1919

Daughter

The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl. Her real name was Anne Elizabeth Trent after poor dear mother who had died when she was a little tiny girl but Dad and the boys called her Daughter. Buddy’s real name was William Delaney Trent like Dad who was a prominent attorney, and Buster’s real name was Spencer Anderson Trent.

Winters they went to school and summers they ran wild on the ranch that grandfather had taken up as a pioneer. When they’d been very little there hadn’t been any fences yet and still a few maverick steers out along the creekbottoms, but by the time Daughter was in highschool everything was fenced and they were building a macadam road out from Dallas and Dad went everywhere in the Ford instead of on his fine Arab stallion Mullah he’d been given by a stockman at the Fat Stock Show in Waco when the stockman had gone broke and hadn’t been able to pay his lawyer’s fee. Daughter had a creamcolored pony named Coffee who’d nod his head and paw with his hoof when he wanted a lump of sugar, but some of the girls she knew had cars and Daughter and the boys kept after Dad to buy a car, a real car instead of that miserable old flivver he drove around the ranch.

When Dad bought a Pierce Arrow touring car the spring Daughter graduated from highschool, she was the happiest girl in the world. Sitting at the wheel in a fluffy white dress the morning of Commencement outside the house waiting for Dad, who had just come out from the office and was changing his clothes, she had thought how much she’d like to be able to see herself sitting there in the not too hot June morning in the lustrous black shiny car among the shiny brass and nickel fixtures under the shiny paleblue big Texas sky in the middle of the big flat rich Texas country that ran for two hundred miles in every direction. She could see half her face in the little oval mirror on the mudguard. It looked red and sunburned under her sandybrown hair. If she only had red hair and a skin white like buttermilk like Susan Gillespie had, she was wishing when she saw Joe Washburn coming along the street dark and seriouslooking under his panama hat. She fixed her face in a shy kind of smile just in time to have him say, “How lovely you look, Daughter, you must excuse ma sayin’ so.” “I’m just waiting for Dad and the boys to go to the exercises. O Joe, we’re late and I’m so excited…. I feel like a sight.”

“Well, have a good time.” He walked on unhurriedly putting his hat back on his head as he went. Something hotter than the June sunshine had come out of Joe’s very dark eyes and run in a blush over her face and down the back of her neck under her thin dress and down the middle of her bosom, where the little breasts that she tried never to think of were just beginning to be noticeable. At last Dad and the boys came out all looking blonde and dressed up and sunburned. Dad made her sit in the back seat with Bud who sat up stiff as a poker.

The big wind that had come up drove grit in their faces. After she caught sight of the brick buildings of the highschool and the crowd and the light dresses and the stands and the big flag with the stripes all wiggling against the sky she got so excited she never remembered anything that happened.

That night, wearing her first evening dress at the dance she came to in the feeling of tulle and powder and crowds, boys all stiff and scared in their dark coats, girls packing into the dressing room to look at each other’s dresses. She never said a word while she was dancing, just smiled and held her head a little to one side and hoped somebody would cut in. Half the time she didn’t know who she was dancing with, just moved smiling in a cloud of pink tulle and colored lights; boys’ faces bobbed in front of her, tried to say smarty ladykillerish things or else were shy and tonguetied, different colored faces on top of the same stiff bodies. Honestly she was surprised when Susan Gillespie came up to her when they were getting their wraps to go home and giggled, “My dear, you were the belle of the ball.” When Bud and Buster said so next morning and old black Emma who’d brought them all up after mother died came in from the kitchen and said, “Lawsy, Miss Annie, folks is talkin’ all over town abut how you was the belle of the ball last night,” she felt herself blushing happily all over. Emma said she’d heard it from that noaccount yaller man on the milk route whose aunt worked at Mrs. Washburn’s, then she set down the popovers and went out with a grin as wide as a piano. “Well, Daughter,” said Dad in his deep quiet voice, tapping the top of her hand, “I thought so myself but I thought maybe I was prejudiced.”

During the summer Joe Washburn, who’d just graduated from law school at Austin and who was going into Dad’s office in the fall, came and spent two weeks with them on the ranch. Daughter was just horrid to him, made old Hildreth give him a mean little old oneeyed pony to ride, put horned toads in his cot, would hand him hot chile sauce instead of catsup at table or try to get him to put salt instead of sugar in his coffee. The boys got so off her they wouldn’t speak to her and Dad said she was getting to be a regular tomboy, but she couldn’t seem to stop acting like she did.

Then one day they all rode over to eat supper on Clear Creek and went swimming by moonlight in the deep hole there was under the bluff. Daughter got a crazy streak in her after a while and ran up and said she was going to dive from the edge of the bluff. The water looked so good and the moon floated shivering on top. They all yelled at her not to do it but she made a dandy dive right from the edge. But something was the matter. She’d hit her head, it hurt terribly. She was swallowing water, she was fighting a great weight that was pressing down on her, that was Joe. The moonlight flowed out in a swirl leaving it all black, only she had her arms around Joe’s neck, her fingers were tightening around the ribbed muscles of his arms. She came to with his face looking into hers and the moon up in the sky again and warm stuff pouring over her forehead. She was trying to say, “Joe, I wanto, Joe, I wanto,” but it all drained away into warm sticky black again, only she caught his voice deep, deep…“pretty near had me drowned too…” and Dad sharp and angry like in court, “I told her she oughtn’t to dive off there.”

