So Big (32 page)

“Hello!” said Dallas O'Mara. “This is it. Do you think you're going to like it?”

“Oh,” said Dirk. “Is that it?” It was merely the beginning of a drawing of the smartly gowned model. “Oh, that's it, is it?” Fifteen hundred dollars!

“I hope you didn't think it was going to be a picture of a woman buying bonds.” She went on working. She squinted one eye, picked up a funny little mirror thing which she held to one side, looked into, and put down. She made a black mark on the board with a piece of crayon then smeared the mark with her thumb. She had on a faded all-enveloping smock over which French ink, rubber cement, pencil marks, crayon dust and wash were so impartially distributed that the whole blended and mixed in a rich mellow haze like the Chicago atmosphere itself. The collar of a white silk blouse, not especially clean, showed above this. On her feet were soft kid bedroom slippers, scuffed, with pompons on them. Her dull gold hair was carelessly rolled into that great loose knot at the back. Across one cheek was a swipe of black.

“Well,” thought Dirk, “she looks a sight.”

Dallas O'Mara waved a friendly hand toward some chairs on which were piled hats, odd garments, bristol board and (on the broad arm of one) a piece of yellow cake. “Sit down.” She called to the girl who had opened the door to them: “Gilda, will you dump some of those things. This is Mrs. Storm, Mr. DeJong—Gilda Hanan.” Her secretary, Dirk later learned.

The place was disorderly, comfortable, shabby. A battered grand piano stood in one corner. A great skylight formed half the ceiling and sloped down at the north end of the room. A man and a girl sat talking earnestly on the couch in another corner. A swarthy foreign-looking chap, vaguely familiar to Dirk, was playing softly at the piano. The telephone rang. Miss Hanan took the message, transmitted it to Dallas O'Mara, received the answer, repeated it. Perched atop the stool, one slippered foot screwed in a rung, Dallas worked on concentratedly, calmly, earnestly. A lock of hair straggled over her eyes. She pushed it back with her wrist and left another dark splotch on her forehead. There was something splendid, something impressive, something magnificent about her absorption, her indifference to appearance, her unawareness of outsiders, her concentration on the work before her. Her nose was shiny. Dirk hadn't seen a girl with a shiny nose in years. They were always taking out those little boxes and things and plastering themselves with the stuff in 'em.

“How can you work with all this crowd around?”

“Oh,” said Dallas in that deep restful leisurely voice of hers, “there are always between twenty and thirty”—she slapped a quick scarlet line on the board, rubbed it out at once—“thousand people in and out of here every hour, just about. I like it. Friends around me while I'm slaving.”

“Gosh!” he thought, “she's——I don't know—she's——”

“Shall we go?” said Paula.

He had forgotten all about her. “Yes. Yes, I'm ready if you are.”

Outside, “Do you think you're going to like the picture?” Paula asked. They stepped into her car.

“Oh, I don't know. Can't tell much about it at this stage, I suppose.”

“Back to your office?”

“Sure.”

“Attractive, isn't she?”

“Think so?”

So he was going to be on his guard, was he! Paula threw in the clutch viciously, jerked the lever into second speed. “Her neck was dirty.”

“Crayon dust,” said Dirk.

“Not necessarily,” replied Paula.

Dirk turned sideways to look at her. It was as though he saw her for the first time. She looked brittle, hard, artificial—small, somehow. Not in physique but in personality.

The picture was finished and delivered within ten days. In that time Dirk went twice to the studio in Ontario Street. Dallas did not seem to mind. Neither did she appear particularly interested. She was working hard both times. Once she looked as he had seen her on her first visit. The second time she had on a fresh crisp smock of faded yellow that was glorious with her hair; and high-heeled beige kid slippers, very smart. She was like a little girl who had just been freshly scrubbed and dressed in a clean pinafore, Dirk thought.

He thought a good deal about Dallas O'Mara. He found himself talking about her in what he assumed to be a careless offhand manner. He liked to talk about her. He told his mother of her. He could let himself go with Selina and he must have taken advantage of this for she looked at him intently and said: “I'd like to meet her. I've never met a girl like that.”

“I'll ask her if she'll let me bring you up to the studio some time when you're in town.”

It was practically impossible to get a minute with her alone. That irritated him. People were always drifting in and out of the studio—queer, important, startling people; little, dejected, shabby people. An impecunious girl art student, red-haired and wistful, that Dallas was taking in until the girl got some money from home; a pearl-hung grand-opera singer who was condescending to the Chicago Opera for a fortnight. He did not know that Dallas played until he came upon her late one afternoon sitting at the piano in the twilight with Bert Colson, the blackface comedian. Colson sang those terrible songs about April showers bringing violets, and about mah Ma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-my but they didn't seem terrible when he sang them. There was about this lean, hollow-chested, sombre-eyed comedian a poignant pathos, a gorgeous sense of rhythm—a something unnameable that bound you to him, made you love him. In the theatre he came out to the edge of the runway and took the audience in his arms. He talked like a bootblack and sang like an angel. Dallas at the piano, he leaning over it, were doing “blues.” The two were rapt, ecstatic. I got the blues—I said the blues—I got the this or that—the somethingorother—blue—hoo-hoos. They scarcely noticed Dirk. Dallas had nodded when he came in, and had gone on playing. Colson sang the cheaply sentimental ballad as though it were the folksong of a tragic race. His arms were extended, his face rapt. As Dallas played the tears stood in her eyes. When they had finished, “Isn't it a terrible song?” she said. “I'm crazy about it. Bert's going to try it out to-night.”

