“Have you, Chuck?”
They drifted on in silence. “Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It’s good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play tennis and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of ‘em are wonders!”
Oh, I’m sick of your swell New York friends! Can’t you talk about something else?”
He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or why. “All right. What’ll we talk about?” In itself a fatal admission.
“About—you.” Tessie made it a caress.
“Me? Nothin’ to tell about me. I just been drillin’ and studyin’ and marchin’ and readin’ some–- Oh, say, what d’you think?”
“What?”
“They been learnin’ us—teachin’ us, I mean—French. It’s the darnedest language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a piece of bread, you say like this: DONNAY MA UN MORSO DOO PANG. See?”
“My!” breathed Tessie.
And within her something was screaming: Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He knows French. And those girls that can row and swim and everything. And me, I don’t know anything. Oh, God, what’ll I do?
It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He’d make it, just as he always made the 7:50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it sure. He’d make it there and back, all right. But he’d be a different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, French, girls, swell folks–-
And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in the water. “Bet you can’t guess what I got in that lunch box.”
“Chocolate cake.”
“Well, of course I’ve got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this morning.”
“Yes, you did!” “Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can’t do anything, the way you talk.”
“Oh, don’t I! I guess you know what I think.”
“Well, it isn’t the cake I mean. It’s something else.”
“Fried chicken!”
“Oh, now you’ve gone and guessed it.” She pouted prettily.
“You asked me to, didn’t you?”
Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden among the trees on the farther shore: “There’s Hatton’s camp. They say they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and Sundays. If I had a house like that, I’d live in it all the time, not just a couple of days out of the whole year.” She hesitated a moment. “I suppose it looks like a shanty to you now.”
Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. “No, it’s a nice little place.”
They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the riverbank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him—the breast of the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a double share of icing.
From Chuck, between mouthfuls: “I guess you don’t know how good this tastes. Camp grub’s all right, but after you’ve had a few months of it you get so you don’t believe there IS such a thing as real fried chicken and homemade chocolate cake.”
“I’m glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain’t eating a thing!” His fourth piece of chicken.
Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. And so up the hill, homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck’s hand on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, they would have been something like this:
“Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn’t care if only I had you. I wouldn’t mind babies or anything. I’d be glad. I want our house, with a dining-room set, and a mahogany bed, and one of those overstuffed sets in the living room, and all the housework to do. I’m scared. I’m scared I won’t get it.
What’ll I do if I don’t?”
And he, wordlessly: “Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on thinking about me? And will you keep yourself like you are so that if I come back–-“
Aloud, she said: “I guess you’ll get stuck on one of those French girls. I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be raised, workers are so scarce. I’ll probably be as rich as Angie Hatton time you get back.”
And he, miserably: “Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. I ain’t counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don’t like their jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of ‘em, last week, a fellow in camp had who’d been over there. Their hair is all funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners.”
It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The husband, very damp as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at Ding’s or Halpin’s. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts outside Halpin’s, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. “Hello, Ed. The woman’s inside, buyin’ the store out, I guess.”
“That so? Mine, to. Well, how’s everything?”
Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available by the more important sleeping bundle—two yards of oilcloth; a spool of 100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the five-and-ten.
There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, felt sorry for them—worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she envied them.
There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In his last letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie’s eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and chateaux. He and a bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or something—it was all one to Tessie—and what do you think? She had kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that’s the way they did in France.
The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied with a new and more absorbing topic.
“Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?”
“What about her?”
“She’s going to France. It’s in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being Chippewa’s fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she’s giving up her palatial home and all to go to work in a canteen for her country and bleeding France.”
“Ya-as she is!” sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. “Ya-as she is, the doll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn’t cut up a loaf of bread decent. Bleeding France! Ha! That’s rich, that is.” She thrust her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. “She’s going over there after that fella of hers. She’s chasing him. It’s now or never, and she knows it and she’s scared, same’s the rest of us. On’y we got to set home and make the best of it. Or take what’s left.” She turned her head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over a table at the far end of the room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh. “I guess when you can’t go after what you want, like Angie, why you gotta take second choice.”