She came to herself again in bed with her head hurting horribly and Dr. Winslow there, and the first thing she thought was where was Joe and had she acted like a little silly telling him she was crazy about him? But nobody said anything about it and they were all awful nice to her except that Dad came, still talking with his angry courtroom voice, and lectured her for being foolhardy and a tomboy and having almost cost Joe his life by the stranglehold she had on him when they’d pulled them both out of the water. She had a fractured skull and had to be in bed all summer and Joe was awful nice though he looked at her kinder funny out of his sharp black eyes the first time he came in her room. As long as he stayed on the ranch he came to read to her after lunch. He read her all of Lorna Doone and half of Nicholas Nickleby and she lay there in bed, hot and cosy in her fever, feeling the rumble of his deep voice through the pain in her head and fighting all the time inside not to cry out like a little silly that she was crazy about him and why didn’t he like her just a little bit. When he’d gone it wasn’t any fun being sick any more. Dad or Bud came and read to her sometimes but most of the time she liked better reading to herself. She read all of Dickens, Lorna Doone twice, and Poole’s The Harbor, that made her want to go to New York.

Next fall Dad took her north for a year in a finishing school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was excited on the trip up on the train and loved every minute of it, but Miss Tynge’s was horrid and the girls were all northern girls and so mean and made fun of her clothes and talked about nothing but Newport, and Southampton, and matinée idols she’d never seen; she hated it. She cried every night after she’d gone to bed thinking how she hated the school and how Joe Washburn would never like her now. When Christmas vacation came and she had to stay on with the two Miss Tynges and some of the teachers who lived too far away to go home either, she just decided she wouldn’t stand it any longer and one morning before anybody was up she got out of the house, walked down to the station, bought herself a ticket to Washington, and got on the first westbound train with nothing but a toothbrush and a nightgown in her handbag. She was scared all alone on the train at first but such a nice young Virginian who was a West Point Cadet got on at Havre de Grace where she had to change; they had the time of their lives together laughing and talking. In Washington he asked permission to be her escort in the nicest way and took her all around, to see the Capitol and the White House and the Smithsonian Institute and set her up to lunch at the New Willard and put her on the train for St. Louis that night. His name was Paul English. She promised she’d write him every day of her life. She was so excited she couldn’t sleep lying in her berth looking out of the window of the pullman at the trees and the circling hills all in the faint glow of snow and now and then lights speeding by; she could remember exactly how he looked and how his hair was parted and the long confident grip of his hand when they said goodby. She’d been a little nervous at first, but they’d been like old friends right from the beginning and he’d been so courteous and gentlemanly. He’d been her first pickup.

When she walked in on Dad and the boys at breakfast a sunny winter morning two days later, my, weren’t they surprised; Dad tried to scold her, but Daughter could see that he was as pleased as she was. Anyway, she didn’t care, it was so good to be home.

After Christmas she and Dad and the boys went for a week’s hunting down near Corpus Christi and had the time of their lives and Daughter shot her first deer. When they got back to Dallas Daughter said she wasn’t going back to be finished but that what she would like to do was go up to New York to stay with Ada Washburn, who was studying at Columbia, and to take courses where she’d really learn something. Ada was Joe Washburn’s sister, an old maid but bright as a dollar and was working for her Ph.D in Education. It took a lot of arguing because Dad had set his heart on having Daughter go to a finishing school but she finally convinced him and was off again to New York.

She was reading Les Misérables all the way up on the train and looking out at the greyishbrownish winter landscape that didn’t seem to have any life to it after she left the broad hills of Texas, pale green with winter wheat and alfalfa, feeling more and more excited and scared as hour by hour she got nearer New York. There was a stout motherly woman who’d lost her husband who got on the train at Little Rock and wouldn’t stop talking about the dangers and pitfalls that beset a young woman’s path in big cities. She kept such a strict watch on Daughter that she never got a chance to talk to the interesting looking young man with the intense black eyes who boarded the train at St. Louis and kept going over papers of some kind he had in a brown briefcase. She thought he looked a little like Joe Washburn. At last when they were crossing New Jersey and there got to be more and more factories and grimy industrial towns, Daughter’s heart got to beating so fast she couldn’t sit still but kept having to go out and stamp around in the cold raw air of the vestibule. The fat greyheaded conductor asked her with a teasing laugh if her beau was going to be down at the station to meet her, she seemed so anxious to get in. They were going through Newark then. Only one more stop. The sky was lead color over wet streets full of automobiles and a drizzly rain was pitting the patches of snow with grey. The train began to cross wide desolate saltmarshes, here and there broken by an uneven group of factory structures or a black river with steamboats on it. There didn’t seem to be any people; it looked so cold over those marshes Daughter felt scared and lonely just looking at them and wished she was home. Then suddenly the train was in a tunnel, and the porter was piling all the bags in the front end of the car. She got into the fur coat Dad had bought her as a Christmas present and pulled her gloves on over her hands cold with excitement for fear that maybe Ada Washburn hadn’t gotten her telegram or hadn’t been able to come down to meet her.