“Who—uh—wrote it?” asked Dirk politely.

Dallas began to play again. ‘H'm? Oh, I did.” They were off once more. They paid no more attention to Dirk. Yet there was nothing rude about their indifference. They simply were more interested in what they were doing. He left telling himself he wouldn't go there again. Hanging around a studio. But next day he was back.

“Look here, Miss O'Mara,” he had got her alone for a second. “Look here, will you come out to dinner with me some time? And the theatre?”

“Love to.”

“When?” He was actually trembling.

“To-night.” He had an important engagement. He cast it out of his life.

“To-night! That's grand. Where do you want to dine? The Casino?” The smartest club in Chicago; a little pink stucco Italian box of a place on the Lake Shore Drive. He was rather proud of being in a position to take her there as his guest.

“Oh, no, I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you're surrounded by people who're pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they're there because they are all interested in golf, or because they're university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like 'em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires—everything. That's what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend's house, of course.” A rarely long speech for her.

“Perhaps,” eagerly, “you'll dine at my little apartment some time. Just four or six of us, or even——”

“Perhaps.”

“Would you like the Drake to-night?”

“It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let's go to the Blackstone. I'll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.”

They went to the Blackstone. The head waiter knew him. “Good evening, Mr. DeJong.” Dirk was secretly gratified. Then, with a shock, he realized that the head waiter was grinning at Dallas and Dallas was grinning at the head waiter. “Hello, André,” said Dallas.

“Good evening, Miss O'Mara.” The text of his greeting was correct and befitting the head waiter of the French room at the Blackstone. But his voice was lyric and his eyes glowed. His manner of seating her at a table was an enthronement.

At the look in Dirk's eyes, “I met him in the army,” Dallas explained, “when I was in France. He's a grand lad.”

“Were you in—what did you do in France?”

“Oh, odd jobs.”

Her dinner gown was very smart, but the pink ribbon strap of an under-garment showed untidily at one side. Her silk brassiere, probably. Paula would have—but then, a thing like that was impossible in Paula's perfection of toilette. He loved the way the gown cut sharply away at the shoulder to show her firm white arms. It was dull gold, the colour of her hair. This was one Dallas. There were a dozen—a hundred. Yet she was always the same. You never knew whether you were going to meet the gamin of the rumpled smock and the smudged face or the beauty of the little fur jacket. Sometimes Dirk thought she looked like a Swede hired girl with those high cheek bones of hers and her deep-set eyes and her large capable hands. Sometimes he thought she looked like the splendid goddesses you saw in paintings—the kind with high pointed breasts and gracious gentle pose—holding out a horn of plenty. There was about her something genuine and earthy and elemental. He noticed that her nails were short and not well cared for—not glittering and pointed and cruelly sharp and horridly vermilion, like Paula's. That pleased him, too, somehow.

“Some oysters?” he suggested. “They're perfectly safe here. Or fruit coctail? Then breast of guinea hen under glass and an artichoke——”

She looked a little worried. “If you—suppose you take that. Me, I'd like a steak and some potatoes au gratin and a salad with Russian——”

“That's fine!” He was delighted. He doubled that order and they consumed it with devastating thoroughness. She ate rolls. She ate butter. She made no remarks about the food except to say, once, that it was good and that she had forgotten to eat lunch because she had been so busy working. All this Dirk found most restful and refreshing. Usually, when you dined in a restaurant with a woman she said, “Oh, I'd love to eat one of those crisp little rolls!”

You said, “Why not?”

Invariably the answer to this was, “I daren't! Goodness! A half pound at least. I haven't eaten a roll with butter in a year.”

Again you said, “Why not?”

“Afraid I'll get fat.”

Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You're just right.”

He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure, lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it. She was looking a little haggard, too.

“The theatre's next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don't have to leave here until after eight.”

“That's nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.

“You know I'm an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that's why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.”

“Why did you give it up, then?”

“Nothing in it.”

“How do you mean—nothing in it?”

“No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I'd hung on——”

“And then you became a banker, h'm? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.”

He was a little nettled. “I wasn't a banker—at first. I was a bond salesman.”

Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula's brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I'd rather,” Dallas said, slowly, “plan one back door of a building that's going to help make this town beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.”

He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn't go dubbing along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I wanted——”

“Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and go into bonds?”

“Well—she—I don't know that she exactly——” He was too decent—still too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that.”

“You said you were going to let me meet her.”

“Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you'd even—would you drive out to the farm with me some day? She'd like that so much.”

“So would I.”

He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn't stand not knowing any longer.

“I think you're a nice young man.”

That was terrible. “But I don't want you to think I'm a nice young man. I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven't I got that you think I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that I'm really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject.