The Maiden Evelina used to go into Miss Mathilda’s room when she was out and look at herself for a long time in the lookingglass. Her hair wasn’t mousy, it was quite fair if only they would let her have it curly instead of in pigtails and even if her eyes weren’t blue like George’s they had little green specks in them. Her forehead was noble. Miss Mathilda caught her staring like that into the mirror one day.
“Look at yourself too much and you’ll find you’re looking at the devil,” said Miss Mathilda in her nasty stiff German way.
When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Mathilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker’s novels than to the children. Eveline didn’t like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonderful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit and was proud of being the minister’s daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brotherhood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christmas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people’s houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn’t God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she’d ask her father. He’d smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She called him Dad now and was his Pal.
On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful illustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored illustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Rossetti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad’s came to dinner they’d say when they were introduced to her, “So this is the talented one, is it?”
Adelaide and Margaret were pretty scornful about all that when they came home from school. They said the house looked dowdy and nothing had any style to it in Chicago, and wasn’t it awful being ministers’ daughters, but of course Dad wasn’t like an ordinary minister in a white tie, he was a Unitarian and very broad and more like a prominent author or scientist. George was getting to be a sulky little boy with dirty fingernails who never could keep his necktie straight and was always breaking his glasses. Eveline was working on a portrait of him the way he had been when he was little with blue eyes and gamboge curls. She used to cry over her paints she loved him so and little poor children she saw on the street. Everybody said she ought to study art.
It was Adelaide who first met Sally Emerson. One Easter they were going to put on Aglavaine and Selizette at the church for charity. Miss Rodgers the French teacher at Dr. Grant’s school was going to coach them and said that they ought to ask Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, who had seen the original production abroad, about the scenery and costumes; and that besides her interest would be invaluable to make it go; everything that Sally Emerson was interested in went. The Hutchins girls were all excited when Dr. Hutchins called up Mrs. Emerson on the telephone and asked if Adelaide might come over some morning and ask her advice about some amateur theatricals. They’d already sat down to lunch when Adelaide came back, her eyes shining. She wouldn’t say much except that Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson knew Matterlink intimately and that she was coming to tea, but kept declaring, “She’s the most stylish woman I ever met.”
Aglavaine and Selizette didn’t turn out quite as the Hutchins girls and Miss Rodgers had hoped, though everybody said the scenery and costumes Eveline designed showed real ability, but the week after the performance, Eveline got a message one morning that Mrs. Emerson had asked her to lunch that day and only her. Adelaide and Margaret were so mad they wouldn’t speak to her. She felt pretty shaky when she set off into the icybright dusty day. At the last minute Adelaide had lent her a hat and Margaret her fur neckpiece, so that she wouldn’t disgrace them they said. By the time she got to the Emersons’ house she was chilled to the bone. She was ushered into a little dressing room with all kinds of brushes and combs and silver jars with powder and even rouge and toiletwaters in purple, green and pink bottles and left to take off her things. When she saw herself in the big mirror she almost screamed she looked so young and piefaced and her dress was so horrid. The only thing that looked any good was the foxfur so she kept that on when she went into the big upstairs lounge with its deep grey carpet soft underfoot and the sunlight pouring in through French windows onto bright colors and the black polished grandpiano. There were big bowls of freezias on every table and yellow and pink French and German books of reproductions of paintings. Even the sootbitten blocks of Chicago houses flattened under the wind and the zero sunlight looked faintly exciting and foreign through the big pattern of the yellow lace curtains. In the rich smell of the freezias there was a little expensive whisp of cigarettesmoke.
Sally Emerson came in smoking a cigarette and said, “Excuse me, my dear,” some wretched woman had had her impaled on the telephone like a butterfly on a pin for the last halfhour. They ate lunch at a little table the elderly colored man brought in all set and Eveline was treated just like a grownup woman and a glass of port poured out for her. She only dared take a sip but it was delicious and the lunch was all crispy and creamy with cheese grated on things and she would have eaten a lot if she hadn’t felt so shy. Sally Emerson talked about how clever Eveline’s costumes had been for the show and said she must keep up her drawing and talked about how there were as many people with artistic ability in Chicago as anywhere in the world and what was lacking was the milieu, the atmosphere my dear, and that the social leaders were all vicious numbskulls and that it was up to the few people who cared about art to stick together and create the rich beautiful milieu they needed, and about Paris, and about Mary Garden, and Debussy. Eveline went home with her head reeling with names and pictures, little snatches out of operas and in her nose the tickling smell of the freezias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarettesmoke. When she got home everything looked so cluttered and bare and ugly she burst out crying and wouldn’t answer any of her sisters’ questions; that made them madder than ever.