But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets full of slush with yellow and grey snowpiles along the sidewalks. “If you’d have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you’d have seen a real blizzard.”

“I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards,” said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. “But it was just an illusion like a lot of things.” “New York’s no place for illusions,” said Ada sharply. “It all looks kinder like a illusion to me,” said Daughter, looking out of the window of the taxicab.

Ada and Esther had a lovely big apartment on University Heights where they had fixed up the dining room as a bedroom for Daughter. She didn’t like New York but it was exciting; everything was grey and grimy and the people all seemed to be foreigners and nobody paid any attention to you except now and then a man tried to pick you up on the street or brushed up against you in the subway which was disgusting. She was signed up as a special student and went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn’t seem to have the right line of talk to interest them. It was fun going to matinées with Ada sometimes or riding down all bundled up on top of the bus to go to the art-museum with Esther on Sunday afternoons, but they were both of them so staid and grown up and all the time getting shocked by things she said and did.

When Paul English called up and asked her to go to a matinée with him one Saturday, she was very thrilled. They’d written a few letters back and forth but they hadn’t seen each other since Washington. She was all morning putting on first one dress and then the other, trying out different ways of doing her hair and was still taking a hot bath when he called for her so that Ada had to entertain him for the longest time. When she saw him all her thrill dribbled away, he looked so stiff and stuckup in his dress uniform. First thing she knew she was kidding him, and acting silly going downtown in the subway so that by the time they got to the Astor where he took her to lunch, he looked sore as a pup. She left him at the table and went to the ladies’ room to see if she couldn’t get her hair to look a little better than it did and got to talking with an elderly Jewish lady in diamonds who’d lost her pocketbook, and when she got back the lunch was standing cold on the table and Paul English was looking at his wristwatch uneasily. She didn’t like the play and he tried to get fresh in the taxicab driving up Riverside Drive although it was still broad daylight, and she slapped his face. He said she was the meanest girl he’d ever met and she said she liked being mean and if he didn’t like it he knew what he could do. Before that she’d made up her mind that she’d crossed him off her list.

She went in her room and cried and wouldn’t take any supper. She felt real miserable having Paul English turn out a pill like that. It was lonely not having anybody to take her out and no chance of meeting anybody because she had to go everywhere with those old maids. She lay on her back on the floor looking at the furniture from underneath like when she’d been little and thinking of Joe Washburn. Ada came in and found her in the silliest position lying on the floor with her legs in the air; she jumped up and kissed her all over her face and hugged her and said she’d been a little idiot but it was all over now and was there anything to eat in the icebox.

When she met Edwin Vinal at one of Ada’s Sunday evening parties that she didn’t usually come out to on account of people sitting around so prim and talking so solemn and deep over their cocoa and cupcakes, it made everything different and she began to like New York. He was a scrawny kind of young fellow who was taking courses in sociology. He sat on a stiff chair with his cocoacup balanced uncomfortably in his hand and didn’t seem to know where to put his legs. He didn’t say anything all evening but just as he was going, he picked up something Ada said about values and began to talk a blue streak, quoting all the time from a man named Veblen. Daughter felt kind of attracted to him and asked who Veblen was, and he began to talk to her. She wasn’t up on what he was talking about but it made her feel lively inside to have him talking right to her like that. He had light hair and black eyebrows and lashes around very pale grey eyes with little gold specks in them. She liked his awkward lanky way of moving around. Next evening he came to see her and brought her a volume of the Theory of the Leisure Class and asked her if she didn’t want to go skating with him at the St. Nicholas rink. She went in her room to get ready and began to dawdle around powdering her face and looking at herself in the glass. “Hey, Anne, for gosh sakes, we haven’t got all night,” he yelled through the door. She had never had iceskates on her feet before, but she knew how to rollerskate, so with Edwin holding her arm she was able to get around the big hall with its band playing and all the tiers of lights and faces around the balcony. She had more fun than she’d had any time since she left home.

Edwin Vinal had been a social worker and lived in a settlement house and now he had a scholarship at Columbia but he said the profs were too theoretical and never seemed to realize it was real people like you and me they were dealing with. Daughter had done churchwork and taken around baskets to poorwhite families at Christmas time and said she’d like to do some socialservicework right here in New York. As they were taking off their skates he asked her if she really meant it and she smiled up at him and said, “Hope I may die if I don’t.”

So the next evening he took her downtown threequarters of an hour’s ride in the subway and then a long stretch on a crosstown car to a settlement house on Grand Street where she had to wait while he gave an English lesson to a class of greasylooking young Lithuanians or Polaks or something like that. Then they walked around the streets and Edwin pointed out the conditions. It was like the Mexican part of San Antonio or Houston only there were all kinds of foreigners. None of them looked as if they ever bathed and the streets smelt of garbage. There was laundry hanging out everywhere and signs in all kinds of funny languages. Edwin showed her some in Russian and Yiddish, one in Armenian and two in Arabic. The streets were awful crowded and there were pushcarts along the curb and peddlers everywhere and funny smells of cooking coming out of restaurants, and outlandish phonograph music. Edwin pointed out two tiredlooking painted girls who he said were streetwalkers, drunks stumbling out of a saloon, a young man in a checked cap he said was a cadet drumming up trade for a disorderly house, some sallowfaced boys he said were gunmen and dope peddlers. It was a relief when they came up again out of the subway way uptown where a springy wind was blowing down the broad empty streets that smelt of the Hudson River. “Well, Anne, how did you like your little trip to the underworld?”

