
entirely unconscious jealousy he got her talking about this new
menace, this scoundrel, Abbott Hubbs.

She, it appeared, was sorry that Mr. Hubbs drank so much, and she
believed that his wife was not gentle enough with him.  It also
seemed that an Important Person in Washington had asserted that Mr.
Hubbs was competent to take charge of any newspaper in Chicago or
New York.  Most devastating of all, Mr. Hubbs--he had such a sense
of humor--cut paper dolls out of the exchanges and presented them
to Jinny, who had one of them in her purse this moment, along with
Isis.

To Cass, it looked like a very bad paper doll.  It looked like a
piece of newspaper which had been chewed by a puppy of imperfect
intelligence.

He said that Hubbs was a "splendid fellow and very brainy" and that
the paper doll was of unique charm.  Blessedly, then, they quit
that quest for perfection in each other which is the maddening
glory of all true love, and they did a very fine game with matches--
you make six triangles with eight matches, only you never do.  He
stroked her hand, soft tan against the red-rubber tabletop, and
they went arm in arm off to the movies.



That night, gravely rubbing Cleo's spine, he told himself that
jealousy was the meanest of sicknesses and most contemptible of
prides.

Having delivered before himself an address which would have adorned
any Bar Association dinner, Cass became rather sorry for this
lonely judge, still young, able to love with angelic selflessness,
yet kept waiting like a servant by an opinionated young woman with
shameless scarlet finger-nails.

Then--some time in his dizzy changes of opinion he must have pulled
Cleo's hair, for she yowled and leaped and fled--he fell upon
himself for this desecration.  No!  Jinny was the true goddess,
perfect in every part, under law of the miracle whereby a woman who
is completely lovely of face is lovely also in skin and limbs and
shoulders and voice and walk.  She was the divinity inviolable, to
say nothing of being a very exciting young woman who said such
clever things, and sometimes was a grieved and frightened little
girl who broke his heart by her helplessness against the vicious
world.

Then, by a descent into hell too swift to have been marked:

--Of course she's all that.  But.

--But does she have to fall for every heel she meets?  She
specializes in heels.  First this philandering Little Theater hound
and that statistical Tracy Oleson lout, and now this third-rate
dipsomaniac, Hubbs.

--Oh, quit thinking in circles!  To say nothing of its being a
crime against your love for her, which is the one splendor in your
whole mechanical, law-grubbing existence.

--But do Eino and she make fun of me and laugh at me when they're
by themselves?  Do they consider me a solemn owl trying to be a
lark?  How they must talk and giggle!

--Dear Jinny, my beloved, forgive me for loving you better than I
can!



All the next morning, in court, while he was listening to the
horror of a woman who had killed her own baby, he kept fighting off
a vicious little plan to drop in at the Banner office and see how
Jinny and Abbott Hubbs acted when they were together.  The
testimony of the frightened woman burned away all the cheapness of
his plan, and he wondered that his self, which mostly he respected,
could be so sneaking.  On his way to lunch, he saw Hubbs on the
street: tall, anemic, moving jerkily.  He thought of him, working
hard, drinking hard to keep going, watched always with a friendly
distrust by that bland Olympian, Gregory Marl.

Then all the sickness of jealousy was gone from him--for a while.



20


When the November snows had halted automobile wanderings, they
began a placid habit of evenings at Bergheim.  Sometimes Jinny
brought Isis along and set her where she could watch.  To Cass,
this affection for the tiny glass cat was no sillier than Egyptian
rites in which Jinny might have been a little wise priestess, her
thin hands elevated in prayer to feline mysteries, in the ancient
haze of the Nile.

Mrs. Higbee adopted Jinny, and one evening Cass heard them as they
explored the upstairs, conferring on what should be done for Him.

"Do you ever have French toast for His breakfast?" suggested Jinny.

"Oh, yes, He likes any kind of sweets.  He isn't a heavy eater, you
might say, but the way He can shovel in the griddle cakes!"

"We ought to take more care of His health.  He's always carrying on
about His hunting and tennis and swimming, but wintertime, He
sticks His nose in a book and never gets out."

"Don't I know it, Miss Jinny! . . .  You, Cleo, you get out from
under my feet.  What you want to do?  Trip me up? . . .  I say to
Him at breakfast, I say, 'Judge, aren't you ashamed of yourself,
big strong young fellow like you, sitting and reading, read all the
time, all those big thick books, and not get out for exercise 'cept
summer?'  But Lord, I can't do anything with Him.  I'll keep Him
nice and clean and well fed inside the house, but you got to drag
Him out on walks."

"I will, too.  Gracious, this bedroom of His is gloomy!  I'd like
to see it all in maple, with blue curtains."

"Looks like He likes it gloomy.  I guess judges don't get fun, like
you and me."

"I'll educate Him!"

Downstairs, Cass listened blissfully.

He had at first been fretted by the thought of Jinny's presence
raising scandal among all the John William Prutts and peeping
telephonic widows, but they were so natural and serene and domestic
as they sat reading in the small, pipe-scented library that he
forgot such alien dangers.  He inquired whether she would not
rather go out dancing, drinking, and she had to instruct him:

"I don't want to go racketing around all the time.  If I really
wanted to go out with these young punks, I'd go.  It's just as
exciting to find all these books here:  The Golden Bough and August
Derleth.  Oh, don't INSIST on my being discontented!  I can do that
so easy by myself.  Sweet blessed angel, will you quit your
worrying?

"Yes--yes--oh--sorry--yes!"

--Trying to make her more contented than contentment itself!
That's all a piece with the jealousies I used to feel.  Thank God
THAT'S cured!

--This profession of being a true lover.  Can any one master it?
That must be God's most sublime joke on the human race; that the
more you want to make a woman happy, the more you blunder and bore
her.

--Do you remember that Judge Timberlane being profound about
matrimony in his chambers?  And spinsters and unwed priests giving
advice about it.  Marriage and the common cold--the two persistent
problems of mankind and the ones that have never been solved.

--Lovely Jinny, sitting there with your tongue in the corner of
your mouth, reading Death Comes for the Archbishop and looking like
such a wise child, and all the while more devastating and terrible
than war.

--One thing I do get clear about her.  She is one of those
extraordinary people who are not willing to settle down and wait
for death, willing to play cards and yawn and gossip and actually
speak of 'killing time,' when we have so little time.  What life
she has she will always live.

Unconscious of the lecture about her, the girl softly closed the
book, slid to the hearth, and curled beside Cleo while Cass's
meditations ticked on:

--You baby!  Not so much bigger than Cleo, and yet all the while I
see you as the eternal Pilgrim.  My beloved, can't there be one
husband and wife in history whom Time will spare for a moment and
who will defeat the worm?  Dear Jinny, I wonder if you hear me?

"Cass!  You're smiling so tenderly.  Are you thinking of something
pleasant?"

"Well, something important, anyway."

"Like candy-bars?  Or a high dive?"

"Yes, but with a touch of flaming wings."

"Sounds ingenious.  Oh golly, I'm tired.  I'm going home to bed, my
pet."

"Nice words: home and bed.  But rarely any flaming wings to 'em."

"Are we as mysterious as we sound?"

"Jinny, we are the most mysterious and frightening things in the
world: a man and a woman of whom at least one is in love. . . .
Jin, does it scare you to hear the word death?"

"Never!  I can't die--not for sixty years at least."

The little cat meowed pitifully at their feet.



When he had driven her home and returned to his library, he saw
that she had forgotten to take Isis with her.  On a bookshelf the
trinket shone in firelight, now diamond-flashing, now ruby, until
as he stood there in his rustic coonskin coat and sealskin hat, he
was hypnotized and saw a gigantic crystal cave in whose ice-glaring
maw crouched a little figure, half-naked, sobbing, terrified by
night and death.



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



22


Two days after the army of the Prutts had landed and devastated the
coast, Judge Stephen Douglas Blackstaff came into Cass's chambers
after court.

"Cass, I have been listening to that banker fellow, Prutt, expiring
of sunburn from his blushes of modesty on the telephone.  He's a
fool, but he is a symptom.  A rustle of scandal is beginning to
follow you.  Son, you and I are both men of the world--from a
strictly Calvinistic point of view, of course--but we are also
lawyers, and we both know that there must never be any shadow of
scandal over the judicial office.  Do you care so much for this
girl that I've seen you with?  Would you rather resign than lose
her?"

"Yes, I would, Steve."

"Nonsense, son.  Absolute mongery.  Why the devil don't you marry
the girl?"

"Why don't I?"  Why DON'T I?  Because she's refused me.  Twice."

"My esteemed Rhoda refused me almost continuously, over a period of
two years.  She refused me on Rye Beach, she refused me in the
Brothers and Linonia Library of Yale College, and refused me once
during a communion service--somewhat abruptly, I thought.  But
still I triumphed--at least, that's the accepted theory.  Cass,
you're a good young man.  Don't risk your honor and the honor of
the State for a sentimental fancy!  People are sometimes evil, and
they are not going to believe that you could not marry this young
woman if you desired, and if nothing will make her wed you, there
have always been the soundest precedents for consigning her to the
devil."

Judge Blackstaff's long and rigid back completed his admonition,
and Cass sat wondering whether for Jinny, that lightly dancing
figure on a fan, he would really give up his judicial dignities.

Yes, he would, if he must do so to guard one higher dignity--plain
humanity.  He had no right more imperious than to be with his girl,
married or not, and for this he would certainly resign, at need.
He had reached this uncomfortable resolution when Jinny herself,
not knocking, came flying into his chambers; and before he had
planned what to say, he had sprung up, he had kissed her, and she
was sobbing:

"Cass!  I've lost my job!"

"Oh no!"

"I didn't think I ever could.  I was so proud--the girl cartoonist!"

"What--"

"Mr. Marl fired me.  For incompetence.  I wish it could have been
for drunkenness or bigamy.  I did so want to be independent, and I
thought I was such a whiz--everybody said they liked my cartoons,
and I thought they were all looking for them in the paper.  I was
so busy, and I was enjoying it, like a fool, and Mr. Marl called me
in and first he said Mrs. Marl and he wanted me to come to dinner,
all by myself--was I ever proud!  Then he asked me how come I
didn't have a cartoon ready for day-before-yesterday.  I hadn't
been able to get a good idea, and I'd ruined two drawings.  Then he
said he'd already hired a new hand from Minneapolis and he was so
sorry, so awful sorry, but I was through.  So now I'll go back to
the factory and eat dirt.  I was so proud and silly and now I'm all
washed up--"

She was weeping, against his shoulder.

As George Hame entered the chambers, Cass said to her, "Now you're
going to marry me."

"Am I?  Maybe."



Judge Blackstaff said, yes, it would be a little inconvenient to
have Judge Timberlane away from court during mid-term, even for a
honeymoon.  "But," said the senior judge, "it will be a noble
inconvenience."  He patted Cass's shoulder.  "Son, I am glad that
you thought my advice over and decided to take it.  I may no longer
be the sprightly beau I once was, but you see now that I understand
women."

"Oh, thoroughly, Stephen."

"By the way, my boy, take a Bible on your honeymoon.  You yourself
may not read it extensively, but it may implant some ideas in the
pliable mind of your bride.  I assure you that it is full of the
most admirable advice to females to be thrifty, industrious,
chaste, and SILENT.  One of the most useful books to husbands.  And
whenever I travel I find it much safer to take some pulverized
coffee."

The Jinny whom Cass had expected to want only an informal wedding,
with the mayor officiating and Eino and Tracy racketing around and
beer and melody afterward, demanded a formal affair, with all the
clergy, trains, white flowers, unreconstructed relatives, and
champagne available.  Cass was touched by the thought that she did
not intend to come into the heraldic haughtiness of Ottawa Heights
by the back door.  She was so small and alone, and the Prutts so
large and firm and multifarious.  All right.  His fairy princess
should come in with as large and brassy a band as he could muster.

But again he felt, "I can't go on carrying everything alone.  I
must have someone to help me."  He turned to his sister Rose and to
Mrs. Higbee.  He was not worried about the attitude of Cleo; he
felt that she would be for anything that brought gaiety and ribbon-
trailing and mouse-fetching cake into the somber house.

He sat gravely at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, with Mrs.
Higbee seated across, and urged, "I hope you'll be happy with Miss
Jinny here."

"Judge, would you like me to quit, so I won't get in her way?"

"Good Lord, no!  She loves you, same as I do.  The question is
whether YOU'LL be happy."

"Very.  A lot of bosses never think of it, but a house is a
servant's HOME.  I couldn't imagine myself anywheres else, but
sometimes it has been lonely.  I'll be real pleased to have her
here, and that quick way she walks, almost runs, around the place.
I hope I ain't intruding if I say it's grieved my heart sometimes
to see you poking around so lonely.  I prayed about it in church."
She laughed.  "I hope the Lord consulted you to see if it was all
right, before He sent Miss Jinny in answer to my prayer!"

"Yes, He consulted me.  Thank you for Miss Jinny."

"Well, she was about the best I noticed around this town--of course
it isn't a very big place."

"That's so."



While Jinny was in as much of an orgy of dressmaking as any
Wargate, Cass nervously conferred with Rose about "redoing the
house."

"Leave it to Jinny," she said.

"And then there's a matter--I don't quite dare to ask her, Rose,
about--about rooms--"

Rose answered with the coarseness that only a truly good and wedded
woman can achieve.  "You mean, do you think she'll want the favors
of the same bed with you every night, or to have a room of her own.
Of her own, of course; same as any woman born since 1890.  If you
knew how Don gurgles all night long, and when he turns over, he
sits up straight and then moans in terror and shakes himself like a
wet dog and then he doesn't just lie down again--he makes a dive at
the pillow--a belly-flopper dive.  Give her the northeast bedroom,
Cassy; the one I had as a girl.  It's smaller than that funeral
parlor of yours, but it gets the sun."

"It's a go!" said His Honor, the learned judge.

He felt very clever and efficient.



His Honor, the learned judge, who had heard the details of maniac
sex-murders and been bland enough in discussing them with
psychiatrists, approached Jinny like a freshman:

"You know, just at first, we might--uh--we might not want any
children, and I believe there are precautions--uh--is there a woman
clerk in your father's drug store that would--uh--I hate to speak
of this but--"

"You poor dear lamb!  What do you suppose girls talk about
nowadays?"

"Do they really?  I didn't know."

"There, there, Mother's glad you've kept your innocence."



As a politician, Cass did possess the correct morning clothes, but
there was a crisis in the matter of the top hat, that symbol, that
grotesque crown made of rabbit's fur, that more than the coat of
arms or the broad A or even the dollar sign distinguishes a gent
from a fellow.  In Grand Republic, they rate with bustles, and
while Cass did own a top hat, he had last worn it at a Plattdeutsch
funeral, and it had long rested in the attic, a nest for mice.

He begged of Jinny, "You don't want me to wear a stovepipe hat,
like Abraham Lincoln?"

"Yes, I do!  I've never seen one, except in the movies!  Let's be
gaudy for once.  I don't expect to get married but just this one
time in all my life."

"Fine!"

He had the Piccadilly Cents' Ware Shop send for the hat.  When he
had put on the whole armor of a knight, the high silk helmet,
steely white shirt, linen gorget, dark-gray coat shaped like a
calla lily, and studied himself in the full-length mirror on the
back of his bathroom door, he was delighted.



His best man, Dr. Drover, along with Boone Havock, Bradd Criley,
Judge Flaaten, Frank Brightwing, and his other ushers had talked of
a bachelor dinner, but he had no mind to endure their heavy jokes.
The thought of Jinny was to him as frail and muted as a distant
flute in the autumnal dusk.

He spent his last evening before the wedding alone with Cleo in the
quarter-lighted library.

Was Jinny in love with him at all?  Did she love him enough to
endure his longing to give her everything that he was and had?  It
is more difficult to receive tolerantly than to give gladly.  Of
Jinny's mother and grandmother the question would never have been
asked, but did Jinny, or any girl of her era, really attach herself
to her husband and his fortunes, sick or in health, richer or
poorer, avid for bright noise or content with the quiet mind?

He was apprehensive.

Cleo, who had been asleep upon his knee beside the dead fire, came
suddenly awake, twitching and terrified, and leaped from him.  He
could hear her protests as she roamed the dark house, up and down,
searching for something he did not understand.  He sat uneasy, and
when the telephone assaulted his ears, he gasped.

It was Jinny.  "How are you darling?  Are you scared, like me?"

"Bless you for calling.  Scared stiff."

"Well, and very right, too, Cass.  Both of us ought to be; both of
us these disgusting Sensitive Souls, looking for a chance to be
hurt and likely to get sore when we DON'T get hurt, because that
shows nobody cares enough about us to hurt us.  But what are you
sitting in the dark for?"

"How did you know I--"

"Because I am, too!  Good night.  Oh, Cass, we're going to have a
lot of fun being married.  I'll really learn chess, even.  I've
ordered a chess costume: plaid, with rabbit-lined boots.  Good
night, my dear!"

He was convinced that this spirit of fire and mist might some day
love him like a breathing woman.  But through the house Cleo was
still searching, still whimpering reproachfully.



Jinny was not so avid of grandeur as to want the reception that
Rose Pennloss longed to give for them.  She agreed with Cass that
it would be wise to take the train directly after the ceremony.
But that ceremony itself was ducal.

Not since the wedding of Della Lent, and her a Wargate, had there
been a richer gathering of all that was noble, virtuous, and of
five-figure income than at the union of Miss Marshland and Judge
Timberlane; and the Rev. Dr. Gadd wore a new Geneva gown and had a
Lutheran pastor and an Episcopal priest--pretty young, but of the
very highest church--for collaborators in the conjuring whereby the
little wild hawk was turned into a Grand Republic matron.

There were even Prutts present.  It was more fun to attend and look
doubtful than to stay away.

Through the forest of mink and broadtail, Cass saw Jinny coming
down the aisle with her father.  He noted, as casually as though he
were studying a jury, that Mr. Marshland seemed timid and shrunken
and shabby, against all the sleek furriness, and that Jinny, in
cloudy white, was of the precise loveliness and inviolability of a
goddess.

--God keep her shining and confident as she is now.

Then Jinny was his wife, and she was looking at him trustingly, and
there was trust and adoration in his first marital whisper to her,
"Let's try to sneak out the back door; we got just an hour and a
quarter before the train goes" and in her enchanted answer, "Okay,
darling--my husband!"



23


They met again at the station, in rather-too-new traveling
costumes.  During the maverick reception on the platform, with
champagne served in paper cups, it was not Roy, the best man, but
Bradd Criley who was the clown.  He yelled, he slapped backs, he
kissed Jinny, Lyra Coggs, Chris Grau, and Jinny's astonished
mother.  The train was going then, and Cass was muttering to Jinny,
"It's good to get away from our loving friends."

In their Pullman seats, she boldly held his hand, not caring who
looked, and said with a strange little fierceness, "We've started,
and I'm incredibly excited and cheerful, and Heaven knows where it
will end--maybe China and temple bells."

But she had never been farther East or South than Central
Wisconsin, and when they had left St. Paul for Chicago, the bold
and Chinaward girl became less confident and Cass was promoted from
home-town neighbor to expert traveler, who knew all about altitudes
and populations and how to treat dining-car waiters, and she looked
at him with 1880 bridal reverence, and asked him about the scenery
as though he were a geologist.

There was food for awe:  The palisades along the Mississippi, dark
giant rock and swooping slopes of snow.  The ravines of Wisconsin,
leading to wintry valleys.  The North Shore suburbs of Chicago,
where at stations influenced by the Alhambra the wives of
significant insurance-brokers looked haughtily out from station
wagons.  Lake Michigan, a relentless ocean.  The portentous jungle
of Chicago factories and warehouses and slums, the smutted steel
insanity of the Loop, and the leather and crystal Pump Room, where
she listened admiringly while Cass, who knew nothing whatever about
the subject, held a symposium on sauternes with the wine-waiter.

The Liveoak Special, leaving for Florida at one A.M., was a supple
serpent of a train, all in crimson-barred silver, with no
vestibules breaking its smoothness.  The fourth-fastest train on
the continent, it had a library car, a bar-room car, a car for
dancing, four bathrooms, two stenographers, and a Social Hostess
who had once been married to a Russian prince who had once been
married to a Hollywood female star who had once been married to
practically anybody.

Jinny looked at these conveniences as one of her peasant ancestors
might have looked at Kenilworth Castle.  It was her Cass who had
given her this train.  There was a husband for you!

She did not know that he was in the agony of accommodations-
trouble.

Like many young people of the day, Jinny was familiar with
automobiles but less familiar with trains than her own grandmother
had been.  She had motored with her parents twelve hundred miles
out to Yellowstone Park, confidently driving four hundred miles a
day, but she had never spent a night on a sleeping-car and she knew
no more about the subtle categories of berths, sections, roomettes,
bedrooms, compartments, and drawing-rooms than she did about the
etiquette of wedding-nights, so delicately connected with them.

In the Florida rush which was now taking the place of trips to war-
barred Europe, the Liveoak Special's private rooms had all been
engaged a fortnight before Cass applied.  He unscrupulously tried
to use the influence of the court, the mayor, the local political
bosses, and the department-store owner, but the best he had been
able to do was two lower berths across from each other.

They rustled through the Pullman, already stuffy with sleep and
green curtains, and Jinny had no surprise when he showed her the
two separate cloth-smothered caves.  She only said, inevitably,
"Do I have to sit on my clothes while I'm taking them off?  Mercy!
Good night, dearest; wonderful day, wonderful journey.  I LIKE
being Mrs. Timberlane!"

And vanished between the curtains.

He sat on his berth, smolderingly took his shoes off, and
thoughtfully rubbed his toes.  He was in his pajamas (very refined
mellilunar ones, a dark-blue silk with a fine silver stripe) and
under the close-tucked bedclothes before he decided that he had to
do better than this.  He would kiss her good night, anyway.  They
were married, weren't they?  He had some rights, didn't he?

The solid Sioux nose of Judge Timberlane jutted cautiously out into
the aisle, and turned right and left and hung there, rigid, as the
eyes immediately above it perceived that George the Porter was
standing inflexibly in the curving niche of Drawing Room A, on
watch.

The nose was jerked inside and its proprietor felt guilty, but also
credulous that, through the sound of the moving train, he had heard
a delicious flutter of disrobing in the berth across the aisle--so
near, so perilous.

Three times the nose came solemnly pushing out.  Once it shot back
at the approach of the conductor, once at the return of the
persistent and unromantic George, but the third time it shot
across, and Cass was shaking her curtain, moaning, "Unbutton this--
open it up--quick!"

He was safe inside then, but flustered.

She was in pajamas, pale-yellow silk, well curving, and she was
sitting up, staring at him.  He expected a protest at his wild
invasion, but what she said was, "Aren't those the nicest little
lights!  You can lie awake and read by 'em!"

"Jinny!  Kiss me--and in the greatest hurry!"

"Why?"

"If the conductor finds me here--He doesn't know we're married.
I should hate a public argument!  Kiss me!"

She did, leaning forward.  She was in his arms, only the two thin
layers of silk between them; and shakily, not at all masterfully,
he undid the top button of her tunic and softly kissed her breast.
Then she drew back, as far as the thick pillows would let her, and
whispered, "It frightens me--you dash in here so quickly--I do love
you, but now I'm kind of frightened and so alone--this huge train
rushing us along in the darkness; you couldn't escape from it, if
you wanted to--Be gentle with me, Cass; I'm such a spoiled baby."

"Yes, I'll always be gentle, I hope.  I love you very much.  And
now good night, dear wife. . . .  And don't you sit up and read,
either!"

He had shot back into his own berth through green denim space,
unconscious of transition or of spying conductors, and he lay awake
alternately exultant with memory of how satin-like her breast had
been and worrying lest she prove too anemic for ardent love.  He
had heard that these pencil-wise, half-intellectual girls were
often so.

His berth-light was on, and in it he gapingly saw a smooth hand
slip between the curtains and begin to unbutton them, and then,
grotesquely, there was Jinny cheerfully returning his visit.  But
with a woman's sense and realism and magnificent vulgarity, she was
not playing at furtive lover, as he had.  She drew wide the
curtains and left them open, and in her pajamas, with the vaguest
of negligees merely setting them off, she sat cross-legged on his
bed.  And she was smoking a cigarette.

"Golly!" said the learned Judge.

Her bent knees were extraordinarily round and suave, he noted, and
where was that porter, and would he have to have a row?

"It did seem so unfriendly not to return your call," she said, and
her expression was like that of Cleo in one of her better moods.
"And I wanted to tell you something--I've always wanted to, but I
was too embarrassed--but you must have wondered, I don't see how
you could have helped it--of course you were too much of a
gentleman to ever ask--"

The porter's voice, not so much shocked as official, came from just
beyond Jinny's shoulder.

"Sorry, Miss, but we don't allow any smoking in the berths."

Cass could see the edge of Jinny's affable smile as she turned.
"Oh, I am sorry.  Porter, will you please take this cigarette and
finish it up for me?  It's an awfully good one--a wedding present--
today!"

The dazed Cass saw the dazed porter carry the cigarette away, at
arm's length, while Jinny turned back with:

"Of course you would never even hint at it, but I do imagine you'd
like to know, so now I can tell you--and I'm darned if I know
whether this is a boast or a confession--but if it interests you,
I'm still a virgin."

Suddenly he grew up a little, and he was placid in saying, "Yes, it
does interest me, and I'm glad, though I don't think I'd 've been
ugly if it had been the opposite.  And I love you madly and you go
back to bed or I'll spank hell out of you."

"Right here in public?  In my pajamas?  I dare you to!" she said,
and kissed him and was gone.

Infinite pity encompassed him that she should have to grow older
and more frail, helpless before covetous men and corroding illness,
before poverty and storms that would come halfway round the world
to threaten her proud head.



In the morning they had left the snow and were running through
level farmlands with a sparkle of frost on gray grass and gray
snake-fences.  He did not know whether they were in Illinois or
Indiana or Kentucky, so for her information he picked the last, as
most distant from the center of the world--Grand Republic.  She
stared out and said joyfully, "Look what you've started!  This is
my first foreign country.  How near are we to China now?"

He had explained that, in preference to the gaudiness of Palm Beach
and Miami, he had chosen a plain West Coast Florida resort, for
privacy, for adventurous fishing, for bathing and shell-hunting on
great lonely beaches.  He had never seen the place, but Harley
Bozard said the food was excellent and the fishing superb.  She'd
certainly enjoy catching a tarpon.

Oh, yes.  She'd always wanted to catch a--a what?  Oh, much better
than dancing with a lot of handsome tennis players.  Yes, she had
brought old clothes with her, as he had directed; she'd wear them--
when she wore anything at all.

He did not add, not even to himself--not really--that the place
would also be much cheaper.

Thus she was not completely disappointed when, on the morning of
December fifth, they came to Baggs City, Charlotte County, Florida,
and to the trim, clean, white, and completely dolorous Bryn-
Thistle-on-the-Bay Inn.  The small lobby was full of old ladies who
listened and of geraniums which stared, and their bedroom, just
large enough for a double bed and a bureau and two chairs, was
adorned with a hand-lettered version of the poem about the man who
wanted to live by the side of the road, a pink chamber-pot with
forget-me-nots, and a three-color job of a cupid piloting a bomber.

"In here, I wouldn't even let you kiss me," protested Jinny.

"Well, there's a lot of outdoors down here."

They walked through the Inn grounds, which were as suburban as
Glendale, but it was magical, two days from the wintry street-
hurrying of Grand Republic, to stroll in this rich and scented air.
Jinny eyed the crepe myrtle, the roses, the obese wonder of a grape
fruit growing, and looked at the Cass who had worked this magic for
her.

"My Merlin!" she said.



All afternoon, in a slow, good-natured launch, they fished in a
deep salt-water inlet bordered by the shade and jungle brightness
of a swamp; they stared at the palms, which meant India and the
Congo to these inlanders from the wheat prairies and the pine
woods; they relaxed and, cheerful as honeymooners rarely are, they
came back to the Inn for supper.  But the horrible daintiness of
the place enfeebled them at once.  It was like being choked with
pink bedjackets.

All the widows watched them as they ate a meal consisting of fish
and finger-bowls; they had too many invitations to play bridge and
too little competition when they did play; three several females
flickered about "the little bride"; and when they went up to bed,
making it as late as was physically possible after an afternoon
spent on the water, the air was so thick with lascivious female
glances that they could have climbed it instead of the stairs.

They shut the door against a world of intrusive friendliness.  They
faced each other, and he understood her shyness and tried to speak
as he thought her Gang at Miss Hatter's would speak:

"Well, baby, this is it.  I guess we're up against it.  But let me
explain that I'm not just violently in love with you.  I'm also
extremely fond of you."

She was shivering, but she tried to be merry.

"They all make so much of this accidental virtue of virginity that
you get scared about it, and the wedding-night--I suppose this is
our real wedding-night--is a combination of getting drunk and
winning a million-dollar lottery and waiting to be hanged.  Animals
are a lot wiser."  Then, more sharply, "I hate being an amateur, in
ANYTHING!"

In a practical way, she had begun to undo her belt, and when he had
tremblingly drawn off his jacket, she stood, looking admirably
casual, in brassiere and absurd small pants.  He could not help
kissing her shoulder, which tasted faintly of sun and sea.  When
she had put on a pathetically gay little rose-colored nightgown
that must have come from Pioneer Falls and had mutely slid into bed
beside him, he held her quietly, hoping that she would feel secure.

He was conscious of the creeping and thunderous silences of the
Inn: hesitant slippered footsteps past the door, whispering in the
adjoining rooms, a feeling that an inquisitive world was looking at
them through the wallboard partitions.  He was tense with
listening, and Jinny, in his arms, was as impersonal to him as a
pillow, and apprehensively he realized that he could no more make
ardent love to her now than to that pillow.

Was he going to be a failure as lover with this one girl whom he
had loved utterly?

She muttered, with almost prayerful earnestness, "Was the bathroom
the third door on the right or the second?  I'd hate to go
rocketing in on some old maid!"

He laughed then, and lost his apprehensiveness.  But as he kissed
her it was she who had become fearful and unyielding, and in pity
for her his ardor sank to a gentle stroking of her cheek.

When she seemed to have relaxed a little, to be expectant, his
intensity had so worn him that he could only hold her softly, while
fear crept through him again, and he stammered, "I've heard of such
things but I never expected--I find I'm so fond of you, and maybe
scared of you, that just now I can't even make love to you."

She answered as sweetly and briskly as though they were discussing
a picnic-basket.

"Yes, I've heard of it.  Temporary--not matter a bit.  Oh, you'd be
surprised at all the things Lyra and Wilma and I used to talk
about.  Don't worry.  I love just lying with my cheek on your
shoulder--now that I've found a comparatively regular valley among
the jagged peaks of your shoulder-blades.  Dear darling!"

They were almost instantly asleep and Cass came to life at dawn to
sit up and see, on her own side of the bed, curled like a cat and
rosily sleeping, his adored and inviolate bride.



24


They fished again in the salt inlet, next day; they delightedly
though erroneously believed that they saw a barracuda, a
threatening moccasin; they felt valiant as only tourists can.  They
hired a Drive-Yourself car, put in bathing-suits and a bottle of
cognac for emergencies, and cruised slowly down sandy roads among
the yuccas.

In late afternoon they came to an inlet with a great wash of wet
sand and a cluster of whitewashed shacks: over-night cabins and a
restaurant for impecunious tourists--the eternal gipsy encampment,
the wooden-tented caravan.

"Look!  We can get away from the painted bridge-pads here!  Here's
the place for thwarted hoboes!" said Cass.  And Jinny noted that on
their journey to China, they had come as far as Tahiti.

The restaurant walls were of upright bamboo, with palm thatch; the
interior was cool and dim, with cement floor and loose-looking
tables and black-and-white reed chairs.  The pine bar was for
drinking, not for the display of glassware.  The bartender was a
Minorcan, with a trim thread of mustache, the waitress was Mexican,
and in the shadowed background, letting his planless harmonies drip
from a guitar, was an old man in overalls, barefoot and masked with
whiskers.

The troubadour waved his straw hat and the bartender greeted them,
"H' are you, folks."  They had two Daiquiris, cool and silken, and
dined on fresh red snapper and a Cuban cocoa-nut ice cream.

Before dinner they had inspected the bare pine cottages, each with
only a double bed, a chair, and a water-tap, yet far larger than
the Inn cubicles, and voluptuously furnished altogether, for
outside each door was the curving sand and the rolling Gulf of
Mexico.

"I wish we were staying here, instead of at that knitting-works,"
sighed Jinny.

The bar-restaurant half filled, after dinner, with Italian
fishermen, Mexican truck-farmers, and such tourists as wandered by
flivver and trailer, not to improve their minds or tans or social
standing, but just to wander.  Cass bought drinks for half a dozen
new lifelong friends.  Everybody beamed at him and Jinny, not
titteringly, as at the Inn, but with an earthy love of lovers, and
the troubadour played "La Paloma" at them.

"Let's stay here tonight, in one of the cabins," Cass blurted,
astonished at himself.

"With no baggage?"

"We have ourselves."

"Okay."

When Cass paid for a cabin in advance, the bartender took it for
granted that they were not married, and was delighted by the whole
general idea.  So were the eloping Cass and Jinny as, with no bags
to unpack, they took possession of their first real home together.

There were no occupied shacks near them, no whispering lady guests,
but only the sliding sea.  They lay with the door half open to the
night, and suddenly he was ruthless with love and she as fierce as
he, nipping his ear with angry little teeth, and they fell asleep
in the surprise of love.

At dawn, Cass woke her and they ran down the beach and bathed,
unclad and laughing, and came back to new abandonment.

Jinny marveled, "We both seem to be great successes.  It was a
terrible shock at first, but now I do cleave to you and we are one
flesh."

"Forever?"

"Forever and ever, beloved!"

Sleeping and waking, waking and sleeping, their open door embracing
the wash of the fertile tide, amazed by the curiousness of arms and
legs and breasts, redeemed from civilization they lay about the
tousled bed till noon, and dressed and ate fried corn-mush for
breakfast, to the commendatory smiling of the waitress.  They
wanted to be dignified, as suited their unique position in the
history of lovers, but they also wanted to guffaw when Jinny said,
"Think of what the old ladies at the Bryn-Thistle must be saying--
the painted old hussies!"

They were one flesh, truly, and ecstatic with life.

"'Husband,'" she mused.  "I used to think that word sounded funny,
but now it seems such a sturdy old word.  It takes me back, clear
through Walter Scott to King Arthur, back to the Anglo-Saxons and
the old woods of Wessex, and I feel as if you and I were in a bark
hut, worshiping the old gods.  My Druid!  My husband!"

"My wife!  Yes, there are words that even the radio can't spoil."

"Golly!  Were the Druids Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or what?"

"I honestly don't know," he said, in a blissfully shared community
of ignorance.



There were no other guests at the tourist camp on this shining
Sunday, and during the night Cass and Jinny had had no considerable
sleep.  Happily frowzy in the shade before their frowzy shack,
lying on the long beach-grass with the sea-wind sweet about them,
they slept through the afternoon.

They might not have gone back to the Bryn-Thistle at all that
night--the night of December 7, 1941--but they were not yet so
saved from Pruttery that they could stay on without clean clothes.

They would come down here again, in a couple of days.  Certainly.

With her arm injudiciously linked in his as he drove, they returned
to the Bryn-Thistle at dusk, and from the porch a woman joyful at
finding victims who had not heard the news screamed at them, in
delighted horror, "Been away?  Then you don't know.  We're in the
war!  Japan attacked our ships at Pearl Harbor today!"

They said nothing till they were in their room.  Then, staring at
him as though she had found him treacherous, Jinny said sharply,
"Oh, curse the luck!  Why couldn't I have known a few weeks ago?
This time, they'll take women in the army.  I could have seen
Hawaii--France--Russia!  And all the boys will be going--Eino and
Tracy and Abbott Hubbs and everybody!  And I'll be left home with
the old women!"

"And with me, my dear."

"Yes," sardonically, "with you!"

Her tantrum--that was what they had come to call any of her not-
too-frequent wild moods--was agallop.  She moaned, "I hear they'll
make women captains and majors and everything now--in uniform and
be saluted--and station 'em with the flyers--young and brave and
good-looking!"

--I don't blame her for being disappointed--greatest chance for
adventure women 've ever seen.  But--It certainly does hurt to have
her talk as though I were senile.  Be careful now--be gentle.

"Jinny, I'm sure you can still get into the war, even if you are
married."

"Oh, no.  You'll complain about being left alone in your gloomy ole
Bergheim."

"We can do war-work--maybe together."

"Aaaah!  Rolling bandages with Mrs. Prutt, and you being obsequious
to that old camel!"

"Jinny!  Quit it!  If you want to go off to war, you shall.  But
I'm not going to let you forget last night."

She fled to him and kissed him.  "Forgive me for carrying on so.  I
just meant--You ARE a darling, and I do love you so; I even love
you passionately, now, as I never could any other man living."

"More than the jittery Mr. Hubbs, even if he's in uniform?"

"Oh, now YOU'RE being nasty.  Much better than Mr. Jitters.  Even
more than my cute Eino.  But you must admit that you're not as awe-
inspiring as a whole army marching together."

"I certainly do.  Jinny, shall I try to get into the Army, into
uniform--maybe the Judge Advocate's department?"

"No, I imagine they'll tell you that you can do more good right
where you are.  And maybe me too, where I am.  Yes--maybe."

--Now shut up, Cass.  She'll get over her disappointment if you
just keep still.

He did keep still, but he felt useless, he felt that she did not
vastly appreciate his labors as a jurist and a defender of
Democracy.  He felt, in fact, sulky, and doubtless his sulkiness
was visible to her.  When he said, with what he considered
admirable good nature, "How about our going fishing again tomorrow--
haven't tackled that tarpon yet," and she echoed, "FISHING!" he
yelped, "All right then, we won't!  Of course we do only what YOU
want to, my dear Jinny!"

"And just what is there to do, in this dump?"

That was all of their quarrel.

They did go fishing next day, on a placid-colored inlet, and they
were so fond of each other that they almost forgot the war, and
everybody forgave everybody everything.  But it HAD been a quarrel,
and if possibly she had started it, he had been the guiltier in
carrying it on.  They had had differences before, but this had been
their first quarrel, their first drink, their first murder, and so,
inevitably, it was the beginning of a series of quarrels
interspersed with frantic peace-proposals, while the little crystal
Isis listened bleakly.



Their second quarrel rose from one of her "tantrums,"
comprehensible but unexpected.  In the midst of a poor little dance
that the Bryn-Thistle was trying to give, with aged gentlewomen
tottering around the dining-room dancing together, Jinny demanded,
"Have we got to go on staying in this hencoop when people are
having such a gorgeous time at Palm Beach?  Aren't we good enough
to go there?"

"My dear child, we'll go over there any time you want to.  We'll go
tomorrow.  We'll hire a car and a driver."

That was all, and after another dance, she apologized:  "I'm sorry
I flared up so.  I'm sure the dear old things here mean well, but
they get on my nerves."

"We'll go up and start packing now."

"You're wonderful, and I'm sorry I was noisy and spiteful--and come
on, let's get going!  Palm Beach, here I come!"

--Do people who love each other always bicker and scratch and hurt?
Must they?



They both felt guilty when all the guests at the Bryn-Thistle came
out on the porch to cry, "It's been so nice to meet you both.  We
just loved knowing you, Judge, and your dear little bride."

It was a hundred miles across the Everglades to Palm Beach, and
they sang all the way, hand in hand, behind their sedate colored
driver.  She was radiant then, a joyous peasant with a red kerchief
round her dark hair, and when they came into the American Cannes,
where all the people are beautiful, the houses all carven of gold,
and the ocean water especially imported from the Riviera daily, by
airplane, she was impressed to a blissful awe.

The season was early; they were able to get a suite at the Royal
Crown: two rooms filled with white-fur rugs and glass tables and
chairs so modern that you sat in them as in a bucket; and Jinny
squealed continuously in the high religious passion of absolute
luxury, and he ordered up a bottle of Johannisberger Cabinet, in
the slow drinking of which they enjoyed everything but the taste.

He telephoned to Berthold Eisenherz, now head of the very richest
family in Grand Republic, who came down to his villa at Palm Beach
every winter.  Eisenherz was cordial, which exiled Grand
Republicans are not always to their fellow refugees, and urged them
to come over to the villa for dinner and dancing, that evening.

So for five hours the Timberlanes lived in a Hollywood motion
picture: a marble terrace on the starry ocean, a Cuban orchestra,
champagne from a portable silver-striped bar, roses on a December
night, and young Navy officers who danced with Jinny.  The war
seemed only fictional.  She exulted, "Cass, this is the night I've
lived for--this and our night at the gipsy camp.  I'm intolerably
happy!  I'm sorry if I was ever cross.  Because I love you!"

"More even than that lieutenant s.g.?"

"More even than that lieutenant j.g.!"

"Champagne, madame?" said the footman, who was a deacon in the
Swedish Baptist Church, back home in Minneapolis.

Jinny's husband was so relaxed that for the five enchanted hours he
actually let her enjoy what he had so anxiously wanted to have her
enjoy.  And through the net of Jinny's black evening bag Isis
peered out with a benignity that knew not good or evil.



The Honorable Mr. Hudbury, United States Senator Hudbury, should
have been in Washington, lighting the war, but as he was a very
thick, round, stupid man, it may have been as well that he was
taking a week off from statesmanship to repose his limbs, which
looked like four fingers of an enormous pale-white glove, as
they were displayed upon the sands of Palm Beach.  As an ex-
representative, Cass recognized the Senator even in the improbable
disguise of a bloated violet bathing-suit, with a belt patriotically
symbolizing the American flag encircling the globe. Mr. Hudbury's
belly being the globe.

Now Cass did not care for Mr. Hudbury, not as a pal.  Mr. Hudbury
started every sentence with "In my opinion," and he spent week-ends
with lobbyists.  Cass would not have collected Honorable Mr.
Hudbury, or any other accidental celebrity, except to give him to
Jinny, but since he had not given her any presents now since ten
o'clock this morning--the present then had been a coral necklace
which looked like the devil on her--he now picked up the Senator's
halo and handed it to her.

Fortunately Hudbury remembered him, and fortunately he did not
remember that he had hated Congressman Timberlane after a party
caucus at which the fellow had suggested that even Republicans
ought to know that there was a new invention called labor unions.

They were a musical-comedy group upon these tropic sands: the
Senator tubby and half naked, the Judge stalwart and three-quarters
naked, and Jinny, like all the other respectable women at that time
and place, almost entirely naked, charmingly naked, with white
midriff turning coffee-color.  With difficulty could you have found
three people more nude or more piously against "this crank theory
of Nudism."

"Senator, I don't know whether you'll recall me--Cass Timberlane,
formerly in Congress from Minnesota."

"Why, yes, yes, my boy, how could I forget a wheelhorse who has
rendered such sterling services to the Party!  Sure.  You had that
house on H Street, and the cocktails made with Swedish aquavit.
Perfectly."

"This is my wife."

"Oh, yes, and of course I remember you, too, and the name--ah, ah
now, wait, don't tell me--BLANCHE!"  The Senator looked confused,
but he was used to it.  For years and years he had been confused
over something or other, and he would continue to be confused until
someone in his State discovered that he was their Senator, and had
him defeated.

Jinny looked irritated, then winked at Cass, yet she viewed Hudbury
not without respect.  After all, a United States Senator is a
United States Senator, even when he is a hoot-owl.  (She still held
that innocent theory.  She had never lived in Washington.)

The Senator went on making sounds like an empty barrel.  "How could
I forget anything so charming as your lady, Cass?  Ravished to see
you again, Blanche."

"Oh, don't be ravished, Senator."

"Yes, yes, I will!  I can't help it.  Now, folks, I'm about to
assume the normal habiliments of a gentleman, and what-say you join
me for a cocktail on the terrace of the Choiseul in half an hour?"

Cass looked to Jinny for permission, and said, "Fine."

The truth is that over the cocktails, and how many of them there
were, Jinny was proud of being intimate with this aged poop, and if
he did reveal himself by saying that "American Business stands
wholeheartedly back of the war effort, ready to pledge every dollar
to encourage Our Boys," yet he also revealed the senatorial magic
by having somehow discovered, while he was dressing, that Blanche's
name was now Virginia.  It is probable that while he was under the
shower he had been speaking to the Federal Bureau of Inquiry by
vest-pocket radio.

Calling her "Jinny," pouring his black-molasses charm all over her,
he first told her that as a boy he had sold newspapers.  That was
for him an obligatory introduction to anything he had to say,
whether in the Senate, a grocery store, or a parlor house.  Then he
took them right into the heart of world affairs by confiding that
on the very day after Pearl Harbor, he had been summoned to the
White House for a small conference of the leaders of both parties.
(That the President had noticed that Senator Hudbury was there or,
if so, that he had said anything to him beyond "Got a cigarette?"
Cass and Jinny never could find out.)

After cocktails the Senator took them on to the roulette club
where, but under strictly honest, home-made American conditions,
none of your foreign shenanigans, Jinny lost forty dollars.

Here, they were in a spotlight of international chic.  The
Senator's secretary, a pale young man with constant reservations,
who was the Senator's eyes and his ideology, had come with them,
and he pointed out, at the gaming tables, the third-greatest radio
crooner in America, the fourth-greatest New York banker, the fifth-
most-beautiful woman from Alabama, a colonel who was going to be a
major general, a major general who was going to be a retired major
general, and a gentleman, with a beard, who had been a German
manufacturer but was now an exiled French patriot.

Through all of this global low-down, Cass was as grateful as little
Jinny, and said as they parted--he did not sound like Judge
Timberlane of the Twenty-Second Judicial District--"It was
extremely kind of you, Senator, to give us such a good time.
I appreciate it."

At dinner, the two of them at their hotel, Jinny pounced:

"Have a good time, Cass?"

"Splendid.  How did you like the Senator?"

"He's a fool."

"Yes, he does rather bear that reputation.  But he's always been
clever at picking useful brothers-in-law."

"Why were you so excited by having the old pot condescend to you?"

"M?"

"He doesn't even know anything about politics, only about
politicians.  He doesn't know half as much as Tracy Oleson or Mr.
Hubbs."  Then, clearly as an afterthought, "Or as you.  Why did you
ever drag in the old idiot?"

"Because I thought he would amuse you."

"Dullness doesn't amuse me."

"I picked him out for you the way I did your coral necklace.  I
wouldn't want to rub my face against the coral, either.  Don't be
so youthfully censorious.  If you don't care to have Hudbury for
your collection, if you don't want me to shoot him and stuff him
for you, we'll throw him out. . . .  Jinny! . . .  Sweet!"

"I know, darling!  I AM censorious.  AND young.  And I do try to
show off my superiority.  I'm sorry.  Some day, I'll grow up."

And of that quarrel there was nothing more.  But Cass was thinking
nervously that for years yet she would be impulsive, hasty to judge
him, aggressively independent, like the other children of her
Positively Final New Modern Revolutionary Age which by 1970 would
have come to seem such a naive Old-fashioned Age.

--Like all these girls, she feels--and how can you blame her--that
she must have her own life.  Besides that, I'm no longer the family
priest to her or a guide or a refuge; I'm just A Husband.  And I
don't even care much, so long as she'll let me go on being THAT!



There was nothing in the Specimen Hudbury that Jinny had not been
able to identify from her Pioneer Falls collecting.  In fact he
looked like the local pre-motor livery-stable keeper who was still
sitting in front of his empty barn, still covered with hay-dust,
waiting for this automobile craze to pass.

But she was impressed and a little confused when they went to lunch
at Berthold Eisenherz's villa, and so was Cass.  At the villa dance
they had met Berthold only as a sort of private head-waiter.  Now,
they collided with him as a personality.

The only thing about him to hint that he was not a gentleman was
that he too consistently looked too much like a gentleman.  He had
devoted the voluminous money that his grandfather had made, as a
Minnesota pioneer, by skinning beaver and redskins, to Harvard and
Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and a black-eyed, red-tempered Latvian
girl who spoke all languages, in and out of bed, and so had
qualified himself for the American diplomatic corps, in which,
before he got tired, he had risen to first secretary in a minor
legation.

He looked like a German who was trying to look like an Englishman.
He had been married, now and then, to the daughters of German-
American millionaires, who played pianos and barons.  At fifty, he
was bald and not officially married; he was bald and erect and
soft-spoken.  In Palm Beach he wore the monocle that even he did
not dare to display back home in Grand Republic, where Swedish and
Finnish urchins and Roy Drover and Boone Havock would have made
exactly the same rather Freudian comments upon it.

He had the Timberlanes for one of his better Grade-B luncheons,
with one actress, one lady pianist, one viscountess, a Swiss
violinist, and an economist from New Zealand.  At the flower-
strewn, yellow-damask covered table, on the terrace looking to the
Southern sea, the Timberlanes listened while the viscountess tried
to talk faster than the pianist.

Berthold himself talked only to Jinny, asking her questions in a
manner that made her feel solid and original.  Afterward, Jinny
confided to Cass, "That was fun.  The visvy-whateveritis-countess
was silly, but I think your friend Berthold is wonderful.  I always
heard so much about him in Grand Republic, but I never saw him
before.  Will we see him when he goes back in the spring?"

"I guess so.  If we want to."

"Isn't he hard to know?"

"'Hard to know'?  Why should he be?  Just because he's rich?  Back
home, we're not as naive as Palm Beach.  We know where his money
came from!"

"No, I don't mean 'because he's rich'!  Because he's wise and
charming, and he treats a colt like me as though I were a--you
know--a countess, too.  And the way he can speak French!  And knows
all about Bessarabia!  And kiss the hand!  My hand's still tingling
from it.  Oh, boy!"

"If you're going out for international society, along with
Excellency Bertie, you can't mix your dialects, and say 'Oh, boy'!"

"Okay.  But don't you like Bertie?"

"Would you be surprised if I said he's even phonier than Senator
Hudbury?"

"I certainly would.  And I would be fairly sure--fairly sure that
you were going jealous on me again."

He gaped.  It was true; he was jealous; jealous of Eisenherz, not
because he owned a palace but because with it he had been able to
impress Jinny; not that he knew the Deauville patter but that he
could make Jinny admire it.

He was quick about getting the proper forgiveness, so THAT could
not be called a quarrel.



There came a hot and humid evening, and Aucassin and Nicolette
acted like Auggie and Nig.  For two days they had been idle, soaked
in sun, confidently making love, and that sensible uselessness had
been too much for two people so perpetually active.

They drove over to West Palm Beach to see a super and maddening
movie, and they were unhappy and nervous.  He tried to hold her
hand, and she drew hers away.  She said it was too damp.

He watched her anxiously, and so she watched him protestingly, and
when they had worked up a fine, thick, hateful tension, he wanted
to cough.

He felt that she was just waiting for him to do something
objectionable like that, cough and whoop and spatter in a public
place--and so he couldn't do it, and so he wanted all the more to
cough, until the entire subsolar world was one horror of suppressed
coughing, and he let go in one gargantuan throaty bellow, and,
beside him, she gave off electric sparks of rage.  Then, in
ostentatious indifference, he crossed his legs, and his garter came
loose, and he had to make a public presentation of stooping down to
fasten it.

He insisted on a sundae after the movie and naturally, being
normally a tidy man, he now dropped chocolate sauce on his white
shirt.

"Disgusting!" she muttered.

She sadistically scrubbed it into a worse mess with her
handkerchief, and they drove back to the hotel in a great hot
silence.  So when he was brushing his teeth, he dropped a white
spot of toothpaste on his slipper, and she saw it, oh, she saw it,
and she said:

"Disgusting!"

She thought it over, with all of a good woman's earnestness, and
spoke as to a seven-year-old brat whom even his grandmothers had
agreed to murder:

"Cass, can't you ever pay the least bit of attention to your
personal habits?"

"Whaaaat?"

"I know you've lived alone so much, but still you're supposed to be
an intelligent man, and why you don't even notice it when you act
like a pig--your sloppy table-manners and yanking your garter
around right out in front of people--why do you deliberately go and
pick out garters that are guaranteed to come loose?  And dribbling
spots on your vest and your dressing-gown, and as for your LAPELS--"

"I deny all of that."

"Dribbling.  Constantly."

"I do not dribble!  You found one spot on my lapel, a month
ago . . . before we'd gone and got married.  But if it were true,
and I slopped around like a half-wit, I'd expect you to shut up
about it. I'm neither a New England housewife nor a pansy.  I want
your love, but not because of my exterior decoration.  If you're
going to go on watching me, expecting me to act like an ordinary
vulgar Middlewestern male--well, that's what I am.  I haven't one
single extraordinary virtue except my devotion to you.  If you want
to take advantage of that, I'm helpless.  But beloved, my beloved,
don't YOU lose something when you make me into a swine?"

She ran to him, and she was crying, lovely in repentance.

"I didn't realize I was picking on you.  I was just letting my big
mouth run on, as Eino used to say.  It didn't really mean anything
more than all the silly kidding that Lyra and Tracy and I used to
do.  I forgot you're so touchy."

"Am I very touchy?"

"Like a racehorse.  But that's why I love you.  Oh, my dearest,
I'll never let you go into politics or be a judge or anything like
that.  Your hide is about as thick as tissue paper.  Kiss me."  Her
kiss was that of a naughty child distraught to find that she has
hurt her friend.  "I truly think you're the greatest man living.
That's why I was cross with you about Senator Hudbury: that you
didn't realize how much bigger you are than him--than he?--
whichever it is.  You know, I'm not really ungrateful.  I know I'm
lucky to--"

"Sweet, don't go on.  You're making me feel like a lug for even
spitting back at you. . . .  I do love you so!"

"Identical, pal."  But her effort to be funny was pathetic, and she
looked so forlorn.

It was after half an hour of tenderness that Cass said, "I'm sure
now we'll never have another quarrel."

"Never!"

"And so I'm going to risk my life and criticize you for over-
dressing."

"M?"

"At lunch at Bertie's, didn't you notice the rigid millionaire
simplicity of that blasted countess?  But you had on a boutonniere
AND a necklace AND two bracelets AND a comic-dog breast-pin AND a
rhinestone buckle on your hat.  Too much."

"Too Pioneer Falls, eh?"

"Still, why shouldn't you be?"

"Because I am the wife of a judge that ought to be on the Supreme
Court bench right now, and I mean it!"

She must have slipped down to the lobby while he was bathing, while
he was feeling proud of himself for having asserted his power and
ashamed of himself for having so priggishly bullied so defenseless
a little criminal.  For there she was, shyly holding out a small
Modern Library edition of South Wind, and begging, "It's a
repentance present."

He almost wept then, while Isis, on the bureau, stretched herself
with ancient despair.

There could never be any more quarrels or jealousy.  Never.

On the bathing-beach, when numerous men were attentive to the
pleasant sight of her straight smooth legs, and got acquainted with
her apropos of a dog, a daughter, a cigarette-light, or the quick
sketches of the bathers that Jinny sometimes made in charcoal, then
Cass was proud that he felt no jealousy.

--Might as well get used to it.  When we get back, probably every
friend I have--Roy, Bradd, Jay, Harley, Frank, Greg--the whole
bunch of 'em will try to make her.  Not a chance, gentlemen.
There's no malice, no treachery, no intrigue in my Jinny.  Going to
be none of this "modern, civilized, urbane" sleeping around and
getting complicated in OUR house.