That June after school was over, they all went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awfully depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hills were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of Trilby in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier illustrations instead of in knights and ladies.
When she wasn’t reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sally Emerson. She didn’t feel well most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people’s bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Margaret told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn’t tell them how horrid it made her feel inside. She read the Bible and looked up uterus and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn’t stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom till she found a bottle marked POISON that had some kind of laudenum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musically traurig about dying, but she couldn’t seem to get the rhymes right and finally fell asleep with her hea
d on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chilly in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she’d keep the bottle and kill herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better.
That fall Margaret and Adelaide went to Vassar. Eveline would have liked to go east too but everybody said she was too young though she’d passed most of her college board exams. She stayed in Chicago and went to artclasses and lectures of one sort or another and did churchwork. It was an unhappy winter. Sally Emerson seemed to have forgotten her. The young people around the church were so stuffy and conventional. Eveline got to hate the evenings at Drexel Boulevard, and all the vague Emerson her father talked in his rich preacher’s boom. What she liked best was the work she did at Hull House. Eric Egstrom gave drawingclasses there in the evenings and she used to see him sometimes smoking a cigarette in the back passage, leaning against the wall, looking very Norse, she thought, in his grey smock full of bright fresh dabs of paint. She’d sometimes smoke a cigarette with him exchanging a few words about Manet or Claude Monet’s innumerable haystacks, all the time feeling uneasy because the conversation wasn’t more interesting and clever and afraid somebody would come and find her smoking.
Miss Mathilda said it was bad for a girl to be so dreamy and wanted her to learn to sew.
All Eveline thought about that winter was going to the Art Institute and trying to paint pictures of the Lake Front that would be colored like Whistlers but be rich and full like Millet drawings. Eric didn’t love her or else he wouldn’t be so friendly and aloof. She’d had her great love; now her life was over and she must devote herself to art. She began to wear her hair screwed up in a knot at the nape of her neck and when her sisters said it was unbecoming she said she wanted it to be unbecoming. It was at the Art Institute that her beautiful friendship with Eleanor Stoddard began. Eveline was wearing her new grey hat that she thought looked like something in a Manet portrait and got to talking with such an interesting girl. When she went home she was so excited she wrote George, who was at boarding school, about it, saying she was the first girl she’d met who really seemed to feel painting, that she could really talk about things with. And then too she was really doing something, and so independent and told things so comically. After all if love was going to be denied her she could build her life on a beautiful friendship.
Eveline was getting to like to so much in Chicago, she was really disappointed when the time came to leave for the year’s trip abroad that Dr. Hutchins had been planning for his family for so many years. But New York and getting on the Baltic and making out the tags for their baggage and the funny smell of the staterooms made her forget all about that. They had a rough trip and the boat rolled a good deal, but they sat at the captain’s table and the captain was a jovial Englishman and kept their spirits up so that they hardly missed a meal. They landed in Liverpool with twentythree pieces of baggage but lost the shawlstrap that had the medicinechest in it on the way down to London and had to spend their first morning getting it from the Lost and Found Office at St. Pancras. In London it was very foggy. George and Eveline went to see the Elgin marbles and the Tower of London and ate their lunches in A B C restaurants and had a fine time riding in the tube. Dr. Hutchins only let them stay ten days in Paris and most of that time they were making side trips to see cathedrals. Notre Dame and Rheims and Beauvais and Chartres with their bright glass and their smell of incense in cold stone and the tall grey longfaced statues nearly made Eveline a Catholic. They had a first class compartment reserved all the way to Florence and a hamper with cold chicken in it and many bottles of Saint Galmier mineral water and they made tea on a little alcohol lamp.
That winter it rained a lot and the villa was chilly and the girls squabbled among themselves a good deal and Florence seemed to be full of nothing but old English ladies; still Eveline drew from life and read Gordon Craig. She didn’t know any young men and she hated the young Italians with names out of Dante that hung around Adelaide and Margaret under the delusion that they were rich heiresses. On the whole she was glad to go home with mother a little earlier than the others who were going to take a trip to Greece. They sailed from Antwerp on the Kroonland. Eveline thought it was the happiest moment of her life when she felt the deck tremble under her feet as the steamer left the dock and the long rumble of the whistle in her ears.
Her mother didn’t go down to the diningsaloon the first night out so that Eveline was a little embarrassed going in to table all alone and had sat down and started eating her soup before she noticed that the young man opposite her was an American and goodlooking. He had blue eyes and crisp untidy tow hair. It was too wonderful when he turned out to be from Chicago. His name was Dirk McArthur. He’d been studying a year at Munich, but said he was getting out before they threw him out. He and Eveline got to be friends right away; they owned the boat after that. It was a balmy crossing for April. They played shuffleboard and decktennis and spent a lot of time in the bow watching the sleek Atlantic waves curl and break under the lunge of the ship.