“Allright,” she said after a pause. “Another time I think I’ll take a gun in my handbag…. But all those people, Edwin, how on earth can you make citizens out of them? We oughtn’t to let all those foreigners come over and mess up our country.”

“You’re entirely wrong,” Edwin snapped at her. “They’d all be decent if they had a chance. We’d be just like them if we hadn’t been lucky enough to be born of decent families in small prosperous American towns.”

“Oh, how can you talk so silly, Edwin, they’re not white people and they never will be. They’s just like Mexicans or somethin’, or niggers.” She caught herself up and swallowed the last word. The colored elevator boy was drowsing on a bench right behind her.

“If you’re not the benightedest little heathen I ever saw,” said Edwin teasingly. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you, well, have you ever thought that Christ was a Jew?”

“Well, I’m fallin’ down with sleep and can’t argue with you but I know you’re wrong.” She went into the elevator and the colored elevator boy got up yawning and stretching. The last she saw of Edwin in the rapidly decreasing patch of light between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the vestibule he was shaking his fist at her. She threw him a kiss without meaning to.

When she got in the apartment, Ada, who was reading in the livingroom, scolded her a little for being so late, but she pleaded that she was too tired and sleepy to be scolded. “What do you think of Edwin Vinal, Ada?” “Why, my dear, I think he’s a splendid young fellow, a little restless maybe, but he’ll settle down…. Why?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Daughter, yawning, “Good night, Ada darlin’.”

She took a hot bath and put a lot of perfume on and went to bed, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Her legs ached from the greasy pavements and she could feel the walls of the tenements sweating lust and filth and the smell of crowded bodies closing in on her, in spite of the perfume she still had the rank garbagy smell in her nose, and the dazzle of street lights and faces pricked her eyes. When she went to sleep she dreamed she had rouged her lips and was walking up and down, up and down with a gun in her handbag; Joe Washburn walked by and she kept catching at his arm to try to make him stop but he kept walking by without looking at her and so did Dad and they wouldn’t look when a big Jew with a beard kept getting closer to her and he smelt horrid of the East Side and garlic and waterclosets and she tried to get the gun out of her bag to shoot him and he had his arms around her and was pulling her face close to his. She couldn’t get the gun out of the handbag and behind the roaring clatter of the subway in her ears was Edwin Vinal’s voice saying, “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? You’re entirely wrong… a Christian, aren’t you? Have you ever thought that Christ would have been just like them if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been born of decent people… a Christian, aren’t you….”

Ada, standing over her in a nightgown, woke her up, “What can be the matter, child?” “I was having a nightmare… isn’t that silly?” said Daughter and sat boltupright in bed. “Did I yell bloody murder?” “I bet you children were out eating Welsh Rabbit, that’s why you were so late,” said Ada, and went back to her room laughing.

That spring Daughter coached a girls’ basketball team at a Y.W.C.A. in the Bronx, and got engaged to Edwin Vinal. She told him she didn’t want to marry anybody for a couple of years yet, and he said he didn’t care about carnal marriage but that the important thing was for them to plan a life of service together. Sunday evenings, when the weather got good, they would go and cook a steak together in Palisades Park and sit there looking through the trees at the lights coming on in the great toothed rockrim of the city and talk about what was good and evil and what real love was. Coming back they’d stand hand in hand in the bow of the ferry boat among the crowd of boyscouts and hikers and picnickers and look at the great sweep of lighted buildings fading away into the ruddy haze down the North River and talk about all the terrible conditions in the city. Edwin would kiss her on the forehead when he said Goodnight and she’d go up in the elevator feeling that the kiss was a dedication.

At the end of June she went home to spend three months on the ranch, but she was very unhappy there that summer. Somehow she couldn’t get around to telling Dad about her engagement. When Joe Washburn came out to spend a week the boys made her furious teasing her about him and telling her that he was engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City, and she got so mad she wouldn’t speak to them and was barely civil to Joe. She insisted on riding a mean little pinto that bucked and threw her once or twice. She drove the car right through a gate one night and busted both lamps to smithereens. When Dad scolded her about her recklessness she’d tell him he oughtn’t to care because she was going back east to earn her own living and he’d be rid of her. Joe Washburn treated her with the same grave kindness as always, and sometimes when she was acting crazy she’d catch a funny understanding kidding gleam in his keen eyes that would make her feel suddenly all weak and silly inside. The night before he left the boys cornered a rattler on the rockpile behind the corral and Daughter dared Joe to pick it up and snap its head off. Joe ran for a forked stick and caught the snake with a jab behind the head and threw it with all his might against the wall of the little smokehouse. As it lay wriggling on the grass with a broken back Bud took its head off with a hoe. It had six rattles and a button. “Daughter,” Joe drawled, looking her in the face with his steady smiling stare, “sometimes you talk like you didn’t have good sense.”

“You’re yaller, that’s what’s the matter with you,” she said.