Their first Christmas dinner together was at Eisenherz's villa.  It
was a Grand Republic dinner and full of the double joy of loving
the home town and of being able to get away from it in winter.
Webb and Louise Wargate were there, just come in, and Madge
Dedrick.  There was apprehensive talk about the war, and the
Wargates expected to rush home early, but there were also hot rum
punch and tangoing and holly and kisses as harmless as 1890--though
not more so--and Bertie and Madge said that Jinny was going to be
their dearest friend for life, starting about March 20th, on their
annual bird-flight back to Grand Republic.

But the real Christmas was later that night, when Cass and Jinny
stood on the balcony of their suite, looking at the tranquil glow
of Lake Worth, and she sighed, "I'll never forget today.
Especially, I won't forget our standing here, us two.  And I'm glad
we're going back home--us two!  I don't really fall too much for
this Palm Beach glamor.  I know it's just gambling with counterfeit
money."

"I'm glad.  I was afraid maybe I'm too rustic for all the
nobility."

"No, you're too independent.  Cass, I'm very happy.  I'll always be
very happy with you."

They came into the station at Grand Republic in a snowstorm.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

GEORGE HAME & FRIENDS


The return of Judge Timberlane to his court room was marked by an
impassive "Glad to see you back, Judge" from Humbert Bellile, the
bailiff, a hand-shake from the clerk of court, and "Now we can get
going--nice trip, Chief?" from George Hame, the court reporter.

They were quiet and competent men, though bored, and it appeared
evident from seeing them run the court machinery that they had
nothing so disturbing in their lives as wives to hate or trust,
daughters to be worried about, ambitions to be defended; nothing
more complex than the conduct of dull agricultural arson cases.

Hame and Bellile went, after court, to the Cockrobin Bar, and had
comforting conversation with Ed Oleson, the barber, and Leo
Jensing, the electrician.

"See your boss is back from his honeymoon, George," said Oleson.

"Looks fit's a fiddle.  Incidentally, the best judge in the State.
Born professional."

"What kind of a girl he marry?"

"Cute little trick, bright 's a dollar.  Hope she appreciates him."

Jensing yawned, "Those rich guys that belong to the Federal Club
certainly do marry the swellest dames.  Well, they can have 'em.
I'll bet they're all a bunch of headaches.  My old woman and I--I
always tell her she looks like a constipated chicken, and she says
I look like a stubble field--she's dumb and she was brought up a
Seventh Day Adventist, but we get along like nobody's business.  I
cuff the kids and send 'em off to bed and then I get a can of beer
and we strip down to our undershirts and sit around and tell lies
and yap about what rats our neighbors are and generally enjoy life.
The Judge can keep his cutie, and that goes for all the fat boys in
the Federal Club.  Say, ever been in that club, George?  What kind
of a dump is it?"

Mr. Hame explained, "I often take papers to the Judge there.  It's
a pretty swell joint, at that!  All wood paneling and the bar's
like a chapel, stone arches and floor.  But you know what you can
do with the whole club!  Lot of landlords telling each other
Roosevelt is a Communist, like it was a piece they learned at
school."

Ed Oleson was eager.  "You ask ME about the Federal Club!  I go
there all the time, to shave the upper-bracket crooks when they got
too big a hang-over to walk.  Oh, a lot of 'em are okay; Webb
Wargate is a real constructive citizen, and Judge Blackstaff--he's
just as good a judge as your boss, George, and tips you four bits,
like a gentleman.  But Prutt, the banker, he never gives you a
cent--explains they don't tip, in a club.  Hell, I ain't a club
servant; I got my own independent business and I don't have to
shave any cactus-faced old gentleman-virgin unless I feel like it.

"But the worst guy there is that Boone Havock.  Say, why decent
people ever let him in their houses is beyond me.  I've been called
in to shave that cut-throat when he was so drunk he couldn't go
home and had to take a room at the club, and he told and
volunteered and told me that he'd spent the night with a tart in a
shack down in the South End and then got her cockeyed and cheated
her out of her five bucks, and he boasted about it.

"My son Tracy, that works for Wargate, has got more brains and
financial savvy than the whole club put together.  By the way,
Tracy knows Judge Timberlane's bride; says she's a high-class girl.
And talking of wives, I'm like Leo here: my old girl and I have a
swell time, especially now the kids are grown up.  We go out
hunting and canoeing like a couple of Indians.  That's the kind of
a wife I like."

George Hame rose, jeering, "Glad to hear there's so many square-
shooting wives around this burg.  I congratulate you boys."

The bailiff, also rising:  "Same here.  Fellows that 're out from
behind the matrimonial eight-ball like you two must have money to
spare.  We'll allow you to pay for the drinks."

Jensing crowed, "Just to prove it, I WILL buy 'em!"

"Any time you're in for rape, Leo, just remind me that I used to
know you, and I'll get the Judge to let you off with life," said
Hame.  "Good night."



Bailiff Bellile, as he entered his brown Cape Cod cottage, waited
for his wife to say, "Have you wiped your feet?  I try so hard to
keep things nice here, and then you come home drunk and get
everything all dirty."

She said it.

She waited for him to say, in echo of his days as a lumber-camp
teamster, "I wish to God I WERE drunk, and maybe it wouldn't make
me so sick to look at you."

He said it.



Ed Oleson went noisily into his upstairs half of a two-family
house, and his aging wife chirped, "It's the old master himself.
Have a good time with the boys?"

"I'll say!  Wish you'd been along."

"Whyntcha invite me?"

"Juvecome?"

"Try it and see!  Bet I would.  Smell something nice?"

"And how!  What is it?"

"Real Hunky goulash."

"Now you don't tell me."  He kissed her.

"Nice time in the shop today?"

"Fellow here from Rochester, New York, he told me all about how
we'll lick the Japs with a secret weapon we got.  Say, I'll bet
Tracy 'll be in the war, and be a major."

"If his lungs are all healed up.  Golly, Ed, aren't you proud of
that boy!"

"Say, don't you quote me and don't let the newspapers get hold of
it, but I'm nuts about him.  The damn little hick--think of him--
headed for the top of the Wargate Corporation some day!"

"And let me tell you, Mr. Ed Oleson, they'll be lucky to get him!"

"I'll say.  How about lassoing that goulash now?"

"I think you got something there, Mister.  Let's go!"



There was no ugly noise between George Hame and his wife, Ethel,
when he came coldly into their freight-car of a house, but only an
uglier silence.  That was agreeable to him, because there was for
him a poisonous boredom in what he considered her spiritless and
hopeless fussing, her whimpering demands for money.

He looked at her over the Dumas he was always reading.  She was
hemming a pot-holder made of red calico.

"Much too bright for her," he muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing . . .  You certainly will drive me nuts."

"What say?"

"Nothing."

Then another baby yelled.  They had five of them, and all unwanted.
But there was also their fifteen-year-old daughter, Betty, whom he
loved.

He said placidly, "All I exist for is to supply you with brats and
lactation."

"And whose fault--"

"Yours.  If you'd take a little care of yourself--As Montaigne
observes, this place is always obscene with new dripping babies,
and smells like wet death."

She knew enough then not to speak.  When he mentioned Montaigne--
pronounced Montaigny--he was likely to hit her with his seal ring.

Betty came in, round and pert as a bouncing tennis ball.

"Hello, Daddy," she said, as she raced for the stairs, and "Hello,
sweetheart" he answered, looking up after her new nylon stockings
and old shoes.

His wife was afraid not to speak now.  "George!  I will not have
you looking at Betty that way!"

"So you will not have it!  So what?"

He returned to Dumas.

Some day, he thought, Betty and he would run off together to
France, to the shrine of Dumas.  She looked much older than
fifteen, didn't she?  He dreamed about this always, and always knew
that he would never do it.  He knew that he would hold to his wife.
She irritated him, but he was lonely without her on the evenings
when she was visiting her incessantly sick relatives and Betty was
out with one of the neighborhood boys whom he hated.  He was lonely
not because he had no treasures in himself, for he could renew them
out of Dumas or Scott or Washington Irving, nor because he could
not take comfort in solitude, but because he was afraid that when
Betty discovered how he felt toward her and vituperatively left him
forever, then no one in the world but Ethel would stay by him, no
one else would blame it on Betty.

He guessed that Judge Timberlane would kick him out, if the Judge
discovered his thoughts about Betty, and he was sorry, because,
though he considered the Judge a little too naive, he also believed
him to be the Archangel Michael.

With the firmness of the will to death, he waited for Betty to come
down and pass through the room again.  The other children panted in
and out, but their noise was so blurred that it was to him like an
absolute silence.

"Don't you want any supper?" grated his wife.

"What?  I suppose so.  I never thought about it . . .  Oh, Betty,
going out?  Get home early now, sweetheart I'll sit up for you."

"Swell, Daddy," she condescended.

Then he felt gay, and he looked amiably at his wife.  When he saw
her expression, he froze and returned to Dumas.



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-in-Law, 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."



26


This happy man and woman, this little world, this precious island
in a leaden sea, walled from the envy of less happier homes, this
blessed trust, this peace, this youthful marriage, this home of
such dear souls, this dear dear home.

This valley of refuge, this refuge without flight, this valley
shelter from the wars abroad and the hysteric factions of the land,
this close and smiling cheer, this dear dear home.

Thus only could Cass read his Richard the Second.



If the world of the twentieth century, he vowed, cannot succeed in
this one thing, married love, then it has committed suicide, all
but the last moan, and whether Germany and France can live as
neighbors is insignificant compared with whether Johann and Maria
or Jean and Marie can live as lovers.  He knew that with each
decade such serenity was more difficult, with Careers for Women
opening equally on freedom and on a complex weariness.  But whether
women worked in the kitchen or in the machine-shop, married love
must be a shelter, or the world would freeze, out in the bleak free
prairies of irresponsible love-making.

With whatever flaws, his dear Jinny and he had created such a
shelter.  He hastened back to her from his day in court; she
hastened to him from her war work in the Office of Civilian
Defense, or from a French lesson with Frau Silbersee, or from a
movie with Rose and Valerie Pennloss.  He met her with a
perpetually renewed amazement that this brisk and well-armored girl
would soften to his love.  She met him with astonishment that so
reserved a man should be so without reserve her worshiper.

They walked on winter nights by the dark river flowing under the
ice from dark pinelands; they panted home to read in quiet, with
one final ferocious game of chess, and she came into his room to
say good night and forgot to go.

Poor Cass was so much simpler than most of the criminals who
appeared before his wisdom, and any beslobbered pickpocket knew
more about the intrigue of love.  He suffered from thinking that
his was an entirely reasonable, realistic, unsentimental love--in
fact, he suffered from thinking, while Nature was busy with much
livelier urges.

So great was her kindness toward his stumbling and beautiful faith
in her that Jinny was not tempted to tease him by keeping him away,
but she was human enough to bully him.  It was in timing that she
could, with innocent sweetness, most bedevil him.

He was invariably ready to do whatever she wanted to when she
wanted; she usually thought that what he wanted to do was a fair
notion, but she always showed her independence by delaying the
WHEN.  She was always ten minutes late, always had been and always
would be, and he always protested that she was late, and she always
explained that her watch was slow, and the ever-refreshing topic
was probably a safety-valve and kept them from more perilous
matrimonial topics, such as relatives, religion, and the vanity of
too-much lipstick.

He had to face the twin questions of whether she could settle down
with his staid set, and whether that set would snub her as an
outsider and not come calling.  But the entire town (again meaning
one per cent of it) was frenzied to know what this girl was like
who had captured Our Cass.  They did come, and Jinny was pleased,
even when she was irritated by the manner of the older worthies,
which indicated, "We shall make every effort to have you accepted
by our senate, now that you are no longer young and wild, but we
must be convinced that you appreciate it."

Queenie Havock came in, at the most inconvenient time available,
just when Jinny had started to wash her hair, and gave Jinny
instructions on how to keep Cass ardent, and charged into the
kitchen, said it was too large and too old-fashioned, insulted Mrs.
Higbee, and then won her back by screaming, "Here I am shooting off
my mouth again, but I know what a crank Cass is about temperance
and purity and all that hooey, the old stiff, and you two girls
have to live with him, and I just meant any time I can tip you off
about men, you let me know, and how would you like a brace of
frozen pheasants?"

Less endurable was Diantha Marl, Mrs. Gregory Marl, the handsome
and fresh-voiced and amiable.  Both as the wife of the Banner and
in her own right as a committeewoman, a madame chairman, an
exhaustive and exhausting talker about foreign affairs, the drama,
and the illegitimate babies that all the gayer young ladies in town
were certainly going to have immediately, Diantha ranked with Mrs.
Webb Wargate, Madge Dedrick, and Della Lent as one of the female
rulers of the tribe.

She had worked so hard at an English accent that she had acquired a
fascinating combination of Oxford and oxcart, and she was so
mannered, so pretentious, that when she met you on the street and
said "Good morning," it somehow informed you that she was on her
way to a conference with the Secretary of State or with Bernard
Shaw, who had secretly slipped into town for that purpose.

She remembered that Jinny had once worked for her husband--how she
remembered it! how glowingly and inescapably she remembered it!--
and, under her system of private imperialism, she assumed the right
to inflict on Jinny, as one of her smaller colonies, a rule of
gentle questioning, which would provide her with new dinner-party
tattle.

Jinny, proud in her power as young hostess, who could give orders
to Mrs. Higbee and often have them carried out, offered Diantha tea
or cocktails.  She took cocktails, and began to whinny.

How cozy here.  Did Cass tell Jinny all about his cases in court?

"Oh, yes," lied Jinny.

Did Cass like to play with her, and was he a generous provider?

"Oh, yes," said Jinny, surprised at being able to tell the truth.

What was Cass's worst fault?

"Why, I imagine it's his thinking that his wife is so bright that
she's onto it when people who really dislike her pretend to shine
up to her."

Not for months did Diantha decide whether Jinny had meant to be
insulting.  She then, very erroneously, decided No.

She ran through a discourse on the post-war education of Germany
(which ought to be taken over by liberal-minded women like Diantha
Marl), on trout-fishing (she was one of the best fly-casters in
Radisson County), and on what a creeping imbecile Perry Claywheel
was to believe that his wife was true to him.  So Diantha got
easily through the period before she could go home and tell a
dinner-party that this Jinny Timberlane was illiterate but
harmless.

But Mrs. Nestor Purdwin, wife of the dean of the local bar, just
brought Jinny a jar of chutney, and that rangy older hawk, Mrs.
Judge Blackstaff, came and sat and knitted with Jinny, who was glad
then to believe that she herself would some day become an authentic
Mrs. Judge.



As a planner, a maker of notes and lists, Cass had anxiously
thought over all the younger people whom Jinny might like.  He was
pleased when the Havocks' daughter, Ellen Olliford, came home from
Massachusetts.  She was just Jinny's age, and everybody said she
was "so amusing."

They would be Great Friends, decided Cass.

Ellen Havock had gone to Smith College, then married Mr. Olliford,
an engineer resident in Springfield, Massachusetts, now in the
service, a captain.  Ellen, with her one baby, had come back to
stay with her parents.

She loved and despised her parents, she loved and was bored by
Grand Republic, and she spread abroad the news that Springfield
(Mass.) was a heavenly city compact with music, French cuisine,
silver golf-sticks and bridge-cards beaten out of fine gold, till
her father said--but still lovingly--"Then why the hell don't you
get out of this hick camp and go back to your codfish?"

Jinny was more terrified by Ellen than by Ellen's strident mother.
Young Mrs. Olliford was so artificially slim, so icy, so at ease,
so inquisitive; and without saying it, she so clearly said to
Jinny, "How did a country girl like you ever marry a man who,
however far down the rungs, still belongs to our International
Ladder Society?"

Half a dozen other young war-widows also came reluctantly back to
the primitiveness of their native Grand Republic, after marrying
into such exclusive Eastern centers of culture as Peoria,
Bridgeport, and Scranton.  They knew their horse-shows and their
Vogue fashions, and Jinny was as uncomfortable with them as any
other fox-terrier with a pack of disdainful greyhounds.  None of
this did Cass realize; he thought that Ellen and her kind were
"nice kids, maybe a little too extravagant," who would be grateful
to meet anyone so forthright and individual as Jinny.  When she
said, no, she did not want to give a party for them, he dismissed
them with a comfortable "You're probably right.  How about some
cribbage?"

Not too discontentedly, he thought, Jinny settled down with Lyra
Coggs, Francia Wolke, Cerise Osprey, Hortense Hubbs, Rose Pennloss
and, perhaps most of all, with Rose's daughter Valerie who, at
fifteen, seemed to Jinny to have more eagerness and integrity than
anyone she knew except Cass and Eino.



Webb and Louise Wargate, home early from Florida because of the
war, gave the Timberlanes a formal party, but of that Jinny could
remember nothing except white shirt-fronts, a swirl of tulle, and
the magnificent, the absurd, Great Room in the Wargate palace, with
its enormous crimson circular seat with an orange tree on the
central pedestal, and the marble fountain imported from Italy.

Their real welcome to matrimony was the dinner of twelve persons
given by Dr. and Mrs. Drover.

Jinny had, with difficulty, persuaded Cass that it would be
fashionable for them to be ten minutes late, so when they came in--
two minutes early--the citizens had all arrived, and Cass could
hear Roy and Queenie in an antiphon that seemed familiar:

Nobody at all has any servants whatsoever now, and those who do
have pay too much, and so all strikes ought to be stopped by law,
because all labor leaders and Democrats are crooks.  Cass listened
while he waited for Jinny to return from the coat-room, and
silently exploded.

--Dear Jinny, I've done a dreadful thing, to trick you into
becoming my wife and, for your reward, let you for a whole evening
listen to Roy Drover belching.  I must have hated you, not loved
you.  I've shut you in a morgue.  Well, I'll take you out of it.
I'll take us both out!  I'd better, little hawk, or you'll fly off
without me!

--Now what kind of a way to talk is that?  Jinny is a wise-enough
kid to know that these people are the salt of the earth, the
friendliest and solidest people living.  What the devil!  They're
not SUPPOSED to talk like a bunch of actors or professors!

He had got so far in his inward scolding when Chris Grau walked in,
with scarf, and looked at him straight--not rebukingly, not
pathetically, not tenderly, just straight, her manner saying that
he had gone rather far, not so long ago, in making love to her, in
drinking in her sympathy, and there was nothing that could be done
about it, but she did want to have the record clear.

The Judge quit brooding and became practical.  Leaving Jinny
comparatively safe with Rose Pennloss and a cocktail, he appealed
to Lillian Drover, the hostess.  She smiled beseechingly at him, as
she always did.  "Lil!  Can you seat Jinny beside Bradd Criley at
dinner--he'll entertain her more than anybody, I think--and let me
sit by Chris?  I've neglected her."

Lillian blushed and nodded.

He bustled to Bradd.  Good ole Bradd!  Thirty-nine now but hard to
believe it, still looks about twenty-nine; wavy-haired, impudently
courtly, handsome in a track-athlete way, slim as a tennis-player,
master of every trick of the law court and the poker table and the
boudoir, a more smiling friend than Roy Drover and a more sensible
one than Frank Brightwing--no wonder he held that ducal office of
The Most Popular Bachelor in Town!

Cass urged, "Bradd!  Pay some attention to Jin tonight.  She's shy
of these old crabs, and I've got to soothe Chris."

The dimple, the quick smile, the manly voice, as Bradd promised,
"Do you think I'll find that hard?  Jinny is the one person here,
besides you, that I want to see.  I'm delighted that you and she
are so happy together.  And you can hold her.  She'd be onto a
flashy guy like me in ten minutes.  You watch me squire her."

Good ole Bradd, thought Cass.

Sitting beside Chris at dinner, he probed, "Well, what do we say?"

"About what?"

"About us."

"You mean about letting me think you loved me, and then sneaking
off with this girl?"

"Not sneaking."

"Sneaking! . . . Well, I must say, but regretfully, that I think
you were right."

"M?"

"Oh, Cass, I know; I had no youthful passion left to give you.  It
all went to my father, then for years to Mother, and when--I wanted
to hate Jinny, but I'm sorry to say that I love her.  I don't
suppose I'm more than six or seven years older than she is, but I
feel as if she were my daughter.  She's fundamentally a shy thing,
isn't she?  Look at her, trying to laugh at Roy's dirty jokes."

"Well, Bradd will carry her through, on her other side.  He's--"

"Cass!  Are you a competent husband for any girl as fine and
winning as Jinny?"

"I don't know.  I hope so."

"You've got to be!  For my sake, too.  Cass, she's my understudy.
No, she's me; she represents me, she IS me, in the only love-affair
I'll ever have.  Are you gentle enough for her and tolerant enough
and imaginative enough and flexible enough?"

"What do you think?"

"I'm not sure you are.  You're so methodical."

Then Cass was angry.  "I'm sick and tired of this contemporary
belief that any man who likes to spend as much as one evening a
week home is too dull a breadwinner for any up-and-coming young
female who's had such a modern education in science and sociology
that she can turn on the radio all by herself!  But I do love Jinny
to a point of desperation, and however much she may like dancing-
men and all these other wonder-boys that are too 'flexible' to be
'methodical,' yet in the long run she'll prefer somebody who's
solid, like me or Bradd, and I don't intend to apologize even to
HER because I do brush my teeth and pay my bills!"

"Cass, you do love her, don't you!  I'm glad.  Do love her.  If you
ever for one minute wanted to love me or anything in me, then love
me now in her!"

Her intensity frightened him; in relief he looked along the table
at the placidity of Jinny.  He was pleased to see how helpful to
her Bradd was being.  Bradd was talking low and fast, and smiling.

--Thank God, there's one friend I can trust to give her a good
time.  Bradd is as young as Eino and as mellow as Steve Blackstaff,
and I wouldn't wonder if he understood women better than some
married men.



Jinny was so fortunate as to draw Bradd and the Penlosses for
bridge, after dinner; she seemed to have a good time, and Cass was
puzzled when she was silent to his query "Enjoy yourself?" during
the extensive five-block drive back home and when, in the hall, she
threw her silver-fox jacket at the indignant Cleo.

"Come sit on my knee," he said.  Somehow that always seemed to him
a soothing thing to suggest at these times of sulkiness.

She obeyed, but her head against his shoulder was rigid as a
plaster model.

"What's trouble, baby?"

"NOTHING'S the trouble!  Good HEAVENS, can't I be quiet without
your thinking that--"

"No, sweet, you can't.  What's the charge?"

"You seemed to be having a gorgeous time with your old girl-friend,
that Grau woman."

She loved him enough to be jealous!

"I WAS having a gorgeous time with her.  Do you know what we were
talking about?"

"Me, I suppose."

"Don't be so egocentric.  But matter of fact, we were.  She wanted
to hate you, but she's succumbed, like me.  She loves you.  I said
you were a hawk, but she says you're a LARK, among all these
crows?'

"Well, now, that's what I call something like it!"  She kissed his
bent forehead; kissed it again with "That second one is for Chris.
I always liked larks better than any other bird; the meadow lark
that makes you feel so fresh in early morning, and I want to go to
England when the war's over, just to hear the skylark.  And yet
Chris does--"

She was tense again in his arms, and there was nothing funny,
nothing of the bad-little-girl in her grave complaint:

"But you and she were so intimate.  You've known her so long--you
know so many things together that I never even heard of.  I felt so
shut out.  You two have jokes and memories--maybe of all the
romantic passes that you've made at her."

"Not so many and not serious.  Why, Jin, you aren't jealous?"

"Yes, I am!"

"You, the crusader against jealousy?"

"I'm not a crusader against anything!  I'm only jealous when
anybody takes ANY of you away from me.  Jealous when I realize, and
God knows I try and forget it, that you've had so many experiences
with women that I don't even know about."

"Haven't you had experiences?"

"Not really.  Eino kissed me very nicely one evening, if you want
to know.  But when I think of Chris, and especially when I think of
BLANCHE, that hell-cat, that female heel--"

"No, she wasn't."

"--then I get mad.  You and your Blanche!  Actually married to her!
I can just see it and hear it: dark rooms, and she on your lap,
too--"

She tried to bounce away, but not too violently, and he held her.

"--and you two lying and laughing in the darkness and breakfasting
together in pajamas--oh, sometimes I get so furious I could kill
both of you, and sometimes it just makes me disgusted and feeble.
Cass Timberlane, you got to love me terribly, to make me forget all
that."

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes, I do!"

"Do you love me, Jin?"

"Yes, I do.  Damn it!"

"How much?"

"Very much.  Very very much."

She forgot her distress, and not till late, when she had refused to
return to her own room, on the ground that it was wolf-haunted, and
lay curled serenely in his vast bed, did he recall from his
criminal cases into what frightening shapes a resentment long
hidden can twist itself.



27


He had heard it often enough from his sister Rose, but he had never
thoroughly understood that Jinny, with little occupation beyond
asking Mrs. Higbee what she wanted her to want, would become idle,
empty and bored.

Her chief employment was in war-work.  With the others, she did her
Red Cross detail and the entertainment of transient soldiers, but
it took no initiative, not with such captains of enterprise as
Diantha Marl and Zeta Umbaugh directing her how to address
envelopes, how to make layettes for soldiers' wives.  She worked
conscientiously, but the tasks did not take one-tenth of her time,
one-hundredth of her energy.

She had been elected to the Junior League, with its dances and mild
benevolences, but she did not feel greatly at home in that self-
constituted peerage of the Nice Women.

She read enough, but what to the factory draftsman had been stolen
joy was merely grim, as an all-day entertainment.

For a month it had been luxury, after having been a working girl
goaded by alarm clocks, to sleep till eleven and to breakfast on
Mrs. Higbee's gossip and Cleo's antics with the golden string.
Yet, before summer, Jinny was bored to the danger-point.

She hoped that when she had children, she would be fulfilled, but
there was no advice of their coming.

Now of all this Cass was more aware than Jinny knew, aware and
bothered.  He had realized from divorce cases that boredom can be a
slimier serpent in Eden than cruelty or drunkenness, and he saw
that snake writhing.

What had Blanche done to keep busy?  Why hadn't she complained?

Oh, yes.  He remembered now.  She had.

And at that, Blanche had been nearer in age to Rose and the Bozards
and more companionable, and she had enjoyed impressing Grand
Republic by wearing backless dresses and being a great hostess.
But when she had not been on parade, she too had been bored.

Cass wondered whether Jinny could, as Blanche decidedly could not,
be influenced to take an interest in the technicalities of his
work.

He gave her popular books about the law.  He came home with
stories--even he did not think they came out very excitingly--about
what an old stickler Oliver Beehouse, chief counsel for the
Wargates, was about rules of evidence, what battlers for justice
Sweeney Fishberg and Nestor Purdwin were, and how irritated Judge
Blackstaff was when Judge Flaaten referred to their new silk robes
as their "overalls."

But he got no spark out of her till he told about the young soldier
who had been sent up for carnal knowledge, at which she lighted up
and warmly defended the young man without having listened to
anything but the more esoteric features of the case.  Cass
discovered that she was as non-conformist in the judicial system as
in chess.  Her theory of verdicts was humanitarian and brief.

If a criminal was a nice-looking boy, you imposed the minimum
sentence and then suspended it and gave him five dollars to go out
and get another drink; and in civil litigation, the judge ought to
sneak out into the corridor with the foreman of the jury and tell
him to give judgment for all tenants, widows, and all persons over
seventy, and against all landlords, employers, corporations, and
bald-headed men who smoked cigars and called women "Sister."

"I don't think she'll ever be a rival of John Marshall," decided
Judge Timberlane.

It was in early March that he came home to find a girl dancing with
pride.

"Darling, know what's happened?  Guess.  You couldn't guess.  Greg
Marl--what nerve!--he wants me to go back to work for him.  I will
not!  The idea!  Maybe I will.  Firing me--the best cartoonist
HE'LL ever get!  Well, I guess I was sort of bad.  Maybe I'll be
better now.  But I was a pretty darn good cartoonist then, too!"

"Whoa!  What is all this?"

"Greg called up.  Two of his reporters and his new cartoonist have
been drafted.  He says he could just use a syndicated cartoon, but
he'd rather keep the local touch, and he thinks--"

"Do you want to do this?"

"For a while, maybe.  Yes, I think I do.  Would you mind terribly?"

"We'll talk about it at dinner.  Let me think about it first."

While he washed his hands, gargled, inspected the purity of his
collar, put on his smoking jacket, peeped at the war news, called
up about the coal, looked at the thermometer to see what time it
was and looked at his wrist-watch to see how cold, wrote a check
for the garbage-collector, glanced at the sports page, looked into
his current detective story to find out whether it was due back at
the public library, looked at the furnace, put on his slippers and
then, with a feeling that this was his evening to be dignified, put
on his shoes again, and then put on his slippers--through all his
exigent before-dinner duties, the Judge was voraciously thinking
about it first.

At dinner, Jinny spoke with more affection than belligerence:

"I'm not so proud and stuffy that I care especially about seeming
independent of you, like Diantha Marl, but this is a shaky world
now, and any girl of my age may have to earn her living yet, and
she ought to be trained, and I've only started my training as a
draftsman.  I ought to be really good."

"I agree."

"I wish I could be of some help to you in the law, but that would
take years, and I have made a start with drawing.  Honestly, it's
all--well, anyway, it's partly because I do love you and want you
to respect me and not consider me just a kept woman.  Can't you
see?  I mean, work till God or whoever it is that's responsible
sends us some children.  Couldn't I?"

"Dear child, you don't have to ask my permission!"

"But I wouldn't feel right--"

"I'm not your tyrant.  If you want to do this enough, why, it's
decided.  I'll admit I had hoped to have you waiting for me at the
end of the day, and all fresh, not a tired working woman, but I
know I have no right to demand that.  So.  When do you go to work?"

"Well--yes--I know--but there is one thing.  You see, Greg wants
me--and Hubbsy says I'd be fine at it--and Greg will pay me more,
but he wants me to do some reporting, too, and that means the hours
would be from noon till eight o'clock in the evening--maybe later
sometimes, but not very often.  How do you feel?  I'm not quite
sure."

He was a sunken man then, but he wanted to be polite.

"Look, Jin.  If this were some critical war job, or if it were
going to lead to a blazing career for you, I'd be glad.  I'd merely
be wondering how I could help.  I know that more and more millions
of women will have to earn their livings now, and I'm all for
having every occupation--especially law and medicine--open to them
completely.  But is it any part of this theological doctrine of the
economic independence of women--this rare new doctrine that only
goes back to the Egyptian priestesses--that women HAVE to have
independent jobs, even if it cracks up the men they love--or at
least the men that love them?"

"Don't look so utterly stricken!  Of course I won't do it!  Foul
idea anyway, out in the rain all evening when I've got you and Mrs.
H. and Cleo to come home to.  Forget it!"

"But I don't want to forget it.  You're right about the passing of
the fond, foolish Little Woman.  But look.  You yourself say you
need more training in art.  You know this old fellow Bezique, that
has art classes at the Junior College?  I hear he's quite good--he
wouldn't be here but for the war.  Why don't you work with him?"

"Maybe I will.  Now stop looking so woe-begone.  Honestly, I don't
insist on solving the entire feminist question right away!"

She rushed around the table to kiss his hair, which was gratifying
not only to Cass, but to the highly observant Cleo.  She was
unusually pleased with him and with herself all evening, while he
tried to look generous but masterful, and underneath it worried
that, three months after their marriage, she could cheerfully have
left him for her own world of young workers, and had been kept from
it not by adhesion to him, but by the accident that she would have
to work after dark.

He realized that from his first sight of her on the witness-stand,
his zest in trying to win her had always been underlaid by the fear
of losing her.  He realized that in the civilization that he
represented officially, if nine-tenths of the people suffered from
occasional hunger and constant insecurity, the rest of the
community, whom the nine-tenths labored to keep in contentment,
suffered from boredom and futility.  His problem was concerned not
with one light-footed girl, but with all women everywhere in an age
that puzzled and frightened him.

And Jimmy--with enthusiasm she took up sketching and French
literature at the Junior College, in Alexander Hamilton High
School, and with more enthusiasm she dropped them, when she found
that most of the students in the adult classes were youngish
housewives who were more willing to fall in love with the teacher
than to study.

But this failure did not so much affect Jinny as her discovery that
she was a second Eleonora Duse.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

SCOTT & JULIET ZAGO


Scott Zago, president of the Northern Insurance Brokerage
Corporation of Grand Republic, Inc., suffered from nothing in life
except his diagnosis of himself as a humorous fellow.

He was a profound yet ingratiating insurance-man, a collector of
shotguns, a talented carver of duck-decoys, a powerful dahlia-
grower, a pipe-smoker, a dog-lover, and a faithful husband, and he
could quote accurately all the limericks about the Bishop of
Birmingham, but he would put on an expectant smile and make puns.
He telegraphed "Congratulations on the pappy event" to new fathers,
provided they were of an insurable social standing, and to lawyers
he said, "How's the great trial-liar today?"

He had a comic name for every acquaintance, and used it whenever he
saw them.  Loudly.  "Lydia Pinkham" was his name for Dr. Drover; he
shouted "How's Doc Pinkham this obsequious day?" even in the hushed
pomposity of the Federal Club; and he introduced him to male
strangers with, "Folks, I want you should meet Doc Pinkham.  He'll
take care of any female complaints you got in stock today."

He found that Abbott Hubbs was born in Oklahoma, and he gurgled
invariably, "How's the oil wells today?"  As he was never quite
sure whether Oklahoma was to be regarded as Western or Southern, he
added either, "Brethren, we will now absquatulate together and sing
'Dixie,'" or "Brethren, we will now absquatulate together and sing
'Home on the Range,'" according to his geographic mood.

But Scott Zago was magnificent as a husband.

Juliet and he made love rapturously and unwearyingly; they giggled
at each other's jokes, and whenever they tried to quarrel, they
broke down and laughed.  They had two jolly children.  They called
their fake half-timber cottage "The Dolls' House," and it had a
pool table and good beds and two-thirds of a set of The Harvard
Classics.

Their amorous delight was only increased by the fact that Scott was
fifty now and Juliet only thirty-five.  She had been married to him
when she was twenty, but she was a chronic child-wife, and would
still be at seventy, if God should blessedly preserve her as a
proof of how unnecessary is intelligence to romance and fine
cookery.

She flapped her pretty little fat hands and beamed like a fat round
little baby and did a fantastic little toddling dance with her
little round feet, and simpered, "Honya, I dess tan't understan'
all de biggy, wisey gwowed-up talk that oo big mans is saying, but
'ittle Juley can shake up a cuddly 'ittle Clover Club while oo is
doing it."

Her favorite endearment was this "Honya," and she ran to the
infantile in clothes; she wore ringlets, with piratical kerchiefs
flaunting over them, large pink hats, and dirndls and flat strapped
baby-shoes and chains hung with jingling silver charms.  And she
poked people in the ribs and squealed at their wincing.

Juliet was not only infantile but cultured.  Every month she took
from the library a volume on some branch of science like astrology,
New Thought, gland-therapy, Freud's translations from the original
four-letter words, or the hidden inner secrets of Tibet, and with
the touching zeal of the young savant, she quoted the first two
paragraphs of each book to all newcomers.  Naturally, like Mrs.
Higbee across the way, she believed in numerology and palmistry,
but she had one superstition that Mrs. Higbee did not share: she
put perfume behind her ears.  Also, she never listened to
information and let it go at that.  She had to make a witty
comment, in the belief that she was easing the social way for large
and surly professors of biophysics or Burmese history.

Most men knew instinctively that the way to shut up Juliet was to
kiss her.  For so plump a girl, she did get more incidental kissing
from entirely tangential gentlemen!  They were deceived, however,
if they thought they were going farther.

After parties, she reported to Scott on the assorted kisses she had
received during the evening, and he tried, under her direction, to
imitate the several categories, as: the butterfly kiss, the solid
brother-in-law, the allergic-to-lipstick, the short interrogative,
the long interrogative, and the vampire-minatory, meant for
ravishing.  They bounced around in bed and laughed a good deal
during these imitations, and ended up in an innocent frenzy which
would have astonished serious citizens like Judge Timberlane, who
thought the Zagos were fools, or sentimentalists like Young Mrs.
Timberlane, who thought they were triflers.

The Zagos came near to justifying all such anachronisms as
Insurance, cocktails, and houses with shingles imitating thatch.



28


From a camp in South Carolina, Eino Roskinen wrote to Jinny, "I'm a
corporal, I shall be a sergeant, I'll never be a comm. officer, I
ask too many flip questions.  Now you are married and a woman of
leisure, why don't you finally go out for the Lit Theater, you have
looks and spirit, tho I doubt whether you have enough inner
discipline to take direction, why not try?  Furioso the Finn."

She read it aloud to Cass, and said with marked doubt, "What do you
think?"

"Not bad.  I believe you'd be good at dramatics, and you'd have a
lot of fun.  The Masquers have had a good reputation, more than ten
years now.  I couldn't ever imagine myself getting up there before
a lot of people and pretending I was a king or a butler--"

"You do every day.  On the bench."

"Maybe.  Anyway, I'd be delighted."

"I wonder when the next try-out is.  I wonder what the play will
be."

"The play is Skylark, by Samson Raphaelson; it's the last play of
the season; the reading will be at Della Lent's next Thursday
evening, at eight-fifteen."

"How come you always know everything?"

"Why, I read the papers!"



Rice and Patty Helix were small and active and rather untidy.  They
were the paid semi-professional managers of the Masquers:
directors, scene-designers, ticket-peddlers, borrowers of stage
furniture.  They were devoutly married, and they were either older
than they looked, or more wrinkled than their age.  They talked,
rapidly and enthusiastically, about "Gene" O'Neill, moonlight-blue
lights, and tormentors, and they could make a wind-machine out of
an old bicycle, a marble Venus out of a Quaker Oats box.

They had acted professionally, but no one seemed to know just when
or where; they said that they had given it up because it was so
hard to get engagements together; and before they had found a
career in the little theaters, they had tried chicken-farming and
clairvoyance and being lecture agents in Texas.  Late at night,
they were seen running hand in hand.  The Boone Havocks received
them as somewhere between schoolteachers and bartenders.

But at best they were the upper servants of Della Wargate Lent, who
supported the Masquers.

The plays were rehearsed at the various houses of the cast and
finally presented in the high-school auditorium, but the try-outs
were held at Della's abode, which was by no means the largest house
in Grand Republic but had the largest drawing-room, all filled with
gilt pianos and majolica.

For casting during war-time the Helixes had enough women among whom
to choose, but they had to drag in young men from shops and
factories and offices.  There were present for the reading of
Skylark only eleven men from whom to pick the six male characters
of the play, and one of these was cross-eyed though spirited, but
for the four women characters there were twenty-seven candidates,
ranging from fourteen and sulky to sixty-three and still artistic.

All twenty-seven wanted to play Mrs. Kenyon, the lead.

Cass told himself that Jinny stood out among the others as the
loveliest yet the most efficient.  It was not the fantastic or the
playful or the flirtatious Jinny who was here tonight, but a
business-like young woman in a snuff-colored suit, a crisp scarf,
a small brown hat.

They all tried it, but only two were chosen for a second reading of
the part of Mrs. Kenyon:  Jinny and Letty Vogel, wife of the county
agricultural agent.  Mrs. Vogel was three or four years older than
Jinny, a thin figure in almost-shabby black, a thin, pale, anxious
face with eyes too large.

--That poor Vogel girl.  Seems to have a fancy for the theater, but
not a chance against Jinny--all fire and ivory.

They tried again, and Jinny's reading was like crystal, her voice
warm, every syllable clear--and all syllables exactly alike.  Lefty
Vogel seemed tired and her voice was slightly shaky, but as she
read she was not Mrs. Vogel at all but the character in the play:
wilful, gay, a little cheap and utterly tragic, a wisecracking
angel.

--Now, now, now!  This is awful!  Mrs. Vogel is superb and poor
Jinny, she can't act at all!  She reads like a schoolgirl.

And so Cass loved her, passionately and protectively, because she
could not act.

Della Lent and the Helixes whispered together, and Rice Helix
announced:

"Folks, both these final readings were simply swell, and we all
know what a fine, hard-working actress Letty has always shown
herself to be in a number of plays, but for this particular society
part, we feel that Mrs. Timberlane is not only the best, but golly,
what a high-class best, and we honest to God believe that with the
careful direction we intend to give her, she will put it all over
the original performance that Gertrude Lawrence gave on Broadway.
Welcome to our midst, Jinny; you sure are a great addition to the
local arts.  And now, folks, before we bust up, let's put back the
chairs in order that Mrs. Lent has been so generous and, to not
intentionally make a pun, has lent us for our little try-out, and I
sure am real proud of the showing that ALL you folks have made this
evening, not a bad egg in the basket, as the fellow says, and don't
be discouraged, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, and
don't forget, put back your own chair where it was, we thank you."

The just Judge was staring, wanting to protest, wanting Jinny to
protest, and loving her passionately because she did not know how
bad an actress she was.



The first rehearsal of Skylark was held in the Cyclopean basement
of Cass's Bergheim, with cordwood and ash-cans and shotgun-shell
boxes for furniture.  The first half of it, Cass did not see, and
he was regretful, as he had already forgotten that the flowering of
Jinny's dramatic genius might not be so showy an exhibit.  But he
had to go off to address a dinner of the local Junior Chamber of
Commerce:  "Eat at six, inspiration at seven-fifteen, home at
eight-thirty, all come, special treat this time, Hizzoner Cass
Timberlane on 'The Cultural and Architectural Future of Our City.'"

As a judge, Cass was expected to know everything, and as a knower
of everything, he was expected to hold forth about it publicly, and
as a public forth-holder, he was expected to be a medicinal but
tasty digestive tablet after the chicken croquettes and brick ice
cream.  Oratory is the dearest treasure of the American male as
alimony is of the American female.

Tonight, Cass was prophetic.  He said that some time the City
Planning Commission might really have power, and firmly discourage
the citizens of Grand Republic in their constant ambition to erect
a two-story red-brick bowling-alley, with offices for chiropractors,
between a ten-story limestone bank and the City Hall.  The Junior
Chamber of Commerce, composed of men under thirty-six who expected
some day to belong to the Senior C. of C. and have public esteem,
were slightly shocked by Judge Timberlane's communism.  They
whispered together that "He oughtn't to pull such impractical and
uncommercial ideas on a forward-looking group that are expected to
mold the ideals for the new age of Business and the American Way of
Life."

But his adjectives, his grammar, and the authority in Cass's voice
made them forgive him, and at the end they did that mystic rite,
that flapping together of portions of their anatomies, like locusts
scraping their wing-cases, which is known as applause, and six of
them invited him out for a drink.

The Judge thought that these young husbands were strangely desirous
of staying away from their wives, on their rare evening out, and
after listening to a talking-dog story, he got away from them and
hastened home for the end of the rehearsal.

--Keen to see her work.  Of COURSE Jinny is better than Letty
Vogel.  Mrs. Vogel is too pretentious and arty.  I much prefer to
have Jinny keep her voice clear and melodious, and not crack it
with all sorts of attempts to be emotional.  She'll be wonderful.

--Well, anyway, she'll be all right--as good as any of 'em.

--She could be a great actress or a great anything, if she put her
mind to it.  Her mind is so flexible.

--Love to think of her hair--the way when you see it from behind,
it's scarcely hair at all but some finer fabric.  It's dark and
sleek at the top, but it runs down into waves that you want to
follow with your hand.

--So much!



The author of Skylark, who presumably thought that he had written
high comedy, would have been astonished to learn that, as enacted
by Fred Nimbus, it was a Hollywood demonstration of sultry tropic
passions.

Cass came down the dark stairs to his basement and stood to watch
Fred trying out "business" with Jinny.  He thought that this
business of manhandling Jinny was altogether too businesslike.  He
had no initiation into theatricals nor into midnight studio-
parties; he resented her being mauled.

Fred was, under the directive eye of Mr. Helix but apparently not
needing that expert encouragement, slowly kissing Jinny, her head
back, sidewise and helpless; kissing her long and closely, and
letting his tight-pressing hand slip from her shoulder to her
breast.

Then Cass came into the lighted basement all in one piece, and Cass
spoke.

"Nimbus!  You may quit that now!"

Nimbus quit.

"Helix, it is not necessary for this fellow to act like a thug in a
bawdy-house in order to rehearse a play."

Poor Rice Helix trembled.  "Are you trying to bully me?"

"Of course!  But I think that's all the outburst I'll need.  Go on
with the rehearsal now, and you be a good boy, Nimbus.  Good night,
everybody.  I'm going upstairs and read the Book of Mormon.  Isn't
it curious now that I've never read the Book of Mormon?  Good
night."

And he did read it.  He was not much afraid of what Jinny would be
coming up to say--not more afraid than of the black plague, or
indictment for malfeasance.

When she did come, after the rehearsal, and started with the
inevitable, "Well, of all the--" he plunged.

"Dry up, Jinny.  I know the line.  Ridiculously jealous husband--
crass outsider interfering with the arts.  Will you answer this:
Fred had been pawing you pretty extensively before I came, hadn't
he?  Huh?  Hadn't he?"

She half giggled.  "He was kind of exploratory."

"And I'm not going to have my wife declared a general area for
exploration, with dog-teams and native bearers.  If you'd slapped
Fred, as you should have, I wouldn't have had to make a spectacle
of myself.  Remember that, the next time you go and get modern and
courageous on me, will you?"

She tried her best, with:

"You must admit you were rather middle-class and reactionary and--
Shouting and bullying and carrying on that way, when if you'd been
a man of the world, or believed in the ability of the modern woman
to take care of herself, you'd just of tapped Fred lightly on the
shoulder and said gaily, 'Ease it up, ole boy.'  You know.
Something like that.  Something--uh--suave."

He laughed at her, and she looked unconvinced of her own advice.

"Jinny!  I know I was noisy, but both of you were asking for it.
You didn't think he was measuring you for a raincoat, did you?
Raincoats don't fit that tight.  So!  Kiss me."

She grumbled only a little, and she kissed him with surprising
devotion.

But he knew that it would not last.  He had succeeded for a few
minutes in being masterful, melodramatic, insulting, and all the
other things that a sedentary professional man, married to so
attractive and curiosity-ridden a girl as Jinny Marshland, ought to
be, but he was not easy in the role.



29


He was not unduly intrusive on the other rehearsals, but merely
looked on a moment when he called to drive her home.  He was
pleased to see how patiently Jinny was working; her part letter-
perfect after two weeks, taking direction, merely arguing a little
with Rice Helix when he insisted that a Perfect Lady expressed her
emotions by showing all her teeth and wriggling her fingers as
though a bug was crawling over them.  He was even more pleased that
she was seeing new friends here:  Letty Vogel--who, as she could
not play the lead, earnestly built the scenery, Bernice Claywheel,
wife of the Superintendent of Schools, Dick and Francia Wolke, the
young rabbi, Ned Sarouk, and his wife Nelly, and Jay Laverick, the
flour-miller, the only member of the Federal Club besides Frank
Brightwing who recognized the Masquers.

Cass was puzzled by Fred Nimbus's intentions.  Now, whenever it was
Fred's appalling duty to embrace Jinny, he did so lightly, with
tapping fingers.  But a sour thought occurred to Cass: that Fred
might be taking advantage of that most sound and ancient technique
of the child--knowing that the safest time to steal the jam is when
the family is ashamed of itself for having yelled at it for having
stolen the jam.  It had never quite come to Judge Timberlane that
there are men outside jail who make it a careful and well-funded
business to seduce all the pretty women in sight, and that against
their expert business-methods, an innocent householder is helpless.

"Oh, quit being so ingeniously jealous and let the girl have a good
time," the ardent husband rebuked himself.

He noticed then that it was not the pulpy Nimbus but the gallant
Mr. Jay Laverick with whom Jinny laughed in corners and, between
scenes, danced the rhumba.

Jay Laverick was the town drunk, the town clown, the town tragedy.
He was a widower of forty, and he had inherited the Laverick Flour
Mills.  He was always polite when he was drunk, but unfortunately
he was almost always drunk when he was polite.  No dance at the
Heather Country Club was canonical without the presence of Jay
Laverick, emitting the rebel yell and saying to some aged (and
delighted) matron, "Madame, does my reason totter on her throne, or
are you actually Queen Elizabeth the First?"  When people said, as
people immensely did say, "Poor Jay is drinking himself to death,"
it was not irritably but with affection.

In person he was not the round and beloved comic Irishman but the
sallow and villainous baronet, with a thin dark face and a long
black mustache.  It was to be credited to his inherited Irish
constitution that, against the normal rule, excess of alcohol had
not impaired his powers of love-making.

He was the best flour-salesman north of Minneapolis, and usually
sober in the office.

Not till the rehearsals had Jay and Jinny met, except in crowds.
She liked his bitter capering, his tragic flourishes, his lightly
touching hands, professional touch of the surgeon, the pianist, the
healing saint, or the satyr.

Cass was uncomfortable again--and tired of it.

He told himself: here is this poor girl, business-like in sweater
and slacks, sexless as a nurse, working hard to produce something
beautiful in a blacked-out world.  No gauds and gimcracks; just a
sweater and gray manly trousers.  But--Did Jinny know how fetching,
how conspicuously womanly, she was in a tight sweater?

--Of course she knows it!  All women know things like that.  Their
capital is modesty, but how they do squander it.

--Of course she never even thinks of such a thing, you Pharisee.
You love her, don't you?  Well, then!  How can you insult her with
such suspicions?

--Oh, nuts!  Whoever said there wasn't a lot of wanton in every
good woman?

--Well, I don't like your using the word "wanton" and thinking evil
of--

--Look here!  The monarch who sniffed "Honi soit qui mal y pense"
was not of a notably moral character.  There's nothing shameful
about suspecting that a girl is not displeased when she knows that
she's stirring up a few normal biological reactions by all her
beauties lily-white.  You wouldn't want her to be unworldly to a
point of imbecility, would you?

--Sure!  I wouldn't mind a bit!  Friend, my worship of her IS
unworldly, it has a little of the divine; to me, she is all
womanhood, out of every time and place.

--Yes, yes.  As you say.  But I do wish she wouldn't so perpetually
get herself ambushed by Nimbus and Jay.  Why can't she talk to a
really nice fellow, like Frank Brightwing?

Though Cass saw less of Frank Brightwing than of Roy Drover or
Bradd Criley, there was no one in Grand Republic whom he more
warmly liked.  At thirty-eight, Frank was what is known as a
successful real-estate man; he dealt not in harp-playing and the
design of angels' pinions, as was his nature and as his name
quaintly hinted, but in Lot 13, Block 7; in 2-c garg., r.w., h & c;
in abutments and amortizations and easements.  He had a plush wife
and three medium-grade children, but his excitement was in the
Masquers, and if a play ran for two weeks, then for twelve nights
he went on believing that the hero was as courageous and the
heroine as voluptuous and the comic maid as funny as they said they
were.

Being the worst of actors, as is likely with such a worshiper of
acting, Frank had to be ticket-seller, stage-carpenter, and
assistant electrician, and he was content with life when they let
him hold the book at rehearsals.

Being, remarkably, also the worst of critics, he believed and he
told Cass that they were lucky to have Jinny playing Mrs. Kenyon
instead of Letty Vogel.

"But I thought Mrs. Vogel showed a lot of talent."

"Oh, no, Cass.  You laymen don't understand these technical
problems.  Letty is what we in the theatrical world call 'fuzzy,'
while Jinny is sure of herself--a real type.  Oh, she's out of this
world, Cass."



Over morning coffee, Cass said cheerfully, "Well, Jinny, I guess
our friend Nimbus has laid off you."

"Oh, absolutely.  Sweet Freddy, he's such an obvious lug that he
never gets far."

"You kind of liked him."

"Sure I did.  I like all rats.  They usually know how to kid like
nobody's business, and they have a line.  It's their job."

In English, she meant, "Certainly.  I like all scoundrels.  They
are full of amiable banter."  Her normal use of the swing-age argot
had been increased by association with the violently artistic
Masquers, but Judge Timberlane understood much of her dialect, and
love enlightened where understanding staggered, and increasingly he
used the dialect himself.

"Anyway, I wouldn't ever be half so jealous of Nimbus as of Jay
Laverick.  I imagine you women find him a dashingly tragic figure."

"I'll say!  And how!  And has he fallen for me!"

"Don't take it too seriously.  Jay is a decent fellow with men, but
his record of falling for every female from six to ninety-six is
rather extensive."

"Now don't go and tell me you're going to be really jealous even of
your old friend Jay!"

"How could I be?  Ho, ho!"

"Sweetie pie, that's the falsest-sounding stage-laugh I ever heard.
Now quit it!"

--I told you so!  What did you ever bring it up for?  You knew just
how far you'd get, didn't you?

--I couldn't help it.



Rice and Patty Helix knew their strange art of coaxing people to
give up being themselves and become someone else, not so pleasant.
The play, when it was presented at the high-school auditorium,
actually was a play and not an amateur reading.  Cass found himself
for moments believing that Jinny was this flashing wife of an
acrobatic advertising man and not his own simple girl.

At the opening-night party afterward, at Della Lent's, Cass noted
the following expert dramatic criticisms:

Bradd Criley, lawyer:  "Honest, boy, she was wonderful.  Even I
didn't know there was so much fire in her."

Frank Brightwing, real estate & loans:  "She was ten times better
than Gertrude Lawrence in the role.  I never saw Miss Lawrence in
it, but I know."

Mrs. Gerald Lent, husband-supporter:  "She wasn't bad at all, Cass.
But was that Nimbus lousy!  AND Jay!"

Mrs. John William Prutt, spiritual, social and domestic adviser in
banking:  "Mr. Prutt and I thought she was very fine, Judge.  I do
hope her playacting and the practising don't interfere with her
war-work and the home."

Roy Drover, physician & surgeon:  "It wasn't a bad show, and I
thought Jinny was as good as any of 'em."

Norton Trock, banker:  "Why, Cass, she was simply too, too divine.
She was all right."

Fred Nimbus, radio artist:  "Honestly, Judge, I never could of put
it over like I did if it hadn't been for Mrs. Timberlane's loyal
support."



Jay Laverick kept sober through the rehearsals, the six
performances of the play, and Della's first-night party.  He did
not break down and become natural man till the party at the end of
the run, a gaudy one at Madge Dedrick's.  Champagne.  Though not
imported.  But that night he whooped and held Jinny's hands and
fulsomely kissed her.

Cass was near enough to hear her say "You quit that!" in a manner
so vicious that Jay released her.  She walked over to Cass and
groaned, "Sweet darling, if you ever catch me seeming to encourage
any man again, you beat me."

"I don't think I'll need to."

She was of a forgiving nature, for before the party was over, she
was dancing with Jay, and painlessly.

Bradd Criley muttered to Cass, "For a nice fella, Jay can be such a
jackass.  It takes Jinny to handle him.  What a girl!"

When Cass and Jinny came home at three, she kissed him boldly.  He
was glad that, no matter how other men might flatter her, it was to
him that she turned for true affection.

At dawn, he heard Cleo crying.  When he left the sleeping Jinny and
went down to the little cat, she shivered and nestled against him
and seemed afraid.



The Banner's strictly favorable review of Skylark, written by
Pandora Avondene, admitted that each actor was either Compelling,
Professional, Brilliant, or at least Satisfying.  A second account
in the paper on Sunday reviewed the play as a Social Event and,
whether by accident or through the malice of Abbott Hubbs, wound up
with a gasping announcement.

It revealed that Mr. Fred Nimbus, who had shown such Sterling
Qualities in Skylark, and who had been writing and playing in a
series of radio stories about the Marines, over Station KICH, which
had been so powerful that he was credited with having gained many
recruits, now felt that he did not desire to wait and be drafted,
and he was going to enlist in the Marines himself.

The town cheered.  But Mr. Fred Nimbus did not cheer.  This was all
news to him.

He called up Cass, along with other local rulers, and cried that he
was being railroaded into the service; that Cass must do something
about it; that while he was zealous to go as soon as his number
came up, he had first to settle his affairs.  He did not exactly
have a mother to support, but he did have a maiden aunt.

"They say that if I don't go in voluntarily, the Marines will force
me to.  That's outrageous and undemocratic!" whimpered Fred.

"Nonsense.  Who says they will?" growled Cass.

"Oh, everybody does."

In a way, everybody did.  There was very little masculine
tenderness in town for Mr. Nimbus.  But a number of maidens who had
thrilled to Fred's manly crooning of his own poetic prose came to
serenade him at his boarding-house.  There was no balcony for Fred
to come out on, like Juliet or a young Mussolini, but he mounted a
folding stepladder-chair on the front stoop, and addressed them:

"Dear girls, you move me more than I can attempt to say.  It is to
defend the virtue and happiness of girls like you that I want to
enlist, and I have arranged to do so tomorrow morning, Room 307,
the County Court House, and any of you who care to come, be sure
and be there before ten.  I don't know why you should care for my
poor autograph, but if you'll bring your little books, I'll be glad
to do what I can.  I am so happy that at last I have been able to
arrange my affairs, and I can now rush where the fighting is
thickest."

Next morning one hundred and sixteen females, mostly under
nineteen, filled the corridor and cheered and wept when Fred
appeared at the door of Room 307, looking scared, with a marine
sergeant, looking derisive.

He later denied the sergeant's canard that he had applied for
office work at Marine Headquarters.

Jinny came giggling in to inform Cass that Fred had telephoned
wanting to say good-bye to her privately.

"I'm going to stay right with you all the time he's here!  I won't
have him bothering you!"

"Don't worry, darling.  He's not coming.  I told him to go jump in
the lake," said Jinny, in a refined manner.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

BENJAMIN & PETAL HEARTH


As a member of that earnest sect, the Cross and Crown Covenanters,
Benjamin Hearth had read numerous tracts about wives with quarter-
loaves and half-candles and starving children who waited shivering
at home for drunken husbands, usually coachmen; helpful tracts
written in England in 1880 and still circulated in forward-looking
America in the 1940's.  Benjamin loved to read and to distribute
such tracts, and it never occurred to him that in these liberal
days, the sexes of the drunks could be switched.

He was the junior partner in Hearth & Hearth, the Friendly 
Morticians, once doing the finest and most sympathetic undertaking-
business in Grand Republic but of late eclipsed by that less artistic
outfit, the Larson Funeral Home and Byzantine Interdenominational
Chapel with the Revolving Cross.  He was fat, and fond of beer and
sauerkraut, which afterward he repented, in fits of indigestion and
remembered piety.

His wife, Petal, was a slight, spectacled, prim-looking woman.  She
was also a dipsomaniac, a drunk and a dirty drunk, but to the end
Benjamin never acknowledged this.

He loved her and she him.  Each orgy he accepted as something that
had never occurred before and certainly never could occur again,
and, after hearing her regrets and wails and audible hair-tearing,
he felt himself a sneak to have believed that it had really
occurred this time.  Probably her stomach.  Or her laudable grief
over the sickness of the second child of Cousin Mary, who lived in
Indiana.

Benjamin was, in a genteel and Covenanter way, convivial; he loved
society dinners at six o'clock, with pickled peaches, and grace
said, and a game of mahjong afterwards--but never the immoral
cards, which lead to atheism and vice.  When Petal married him--she
had been substitute telephone girl for the legal firm of Beehouse,
Criley and Anderson, and later a clerk in the linen department of
Tarr's Emporium--she had stepped into a degree of social prestige
beyond her experience.

She had always liked hot gin better than Benjamin could have
guessed, but economy and the necessity of working all day had
prevented her specializing in it.  All of Benjamin's snobbish
friends--most of them had detached houses, and one was a
professional man, Orlo Vay the optician--said that Petal was quite
the lady, with an inspiration in trimming hats.

They did not know her peculiar gift and betrayal: when she was
drunk, she could still sound sober on the telephone.

Not much was suspected till, a couple of years after her marriage,
within one fortnight she had begged off from three different
suppers to which Benjamin and she had been invited, and one that
they were giving, always on the grounds that "Some close relatives
of mine have just arrived unexpectedly from Indiana, this
afternoon."

Her circle felt that that was too many Indiana relatives too
unexpectedly.  George Hame, the court attache, an enterprising and
agnostic fellow, went creeping up to the Hearth nest after one of
these disconcerting refusals and, peeping under a curtain, saw
Petal not entertaining anybody at all, from Indiana or elsewhere,
but flopped on a couch, apparently snoring, while Benjamin sat by
in distress, smoothing his chin.

George reported that to him it looked as though she had "passed out
cold."

Benjamin knew that she had had a drink, "for a bad cold or maybe
it's intestinal flu," but in a blindness of prospering love he had
been fooled by the sobriety with which she had told him that she
had not felt well enough to go out, and had invented the Indiana
kin to save people's feelings.

He was baffled by the famine of social invitations which now set
in.

Petal had enough of the sot's admirable caution to arrange her best
escapes at times when Benjamin was off on funeral duty.  But with
the splendid new friends whom she met in bar-rooms, now that she
had the leisure and the funds, she became less cautious and more
thirsty.  Once, when she had got home safely from a cocktail-joint
in time to get Benjamin's supper and found a note saying that he
would be on duty out on a farm all evening, she felt unusually free
and happy.  She laughed and put on a negligee.  She took out her
private gin bottle, finished the gin, hid the bottle again, felt
dizzy, again found the bottle, and was amazed that it was empty.

In fluttering negligee, she ran out of the house, across the street
through traffic, past two red lights, and into a liquor store.

On her way home, with bottle, a policeman stopped her.  He hinted
that he thought she might have escaped from an asylum, and such was
the shock to her that she screamed and sat on the curb, weeping.  A
young man who had been following her came up to say suavely, "It's
my sister, Officer.  She's had a kind of delirious fever.  I'll get
her home."

The crowd laughed at the spectacle of the drunken woman being half
carried by the young man, while she wept all over him in gratitude.
He did get her into her house, into bed.  What could she do then in
gratitude but throw her arms about him and kiss him?

The patient Benjamin, at his labors in a windy farm-house, knew
nothing of this, ever.

His first enlightenment was later, when he came home from what he
felt to have been a "real beautiful funeral," and found water
soaking through the dining-room ceiling.  Above, in the bathtub,
naked and entirely drunk, singing "The Red Light Rag," was his
Petal.

The severest thing he said to her afterward was "Dearie, promise me
you won't let anybody tempt you to take a drink again.  You're such
an unsuspicious little silly, sweetheart, that you don't realize
what this horrid liquor can do.  Promise Benny you'll never touch
it again, dearie."

"Oh, I promise, I promise--oh, God, my head!" sobbed the damp
Petal.

In sobriety, Petal was a woman most ladylike in her syntax, one who
knew that you must never call perspiration sweat and that to refer
to a pregnancy by any verbal gesture less refined than "the coming
happy event" was a coarse and whorish thing, not to be permitted in
Evangelical circles.  Yet a week after the bathtub, when George
Hame had with some curiosity invited them in for chicken a la king,
she slipped out to the garage with George, had five amazingly quick
drinks, and went back to turn upon Benjamin and pronounce in a
cool, amiable, very sober and interested voice, "Jesus, what a fat
---- you are.  The trouble with you is, your mother took in
washing, and the way the cop on the beat used to pay her for it
was--So don't ever try and pull any of your Sunday-school stuff on
me."

Benjamin was very sorry when she spoke thus.  He explained to
everybody that she didn't mean it at all.  She was just nervous.

He knew now.  Yet such was his love for this woman, who was so
refined and superior, that he would not permit himself to know what
he knew.

Once it was clear that he understood, she became more careless, and
he tended her like a nurse in a private mad house.  He cleaned the
vomit from her shoes, he changed the sheets when she had fouled
their bed, and when she struck him, though he was a massive man, he
wailed, "Oh, don't do that, dearie!  I didn't mean to make you
cross."

She had developed this new and fascinating trait of hitting people,
hitting them quietly and very painfully.  She did it once at their
pastor's house, and that ended any possible resurrection of the
Hearths' social career.

She blamed Benjamin; she said that people could not endure his
vulgar belching.  On that theme she shouted for an hour.  When he
tried to stop her, she shut herself in the locked guest-room, where
she had stored half a case of gin.  Sometimes she screamed at him
through the door, sometimes out of the window at awed neighborhood
children.

Benjamin took to staying away from the business, to guard her.
They became hermits, the lonelier in sitting together spying on
each other.  He knew that she was thinking how she could kill him.

His older brother, Robert, head of the firm, told him that he would
have to have Petal locked up in an institution, or quit the
business.

He quit.

He went to work in the Wargate plant, on war materials, satisfied
with the job of running a band-saw all day, except when he thought
of Petal's misfortunes.  People did not understand her.

For two days, at home, she could get no liquor at all, because he
had given her no money and the stores did not trust her.  Then she
found an old bachelor who was amenable.

When she set fire to their house, Benjamin did have to send her to
a private sanitarium.  He lives now in a hall-room and cooks his
own meals on a kerosene stove, because it takes most of what he
earns to keep her in the sanitarium.  In his room there is but one
ornament: the bridal picture of Petal, in white satin, unstained
and lovely.  Benjamin sits and looks at the picture or at a
newspaper all evening.

The landlady lends him the newspaper.  He feels that he cannot
afford to buy one.

He says that when his dear wife recovers from her mental shock,
which she sustained upon the death of a beloved relative, they are
going out into the country to rent a farm and grow flowers.
Benjamin particularly loves all flowers that look like white satin,
lovely and unstained.



30


There was as yet no wartime gasoline rationing in the Middle-west,
and they had driven, for the beginning of their summer vacation,
north to Ely and the deep woods of the Arrowhead canoe country, up
to Grand Portage, which in the 1790's was the castle of the French
and British fur traders.  You can still see the ghosts of the
voyageurs, in capotes and sashes, toting their canoes at twilight.

They drove back along the vast bright palisades of the North Shore
of Lake Superior to Grand Marais, and up the Gunflint Trail to a
dark lake curtained with pines, where they paddled under a great
sunset that made their voices cleave together in fear of
loneliness, beneath that threatening majesty.

They sat now in their car on the Skyline Boulevard, looking far
down on the city of Duluth and the blue-and-silver vastness of Lake
Superior, that blazing shield of inland ocean.  Across this
narrowed end of the lake, the Wisconsin shore rose into hills, and
on the Minnesota side, to the eastward, the cliffs behind the
smooth uplands of the Hollister Hills were cut by ravines meant for
a western Rip van Winkle.  The air was thinner and more resolute
than the earthy odor of their own inland cornfields and valley
thickets.

Jinny mused, "It's so exciting and lovely, Duluth, between hills
and the sea.  I've loved the whole trip--Grand Marais--the Riviera
towns must lie against the hills like that.  And you've been so
much fun, such a whale of a paddler and fly-caster.  I'm much
obliged to you, sir."

"Best time since our honeymoon, I think.  Look at that ship down
there, headed east."

An ore boat, huge as a liner, was hull-down on the milk-white
eastern horizon; it flickered in straying sun and was presently out
of sight, all but its trail of smoke.

Cass mused, "Tomorrow it will be at the Soo.  I always think
there's a kind of sadness in the passing of ships that we might
have taken to ports with domes and towers and bazaars--and Asian
birds.  But if I were here alone in Duluth, I'd be imagining that
the steamer was sailing off with YOU, at sunset, and I not on it."

"Look!  Here I am.  I'm not on it!"

"I'm glad."

Silver flaws shivered across the lake, and now another great red
ore ship, westward-bound, was coming into sight, with its high
pilot's deck and its coal-filled belly for the furnaces of
Minneapolis and the Dakotas.  Their pensiveness was gone in more
prosaic cheerfulness.

"What a lot of coal there must be in that hold for somebody to
shovel," considered Cass.

"Look, pie.  Let's move to Duluth.  More fun than Grand Republic."

"Nope.  It's too large.  Over a hundred thousand people.  That's
terrible--bad as Chicago or London, almost.  Even Grand Republic is
too big.  I like a place where you can know people."

"And I like a place where there are some people you can know!"

"Now, now, you know plenty in G.R., and you know doggone well you
know you know plenty.  Now don't you!"

"Oh, yes, some nice ones.  Rose and Francia and Lyra and Valerie,
my lively niece, and Nelly Sarouk and the Fliegends and Bradd and
Frank and Rev Gadd and Tracy and Chris and the Blackstaffs."  She
meditated, and added musingly, "And Jay Laverick."

"I could do without quite so much of Jay."

"Oh, do be fair to him, Of course he's something of a pest, but
he's such a queer, lonely specimen--he needs sympathy--and I'm sure
he admires you much more than he does me."

"He must admire me a lot then.  Oh, let's forget Jay."

"Let's. . . .  Poor Jay."

The ore boat, thrice whistling, demanded that the Aerial Bridge be
lifted for its entrance to St. Louis Bay.  And that night they
heard, from their hotel in Duluth, the fog horn--sounding first
like a moaning calf, then like giants moving their giant furniture.

Fog and snorting tug-boats, thought Cass, and great ships upon the
waters!  Some day Jinny and he would know them in Sydney Harbor and
Portsmouth and Rotterdam.



They took, for the rest of the hot summer, a lakeside cottage on
the north shore of Dead Squaw Lake.  It was seven hundred and fifty
feet from the cottage shared by those professional bachelors, Bradd
Criley and Jay Laverick.

This tiny summer colony on Dead Squaw derisively called itself
Mushrat City.  There were a dozen yellow or white shacks, running
mostly to porches, bath-houses, boat-houses, and wooden-floored
tents in which Junior and Sister slept.

Only one of them had a bar, and this was the Laverick-Criley
establishment.  Inside, there were four cots, and a room containing
a divan-bed, ornamented with a silken coverlet and not visibly
used.

In the colony were the Pennlosses, the Drovers, the Brightwings,
the Beecher Filligans, Vincent Osprey, that forward-looking young
lawyer and his backward-looking wife Cerise, and Scott and Juliet
Zago, and into it dipped scores of visitors from the nearby Yacht
Club.

The true American is active even in his inactivities.  The Mushrat
City colonists did not lie indolent watching the slow tides of the
water rise and merge with slow-revolving sky till heaven and earth
were all one sun-hued dream.  No, they swam, they dove, they
sailed, they fished for bass, they drove into town for the movies,
they played bridge, they cooked steak and fish at outdoor grills,
they danced to the radio, they drank considerably and made love
cautiously.

Grand Republic was not a singularly philanderous community, but at
Mushrat City the more earnest strayers had classic surroundings:
deep pine woods, skiffs filled with cushions, and long plank piers
on which lounged the nymphs and fauns of Thessaly, with a few
satyrs.  Yet among them all, only Jay Laverick was ever assailed as
an amorist, and his friend Bradd Criley defended him by insisting
that Jay merely flirted a little to cover up his one passionate
ideal, liquor.

At the neighboring Yacht Club, Dr. Roy Drover said to Bradd, fairly
publicly, "So Jay isn't a chaser, eh?  I don't suppose you are,
either!"

"I certainly am not."

"What about Gillian Brown and Sabine the Gold-digger?"

"Well, what about them?"

"Weren't they seen leaving you two fellows' shack at dawn on
Wednesday?"

"Not by me they weren't.  Did you see them?"

"Not personally."

"Then shut up about it, Roy.  I can tell you confidentially, it's a
lie!"

"Okay by me, Bradd.  It's no skin off my neck, anyway."

The Council of Elders, in the club bar, agreed that Dr. Drover had
been neatly answered.  They went so far as to declare that,
whatever Jay did, Bradd was completely chaste: that is, naturally,
he had a few lady friends in St. Paul or Chicago, but he was
strictly--and in the long run profitably--pure and impersonal with
his women clients, his stenographers, and his friends' wives and
daughters.

All day Mushrat City brawled with children dashing into the lake.
Most of the men were in town, in their offices, except on Saturday
and Sunday, and now, in wartime, many of the women joined them.
Jinny and Rose Pennloss drove in every Wednesday and Friday, to
serve as waitresses in the soldiers' canteen or to take coffee and
sandwiches to the troop-trains.  Cass, with his court closed, went
in thrice a week and served on the ration board and in bond drives.
All of Mushrat City was busy, and the only menace to its morals was
Jay Laverick.

It was unfortunate, thought Cass, that it was Jay whom Jinny found
most entertaining.

But so aboveboard was her liking for Jay, for his dancing, his air
of sardonic liveliness, and so frankly did she talk about him, that
Cass could see it would be very wrong to suspect her.  They could
scarce avoid meeting, with the swimming, tennis, canoeing.  Jinny
was a clean diver, and all afternoon at the Yacht Club, her hands
flashed like nimble daggers as she dealt at bridge, but in all of
these diversions Jay was the champion, when he was partly sober.
Cass assured himself that all this was desirable, and good fun for
Jinny.

But when Pasadena Filligan, Mrs. Beecher Filligan, who herself
liked Jay, gave to his favorite morning drink, gin and bitters, the
nickname of Jin and Jay, and it became current, then Cass was
vexed.



It was obvious that the one safe path for Jinny between empty
boredom and emptier philandering was to have children. "Let's drop
all precautions now and start the family," he blurted.

"Yes, let's," she said.

That was all.



They were having a decorous Sabbath-afternoon walk, Cass and Roy
Drover ambling on ahead of Jinny and Jay.  The Cass who three
months ago would have looked back only to gladden his eye with the
vision of his sweet fair one could not keep from turning his head
for less tender spying.

He saw Jinny and Jay arm in arm.  He saw Jay tuck her hand between
his arm and his side.  He saw Jinny snatch it away, but not too
swiftly, after what seemed to be a laughing debate.

So Cass, the Better Sort of American Husband, unhearing Roy's
important remarks on wild rice as duck-feed, wanted to go back and
beg Jay please not to seduce his wife--please not--it would be so
much friendlier all round if Jay didn't--and would Jinny please
forgive him for mentioning it?

He realized that Jay saw his spying.  Deserting the girl, Jay
galloped up and cried unctuously, "Boys, did you ever have a wild
cat bawl you out?  That's what I've been getting.  Jinny has been
giving me hell for trying to make Pasadena Filligan.  Depict that,
will you?  And me never so much as wondering whether Pas would or
wouldn't.  All I know is, she's a good tennis partner.  I should
chase her, or any other woman in G.R., when I already got a girl in
Fergus.  You know I have a branch office there.  Oh, damn all
women, even your brainy wife, Cass.  Say, uh, Roy, is the health
commissioner going to get after the sewers down by my mill?"

But Jinny was walking airily, heel and toe, with a small smug smile
as the jaunty banner of her thoughts.  She looked so gay!  Cass
ached with the sense of all the monsters that might be coiling
around her recklessness.

--I'd hate to have her get involved, and go the smeary way of all
loose women.  For my own honor, if there is such a thing, but more
for HER honor and contentment.  It would kill me to see that secure
smiling of hers turn diffident and scared and appealing.  Dear
Jinny, don't be a fool.  And that's the one thing I can't ask you
not to be.

So these provincial and middle-class and uncomplex Sunday-afternoon
strollers, a rural magistrate and his bourgeois friends and his
little country wife, obviously ungifted for the passions and
spiritual tortures of Bohemia or Mayfair or the boulevards,
straggled through the humble, sun-quivering balsam aisles, and up
to the Timberlane summer-cottage on the weedy lake-shore.

The cottage, of pine clapboards apparently once painted green, was
airy as a birdcage.  The roof sloped out over the screened porch,
which made up half the house and served as lounge, dining-room,
observation-post for recording the doings of the Filligans and the
Ospreys, on either side, and as Cass's bedroom, with a frame and
mattress swinging from four steel chains.  Inside the house were
only a squat living-room, with a preposterous granite fireplace,
Jinny's narrow bedroom, the kitchen, with a kerosene stove, and a
toilet with a homemade shower-bath.  Mrs. Higbee and Cleo had a
one-room tarpaper shack to themselves, behind the main house.  Cleo
had become a sinister young huntress, a chipmunk-stalker and a
dabbler after fish.

The whole establishment was more camp than residence, and it caught
the scent of pines, the breezes that were always fleeing in
pretended panic from the lively colored, fresh-smelling lake.

Ah let us to the country hie, and seek an humble home, we little
care for marble halls and the woes of Tyre and Rome.  Here
peacefulness and fruitfulness and family concord glow, and hearts
of happy harvesters with simple joys o'erflow.  Ah, well we wot, we
city slaves, we pay a bitter scot for our tempestuous tragedies:
thank God, THEY know them not!  Ibid.

When they came up to the cottage, Cass looked beseechingly at Jay,
hoping that he would have the sense to go home.  This was no Fred
Nimbus whom he could bully.  Jay had enough skill in his trade of
village gallant to be able to answer, "I don't know what you're
talking about.  Do I understand you to mean that your wife, whom
I had supposed you to respect and honor as I do, is an unchaste
woman, or such a fool that any passer-by can mislead her?"

Oh, yes, he could kill Laverick, but he could never shame him,
never frighten him.

"How about a little bridge, the four of us?" Jay said sunnily.

"Not for me.  I don't feel like it.  I just want to sit and chew
the rag with Roy," said Cass.

"Fine.  Jinny, here's your chance to teach me some chess.  You must
have learned enough from ole Cass by now to be fairly good.  We'll
go up on the porch, like little mice, and not disturb the Big
Boys."

"Wonderful!" chirruped Jinny.

Cass and Roy sat sourly out under the trees, on a sawbuck and a
wheelbarrow.

Roy grumbled, "It's none of my business, but don't you know that
Jay isn't the kind of buzzsaw for little ladies to monkey with?"

"Jay has a good line; he amuses her.  But he's perfectly harmless."

"Oh, yeah?  Better make sure he doesn't amuse her too much.  Now
don't get sore.  I'm not going to butt in any farther.  But just
ask Pas Filligan--or better yet, ask her husband--just how harmless
Jay is.  Well, here's where I go over and turn in and get a nap.
So long. . . .  Bye, Jinny! . . .  She never heard me."

Cass sat alone on the sawbuck, a seat too narrow for comfort but
surrounded by spruce chips and sawdust with a friendly smell.  He
wanted some such small homeliness, for he was picturing a menacing
procession.

--Tracy Olesen, Eino Roskinen, Abbott Hubbs, Bertie Eisenherz, Fred
Nimbus, Jay Laverick.  None of them dangerous, but I wish she
weren't quite so enthusiastic about the virtues of quite so many
nonentities.

When Jay was gone, Cass and Jinny swam out to the farther float.
He had a crawl-stroke, steady and uninspired as the pounding of a
freight-steamer, untiring and faster than it looked.  She flirted
with the water like a sail boat.  They sat then on the narrow sand-
beach, baking.  She was tanned a soft brown; he, in his trunks,
chest hard and arching, was of a coppery red-Indian hue.  Relaxed
thus, it was easier for him to blurt it all out:

"Sweet, I'm not jealous of Jay, but he's around here too much.  A
bold desperado, that fellow.  He always keeps it up till somebody
slaps him down.  Won't you do it for me?"

"Oh, good Heavens, just because I enjoy playing tennis with him,
and he talks amusingly--"

"Quit that!"

"WHAT?"

"I know all his virtues better than you do.  He's been conspicuously
displaying them for a long time now.  But you know and I know that
he's on the make, and what's worse, he knows perfectly well that we
know it, and if we allow him around here at all, we practically
confirm his ethics.  I wish you'd tell him yourself to quit acting
the up-creek Casanova."

"Why, dearest, of course I will, if you want me to, though I
honestly don't think he has any yen for me whatever.  He's far too
much interested in Pas Filligan."  Her eyes were suddenly fixed and
angry.  "Blast her!"

"Why, Jinny, you aren't THAT much taken with him?  You aren't
jealous of Pas?"

"What?  How?  Of Pas?  Heavens, no!  I just meant I was irritated
by the whole gang of them--the Filligans and Jay and the whole
bunch.  Aah!  They're so sloppy.  You're right.  You're single-
minded and good."

That night he lay relaxed and secure, listening to the wind in the
pines, far in the north beside the lonely lake.



She chastened the petitionary Mr. Laverick simply and with dreadful
effectiveness.  At a Yacht Club dance; the next Saturday, when Jay
was being especially attentive, she yelled publicly, "Why, Mr.
La-ver-ick, are you trying to flirt with me?  Back to your Irish
bogs, ye little black divvle."

She knew that the one thing about which Jay was sensitive was the
extreme boggishness of his swarthy paternal grandfather, who had
been born between nothing and an east wind.  When he had migrated
to America, he had worked on a railroad section-gang, and had died
in a kennel called The Pipes of Erin, which was a Swedish-owned
German saloon and Chinese chop-suey joint on Washington Avenue, in
Minneapolis.

Jay left her flat, and went to the bar.  The good Judge was
surprised to find how pleased he was by her rudeness.

He spoke to Bradd Criley.

"I wish you'd have a talk with your friend Jay.  He buzzes around
Jinny entirely too much."

"I certainly will.  I'm fond of Jay, and he isn't as bad as he acts
but he is a crazy fool.  I won't tell him you spoke to me, Cass.
I'll just say I admire Jinny, and will he lay off, or else."

"Thank you, Bradd."

"And of course it's true.  I've always loved Jinny like an uncle,
and I want to protect her almost as much as you do."

"I'm sure of it, and I'm mighty grateful."

So the truce of God was proclaimed, and Cass and Jinny were
trusting lovers again, sitting in the northern twilight, with Cleo
slipping ghost-like among the trees.

They settled to village peace by the lake, content with humbler
establishments than the summer estates of the Wargates or Bertie
Eisenherz, who had a small lake of his own.  With Bertie, Jinny had
learned what trans-Atlantic passengers learn: that you never see
vacation-time intimates except on the street.

When she gave up the ways of dalliance, she went out for swimming
so powerfully that she became a threat to the lady Olympic
champions--for two weeks.

At all sports she was more deft and quick-learning and natural than
Cass.  She dived, played tennis and golf, rode, paddled, with joy
and style and innate talent, and with innate sloppiness Cass was
awkward at learning, and he gave no signs of particularly enjoying
these games, but he mastered them better than Jinny, and he wanted
to keep on picking away at them long after she was bored.

But all such competition vanished in the problems of comparative
wealth.  Cass had become rich--for Cass.



31


He came back from town, he yelled "Jin-nee!" in front of their
summer cottage, and brought her tumbling down out of an old
crabapple tree where she had been curled up asleep, with Cleo
asleep in her arms.

"Jinny," he inquired, "would you think one hundred and ten thousand
dollars was a lot of money?"

"I would think anything over five dollars was a lot of money.
Why?"

"That is the fabulous sum we now possess."

"Money!  Dresses!  Singhalese scarfs!  A red collar for Cleo!  A
'Liebestodt' record!  Has somebody been bribing you?  Oh, goody!"

"Nothing as interesting as that.  Mm.  Howl would hate to have
somebody offer me a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe!  I'd have to
refuse it--"

"Why?"

"Oh, you know."

"No, I don't!  Why?"

"I can't explain why, but I would, of course,"

"How about TWO hundred thousand?"

"Now don't go on raising.  I just refused one hundred thousand,
didn't I?  Let's say hastily that we've proved the principle, and
get on with the experiment."

"But honestly, what would be your limit?"

"Jinny, how much would you want for selling your virtue?"

"To which man?"

"Say just an average man."

"Do you mean indoors or outdoors?"

"Say outdoors."

"Do you mean on a summer night like this, with a full moon, or a
night in January--Ah, poor sweet, you don't really think that's
funny, DO you!"

"But listen now.  This hundred thousand that we already have--"

"And ten!"