One moonlight night when the moon was plunging westward through scudding spindrift the way the Kroonland was plunging through the uneasy swell, they climbed up to the crowsnest. This was an adventure; Eveline didn’t want to show she was scared. There was no watch and they were alone a little giddy in the snug canvas socket that smelt a little of sailors’ pipes. When Dirk put his arm around her shoulders Eveline’s head began to reel. She oughtn’t to let him. “Gee, you’re a good sport, Eveline,” he said in a breathless voice. “I never knew a nice girl who was a good sport before.” Without quite meaning to she turned her face towards his. Their cheeks touched and his mouth slid around and kissed her hard on the mouth. She pushed him away with a jerk.
“Hey, you’re not trying to throw me overboard, are you?” he said, laughing. “Look, Eveline, won’t you give me a little tiny kiss to show there’s no hard feeling. There’s just you and me tonight on the whole broad Atlantic.”
She kissed him scaredly on the chin. “Say, Eveline, I like you so much. You’re the swellest girl.” She smiled at him and suddenly he was hugging her tight, his legs hard and strong against her legs, his hands spread over her back, his lips trying to open her lips. She got her mouth away from him. “No, no, please don’t,” she could hear her little creaky voice saying.
“All right, I’m sorry. . . . No more caveman stuff, honest injun, Eveline. But you mustn’t forget that you’re the most attractive girl on the boat. . . . I mean in the world, you know how a feller feels.”
He started down first. Letting herself down through the opening in the bottom of the crowsnest she began to get dizzy. She was falling. His arms tightened around her.
“That’s all right, girly, your foot slipped,” he said gruffly in her ear. “I’ve got you.”
Her head was swimming, she couldn’t seem to make her arms and legs work; she could hear her little moaning voice, “Don’t drop me, Dirk, don’t drop me.”
When they finally got down the ladder to the deck Dirk leaned against the mast and let out a long breath, “Whee . . . you certainly give me a scare, young lady.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was silly of me to suddenly get girlish like that. . . . I must have fainted for a minute.”
“Gosh, I oughtn’t to have taken you up there.”
“I’m glad you did,” Eveline said; then she found herself blushing and hurried off down the main deck to the first class entrance and the stateroom, where she had made up a story to explain to mother how she’d torn her stocking.
She couldn’t sleep that night but lay awake in her bunk listening to the distant rhythm of the engines and the creaking of the ship and the seethe of churned seas that came in through the open porthole. She could still feel the soft brush of his cheek and the sudden tightening muscles of his arms around her shoulder. She knew now she was terribly in love with Dirk and wished he?
??d propose to her. But next morning she was really flattered when Judge Ganch, a tall whitehaired lawyer from Salt Lake City with a young red face and a breezy manner sat on the end of her deckchair and talked to her by the hour about his early life in the west and his unhappy marriage and politics and Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive party. She’d rather have been with Dirk, but it made her feel pretty and excited to see Dirk walk past with his nose out of joint while she listened to Judge Ganch’s stories. She wished the trip would never end.
Back in Chicago she saw a lot of Dirk McArthur. He always kissed her when he brought her home and he held her very tight when he danced with her and sometimes used to hold her hand and tell her what a nice girl she was, but he never would say anything about getting married. Once she met Sally Emerson at a dance she’d gone to with Dirk she had to admit that she wasn’t doing any painting, and Sally Emerson looked so disappointed that Eveline felt quite ashamed and started talking fast about Gordon Craig and an exhibition of Matisse she’d seen in Paris. Sally Emerson was just leaving. A young man was waiting to dance with Eveline. Sally Emerson took her hand and said: “But, Eveline, you mustn’t forget that we have high hopes of you.” And while she was dancing everything that Sally Emerson stood for and how wonderful she used to think her came sweeping through Eveline’s head; but driving home with Dirk all these thoughts were dazzled out of her in the glare of his headlights, the strong leap forward of the car on the pickup, the purr of the motor, his arm around her, the great force pressing her against him when they went around curves.
It was a hot night, he drove west through endless identical suburbs out into the prairie. Eveline knew that they ought to go home, everybody was back from Europe now and they’d notice how late she got in, but she didn’t say anything. It was only when he stopped the car that she noticed that he was very drunk. He took out a flask and offered her a drink. She shook her head. They’d stopped in front of a white barn. In the reflection of the headlights his shirtfront and his face and his mussed up hair all looked chalky white. “You don’t love me, Dirk,” she said. “Sure I do, love you better’n anybody . . . except myself . . . that’s a trouble with me . . . love myself best.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair, “You’re pretty silly, do you know it?” “Ouch,” he said. It was starting to rain so he turned the car around and made for Chicago.