“Daughter, you’re crazy… you apologize to Joe,” yelled Bud, running up red in the face with the dead snake in his hand. She turned and went into the ranchhouse and threw herself on her bed. She didn’t come out of her room till after Joe had left in the morning.

The week before she left to go back to Columbia she was good as gold and tried to make it up to Dad and the boys by baking cakes for them and attending to the housekeeping for having acted so mean and crazy all summer. She met Ada in Dallas and they engaged a section together. She’d been hoping that Joe would come down to the station to see them off, but he was in Oklahoma City on oil business. On her way north she wrote him a long letter saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her that day with the rattler and wouldn’t he please forgive her.

Daughter worked hard that autumn. She’d gotten herself admitted to the School of Journalism, in spite of Edwin’s disapproval. He wanted her to study to be a teacher or social worker, but she said journalism offered more opportunity. They more or less broke off over it; although they saw each other a good deal, they didn’t talk so much about being engaged. There was a boy named Webb Cruthers studying journalism that Daughter got to be good friends with although Ada said he was no good and wouldn’t let her bring him to the house. He was shorter than she, had dark hair and looked about fifteen although he said he was twentyone. He had a creamy white skin that made people call him Babyface, and a funny confidential way of talking as if he didn’t take what he was saying altogether seriously himself. He said he was an anarchist and talked all the time about politics and the war. He used to take her down to the East Side, too, but it was more fun than going with Edwin. Webb always wanted to go in somewhere to get a drink and talk to people. He took her to saloons and to Romanian rathskellers and Arabian restaurants and more places than she’d ever imagined. He knew everybody everywhere and seemed to manage to make people trust him for the check, because he hardly ever had any money, and when they’d spent whatever she had with her Webb would have to charge the rest. Daughter didn’t drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and if he began to get too obstreperous, she’d make him take her to the nearest subway and go on home. Then next day he’d be a little weak and trembly and tell her about his hangover and funny stories about adventures he’d had when he was tight. He always had pamphlets in his pockets about socialism and syndicalism and copies of Mother Earth or The Masses.

After Christmas Webb got all wrapped up in a strike of textile workers that was going on in a town over in New Jersey. One Sunday they went over to see what it was like. They got off the train at a grimy brick station in the middle of the empty business section, a few people standing around in front of lunchcounters, empty stores closed for Sunday; there seemed nothing special about the town until they walked out to the long low square brick buildings of the mills. There were knots of policemen in blue standing about in the wide muddy roadway outside and inside the wiremesh gates huskylooking young men in khaki. “These are special deputies, the sons of bitches,” muttered Webb between his teeth. They went to Strike Headquarters to see a girl Webb knew who was doing publicity for them. At the head of a grimy stairway crowded with greyfaced foreign men and women in faded greylooking clothes, they found an office noisy with talk and click of typewriters. The hallway was piled with stacks of handbills that a tiredlooking young man was giving out in packages to boys in ragged sweaters. Webb found Sylvia Dalhart, a longnosed girl with glasses who was typing madly at a desk piled with newspapers and clippings. She waves a hand and said, “Webb, wait for me outside. I’m going to show some newspaper guys around and you’d better come.”

Out in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben Compton, a tall young man with a long thin nose and redrimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meeting and asked Webb if he wouldn’t speak. “Jeez, what could I say to those fellers? I’m just a bum of a college student, like you, Ben.” “Tell ’em the workers have got to win the world, tell ’em this fight is part of a great historic battle. Talking’s the easiest part of the movement. The truth’s simple enough.” He had an explosive way of talking with a pause between each sentence, as if the sentence took sometime to come up from someplace way down inside. Daughter sized up that he was attractive, even though he was probably a Jew. “Well, I’ll try to stammer out something about democracy in industry,” said Webb.

Sylvia Dalhart was already pushing them down the stairs. She had with her a pale young man in a raincoat and black felt hat who was chewing the end of a half of a cigar that had gone out. “Fellow-workers, this is Joe Biglow from the Globe,” she had a western burr in her voice that made Daughter feel at home. “We’re going to show him around.”

They went all over town, to strikers’ houses where tiredlooking women in sweaters out at the elbows were cooking up lean Sunday dinners of corned beef and cabbage or stewed meat and potatoes, or in some houses they just had cabbage and bread or just potatoes. Then they went to a lunchroom near the station and ate some lunch. Daughter paid the check as nobody seemed to have any money, and it was time to go to the meeting.

The trolleycar was crowded with strikers and their wives and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town because in that town the Mills owned everything and there was no way of hiring a hall. It had started to sleet, and they got their feet wet wading through the slush to the mean frame building where the meeting was going to be held. When they got to the door there were mounted police out in front. “Hall full,” a cop told them at the streetcorner, “no more allowed inside.”

They stood around in the sleet waiting for somebody with authority. There were thousands of strikers, men and women and boys and girls, the older people talking among themselves in low voices in foreign languages. Webb kept saying, “Jesus, this is outrageous. Somebody ought to do something.” Daughter’s feet were cold and she wanted to go home.

Then Ben Compton came around from the back of the building. People began to gather around him, “There’s Ben… there’s Compton, good boy, Benny,” she heard people saying. Young men moved around through the crowd whispering, “Overflow meeting… stand your ground, folks.”

He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamppost. “Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of the working class. There are not more than forty people in the hall and they close the doors and tell us it’s full…” The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrellas bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrolwagon. “Shame, shame,” people yelled. They began to back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hall. People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street toward the trolley tracks with the cordon of mounted police pressing them on. Suddenly Webb whispered in her ear, “Let me lean on your shoulder,” and jumped on a hydrant.

“This is outrageous,” he shouted, “you people had a permit to use the hall and had hired it and no power on earth has a right to keep you out of it. To hell with the cossacks.”

Two mounted police were loping towards him, opening a lane through the crowd as they came. Webb was off the hydrant and had grabbed Daughter’s hand, “Let’s run like hell,” he whispered and was off doubling back and forth among the scurrying people. She followed him laughing and out of breath. A trolley car was coming down the main street. Webb caught it on the move but she couldn’t make it and had to wait for the next. Meanwhile the cops were riding slowly back and forth among the crowd breaking it up.

Daughter’s feet ached from paddling in slush all afternoon and she was thinking that she ought to get home before she caught her death of cold. At the station waiting for the train she saw Webb. He looked scared to death. He’d pulled his cap down over his eyes and his muffler up over this chin and pretended not to know Daughter when she went up to him. Once they got on the overheated train he sneaked up the aisle and sat down next to her.

“I was afraid some dick ud recognize me at the station,” he whispered. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“I thought it was terrible… they’re all so yaller… the only people looked good to me were those boys guardin’ the mills, they looked like white men…. And as for you, Webb Cruthers, you ran like a deer.”

“Don’t talk so loud…. Do you think I ought to have waited and gotten arrested like Ben.”

“Of course it’s none of my business.”

“You don’t understand revolutionary tactics, Anne.”

Going over on the ferry they were both of them cold and hungry. Webb said he had the key to a room a friend of his had down on Eighth Street and that they’d better go there and warm their feet and make some tea before they went uptown. They had a long sullen walk, neither of them saying anything, from the ferry landing to the house. The room, that smelt of turpentine and was untidy, turned out to be a big studio heated by a gasburner. It was cold as Greenland, so they wrapped themselves in blankets and took off their shoes and stockings and toasted their feet in front of the gas. Daughter took her skirt off under the blanket and hung it up over the heater. “Well, I declare,” she said, “if your friend comes in we sure will be compromised.”

“He won’t,” said Webb, “he’s up at Cold Spring for the weekend.” Webb was moving around in his bare feet, putting on water to boil and making toast. “You’d better take your trousers off, Webb, I can see the water dripping off them from here.” Webb blushed and pulled them off, draping the blanket around himself like a Roman senator.

For a long time they didn’t say anything and all they could hear above the distant hum of traffic was the hiss of the gasflame and the intermittent purr of the kettle just beginning to boil. Then Webb suddenly began to talk in a nervous spluttering way. “So you think I’m yellow, do you? Well, you may be right, Anne… not that I give a damn… I mean, you see, there’s times when a fellow ought to be a coward and times when he ought to do the he-man stuff. Now don’t talk for a minute, let me say something…. I’m hellishly attracted to you… and it’s been yellow of me not to tell you about it before, see? I don’t believe in love or anything like that, all bourgeois nonsense; but I think when people are attracted to each other I think it’s yellow of them not to… you know what I mean.”

“No, I doan’, Webb,” said Daughter after a pause.

Webb looked at her in a puzzled way as he brought her a cup of tea and some buttered toast with a piece of cheese on it. They ate in silence for a while; it was so quiet they could hear each other gulping little swallows of tea. “Now, what in Jesus Christ’s name did you mean by that?” Webb suddenly shouted out.

Daughter felt warm and drowsy in her blanket, with the hot tea in her and the dry gasheat licking the soles of her feet. “Well, what does anybody mean by anything,” she mumbled dreamily.

Webb put down his teacup and began to walk up and down the room trailing the blanket after him. “S — t,” he suddenly said, as he stepped on a thumbtack. He stood on one leg looking at the sole of his foot that was black from the grime of the floor. “But, Jesus Christ, Anne… people ought to be free and happy about sex… come ahead let’s.” His cheeks were pink and his black hair that needed cutting was every which way. He kept on standing on one leg and looking at the sole of his foot. Daughter began to laugh. “You look awful funny like that, Webb.” She felt a warm glow all over her. “Give me another cup of tea and make me some more toast.”

After she’d had the tea and toast she said, “Well, isn’t it about time we ought to be going uptown?” “But Christ, Anne, I’m making indecent proposals to you,” he said shrilly, half laughing and half in tears. “For God’s sake pay attention… Damn it, I’ll make you pay attention, you little bitch.” He dropped his blanket and ran at her. She could see he was fighting mad. He pulled her up out of her chair and kissed her on the mouth. She had quite a tussle with him, as he was wiry and strong, but she managed to get her forearm under his chin and to push his face away far enough to give him a punch on the nose. His nose began to bleed. “Don’t be silly, Webb,” she said, breathing hard, “I don’t want that sort of thing, not yet, anyway… go and wash your face.”

He went to the sink and began dabbling his face with water. Daughter hurried into her skirt and shoes and stockings and went over to the sink where he was washing his face, “That was mean of me, Webb, I’m terribly sorry. There’s something always makes me be mean to people I like.” Webb wouldn’t say anything for a long time. His nose was still bleeding.