"AND ten.  My father left me enough so I've been able to keep about
fifty thousand dollars ahead, put away in good securities.  And he
also left me that block of stores and flats down in the South End.
Here lately, they were almost empty, paying me almost nothing, but
with Wargate's and the other factories doubling war production,
there's come to be a big shortage in housing in the South End, and
today Frank Brightwing told me he can get sixty thousand dollars
for the property, spot-cash, and I'd 've said it wasn't worth more
than thirty.  Oh, Lord!"

"You're not glad.  You don't want to do it?"

"I have done it.  I have a nice check for sixty thousand dollars,
minus three-thousand commission, in my pocket."

"Oh, lemme see, lemme see, lemme see, good gracious sakes, let me
see that lovely thing!"

Together, solemnly, they looked at the meager slip of paper on
which was written "Fifty-seven thousand ($57,000 & 00/100)" and
which, by the magic of this credulous era, would trustingly be
accepted by strangers in return for brick houses and roasts of beef
and tickets to Hamlet and safety for death-haunted refugees from
tyranny.

Jinny said reverently, "Now is that a pretty trick!  Hey--wait!  Do
you mean to tell me Frank Brightwing gets three thousand dollars of
our money?  Why, I call that scandalous!  But a minute ago--Why
were you oh-Lording?  A thing like that elegant piece of paper, I
should think it would be something that all the angels would
rejoice over, and even Ma Prutt would look halfway pleased.  Why so
pale and wan, young capitalist?"

"Oh, I dunno--to get this increased price--it seems like
profiteering on the war.  Of course I can put most of it into war
bonds--"

No criminal lawyer has ever attacked more fierily than did Jinny.
Cass was smothered.  She tore him down from thirty-five thousand
dollars of war bonds to five, and nearly had him down to three, and
within half an hour, without knowing better than any layman how the
contract had been put over, he had pledged himself to his boss to
invest another five thousand in more speculative stocks, put forty-
five thousand into a new house and the appertaining furniture, and
devote two thousand to their strictly private blowing-in.

He fretted that Jinny was not overly generous in her patriotism,
but then he fretted that none of them were.  Like almost every
other Good Citizen at any time, he did very little except the
fretting.

He did not know that he was committed, beyond the power of the
court, to buying the new house and deserting the ancient comfort of
Bergheim.  He believed that he was "still thinking it over," and in
the security of that belief he went to sleep, that night, while
inside the cottage she sat brooding for hours, her small hands, so
apt at pencil, at golf-stick, at the hammer, clutched ardently,
like a child's, round her knees.  She stared at a candle till the
tallow took shapes of towers and spires, of ocean steamers and
flaunting bridges, of studios in Paris, of a great stage in New
York and a little exciting figure in the center.

He awoke on his porch-swing to peer in at her, and clumped in to
kiss her excited cheeks, her clasped hands.  She circled his neck
with bare arms, muttering, "Never any one but you, my darling.  I
do want a lot of silly things, and you give them to me, but I want
you more.  I wish sometimes it could be I who give, and not always
you."



The debate about buying a new house started all over again next
morning, as already-thoroughly-settled domestic debates always do.

Cass said profoundly, "Uh--uh--About buying a new house.  And of
course, with wartime restrictions, it will be impossible to build
one.  And I don't honestly see any likelihood of our caring for a
house that somebody else has arranged to suit themselves.  Do you
see?"

"Yes, it--I think this grape fruit and orange marmalade knocks the
spot off straight orange.  You, Cleo, you get off this table, and
don't knock over Isis, either."

"I think it's absolutely superstitious of you, if not infantile, to
have that crystal image always in sight, honey."

"Isn't it though!  See Frazer, The Golden Bough.  Yes.  You know,
we'll have trouble making room enough for all your books in the new
house, WHICHEVER one we get."

"But I don't--That's what I want to talk about."

"I knew it, I knew it, oh, my pet, I absolutely knew it.  I said to
a robin, when I woke this morning, I said, 'Robin, I'll bet you two
worms that Mr. Timberlane will want to talk about the insanity of
buying a new house.'"

"Well, I do."

"Do what, Judge?"

"Think so."

"Think what?"

"That we must consider very carefully whether we really want to do
this.  We have a very fine old house now, and to get a new one
would be spending our CAPITAL."

"But you can sell the old one."

"I don't know whether that would be so easy."

"But if it's such a grand fine old place as you say?"

"Yes, yes, that's--Have to protect our capital.  I might very
easily be defeated for judge at the next election, and then what
would we have to live on?"

"You might practise a little law and make a--what is it? a
modicum?--maybe about five times as much as your present salary,
and so we'd get along?"

"Maybe."

"Darling!"  She stopped being flippant; she spoke like the first
young cavewoman in the morning of history who resolved that her
mate and she must leave their damp cave on the hillside and
struggle down into the bright dangerous plains.  "Let's be young
while we're still young!"

"I know," he said.

"Let's get a house in the Country Club District--if we can find
one, I mean, that isn't too expensive--gay and shiny and lots of
light--not like our old morgue in town."

"Bergheim isn't a morgue."

"The corpses never know that a morgue is a morgue."

"I didn't know you felt that way about it."

"I didn't, till this minute.  And you know, really the chief thing
I'm thinking about is how much more convenient a modern kitchen
would be for Mrs. Higbee."

"Overruled."

"Well, anyway, I did think some about it, and some about me
entertaining in a Spanish drawing-room, looking like the Duchess of
Windsor."

"Baby, you're either as childish as Juliet Zago, or--You really
want a new house?"

"Yes."

"I'll think about it."

They knew what that meant.



He drove into town and, as though he had not seen it for several
years, he stared at Bergheim, his boyhood notion of a castle, his
first citadel as a citizen, a counselor, a judge, the lifelong
repository of his dreams, filled with contradictory and devastating
memories of Blanche and Jinny.

He clumped through the house--noticing how surprisingly much cat-
hair Cleo had managed to leave on the chairs--and he was certain
that he would miss these solid walls, these uncramped rooms, the
irregular hallways and unexpected closets.  In the backyard he
admired the carriage-house with its haughty cupola which, as a boy,
he had considered the seal of elegance.  He mooned over the
espaliered pears, the thick and comfortable backyard grass that
takes a generation to grow, the view from the bluff across twin
valleys.  He knew here a little of the tradition that makes a
Leicestershire squire, a Silesian Junker, a gentleman of Touraine
quiet and enduring and dangerous.

This Country Club District that Jinny coveted--it was a parvenu
colony next to the Heather golf course, on a peninsula thrust out
from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake.  This "brand-new, up-to-
the-second, streamlined home-development for gracious living" had
been planned for the sons of Ottawa Heights, the grandsons of the
extravagant mansions on Beltrami Avenue South, and newcomers who
had wriggled their way into this three-whole-generations
aristocracy.  The houses there were sleek and well planned; they
had steel-and-glass kitchens and tinted toilet-paper; but they were
too close together, too small, too much like hotel-suites.

Thus meditating, he returned to Mushrat City, to coax Jinny please
not to buy a house but do a lot of striking things with paint at
Bergheim.

She met him clamoring, "Beautiful, Pas Filligan says she thinks
we'd like the Simmers house--you know, that Spanish-hacienda number
just beyond the Heather Club.  She says the inside is wonderful and
behind it," reverently, "there's a swimming-pool!  Lemme in the
car, lemme in!  Let's go see it right now.  There's a key at the
club.  Let's go!"

Somehow, as they drove round the lake, Cass could not advocate
painting the Bergheim kitchen, and putting tin over the major rat-
holes, as a substitute for a hacienda-house with a swimming-pool.

And it was quite a house, too.

From the front they saw a roof of alternate red and yellow tiles, a
wooden ox-bow with two ship's-lanterns suspended from it, and an
outside cement stairway leading down to a honeysuckle bush that was
not really remarkable enough to have a special stairway for it.

--Mm.  They probably use the stairs for jumping off into snowdrifts
in winter.

He was rigidly silent; she was silent like a head-turning little
bird, as they went through the place.  The rooms were small and,
with tiled floors and imitation-antique beams, as oppressive as
cells.  Above the Mexican fireplace in the living-room a long crack
in the wall showed that, after only ten years, the house was
sinking.  They considered the kitchen, daintily done in pink,
green, dark blue, and bronze, and went out to the swimming-pool,
which was a nothingness lined with cracked cement.

Then Jinny spoke, tenderly.

"All right, all right, Judge.  I always did think it was a mistake
for us to invite Cortez over."

But it seemed to be understood between them that, since she had so
freely rejected this horror, he could not suggest that they should
not buy a new house at all.

They knew the house hunter's shameless joy of intrusion; of looking
into closets full of forlorn clothes, medicine cabinets with
surprising accessories, sumptuous wine-closets that contained
nothing but a bottle and a half of rye and one can of sardines.
They studied and extensively talked about terraces, tennis courts,
linen closets, automatic-feed furnaces, "breakfast nooks," and
basements which, containing pool tables and home-made bars, were
appallingly known as "rumpus-rooms."

Frank Brightwing, their real-estate expert, grew irritable, Cass
was exhausted, but Jinny strode on, unquenchable.  She could
examine the eighteenth closet in sequence with undiminished
enthusiasm, and three days later could remember the dimensions of
each closet and how many hangers there were in it and whether it
had a full-length mirror in the door.  It did not, however, occur
to Frank or to Cass that, with the opportunity, she would have been
a better real-estate man than either of them.

They decided quite suddenly on a house, in the Country Club
District, which they had twice dismissed as "too plain" and now saw
as dignified in its simplicity: a plaster house with a flat roof
and drawing-room windows down to the floor; what Brightwing called
"a fine restrained example of the French-type house."  It could
just as well have been called an English-type house, a Lombardy-
type house, or a Salzkammergut-type house; it was, in fact, a
plaster house.  It had almost as many closets as Jinny wanted,
almost as much radiator-surface as Cass wanted, a cubbyhole for
Cass's desk, and a good view across the lake.

Jinny said that the long windows would be "nice for a lawn-party--
people can run in and out."  Cass thought it would be abominable to
have people running in and out, whether through doors, windows or
chimneys, and he considered floor-length windows a wretched idea
for Minnesota winters.  But if she was happy, then so was he.

The house had been built for Harold W. Whittick, owner of Station
KICH, who had moved into a flat in one of the few apartment houses
in Grand Republic, to be near his radio station--or, as he put it,
"to the transmission of the critical bulletins of this portentous
hour of conflict."

Neither Cass nor Harold W. Whittick knew that Groseilliers and
Radisson, possibly the first white men in Minnesota, had camped
upon this site in 1660.  It is a pity that Harold did not know.
He might have given those explorers the most gratifying publicity
throughout this rich agricultural and dairying section with
convenient access to all railroads and wholesale markets.



In treachery to her years at Bergheim, Mrs. Higbee placidly
preferred the new house and the new kitchen, and perhaps Isis did
also--she did not indicate.  But Cleo was melancholy about it.

Jinny insisted on their taking a special journey from Mushrat City
to show Cleo her new home, and when Cass objected that the
government wanted them to save gasoline, Jinny explained, "Now do
you suppose the President is going to say to the Secretary of War,
'Look, Harry, there's that dratted Jinny Marshland wasting gas on a
cat?'  I bet they won't even notice."

It was not easy to convince Jinny that Cleo might be so occupied in
her office of grand inquisitor to the heretic field mice that she
could endure waiting another day.

When Cleo did actually see the place, she was difficult about it.
They followed her while she examined every room.  She repeatedly
stopped to ask "Meow?" in a way that said, "Is this all?"

There were--Cleo counted them--not so many rooms as at Bergheim.
There were no unlighted closets, no dark attic stairs, no exquisite
dark triangles of space under the eaves, no trapdoors, no earth-
floored corners in the basement, no place at all where a
respectable cat might expect mice or beetles, or could hide from a
harsh and mocking world.

"I suppose you sympathize with that animal," sighed Jinny, in a sad
little voice.

"No, no," Cass lied.  "Maybe we'll miss the old barracks for a
while, but I already love this place more, because you're more in
it, in every line."

So Cleo went off in a huff and was found in the empty garage,
growling.



They would use but little furniture from Bergheim in the new house;
they would leave the old castle as it was, and rent it till it
should be sold.  They had their sprees of buying, in Grand
Republic, in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and then, in mid-August, he
blurted out the plan that he had been nursing.

Except for the Florida journey, she had still never been east of
Chicago.

"We'll have to wait for all the new furnishings to arrive, and
meanwhile, what do you say to our taking another honeymoon trip?"
he said.

"Do you think we ought to?  Spending so much money--we'll have to
economize.  Oh.  I MUST remember to turn off the lights when I
leave a room."

"But later we may not get much chance--be less and less travel with
the war on and--suppose the trip I was thinking of was to New
York?"

"New York!" she said reverently.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

NESTOR & FANNY PURDWIN



Nestor Purdwin was born in an October gale in Illinois in 1871.  He
came to Minnesota in a blizzard in 1890, and married Fanny Clark
during an April freshet in 1891, with the roads deplorable but the
horizon clear.

He was next-to-the-best criminal lawyer in Grand Republic, and he
was honest.  He never knowingly declared that a scoundrel or a man
of cruelty was harmless, though he might assert that there were
excuses for him.  He represented many of the labor unions, but he
was also summoned by corporations in civil cases, because they
often needed an adviser who could say No.

He was a middleroad-to-leftwing Democrat and a convinced
Episcopalian.  He detested Sweeney Fishberg for being a Jew, an
Irishman, a Catholic, a mystic, and a Communist.  In the old days,
when he had once been associated in a trial with Clarence Darrow,
he had detested Darrow for being an agnostic and a socialist-
anarchist-syndicalist-populist.  Yet in most suits and on most
committees he had somehow found himself standing with Fishberg and
Darrow, and when the veteran liberal, Salem Volk, from Queen City,
came to town, he stayed, often and argumentatively, with the
Purdwins.

He was always roaring.  He roared equally against high-church
rectors named Cecil and Four Square Gospellers named Pete, against
tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines and "fool women who are too
lazy to read the papers and magazines."

He had never gone to college, but he read Plato, Voltaire,
Alexander Pope, Mencken, Bernard Shaw, and Sir Thomas Browne.

Fanny and he had been married for fifty years, and had bickered
continuously in a tart, humorous, satisfied way, and she never
failed to defend him against everybody else with whom he bickered.

"Yes, I know how cranky he must 've been to you.  The man is worse
than a bear in a beehive.  But don't tell ME about it.  I love
him."

When Judge Blackstaff was reported as having said that Mr. Purdwin
was "not a gentleman," Fanny mused, "Ain't he?  That's good.
Neither am I."

For fifty years they had slept in an immense, bosomy double-bed.
His parting kiss to her each morning was a testy little peck on the
lips, but if he forgot it, she was grieved for an hour--but never
for more than an hour--and she never reproached him for it.

Exactly once in the fifty years he had tried an extra-matrimonial
experiment with a hotel stenographer.  He had neither enjoyed it,
repeated it, nor told her about it.

He loved porridge for breakfast, and every morning, three hundred
and sixty-five mornings a year, they had porridge.  It was after
thirty-two years of it that Fanny reported, a bit reluctantly, "I
think I'm beginning to like the nasty stuff."



32


The Timberlanes followed the ancient line of provincial tourists
going to the capitals:  Boeotians to Athens, Tatar caravans to
Tibet, Artie and Mrs. Beppin of the Five Towns to London: excited,
credulous, terrified of the boorishness and cheating that they
expected to encounter.

The question, ancient before the first woman from Petra went up to
Jerusalem, of whether Jinny should have new dresses made at home or
get them more splendidly in the metropolis, was as usual
compromised.  She bought a gray suit that Harley Bozard assured her
was a "fast little number, just in from New York," and left the
rest for Babylon.

Their train from Chicago to New York was an arrow of light.  They
had a compartment, this time, and none of their honeymoon
apprehension.  The train was filled with the most beautiful people,
lovely girls, saintly old ladies, smooth but stalwart men with
clothes and shell-rimmed spectacles and wrist-watches right out of
the magazine advertisements.

Cass let himself relax and enjoy it.  In his days in Congress he
had not gone to New York often enough to be weary of it, and he was
all holiday.  He spoke not only to the Pullman porter, to whom it
was no novelty, but to a clergyman and a traveling-man, and when a
man in herring-bone tweed invited him to play bridge, and chuckled,
"I warn you, though, the wife and I are professional gamblers,"
Cass answered, "My wife certainly is.  She gambled on marrying me."

The man thought that was a pretty good joke.

The man said to his wife, "Our new friend here has made a pretty
good joke."

She said, "Come on now--don't be a tightwad--what's his pretty good
joke?"

"He said the little woman took a worse risk in getting hitched to
him than she ever did in bridge."

"Yes, and what a gamble HE took on getting YOU to handle the rights
to his pretty good joke.  Let's go!"

They played bridge through sixteen counties and forty-two college
towns of Ohio, and had four Scotch highballs and shook hands all
round.  Jinny had won sixty-two cents and a lipstick, and Cass had
lost one dollar.

"I'm a little drunk," he said with self-approval, as they wove into
their compartment.

"You get younger every day.  When I first met you, you were sixty-
one.  Now you're a bright thirty-four," she approved.

They were up early.  People from Grand Republic do get up at the
most surprising times and places.  Along the Hudson, the river of
Presidents, Jinny was thrilled by West Point, the Taj Mahal, and
the leaves of Vallombrosa.  Suddenly there was an apartment house
twenty stories high, and he exulted, "This is it!"  She held his
hand softly, and whispered, "I love you!"

But the Grand Central Terminal was too much for her: an underground
city in which all the inhabitants were going to a fire.  She clung
to her stalwart Cass, a fellow who could beat off these shoving
maniacs, as they doubtfully gave their precious, so-neatly-packed
bags over to a redcap, dotted up an incline, crossed through an
incredible room a thousand feet tall, and took a taxicab, not in
the wholesome fresh air but in a tunnel.  In the taxi she still
snuggled close to him for protection, and fluttered, "I'm going to
have a magnificent time, but let me catch my breath.  Does it get
any worse?"

As they blessedly came out into the light, she found that part of
the taxi roof was of glass, and she gazed up in beatific idiocy.

"Look!  Up there!  That must be the Empire State Building or the
Wrigley Building or something!  Oh, jiminy, they are high.  You
know--high!  I never felt so small.  Don't you dare leave me one
minute all the time we're here!"

She was less exalted when the taxicab stopped meechingly at the
Melchester Arms, which Bradd Criley, as an expert on New York, had
recommended.  "It's smaller and less expensive, but it's one of the
smartest hotels in town," he said.  "That's where the real New
Yorkers go, say while they're opening up their apartments in the
fall."  (Actually, the only native New Yorkers who frequented the
Melchester were clothes-pressers, jobbing barbers, and telegraph
messengers.)

It was a smaller hotel and rather plainer than the Pineland, back
home, and the lobby was a block of darkness surrounding a large oak
table with piles of magazines about travel and the Y.M.C.A. upon
it.  The clerk was a short, scaly, ill-disposed man with that thin
and revelatory hair which is balder than baldness.  He looked up at
them as though he was getting good and tired of having strangers
come in and speak to him without an introduction.

"I, uh--we have a reservation for a two-room suite," said Cass.

"What is the name?"

"Timberlane.  Grand Republic.  Minnesota."

The clerk, after having looked painstakingly through a file of
cards containing names beginning with I and E, sighed, "What was
that name again?"

"Timberlane."

"Oh.  I see!  With a T.  Tamburlaine."

"No, no.  TIMBERLANE.  Tamburlaine is from Marlowe."

"Well, we get a lot of people from Marlowe, too.  The Melchester is
a great favorite with all you folks from the Middle-west."

As he laboriously went at the cards again, Jinny muttered, Why
don't you tell him you're a judge and an ex-congressman, and give
him a good time?  He needs one."

"Kitten, in this town, everybody's an ex-congressman.  We're just a
couple of rural nobodies."

"And how!  This suit that Harley sold me--I'm beginning to find
potato bugs and alfalfa seeds in it.  But Aloysius here is no
Vanderbilt.  I suppose New York has the biggest everything--even
the biggest hicks.  Let me slap him, darling, just once."

The clerk turned to them again and said accusingly, "TIMBERLANE,
that's the name!"

"That's so," admitted Cass.

"Front!" said the clerk, suspiciously.

The elderly bellboy awoke from his dreams of the Civil War,
conducted them to their suite, and gloomily accepted fifty cents.
He was barely gone when Jinny protested, "Four bits?  For that
jerk?  I'd of brought the bags up for ten cents!  There you go,
being the typical tourist you read about, overtipping and hurling
thousands of dollars around when you have a greedy wife that could
use it for luncheon-sets.  Okay.  Bankrupt the firm and see if I
care."

They had recovered the gaiety which had been dimmed in the hotel
lobby, and they went down, arm in arm, to ask of the clerk where
they could get theater tickets for tonight.

Maybe there was a ticket agency, over on Sixth Avenue and down
three blocks?  How would he know?  He was busy, and really it
wasn't his job--

They left him hastily and at the agency inquired benevolently, like
people willing to spend their money and confer a favor, whether for
tonight they could get superior seats for Life with Father or for
Arsenic and Old Lace.

The agent said genially, "You folks from out of town?"

"How did you guess it?" Jinny said viciously.

He looked at her, unanswering, he winked at her husband, and he
offered, "I can get you tickets for either show for about the
middle of next November.  What you want for tonight is Slips and
Slippers."

"Do we?" worried Cass.

"Maybe not.  I wouldn't know.  All I'm telling you is that it's the
best musical in New York for ten years, and I happen to have two
good seats, but if you don't want 'em--"

The seats cost $6.60 each.

When they were outside, Jinny begged, "Have you any room in your
vest-pocket, now you've taken out all that money?"

"Why?"

"That rat made me feel so small when he winked at you that I could
fit right in alongside your watch now.  Jinny isn't up to this
town.  They got street-cars and everything.  Could we go back to
Grand Republic right after the show tonight?  Slips and Slippers!
Six-sixty!  Look!  He meant sixty-six cents, didn't he?"



Their train had arrived in mid-morning.  All day they viewed New
York, by bus and elevated and taxicab.  There was so fabulously
much to master that they felt they would never master any of it.
To them it was all a jungle-spawning of people and buildings,
fierce and purposeless.  The tempo of the city rattled them: the
quick turn of everyone's head, the hard glance, the high nasal
intensity of the voices.

They came back to their hotel suite--correct enough in its white
paneling, but inhuman--and fell desperately asleep and awakened
almost too late for their musical show.  Jinny insisted that it was
Isis, continuing her education by staring out of the window at the
Manhattan streets, who had aroused them.

They reasoned that it would be clever to have a sandwich within
walking-distance of the theater, and dine sumptuously at some gaudy
restaurant afterward.  Cass told Jinny that he had been responsibly
informed that in Madrid people dined as late as ten-thirty.
Probably even eleven.  She said brightly, Yes, she had heard so.

It made them feel that they were already in Europe.

They found a Broadway restaurant the size of Grand Republic, with
lovely black and red signs announcing that here one might have
sandwiches made of smoked turkey, caviar, deviled ham with chives,
or sixteen other rich materials.  Nothing like this at home! they
rejoiced.

The farther hill-country of the interior of the restaurant was
filled with daises, mezzanines, balconies, and quarter-decks, while
the valley was jammed with circular bars, S-shaped lunch-counters,
wall-seats, divans, and booths, and all of these filled, and twenty
people herded at the door waiting, apologetic for wanting to eat
during wartime, while the restaurant's private supreme court looked
at the trespassers punitively.  With the other prisoners waited
Judge and Mrs. Timberlane.  They felt that there was something
obscene about wanting to eat at all, in this choking atmosphere of
corned beef and cabbage, among this queue of dehumanized serfs who
had no longer any power of resentment.

Jinny answered something that Cass hadn't yet even said with,
"You're telling ME you like Grand Republic better!"

When they were finally herded to a table for two, they found that
by merely cutting off one arm and one leg each, and balancing the
glass of water on the sandwich plate which rested on the unordered
and unwanted plate of shredded cabbage under which were tucked the
knives and forks and the paper napkins, they could manage very
well.

Their sandwiches were called Oaxaca Specials, and among other ores
they recognized bacon, peanut butter, currant jelly, chicken feet
and iodine.  It cost one dollar.

EACH of the sandwiches cost one dollar.

Jinny whimpered, "About that Grand Republic now.  I shall never
leave it again.  Oh, that beautiful, beautiful hash we used to
have, back in civilization!"

On the Street again, she speculated, "Couldn't we give our tickets
to one of these pencil-sellers and magic ourselves back to--Let's
go over to the Zagos and have some rummy.  I never realized what a
wide-browed genius Juliet Zago is.  Wouldn't I like to see her and
Scott right this minute!  Pal, could I please kick the next couple
that crowd me into the gutter?  I guess maybe it would be wonderful
to be in New York, if all seven million of 'em didn't want to
occupy the same spot we're walking over, all at the same time."

They arrived in the theater as in a calm haven, but that was the
last calm they felt till they were back in their hotel, with Jinny
trying to explain it all to Isis.

They never did discover what the musical play was about.  From
having attended the more salacious burlesque shows in Minneapolis,
when he was a student, Cass had a few notions, but Jinny was
entirely bewildered.  There was, in the plot, a young lieutenant
who was serving in Tahiti, but as he was simultaneously rowing on
the Vassar crew and selling paper drinking-cups to a Turkish harem,
it was hard to follow his stream of consciousness.  There was also
a pair of funny fellows with jokes about the less attractive vices.

Cass and Jinny sat with hand tight in hand, unsmiling, uncomfortable,
wondering what the laughter was about.  At intermission, Jinny said
only "Six-sixty!" but after the show, as they hobbled away through
the funereally festive crowd, "I'm old-fashioned and I like it!
Honey, if we got a plane, a very fast plane, maybe we could see
Cleo before dawn--and find out if that beast of an upholsterer at
Tarr's has the curtains up in the new house yet.  You know, they
always advertise how fast you can fly to New York, but what would
inspire deep public confidence would be to tell how fast and far
you can get away from New York.  Oh, my sweet, you've got poor
Jinny caught and happy in a sun-trap at home for the rest of her
life!"



They had read, in the syndicated gossip columns devoted to the
gracious doings of cafe society, about the Marmoset Club, that
debonair night restaurant, that Bowery saloon in a velvet evening-
cloak, where cigarette-bejittered heiresses are photographed with
flyers, and cinema press-agents exchange copyrighted wisecracks
with abortionists, but after the Broadway sandwich-abbatoir, they
were ready to be disappointed.  Yet the Marmoset was even more
select, smart, exclusive, fashionable, knowing, chic, gracious,
elegant, decorative, glamorous, glittering, glistening, shimmering,
witty, sophisticated, mundane, gay, international, deft, urbane,
and generally expensive than had been proclaimed by the columnists.

The very small lobby was a jewel-box in which stood a young
gentleman with the clothes of a whisky advertisement, the eyes of a
detective, the gentle effrontery of a diplomat, and the accent of
the Bronx.

"Uh--" said Cass, and again, "Uh--can we get a table?"

"Have you a reservation?"

"N-no."

Jinny said in perfectly clear, sweet, womanly tones, "Let's get the
hell out of here.  I don't like him."

The palace eunuch instantly recognized her then as a distinguished
movie actress, and he said almost humbly, "I'll see what I can do.
I'm sure I can find you something, madame."

He did quite well for them, too.  He found a table in the Que-
Voulez-Vous Room, the largest of the five that made up the
Marmoset, despite the fact that it was almost half full.

Well, and it was a beautiful room, and Cass and Jinny had to admit
it; better even than the Fiesole Room at the Hotel Pineland, back
home.  The walls were lined with gray silk, tucked and flaring;
under the crimson ceiling were constellations of crystal; and there
was a delicate, rustling quiet except at a center table where a
male clothes-designer was breaking a rather elderly lady's heart
and in a corner where an authoress was breaking her contract.