“Go along home,” he said, “I’m going to stay here…. It’s all right… my mistake.”

She put on her dripping raincoat and went out into the shiny evening streets. All the way home on the express in the subway she was feeling warm and tender towards Webb, like towards Dad or the boys.

She didn’t see him for several days, then one evening he called and asked her if she wanted to go out on the picket line next morning. It was still dark when she met him at the ferry station. They were both cold and sleepy and didn’t say much going out on the train. From the train they had to run through the slippery streets to get to the mills in time to join the picket line. Faces looked cold and pinched in the blue early light. Women had shawls over their heads, few of the men or boys had overcoats. The young girls were all shivering in their cheap fancy topcoats that had no warmth to them. The cops had already begun to break up the head of the line. Some of the strikers were singing Solidarity Forever, others were yelling Scabs, Scabs and making funny long jeering hoots. Daughter was confused and excited.

Suddenly everybody around her broke and ran and left her in a stretch of empty street in front of the wire fencing of the mills. Ten feet in front of her a young woman slipped and fell. Daughter caught the scared look in her eyes that were round and black. Daughter stepped forward to help her up but two policemen were ahead of her swinging their nightsticks. Daughter thought they were going to help the girl up. She stood still for a second, frozen in her tracks when she saw one of the policemen’s feet shoot out. He’d kicked the girl full in the face. Daughter never remembered what happened except that she was wanting a gun and punching into the policeman’s big red face and against the buttons and the thick heavy cloth of his overcoat. Something crashed down on her head from behind; dizzy and sick she was being pushed into the policewagon. In front of her was the girl’s face all caved in and bleeding. In the darkness inside were other men and women cursing and laughing. But Daughter and the woman opposite looked at each other dazedly and said nothing. Then the door closed behind them and they were in the dark.

When they were committed she was charged with rioting, felonious assault, obstructing an officer and inciting to sedition. It wasn’t so bad in the county jail. The women’s section was crowded with strikers, all the cells were full of girls laughing and talking, singing songs and telling each other how they’d been arrested, how long they’d been in, how they were going to win the strike. In Daughter’s cell the girls all clustered around her and wanted to know how she’d gotten there. She began to feel she was quite a hero. Towards evening her name was called and she found Webb and Ada and a lawyer clustered around the policesergeant’s desk. Ada was mad, “Read that, young woman, and see how that’ll sound back home,” she said, poking an afternoon paper under her nose.

TEXAS BELLE ASSAULTS COP said one headline. Then followed an account of her knocking down a policeman with a left on the jaw. She was released on a thousand dollars bail; outside the jail, Ben Compton broke away from the group of reporters around him and rushed up to her. “Congratulations, Miss Trent,” he said, “that was a darn nervy thing to do… made a very good impression in the press.” Sylvia Dalhart was with him. She threw her arms around her and kissed her: “That was a mighty spunky thing to do. Say, we’re sending a delegation to Washington to see President Wilson and present a petition and we want you on it. The President will refuse to see the delegation and you’ll have a chance to picket the White House and get arrested again.”

“Well, I declare,” said Ada when they were safely on the train for New York. “I think you’ve lost your mind.” “You’d have done the same thing, Ada darlin’, if you’d seen what I saw… when I tell Dad and the boys about it they’ll see red. It’s the most outrageous thing I ever heard of.” Then she burst out crying.

When they got back to Ada’s apartment they found a telegram from Dad saying Coming at once. Make no statement until I arrive. Late that night another telegram came; it read: Dad seriously ill come on home at once have Ada retain best lawyer obtainable. In the morning Daughter scared and trembling was on the first train south. At St. Louis she got a telegram saying Don’t worry condition fair double pneumonia. Upset as she was it certainly did her good to see the wide Texas country, the spring crops beginning, a few bluebonnets in bloom. Buster was there to meet her at the depot, “Well, Daughter,” he said after he had taken her bag, “you’ve almost killed Dad.”

Buster was sixteen and captain of the highschool ball team. Driving her up to the house in the new Stutz he told her how things were. Bud had been tearing things up at the University and was on the edge of getting fired and had gotten balled up with a girl in Galveston who was trying to blackmail him. Dad had been very much worried because he’d gotten in too deep in the oil game and seeing Daughter spread all over the front page for knocking down a cop had about finished him; old Emma was getting too old to run the house for them anymore and it was up to Daughter to give up her crazy ideas and stay home and keep house for them. “See this car? A dandy ain’t it…. I bought it myself…. Did a little tradin’ in options up near Amarillo on my own, jus’ for the hell of it, and I made five thousand bucks.” “Why, you smart kid. I tell you, Bud, it’s good to be home. But about the policeman you’d have done the same yourself or you’re not my brother. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. Believe me it does me good to see Texas faces after those mean weaselfaced Easterners.” Dr. Winslow was in the hall when they came in. He shook hands warmly and told her how well she was looking and not to worry because he’d pull her Dad through if it was the last thing he did on earth. The sickroom and Dad’s restless flushed face made her feel awful, and she didn’t like finding a trained nurse running the house.