Word had been carried by the restaurant's efficient O.G.P.U. that
the pretty girl with the white mantle was somebody important in
Hollywood and the man with her either a doctor or a major in mufti.
This was no sensation at the Marmoset.  That new Monte Carlo could
really have been stirred only by the appearance of the President
with Queen Nefertiti.  But it did insure a captain of waiters
coming to take their order without disciplining them by making them
wait.

However, by the ease with which he sold them a bottle of Peruvian
champagne and mushrooms a noisette under glass, he could see that
here was only another dull pair of uncelebrities.  He passed the
word, and Cass and Jinny went back into the refrigerator.  No one
even glanced at them, except the male designer, who looked
designing.

Cass saw Jinny's spirit paling in her, and he urged abruptly,
"Well, you're the prettiest girl here.  There isn't one that has
your fire or your eyes or a clear skin like yours."

"And you're the only man here that looks as if he could fight a
battle or build a town."

More silence, out of which she burst, "If I saw Boone and Queenie
Havock over at a table there, I'd go over and I'd kiss both of 'em.
Twice.  And I would request Boone, but very nicely, to stand up and
holler, 'Do you clams know who this is?  This is Judge Timberlane
and his young wife, d' you hear me?'"

"And Boone would probably do it."

"And Boone would certainly do it.  That's why I adore him--now."

That was Monday evening, the end of Jinny's first day among the
revelries of New York.

Comfortingly close to each other, they slept in one of the twin
beds, for shelter against the bleak wind of urban indifference,
while all night the little crystal cat looked out on the prison
wall of the New York street.  It seemed very small on the broad
white sill.

There is a Grand Republic colony in New York, as there is a Smyrna
colony, a Benares colony, a Reykjavik colony, and it is the duty of
that colony to be gleeful at the arrival of all visitors from the
home town, and to take them to that restaurant at which the ordeal
of being cordial can be most quickly got over most inexpensively.
Equally, it is the duty of the visitors to telephone to all members
of the colony upon arrival and to allow themselves to be
becordialed.  (There are also cases in which the two parties to the
social contract really want to see each other.)

With a notion of being thoughtful and not binding them, Cass had
not written of his coming to any of the colonists, nor to Dennis
Thane, the only one of his classmates in the University of
Minnesota law school whom he knew to be in New York.  The
stuttering task of finding his old acquaintances he took up on
Tuesday morning, while Jinny, cocking her bare toes, commented with
ribaldry from the rumpled bed.

Mrs. Byron Grannick?  She was still at Stockbridge.

Dr. Cope Anderson, the chemist?  He was still at his laboratory on
Cape Cod.

Mr. and Mrs. Kenny Wargate?  They were still at Easthampton.

By now Cass felt empty and unwanted.

He reached only Dennis Thane (of the law-firm of Crossbow, Murphy,
and Thane), who invited them for lunch tomorrow, and Bradd Criley's
sister, Mrs. William Elderman, Avis Criley Elderman, who
forebodingly insisted on coming into town from her suburban home in
Darien, Connecticut, and on performing the rite of taking them to
dinner on Thursday evening.

"Anyway, we have two friends in the world, Dennis and Avis, except
for Avis," sighed the lonely Judge Timberlane.

He had not quite dared telephone to one former Grand Republican,
the only person from their section of Minnesota, aside from Salem
Volk the veteran liberal politician, who was famous to the whole
world: Berg Nord, the actor-director-producer-dramatist, who had
been born on a farm in Radisson County.  In fact Nord was so
distinguished that every citizen back home was under a compulsion
to inform strangers, "Oh, we don't take Berg seriously.  We still
call him 'Ice Berg.'  He don't try to pull anything on us, like
maybe he does on you folks.  We know him too well."

Nord's latest play, Feast of Reason, of which he was author and
star, had just re-opened for the second year of its run.  Back
home, Cass had airily thought of telephoning to Nord about tickets--
though he would insist on paying for them, of course--but now,
with the baby-tiger purr of New York outside his window, he dared
not telephone to Nord at all, but after breakfast trotted meekly to
the ticket agency, where the learned vendor condescendingly let him
have two seats.  Cass held them with pride. . . .  He had never
seen Berg on the stage, but as a child of three, he had ridden
pickaback on the shoulders of the twenty-three-year-old Cousin Berg
Nord.  Now he asked of the omniscience, "Nord is considered a fine
actor in New York, isn't he?"

"Oh, merely the best, after Lunt, that's all!"

Cass had lost another inch of stature by the time he had regained
the safety of their hotel and Jinny's presence.



33


They never could recall how they had put in the rest of Tuesday
morning, aside from reading the papers down to the auction notices,
but they postponed the duty of reveling in the joys of New York
till lunchtime.  Then they had the great hours of shopping, and
admitted that, in this, New York was superior.  Jinny dropped the
arm of her protector and stepped out and had a few things to say
for herself.

She contradicted clerks, high impressive clerks with handkerchiefs
like bishops' mitres in their breast-pockets.  She yearned over
furs and Irish linens and perfume-bottles with gold crowns for
stoppers and folding card-tables so sturdy that you could sit on
them--the clerk enthusiastically proved it.  (He was fired for it,
that evening; the table might have collapsed.)  But there was a
hard shrewdness in her, and she bought only one per cent of the
things that she would die if she did not have.

After dozens of tryings-on, while Cass sat on a plush chair in
rooms carpeted to suffocation and wondered if he might smoke, and
wished that he had a walking stick to rest his chin on, like the
other male sitters, she did pick out a silk dress, a blue suit, and
a lynx jacket.

Then she dropped again into panic.

"Cass!  Let's beat it!  So many shops, so many puss-puss grass-
widow clerks, trying to stick you with things you don't want--they
all get so blurry and alike.  There's no fun like there is at
Harley's or Tarr's, where you know all the scandals about the
clerks.  I love you for bringing me to New York, and I wouldn't
have missed it for a million dollars, and I wouldn't ever come here
again for a billion.  Oh, I do want to settle down now.  I promise:
I will read my chess manual.  I will quit getting my queen taken.
I promise!"

He kissed her in the elevator of a department store.



They assured themselves that though the Melchester dining-room did
look stuffy, "We better have our dinner here, just this once, and
not have to hurry to the theater."

The air of the dining-room had been shut in there, among the
Brussels sprouts and the damp napkins, ever since the hotel had
opened, in 1913, and the stuffed veal tasted like the air, and the
waiter, who was a family man and a commuter, had aching feet.

They spent most of their time at dinner in longing for the gaieties
of the John William Prutts, and they went to the play as to an
operation.

Cass knew Nord only as a bulky, tow-headed Swede in a loose black
suit and an irregular bow-tie, lounging around his father's farm.
Jinny had never seen great acting, and she supposed that there
would be a good deal of yelling and throwing up one's arms and
catching them again.

Bewildered, they learned tonight that great theater is more real
than reality.  Nord was the Little Man, a clerk who discovers that
his boss and his wife and his daughters are all liars, who smashes
his world and triumphs in defeat.

Jinny commented only, "Gee!"

Cass said, "I think in these theaters you can--'go back,' I think
they call it, and see the actors in their dressing-rooms, and of
course I've known Berg slightly all my life--I didn't suppose he
was like that!  He's an archangel.  I'm glad I saw this with you.
Well, shall we go back?"

"I'm scared to, but if you're sure it's all right--Course I was
born only about six miles from his birthplace--and maybe I didn't
tell that to everybody in Florida!"

"Come on.  Perhaps he'll go out with us for a drink."

"Don't you dare ask him!  Prob'ly everybody from Minnesota and
points west comes in and bothers him.  Come on!  I don't think we
ought to go see him, but hurry or we might miss him!"



It was all traditional and right: the secret alley beside the
theater, the stooped and hidden stage door, the doorman aged and
Irish and misanthropic.

"To, uh, to see Mr. Nord.  Mr. and Mrs. Timberlane," Cass
submitted.

"JUDGE Timberlane," said Jinny.

But when they were admitted to the star's dressing-room, it was
such a littered coop, and the star, wiping off greasepaint, was
just Ole Ice Berg Nord.  He looked at Cass a little puzzled.

"You're one of the Grand Republic Timberlanes, aren't you?"

"Yes, my mother was Marah Nord.  I'm sort of a second cousin of
yours.  I'm a lawyer."

"Oh, now I have it straight."  Nord, a thick, undistinguished
figure in a blazing silk dressing-gown, was cordial.  "Cass--isn't
that the name?  Mighty pleased you came back, Cass.  Enjoy my
show?"

"We thought it was magnificent."  Nord was obviously pleased.
"Berg, this is my wife.  Just married last year."

"Delighted to see you, Mrs. Timberlane.  This your first visit to
New York?"

"Yes, it's my first."

"You enjoying your visit?"

"Oh, yes, so much.  Well.  That is.  I don't know as I'd want to
live here.  We're fond of Minnesota."

"So am I, Mrs.--uh--Timberlane"

Jinny must have seen in Cass's pleased and honest face the
prohibited come-out-and-have-a-drink look.  Firmly taking her
husband's arm, she stated, "It's been a great honor to be able to
visit with you, and we must go now.  Good night."

And went.

They stopped in the street and shone at each other.

Cass said proudly, "Nice fellow, isn't he!"

"Marvelous."

"Course off the stage, he seems like anybody else."

"Oh, no, I don't think so!  I can feel the tremendous reserved
power in him.  Oh, I could go for him in a big way!"

"Ye-es."

"Let's stop and get a drink some place--a quiet place, if there is
one in this town--and then go to bed.  Oh, Cass, I'm so tired, all
that shopping--but is that plum-colored dress a vision!  We
certainly have one thing to boast of: we didn't try and wheedle
poor Berg into going out with us."

"It might have been courteous to have asked him--"

"Oh, no, you can't ask people like that."



Berg Nord was meditating, "I wish I'd asked those people out for a
drink--or they'd asked me.  They made me quite homesick.  I'd like
to hear the Grand Republic news.  But they're probably busy on
their stay here.  I wouldn't want to intrude."

In her own twin bed a little later, talkative and not sleepy, Jinny
mused aloud, "Think of how brilliantly he must talk when he's with
his real friends."

At Sardi's, Berg Nord was saying to his agent, who was one of his
three close friends, "I don't want to be a hog about it, but you
tell Hollywood I won't even look at less than two hundred thousand.
Know what I'm going to do, some day?  Move back to Minnesota and
stay there.  You New Yorkers are a pain in the neck.  Always
thinking about money. . . .  I'll have another Scotch old-
fashioned."



Their lunch, on Wednesday, with Dennis Thane started jubilantly
with recollections of law school, each of which began, "Say, do you
remember the time I . . ."

Thane was effusive to Jinny.

"Is this your first visit to New York, Mrs. Timberlane?"

"Yes, it's the first time."

"Are you enjoying your visit here?"

"Oh, yes, very much, thank you."

But after that the luncheon was less vivacious.

So they did more shopping and went to museums, thousands of
museums, and went to a news-reel.

"Let's take a chance and dine at Twenty-One or the Algonquin or one
of those famous places, Jin."

"Oh, I don't know.  They're fascinating, but they scare me, Cass.
Why don't we just have dinner here at the hotel, where they know
who we are, and then take in another movie and go to bed?  There's
a bang-up movie opened on Broadway last night.  I know it's good
because it was in Grand Republic two weeks ago, and Mrs. Higbee
said it was swell.  Would that be okay by you?"

"Certainly would.  I never care for more than just so much horsing
around.  I thought eight days would be too short a stay here, and
New York does wake you up and give you a lot of ideas, but I'll be
kind of glad when we get away next Tuesday.  I've enjoyed every
second of it, but I won't be sorry to be home and shoot some golf
with Roy."

"And I'm crazy to see how much the decorators have got done.  Oh,
yes, I'm VERY glad we're staying till Tuesday, but that will be
about enough."



A Thursday filled with trying on dresses, trying on museums, and
churches, and deciding that their feet were too sore to go up and
look at Grant's tomb and the Rockefeller church, those appropriate
neighbors.  The day was magnificently crowned by having dinner with
Avis Elderman, Bradd Criley's emigree sister.

She remembered Cass perfectly, and forgave him for it.

She had glittering jet on her bosom, and she took them to the
Colony Restaurant.

She said to Jinny, "I don't think I ever met you in Grand
Republic."

"No, I lived in Pioneer Falls as a kid."

"Oh!"

It took Avis a minute to swallow this, but she tried again:

"Is this your first glimpse of New York?"

"Yes, my first."

"I trust that you are enjoying your stay here."

"M."

"Mr. Elderman and I are sorry that you are making such a brief
sojourn.  We had hoped to entertain you in our home.  In Darien.
In Connecticut, you know.  Though of course we practically live in
New York City--my husband's office is here, map-manufacturing, and
I come in and join him for an evening at LEAST once a fortnight,
but still, we always say, even the city hasn't a more exacting and
delightful social life than Darien.  You would enjoy it so much."

"I'm sure of it," said Jinny.

As Cass and she went to bed, Jinny snarled, "The very next time,
I'm going to say, 'No.  Is it YOUR first visit?'"

And, after more meditation, "I thought Bradd was a lovely man, till
I met his sister."



When they awoke to devouring rain on Friday morning, Cass rejoiced,
"Would I be a barbarian if I said, 'Thank God, we don't have to go
out and look at the glories of New York all day long'?"

"Me too!"

He thought, he telephoned down to the porter's desk, and presently
he announced, "I find we can get reservations for the trip back
home for Monday instead of Tuesday.  What would you--"

"Darling!  Swell!  Grab 'em!  I'm crazy to see the new house, and
Cleo and Rose and Valerie and Roy and everybody!"

They went back to sleep, lying close together, comfortably and
quietly.  They breakfasted luxuriously, for the Melchester did
unexpectedly run to English muffins and wild-strawberry jam.  They
got rid of the breakfast wreckage, and told the chambermaid to stay
out till lunch-time.  Free from the duties of sightseeing, they
laughed as pointlessly as schoolchildren.

--Well, if this trip hasn't accomplished anything else, it's got
rid of Jay Laverick, and brought her back to me.

They were normally a somewhat restrained couple, but today they
reveled in the cheerful vulgarities of the bathroom.  She scrubbed
his back, in the tub, and laughed, and kissed the wet smoothness of
his shoulder.  He reached up his arms to encircle her with a sudden
need of her, and her giggling died in a passionate quick breathing.

It was on that day of gaiety and benevolent bad weather that their
baby was conceived.

"There couldn't be a more wonderful lover than you," she sighed.

They did admit the chambermaid--who looked at them suspiciously--
but they did not dress till five in the afternoon, when the weather
had cleared.

They had a small walk up Fifth Avenue.  While they were out, Berg
Nord tried to telephone them.  He had their address from Avis
Elderman (whom he hated).  Nord had hoped to have them join him
after the theater, but he did not leave his name.  They never
learned that he was a lonely man.

They came back to the dreariness of having to decide which urban
delight they would work at that evening.

The telephone.  Cass answered.  "Yes?  Timberlane speaking."  Then
he shouted.

"Jinny!  Do you know who it is?  It's Bradd Criley!  He's just
landed here in New York, and he's right here in the hotel, and
he'll be up here in five minutes!"

She sang, "That's the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me
in my life!"



As Bradd came in, like a fresh wind from the Sorshay uplands, Cass
thought that Berg Nord might be a sturdy trial lawyer, and Bradd,
with that wavy hair that provides its own vine leaves, that round
pale face and automatic smile, might be a romantic actor.  But he
got no further with the study, so excited were they all three, two
men and a girl, the trinity of friendship--and of danger.

"You're the best sight for sore eyes I've seen since we left home,"
said Cass.

"You two look pretty good to me.  What about you, Jin?  Are you as
glad to see me as your old man makes out he is?"

"My favorite brother, Bradd!" glowed Jinny, and kissed him.

Bradd summed it up, presently.  "You have till Monday then--tonight
and all day Saturday and Sunday?  Can't we all play around
together?  I'm here for the Wargates, but I don't have to do a
thing till Monday morning, except a few telephone calls."

"Perfect!" said Jinny.

"I really came on a couple of days early, hoping to catch you two."

"Oh, Bradd, you didn't!" whispered Jinny.

"What's your plans for tonight?"

"Not a thing."

"Managed to see Life with Father yet?"

"Impossible to get tickets."

Bradd crowed, "Not impossible for ME to get tickets!  It's a cinch,
if you know the ropes.  And I know every strand of the little ole
ropes in this man's town."

"I'll bet you do," worshiped Jinny.

Bradd was already telephoning.  "Berbetz? . . .  This is Criley,
from Grand Republic. . . .  Fine.  Just got in.  Now listens my
young friend.  I want three for Life with Father for tonight, and I
want good ones, get me? . . .  Fine.  I'll pick 'em up at the box-
office.  I'll be seeing you."

Jinny was looking at him with admiration.

He ordered briskly, "Now I'll run down and have a quick shower and
be ready in half an hour.  Let's have an early dinner and have
plenty of time to talk.  We'll go to the Algonquin or the Plaza,
and then after the show, I'll take you to Twenty-One or the Stork
Club.  Been to any of those places?"

Cass sighed, "We tried the Marmoset, but we felt like a couple of
outsiders."

"You won't with me.  They know me!  I'll be seeing you."

When he was gone, Jinny triumphed, "Now we'll have a tremendous
time.  But--I adore Bradd, but he is kind of a faker, isn't he!"

"What?"

"About this hotel being so out of the world.  About getting these
tickets that you can't get.  The way he does it, he just pays some
speculator about three times what they're worth.  And about being
such a sweetheart to all the night-clubs.  It's just going there
often enough, and tipping more than enough.  The wise guy--the
great man about town!  Why, you're twice as distinguished as he is,
and you look it!"

"Oh, now, Jinny, you're dead wrong.  He isn't a faker."

"A show-off, then."

"But he isn't!  Now, Jinny!  I see him in the court room.  He likes
to make a jury laugh, but there isn't a steadier or better-prepared
advocate in the district, and same way with his approach to his
friends.  He has the heart of a boy, and it pleases him so when he
can do things for you that he just bubbles over.  You've got to
like Bradd!"

"Oh, I do, lots.  I just meant--It irritates me if anybody thinks
we're hicks just because we don't spend all our time doing New
York--on a Wargate expense-account!"

"Don't let his fun and high spirits fool you.  You'll come to love
him."

"Anything for peace," she said.  "All right, I'll love him then."

"Good!" said Cass.



At the Algonquin, Bradd pointed out one timid drama critic, one
savage playwright, and two bored actors.  Then they settled clown
to the news from Grand Republic. . . .  Harley Bozard had been seen
at Austin with a handsome woman from Minneapolis.  Major Umbaugh
had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel.  Jamie Wargate was now a
flyer.

Then Bradd spoke seriously.

"New York seems to have brought you two even closer together.  Jin,
I'm glad you've got the Jay Laverick nonsense out of your system."

"I never had any in it!"

"Oh, yes, you did!  Jay's an attractive heel, and a good friend of
mine, but I wouldn't trust him across the street with a deaf virgin
aged seventy.  He does the sympathy racket.  Listen, young lady:
Cass never would jump you properly about Jay, because he's a
sensitive gent, Cass is, and he's afraid of you.  I'm not.  So--
just how strongly did Mr. Jay express his ambition to make you?"

Cass was surprised that he was not indignant at this intrusion, and
Jinny merely sputtered, "He never expressed anything of the kind!
I wouldn't let him!"

"You couldn't help letting him.  Didn't he ever say anything--very
whimsy and make-believe, the little darling!--about you and him
starting an arty tea-room together--he put up the cash and you the
good taste?"

"Ye-es, he did make some cracks about my talent for watercress."

"That's his standard line.  I know you have too much sense to fall
for him really, but still, you did let him stick around, and you
better cut him out and cleave only to the dumb breadwinners like
the Judge and me.  We won't let you down.  Now you can tell me how
I've been butting in."

"Well, you have!  And I won't be bullied!"

"Tut!"

"I'll fall for whom I like.  I'm a free woman."

"That's what you think."

"Oh, you make me tired," she said, so feebly that Cass and Bradd
smiled at each other, and presently she was smiling with them.



If Cass found it too breathless, Jinny was exhilarated by the
different New York that Bradd disclosed to them.  He took them to
three night-clubs, in which he was cordially greeted by, if not
with, fatted calves, and on top of that, he injected them, at one
o'clock in the morning, into a pent-house party being given by a
man who, Bradd explained, was a very important, high-class man,
with a lot of influence in Washington, the representative of a
chain of Western banks.

Jinny decided that, after all, she had been born to pent-house
life; to the glass bar and the Dali drawings and the couch long
enough to seat eight people, to the garden outside and the nervous
lights in the skyscrapers that formed its mountainous horizon; born
to the attentions of gallantly drunken gentlemen.

Thousands of men were telling Jinny that she was beautiful;
thousands and tens of thousands of ageless women were shrieking
that she must have another drink immediately, till the coils of
people inside the pent-house seemed thicker and darker than the
coils of cigarette-smoke.  Suddenly even the gregarious Jinny could
not endure the blare of voices, and she slipped out on the terrace.

So she beheld a New York new-born and celestial.  She was
astonished to come out not to a light-pointed darkness but to the
rising sun.  Four hours had gone in four minutes.

The pent-house was thirty stories up, on an apartment-house on
Central Park West, looking eastward to Fifth Avenue and the park.
To the northeast, incomprehensible waterways led through a golden
mist to the open sea of Long Island Sound, and over them the
bridges arched and vanished in a smudge of factories and airfields.
The bulky castles of Fifth Avenue and beyond seemed but a narrow
strip of gold-touched black floating upon the waters, and for a
moment the ponderous city was as graceful as Venice.

To southward a thousand towers reached toward the sun, while just
at her feet, far down, Central Park was still a dawn-dark
labyrinth, with the reservoir like one of her own Northern lakes.

At her shoulder, Bradd's voice murmured, "New York can be
beautiful, eh?  It's London and Paris and San Francisco all in
one."

"Yes, I didn't know how beautiful till you showed it to me, Bradd.
I was scared of it, but I think I could love it."

He kissed her, and in gratitude she responded recklessly.  Bradd
drew back.  "We didn't mean that!  It was just an accidental salute
to the sun.  Don't you ever tell that priggish Grand Republic
lawyer about it."

"Cass is NOT a prig--"

"I didn't mean him.  I meant that--what's his name?  Bradd Criley?
The fellow who thinks you're his sister.  Are you?"

"Yes!"

Elbows on the parapet, they were talking quietly when Cass came out
to find them.  He was pleased when he saw their fresh, dawn-cooled
faces.

"You two are the only people here that look as if you've ever
slept, but as it's tomorrow now, how about thinking of going home?"
he chuckled.

"Fine!" said the artless Bradd.



On Saturday and Sunday, Bradd was the most conscientious pleasure-
giver since Dennis the hangman.  He took them to two theaters, for
a drive in a victoria in Central Park.  On Sixth Avenue he bought a
dozen of the marzipan cakes that Jinny loved even more than candy,
and they three walked down the street boldly eating them out of a
paper bag.  Sunday, they drove to Jones Beach and on to a
restaurant with tables on the terrace.

By now, Jinny considered New York just as good as Grand Republic.
But not Cass.

Bradd paid his share of all the bills, but he did not show off by
trying to pay more.  In all their arguments he took Cass's side
against Jinny or Jinny's side against Cass, with equal cheerfulness.
And he bought for her the first orchid of which she was ever the
proprietor.

She confided to Cass, "You were entirely right about Bradd.  He
wasn't trying to impress us about how well he knows New York.  He
just has a lot of fun exploring it, and he loves to have his
friends share it."

When Bradd had seen them off on the train, on Monday, Cass said to
her, "Now you really begin to appreciate Bradd."

"Yes--thanks to you."

They returned to Grand Republic; they moved into the new house; the
fall term of court opened; and the first case over which Cass
presided was the divorce-suit of Beecher Filligan against his wife
Pasadena, with Mr. Jay Laverick warmly referred to in the
testimony.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

FILLIGAN VS. LAVERICK


Beecher Filligan had only a minority share in the ownership of
Havock & Filligan, contractors, but he also played at architecture
and he had inherited a brickyard and a cement works.  In the
peerage of Grand Republic he rated as a viscount, with the highest
distinction in the playing of backgammon.  He was forty, and a
friend of Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick.

His wife Pasadena, born in that Oxford of the Pacific Coast, was
probably beautiful.  She looked like a poor color-reproduction of a
Botticelli goddess of rather late spring.  She was derivative in
everything except her make-up, in which she showed talent, care,
and diligence.

Beecher was sick of her, sick of her mildly clattering tongue, her
extravagance, and her monotony in bed.  He wanted to get rid of
her, and since he had no legal reasons, he set about creating them.

He knew that, despite her cow-like amiability when she had
everything she wanted, she could be shrill and stubborn if she
thought she was being cheated, so the fault had to be seemingly
hers, and his the forgiveness or the vengeance.

Jay Laverick took notice of every halfway-pretty woman who seemed
obtainable, and Beecher saw to it that Pasadena should appear
extremely obtainable.

She was a Talking Woman, and like most Talking Women she was too
busy babbling to notice what was happening about her.  Her
telephone calls, to announce that she would come and play bridge
next Thursday, took half an hour.  By going out to the kitchen and
being orally helpful, she could get any cook to quit during the
first fortnight, and Beecher usually went to sleep to her inane
discussion of something that would have happened if it had only
happened.

Beecher was not utterly to be blamed for his cold plotting against
her.  His plan had started one evening when, after he had
complained absently about her extravagance and her astonishing
tendency to get accidentally kissed at country-club dances, she had
sneered, "Well, if I'm so lousy, why don't you DO something, and
not just yap about it?"

Not till two years later, when she was already married to the
reluctant Jay Laverick, did she realize that Beecher had done
something.

Beecher, in the oldest and simplest of tricks, began his work by
having Jay at the house for three-handed rummy and being called out
to the cement works at ten P.M., then telephoning at eleven that he
would not be able to return till two.  Venus and Freud did the
rest.

Beecher's careful labor was almost ruined by Jay's getting
interested in a much prettier and livelier woman, young Jinny
Timberlane, so he had Jay for house-guest at his summer camp on
Lake Winnemapaug, was called away "for two days," and returned late
that same night.  He despised Jay for an amateur Don Juan when he
found them both in her bed, and asleep.

He said to Jay, "I ought to kill you, and I do happen to have a
loaded rifle here, but I think the only decent, civilized way out
of this horrible mess that you two have dragged me into is for you
to marry her as soon as I divorce her."

Jay said, Why certainly; that's what he had intended to do, all
along.

Pasadena, with her rouge smeared, was very distasteful to Jay.

Later, in chambers, Pasadena reported to judge Timberlane, "Beecher
practically cried over all that he had tried to do for me, and I
just despised him.  After that, I was sure I wanted to marry Jay,
who is a real man, not a whiner.  But I will say for Beecher that
he did manage to make me feel like considerable of a heel."

She was distasteful to Judge Timberlane in any state of make-up.
He said, "But, Pas, any husband must sense it at once if his wife
even begins to stray, and what I don't understand is how either you
or your husband could be taken in by such an obvious wolf as
Laverick."

"Don't you dare say anything against Jay!  He's a gentleman, even
when he's drunk, and he's going to marry me."

He was, and he did.



34


The Timberlanes had been married for a year now, and they were
fondly accustomed to the new house, to the gray furniture and
mulberry carpets and curtains, the yellow leather pouf, the
fireplace set flush in mirrors, in the pert living-room, as
arranged by Jinny.  Isis was presumably happy on a teakwood
pedestal on a small glass shelf.  The pictures were mostly nameless
flower pieces; there were tall portfolios of Impressionist
painters; and on a small flat desk were Jinny's precious tooled-
leather stamp-box and a useless yellow quill pen.  It was all very
gay and comfortable and contemporary, even if it was a little like
a model room in an expensive furniture store.

Cass thought highly of the oil furnace and the electric washing-
machine, though he was not altogether contented in his new study.
It was a cigar-box of a room, handsomely paneled, with a small
fireplace reluctantly let into the pine walls, but there was room
for only a quarter of his books, and the rest were lost in dark
hallway-bookcases and the pinched attic.

"Oh, well, most of 'em I only look at once in a while, anyway," he
sighed, as he lugged them to the attic.  Strange that so few books
can require so many staggering struggles up the ill-lighted stairs.

Jinny was joyfully busy.  Now that she could organize her own
house, and Mrs. Higbee could no longer hide spices and Canadian
bacon and corn-flour from her in cavernous unknown cupboards, she
was an exemplary housewife, busy with errands to the new Byzantine
meat-market and the new Cordovan grocery-store, which made up the
business-center of the Country Club District.  She went on
entertaining soldiers at the canteen, and once she stood on the
running-board of a car on Chippewa Avenue and made a speech for the
sale of war bonds.

"No," said Cass, afterward, "no, you were a very good speaker.  I
wish most lawyers would sum up as clearly as you did.  Sweetheart,
you're beating me at oratory as you do at everything else.  Except
maybe chess."

She was unquestionably beating him at one thing.  She was pregnant.

He was delighted.



It was she who insisted that they must be economical, after the New
York journey and buying the new house, now that Owen or Emily was
coming.

She had picked out this choice of names for the baby, without
discussion.  She explained it to Cass:

"I'm glad about the infant.  I feel like looking up at you as
languishingly as any Dickens heroine.  This is real creation.  I
guess a baby is about the most modern and revolutionary thing a
girl can do.  I intend to be a wonderful mother.  I know that if
it's a boy, he'll be as sturdy and honest as you are, as your
father must have been, so I want him to be 'Owen,' after your
father.  And if it's a girl--I had an Aunt Emily--so gentle, but
awful smart.

"I did think, 'way back six months ago, when I was young, that I'd
like to have a daughter named 'Lark.'  I knew it was kind of a
fancy name, but I want her to be what I always wanted to be and
never could--swift and clean and belonging to the upper air, not
touched with earth.  Wait, wait now!  Don't tell me a lark has to
come down and sleep on the earth after it's got done soloing.  I
guess an expectant mother has a right to her own metaphor hasn't
she?

"But then I got to thinking about what her classmates would do to
the kid, with a name like that, so I said to her, 'All right,
you're going to be a sweet, simple Emily, and LIKE it!'

"Cass, I am going to adore that baby!"



Cass said to Roy Drover, "She's so sort of serene and adjusted
now."

Roy Drover said to Cass, "You mean she's got some of the damn
nonsense knocked out of her by morning sickness."

Bradd Criley said to Cass, in Jinny's active presence, "Our girl is
more lovely than ever now.  How I envy you two!"

Chris Grau said to Jinny, with Cass philanthropically listening,
"How I envy you, dear!  Did you ever know that once I thought I was
a little in love with your dear husband, myself?  Oh, Jinny, you
must give him a lovely baby."

Mrs. John William Prutt said to Mr. John William Prutt who, in a
gray flannel union-suit, was sitting on the floor, cutting his long
pale toenails, "It is perhaps my imagination, but I cannot help
feeling that it may have been our influence as their former
neighbors that has changed Mrs. Timberlane from a really quite
scatterbrained and, I might almost venture to suggest, flirtatious
young woman into an apparently responsible young Grand Republic
matron."

Boone Havock, the distinguished ex-saloon-bouncer, said to Judge
Blackstaff, at the Federal Club, "Cass must of gone plumb crazy.
Probably from working too hard at loving that hot little wife of
his.  Not that it's her fault, poor kid.  I thought at first that
she was from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, but she seems
to have settled down to being a nice little lady and a good war
worker.  But Cass--why, I hear where, right in this classy new
house of his, he entertained this flannel-mouthed Vogel, the county
agricultural agent, that's a Farmer-Laborite and practically an
under-cover gumshoer for the co-operatives that want to ruin every
decent business that we've given our lives to building up."

"Oh, no, no, Boone," insisted Judge Blackstaff.  "I find Judge
Timberlane a sound and loyal colleague.  I think it's just that
his wife--after all, the is young, and she probably enjoys
experimentation and wants to meet all these cranks and freaks and
reds and fanatics, just to see what they're like.  Once she has had
her baby, she'll settle down and be just like your wife and mine.

"I certainly hope so," said Boone.



For Eino Roskinen, who was serving somewhere in the Pacific, Cass
and Jimmy packed a Christmas box: fruit cake, candy, cigarettes,
and a thin-paper edition of Farewell to Arms.

"We do so little and he does so much.  I feel we ought to both be
out there with him," fretted Cass.  "I'm going to kiss you for
HIM."  That kiss was strange and disembodied, as though it were
indeed the caress of a spirit.

On this, their second Christmas together, everybody decided that
the Little Mother--as they all called her, to Jinny's fury--ought
to stay home and be visited and relentlessly loved and cherished,
and they all did it: the Drovers, Havocks, Blackstaffs, Flaatens,
Gadds, and an alternately shrieking and hush-hushing gang of half a
dozen more families, while for Christmas dinner, with much holly
and silver, there were Bradd, Chris, Cleo, and the three
Pennlosses.  George Hame diffidently brought in a pair of woolly
mittens, embroidered for Jinny by his daughter Betty, and a family
whose son they believed Judge Timberlane to have saved from prison
sent a goose from Four Mile Pine.

Jinny announced that she was now domesticated and contentedly
settled for her whole future life.



Drowsy with Christmas turkey and claret, Cass and Jinny and Bradd,
the others gone, hunched down in their deep chairs.  Every five
minutes one of them said, "We ought to take a good brisk walk."
Busy as a squirrel, Jinny ate a chocolate, sipped Benedictine,
gulped a glass of water.  She complained, "I have the most awful
thirst."

"Of course, you baby, eating all that sweet stuff," yawned Bradd.

"Let's see if we can catch the Philharmonic on the radio and then
go out and take a good brisk walk," said Cass.

But first on Station KICH came the war-news bulletins, to which
they listened with the indifference into which civilians fall.
But they sat up as they heard a bulletin:

"I have to announce the sad news that another of our boys has given
his life that democracy may live.  One of our fine young men, an
expert on dairying processes, Eino Roskinen, was killed in an
airplane crash somewhere in the Pacific on Christmas Eve."

Bradd said quite cheerfully, "Didn't you know him, Jin?"

She gasped, and they half heard her groan, "I hardly let him kiss
me.  I wish to God I had!"

Bradd stirred with electrified interest.  Cass was filled with
pity.  He went over to touch her hair, muttering, "A brave boy."
He felt struggling far down in him the rebellious thought, "How do
I know I wouldn't have been just as brave, if it had been my job to
fight?"  But the thought never came to the surface, as she mourned,
cheek against his sleeve:

"We never think that death can come near US.  But I feel as if it
were in the room now."

In the silence, they breathed uncomfortably.  They could hear the
cat as it leaped from a cupboard toward the mantelpiece.  It almost
missed and, clawing, upset the bracket on which was Isis, who
toppled from her little teak standard and fell to the tiled hearth,
with a tiny noise of breaking.  Jinny hastened across the room and
picked up the crystal cat-goddess.  One of its miniscule legs was
broken clean off, and Jinny held it out for Cass to see, sobbing
like a bewildered child.



35


Cass had intended to keep their life from falling into a
prosperous-middle-class routine which would bore Jinny as it bored
his sister Rose, but now, he felt, "just for a while, a Certain
Amount of Routine will protect her."

He was correct in calculating that their routine did add up to at
least a Certain Amount.

The routine of his court room, workmanlike and busy, and the
routine of his return home, the welcoming kiss, the "What you been
doing all day?", news on the radio and reading--sometimes aloud--of
the Banner editorials, the game of chess, the game of dominoes, the
game of gin-rummy.

The routine of bedtime and Cass's "Golly, I didn't know it was so
late--guess it's about time to turn in," and in the morning,
"Almost eight o'clock--time to rise and shine."

The routine of food: steak, chicken, veal chops, corned beef, pork
chops, fried pike, steak; and of reports about the weather.  The
routine discussion of shall we have soup?  He was pro-soup, and she
was anti.

The routine of dining with the Pennlosses every Sunday noon.

The routine of love-making, which became a routine and not a storm
as soon as they wondered how much longer it was safe to continue
it.

But he knew that Jinny was no amateur of such regularity, and he
pondered upon the production of mild and antiseptic amusements.
The best of these seemed to be the encouragement of the Pennlosses
and Bradd and Chris to come in whenever they could.  Somehow, the
busy Bradd was able to "drop in" much oftener than the others.

He was such a safe, comfortable, cheerful friend to have about.  He
was ready to play cards, to talk, to listen, to pat Cleo, to admire
Jinny's knitting and Cass's legal opinions, to tease Jinny when she
was petulant and Cass when he was irritable, and to bring ice in
for the highballs from the kitchen refrigerator.  Bradd was a
singularly neat remover of ice-cubes, refiller of ice-trays, and
wiper of highball glasses, and he agreed with Jinny on the
necessity of using, always, the Chinese brass coasters under the
glasses, to protect the tables.

It was Bradd who affably took charge on the evening when Jay
Laverick came in to show off his new wife, Pasadena, and was drunk
enough to hint that there had been other ladies, quite recently,
who had craved his competent affections.

So Bradd became the tertium quid in the household:  Cass's friend
and admirer, Mrs. Higbee's admirer and beau, Cleo's teacher of
protocol, and Jinny's brother.  He was a combination of
grandfather, son, investment-counsel, assistant judge, trained
nurse, thoughtful patron, and pet dog.

Cass did not realize--surely Bradd could not have realized--just
how often he was there.

Cass would have said that Chris Grau appeared just as often,
because when Chris did come, you noticed it.  In forty-five minutes
she would change from Cass's thwarted sweetheart to protector of
Jinny against Cass's gross passions to sweater-knitting friend.

Bradd also read aloud from a very imaginative little manual of
psycho-analysis.  He kept begging Jinny not to be shocked by these
cases from real life.

She was not shocked.  She was interested.

It was a comfort to Cass that on evenings when he had to go out
speech-making, to the Masons or the Montenegrins or the Mensheviks,
he could count on Bradd to entertain Jinny at home or take her to
the movies.  Occasionally, when Cass was kept late in his chambers
and Bradd felt that poor Jinny might be dull, he drove her down to
the Unstable for a drink before dinner.

This, however, seemed to Cass unnecessary.



They had a serene evening, Cass and Jinny alone, discussing the
future of Owen-Emily.

"It excites me and it scares me," said Cass.  "He--she--will be
able to fly from Grand Republic to London in eight hours, and he
may see the whole world one state, or see it an anarchy starving in
caves."

"Well, before he starts revolutionizing the world," mused Jinny
tenderly, "I'm going to see he's a good swimmer and tennis player,
and says 'Thank you, Mother' nicely."

"Reactionary!"

They were cheerful then, but when Cass came home the next evening,
he found a Jinny irritable as a cat-haunted robin.

"Why, what's the trouble, dear sweet?" he bumbled.

"Don't be so disgustingly forgiving and paternal!"

"All right, I'll be unforgiving.  Go on."

"Oh, it's just--I went out to the Unstable for lunch with Gillian
Brown.  She had an idea I might do some sketches for their fashion
show at the Beaux Arts.  And maybe I will, too.  And--I hadn't
meant to take a drink, but I felt so blue, shut in here all the
time--"

"You aren't!"

"Yes I am too!  I don't know as it can be helped, but I am.  And I
had this mean thirst that's been bothering me lately--I suppose
that's pregnancy, too--and so I had a highball, and I felt better.
And Bradd just happened to drop in, and he came over and joined us,
and he felt like taking the afternoon off, and so he and Gillian
decided they'd go to Alimony Hall and get drunk, and they asked me
would I like to come along, and I said, Yes, I certainly would--"

"You know--"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes, I know EXACTLY what you think of Alimony Hall
and Sabine Grossenwahn, but there isn't any law in the Constitution,
is there, that I have to accept ALL your opinions?  Sabine is
amusing, and if she sleeps with everybody in town--except you--
I HOPE--that isn't any of our business, is it?"

"I rather think--"

"Oh, don't talk like John William Prutt!  Like Mrs. Prutt!  Like
the whole world of Pruttery!  That's how they felt about US, one
time.  Sometimes often you're just as priggish as the Prutts.  I
much prefer a roughneck realist like Boone Havock.  OR Sabine!  But
anyway:  I wanted to go, but I knew you and Roy would have a fit,
so I said, No, I wouldn't.  And so Bradd and Gillian kidded the
life out of me for being such a Puritan, and I think they were
right, too; I think I'd of felt a lot better if I had gone and
lapped up a lot of Sabine's Miracle Mash Bourbon.  Roy is crazy.
He's just an old woman--like all obstetricians--and he isn't even
that--he's a surgeon.  By golly, if there were one in town, I'd get
me a nice sympathetic young obstetrician that would PRESCRIBE hell-
raising!  Now go on.  Be horrified.  I guess it's very choice and
high-class to have a husband that can quote Milton and Veblen, but
I get awful tired of living in a diving-bell.  So now you can be
horrified all you want to!"

"But I'm not, and as soon as Owen comes--"

"Emily!"

"Emily, then.  Then I'll go to Sabine's with you."

If indeed he was "horrified," it was only that the trusty Bradd
should have been willing to take her to that amateur brothel.
Then:

--Oh, sure.  I've got it.  He didn't want her to go at all, and he
just pretended he did to gentle her down.  Still, I would like to
ask Bradd what he really said.

But, worried over Jinny, worried by the war news, he forgot to ask.



He reached home before Jinny, that evening in early March.  He sat
in one of the detestably neat gray-leather chairs, bending his
newspaper.  He heard her at the door.  She did not halt to take off
her furs; she was in the doorway, her hands flat against either
side of the frame, her face wincing, no youthful wife but a
frightened woman.

He sprang up.

"Cass!  I'm sick, I'm really sick, and it isn't just pregnancy.  I
may die."

He held her arms, wet with melting snow.

"I've just been to Roy for my examination.  Cass, I have diabetes!"

"Oh, no!"

"Yes.  And I could die from it."

"It's not serious, Jinny; it couldn't be!"

"Not TOO serious, Roy says.  I don't even need insulin, not yet
anyway, he says; just proper diet and take care of myself.  But
could anything be worse than taking care of yourself all the time,
like an invalid?"

"I'll do it for you."

"You will, O God, how you'll take care of me!  It'll be worse than
dying.  Wrapped in cotton, all night, all day--and expected to be
grateful!"

"Now, now!  Let's get your coat off.  Here, let me rub your hands.
Lord, they're cold!  There, there--"

"Now, now, now!  There, there, there!" she mocked him.  "Sweet,
sweet chick!  Enjoy your beddie-weddie all day long!  You and Roy
will have me as sappy as Juliet Zago in a month!"

He had sense enough to ignore her sputtering.  A girl had the right
to be a little testy at the threat of death!  He yelled out to Mrs.
Higbee to delay dinner fifteen minutes, and to bring two martinis,
quick.  He got Jinny settled on the couch, with Cleo soft between
them, and demanded, "Now tell me exactly."

"Maybe it isn't too bad.  Roy says it's diabetes, all right, but
very mild--says if I just have a little common sense--but of course
that's like saying, 'If you just have the genius of Beethoven,'--
and if I take care of myself, I could live to be ninety and
scarcely know I had the thing. . . .  And be just as good-looking!
I mean--you know--not ugly, I mean . . .  But doesn't it sound
coarse.  Diabetes!  Sugar in the urine!  Aah!  Why can't I die of
something romantic, like Camille or Mary, Queen of Scots?
Diabetes!"

"Call it 'diabetes mellitus,' then.  That sounds fancier."

"So it does.  Oh, I do feel better, now I've told you, and I know
it will be wonderful, the way you'll take care of me.  I'm not
really ungrateful.  I'm just blaming on you the faulty action of my
Islands of Langerhans, blast 'em!  I have some nerve back now.  I
WILL live to be ninety--and you'll be a hundred and four and still
trying to get me to eat less candy--and I'll crab all the time, and
love you for it!"

But she was frightened.  It quavered in all her flippancies, and he
concentrated on her fear, not on his own below-zero terror that she
might die and all his own life die with her.

As she hastily drank the cocktail he had ordered, he mused, "I
suppose Roy has forbidden all alcohol."

"Yes, this drink is my last.  Say, how did you ever get as gloomy a
friend and physician as Roy?  He doesn't even enjoy seeing his
patients die when they disobey him.  Yeh, no alcohol, no candy, no
cake, very little meat.  He wants to keep me alive only
technically.  His theory is that it's better to be alive and
miserable than dead and happy.  Not even one tender, confiding
little cocktail."

"Well, this evening I'll also give you one stiff highball, and
starting tomorrow morning, we'll both of us go on the water-wagon,
absolutely.  Both of us.  You realize that?"

"O God, yes, I realize it.  When the Judge raises his voice like
that, the boys run right out and get the rope."

"Darling, it won't be so bad.  We'll have lots of pleasant
substitutes for sweets and booze."

"As how?  CHESS?"

"No, we'll think of a lot of things."

"Always ending with chess!"

"Now don't be so contrary."

"A girl that's going to die has got a right to be contrary."

"She certainly hasn't any right to say 'has got' for 'has,' and if
she claims all her rights and has a husband like me, who's too
weakly adoring to spank her and put her to bed, she's in danger of
having him become devious and control her by slyness instead of by
healthy bullying.  You can't win, now that I've started to take
care of you, and I want no more pretty nonsense out of you."

"Gee, at that, you may be a better wife-manager than I thought."

"I may.  And by the way--You spoke of my court attendants running
for a rope.  You know, don't you, that actually there is no capital
punishment in the State of Minnesota?  What are you smiling at,
dear?  Have I said something naive?"



During dinner, she was cheerful, and in her old voice of
affectionate derision she read the regimen that Dr. Drover had
given to her.

"Avoid worry. . . .  Doesn't say how; just avoid it--YOU know--
ole worry come, throw it out of the window.  Gee, the wonders of
medical science. . . .  Warm clothes. . . .  Drop in at some
lumberjack store tomorrow and buy me a nice red-flannel union suit,
will you?  That'll keep all the men away, and so I'll also avoid
one of the worries, anyway. . . .  Warm baths.  Mm.  Massage. . . .
That depends on the masseur.  Do you know any handsome young
gentlemen masseurs?  They COULD be blind.  I still think Jay
Laverick would make a fine, conscientious masseur, but I never
could get a meeting of minds with you on that topic. . . .
Diet. . . .  Me on a diet!  Me that in my prime tossed in banana
splits and pickled pig's feet at the same orgy. . . .  Saccharine
for sugar. . . .  Cereals. . . .  Leafy vegetables. . . .  How I do
hate leafy vegetables--the leafier the nastier, I always say.  I
hate to get my teeth into a mess of leaves. . . .  Beans, broccoli,
cabbage, cucumbers, endive, okra--okra!--squash, tomatoes, turnip-
tops, watercress--I ask you!  Could anything sound more loathsome?
Just make sure that I stick to that diet for two months, and I'll
run away with Boone Havock and go reeling down State Street with
the fumes of two steaks and a mutton chop rising to my befuddled
brain. . . .  Oh, darling, can you stand making me stand it?"

"Sure!"



36


At the end dinner he coaxed, "Now I want you to skip right up and
get into bed, and I'll come up and talk to you, and we'll play a
good game of--of dominoes."

"Now you look here!   I do not intend to start being an invalid, in
bed all the time.  I'd rather die first!  Roy didn't say--"

"No, no, just tonight.  You're overwrought.  So am I, for that
matter.  I'll talk to Roy about it, but I presume that ordinarily
you'll be able to stay up till ten-thirty or eleven every evening--
maybe till midnight, after Baby comes."

"No, tonight especially NOT.  If I relaxed, I'd be too scared."

"Tell you what I'll do.  I'll get some lively soul to come in and
gossip and cheer us both up.  I'll get Bradd!  He'll have to know,
sooner-later, anyway."

"Yes, you phone him, and I'll put on my most languorous nightgown
and receive all you boys in bed.  Like a queen. . . .  Oh, Cass, I
was going to be such a good, strong wife, and I'm just a sick,
whining child, to bother you."

She sobbed, head against his substantial shoulder, for a long time.
When she went up the stairs, still whimpering softly, he looked up
after her, and her climbing was that of a naughty child who has
been punished.

He did not tell her afterward, but when he telephoned he did not
find it easy to capture Bradd.  He had to drag him out of a poker
game.  Bradd sounded not too willing, and Cass insisted that Jinny
was ill and really needed the skillful cheering of the man-about-
town.

When he went up to sit awkwardly by her bed, in the new gray-and-
pink chamber, he reflected that Bradd had never seen her here, and
he regretted having invited even his old friend into the sanctuary.
She was miraculously feminine tonight; the baby was going to be
tiny, and she was scarce swollen; there was no hint of it as she
sat up in bed, huddled under the pink silk coverlet.  Her throat
was fair above sinful laces and ribbons, her hair was softly shaken
out, her cheeks were flushed, by nature as well as art.

--Um.  That was a mistake.  But too late now to stop Bradd. . . .
And she really does need some clown like him, tonight. . . .
My lovely, warm, terrified girl.

He fumbled, "Before Bradd comes, there's one slightly embarrassing
thing--I don't know whether Roy spoke of it or not but I wonder--
and of course we have to think of your health beyond any other
consideration--"

"You dear old lady!  You wouldn't be chastely referring to sleeping
together, would you?"

"Why, Jinny!"

"I could use still more lucid expressions."

"Stop riding me, sweet.  I can't help it if I'm shy with you--call
it reverent.  There are a dozen or so words that Roy and I used to
exchange freely, at the age of twelve.  I do know them--you'd be
surprised!  But I honestly don't like to use 'em in your presence."

"Didn't Bradd use 'em, too?"

"Not much.  He was a foully clean-minded little beast--then."

"Poor, innocent Bradd!"

"I'd like to get back to our investigation.  What did Roy say?"

"He said, situation normal for six weeks or so, and then we'll have
to be as chaste as my crystal cat."

They looked at each other so confidingly.



Their old friend Bradd had never been more admirable.

He came in casually; he lightly patted Cass's shoulder; he kissed
Jinny's cheek--not overly glancing, Cass noted, at her bosom
beneath the foam of nightgown; he sat down and took charge of their
muted terror.

"I had a hunch something was wrong, when you called me, Cass, so
I phoned Roy, and he says Jin has a very mild case of diabetes,
nothing to worry over.  Jinny, sweet, our chief job is the
agreeable one of keeping you gay as a gopher.  Now of course all
these docs, even a hardboiled one like Roy, croak about avoiding
all alcohol and sweets, and any mental flings more disturbing than
buying moth-balls.  They exaggerate, because they hope to get HALF
of what they order--like a dealer telling you to keep a new car
down to thirty.  If they tell a patient to cut out alcohol, what
they expect is that the dope will cut the intake down to a pint of
mule every six hours, with just a dash of canned heat.

"The great thing in curing any of these chronic diseases is mental,
so if Cass and you and I have just a couple of drinks and sit
around and laugh like fools, that'll be more sensible than acting
like a dyspeptic killjoy.  How about it?"

"Oh, I'm sure you're right, Bradd," rejoiced Jinny.  "I'll be
careful, but not get sour and Pruttish."

"Look, you two!" protested Cass.

"Consider it said, sweetie," purred Jinny.  "You mean that the
orthodox method of not drinking any alcohol whatever is not to
drink any alcohol.  We young revolutionists don't fall for that any
longer.  And, Cass, you SAID I could have another drink, after
dinner."

"Did I?  Well, I think you're getting along fine without it, so
let's stick to that."

Bradd and Jinny looked with humorous exasperation at this husbandly
spoil-sport, but he was firm.



She refused to have a nurse, but she did, with omissions, "take
care of herself."  To her the omissions were a joke, a game of
thwarting Cass and his co-plotter, Dr. Drover.

To Cass, nothing of all this was a joke.  The shock of comprehending
her danger was a delayed contusion, and not till next day did he
quite take in the special fact of her illness.  Then, all day, on
the bench, he was taut and shaky.

He was agonizingly aware that she might die.  When he passed a
cemetery, cold under March snow, when he heard of the death of
another soldier from home, he starkly saw her then, unmoving in a
coffin, not to move and speak to him again, ever.

He had never rented Bergheim, and now he refused an offer.  He
heard himself saying, "If she died, I would take Cleo and Mrs.
Higbee and crawl back to the old place."

His most desperate effort was to keep from seeming desperate.



Jinny did not often leave the house, as April came roughly in,
promising May.  She drove into the country sometimes with Cass or,
if he was held in court till evening, with Rose or the Wolkes, but
mostly she clung to the house, like the frightened cat with whom
Cass was always identifying her now.

Every night she conscientiously tended her feet, stooped over them,
bathing and rubbing every tiniest crease or abrasion, while Cass
watched her pitifully.

She recited hopefully, "Roy says the great Dr. Joslin says every
diabetic ought to have a dog, because a dog never tempts you to
break your diet or embarrasses you by being too sorry for you, like
your friends.  'Well,' I said to Roy, 'my cat is just as good as a
dog that way, isn't she?' and he said, very stiff, 'Joslin doesn't
say anything about cats--just dogs.'

"And Roy does lay such stress on the grapefruit.  He figures a
grapefruit is the diabetic's best friend--next to his dog, of
course!  I got to eat grapefruit and like it--that horrible, fat,
smug, sickly-yellow lump!

"And Roy says there's no danger Emily will transmit the tendency to
diabetes--or Owen either--if there's none of it in YOUR family, and
he says there isn't any.  Poor Emily!  To start off with a mother
that hasn't got one doggone thing but love for her--no strength and
no candy and not much sense.  You've got to have sense for both of
us, Cass.

"There.  If Dr. Joslin himself came right in this room now and
looked at those feet, he'd say, 'Jinny, I never saw a slicker job
of pedicuring.  You're a good girl, Jinny--for a blasted
diabetic!'"

"No!  A blessed diabetic."

"Oh, yes.  And Roy said Joslin said Clemenceau and Edison were both
diabetics, and they carried on like sons-of-guns with it."

"So will you."

"But you don't think it will make me reactionary like them, do
you?"

"I don't think it will make you anything but Jinny."

"Which is rapidly being accepted by all lexicographers as a symptom
for perfection, you mean?"

He wanted to cry.



Sometimes she was little and bewildered and clung to Cass and
wanted to be obedient to Dr. Drover's orders.  Sometimes she was
irritated by the unreasonableness of being ill and turned to Bradd,
who chirped, "Cheer up, baby; I'm sure you behave a lot better than
His Honor says."

Cass was supposed to be pleased when Bradd could inspire her to a
flippant lightness, but he wondered if they did not depend too much
on Bradd's friendly presence.  Then, in May, the duty of being
comic in the sickroom was shared by a discharged Marine--that
radio-artistic Fred Nimbus who had once acted himself into the war.
Nimbus had an excellent record; he had risen to corporal and been
honorably discharged for a mild stomach ulcer.  He had gone no
nearer to the South Pacific than San Diego, but he came home to his
creative labors at Station KICH where, from his experiences as a
Marine Corps stenographer, he described to the Far-Flung Radio
Audience--flung at least as far as Kanabec County--the fighting on
tropical islands, the inside politics of China and India, and the
racial mixtures in the Balkans and Peru.  He was to be heard at the
house of Gregory Marl, explaining everything so vehemently that
even Diantha Marl shut up.

There were other returned soldiers in town, but most of them had
been wounded and they were strangely unwilling to show off even for
such interrogatory civilians as Diantha, and Mr. Fred Nimbus was
their willing Homer.

He remembered that Mrs. Timberlane and he had been chums, and he
assumed that in her illness the one thing she longed for was his
manly and merry presence.  He was often in the house now, forgiving
Jinny for having failed him, trying to forgive Cass for having
stolen her away, brightening them all up by interpreting the home
l