After Dad began to get around a little they both went down to Port Arthur for a couple of weeks for a change to stay with an old friend of Dad’s. Dad said he’d give her a car if she’d stay on, and that he’d get her out of this silly mess she’d gotten into up north.

She began to play a lot of tennis and golf again and to go out a good deal socially. Joe Washburn had married and was living in Oklahoma getting rich on oil. She felt easier in Dallas when he wasn’t there; seeing him upset her so. The next fall Daughter went down to Austin to finish her journalism course, mostly because she thought her being there would keep Bud in the straight and narrow. Friday afternoons they drove back home together in her Buick sedan for the weekend. Dad had bought a new Tudor style house way out and all her spare time was taken up picking out furniture and hanging curtains and arranging the rooms. She had a great many beaux always coming around to take her out and had to start keeping an engagement book. Especially after the declaration of war social life became very hectic. She was going every minute and never got any sleep. Everybody was getting commissions or leaving for officers training camps. Daughter went in for Red Cross work and organized a canteen, but that wasn’t enough and she kept applying to be sent abroad. Bud went down to San Antonio to learn to fly and Buster, who’d been in the militia, lied about his age and joined up as a private and was sent to Jefferson Barracks. At the canteen she lived in a whirl and had one or two proposals of marriage a week, but she always told them that she hadn’t any intention of being a war bride.

Then one morning a War Department telegram came. Dad was in Austin on business so she opened it. Bud had crashed, killed. First thing Daughter thought was how hard it would hit Dad. The phone rang; it was a long distance call from San Antonio, sounded like Joe Washburn’s voice. “Is that you, Joe?” she said weakly. “Daughter, I want to speak to your father,” came his grave drawl. “I know… O Joe.”

“It was his first solo flight. He was a great boy. Nobody seems to know how it happened. Must have been defect in structure. I’ll call Austin. I know where to get hold of him…. I’ve got the number… see you soon, Daughter.” Joe rang off. Daughter went into her room and burrowed face down into the bed that hadn’t been made up. For a minute she tried to imagine that she hadn’t gotten up yet, that she dreamed the phone ringing and Joe’s voice. Then she thought of Bud so sharply it was as if he’d come into the room, the way he laughed, the hard pressure of his long thin hand over her hands when he’d suddenly grabbed the wheel when they’d skidded going around a corner into San Antonio the last time she’d driven him down after a leave, the clean anxious lean look of his face above the tight khaki collar of the uniform. Then she heard Joe’s voice again: Must have been some defect in structure.

She went down and jumped into her car. At the fillingstation where she filled up with gas and oil the garageman asked her how the boys liked it in the army. She couldn’t stop to tell him about it now. “Bully, they like it fine,” she said, with a grin that hurt her like a slap in the face. She wired Dad at his lawpartner’s office that she was coming and pulled out of town for Austin. The roads were in bad shape, it made her feel better to feel the car plough through the muddy ruts and the water spraying out in a wave on either side when she went through a puddle at fifty.

She averaged fortyfive all the way and got to Austin before dark. Dad had already gone down to San Antonio on the train. Dead tired, she started off. She had a blowout and it took her a long time to get it fixed; it was midnight before she drew up at the Menger. Automatically she looked at herself in the little mirror before going in. There were streaks of mud on her face and her eyes were red.

In the lobby she found Dad and Joe Washburn sitting side by side with burntout cigars in their mouths. Their faces looked a little alike. Must have been the grey drawn look that made them look alike. She kissed them both. “Dad, you ought to go to bed,” she said briskly. “You look all in.” “I suppose I might as well… There’s nothing left to do,” he said.

“Wait for me, Joe, until I get Dad fixed up,” she said in a low voice as she passed him. She went up to the room with Dad, got herself a room adjoining, ruffled his hair and kissed him very gently and left him to go to bed.

When she got back down to the lobby Joe was sitting in the same place with the same expression on his face. It made her mad to see him like that.

Her sharp brisk voice surprised her. “Come outside a minute, Joe, I want to walk around a little.” The rain had cleared the air. It was a transparent early summer night. “Look here, Joe, who’s responsible for the condition of the planes? I’ve got to know.” “Daughter, how funny you talk… what you ought to do is get some sleep, you’re all overwrought.” “Joe, you answer my question.” “But Daughter, don’t you see nobody’s responsible. The army’s a big institution. Mistakes are inevitable. There’s a lot of money being made by contractors of one kind or another. Whatever you say aviation is in its infancy… we all knew the risks before we joined up.”

“If Bud had been killed in France I wouldn’t have felt like this.. but here… Joe, somebody’s directly responsible for my brother’s death. I want to go and talk to him, that’s all. I won’t do anything silly. You all think I’m a lunatic I know, but I’m thinking of all the other girls who have brothers training to be aviators. The man who inspected those planes is a traitor to his country and ought to be shot down like a dog.” “Look here, Daughter,” Joe said as he brought her back to the hotel, “we’re fightin’ a war now. Individual lives don’t matter, this isn’t the time for lettin’ your personal feelin’s get away with you or embarrassin’ the authorities with criticism. When we’ve licked the huns’ll be plenty of time for gettin’ the incompetents and the crooks… that’s how I feel about it.”

“Well, good night, Joe… you be mighty careful yourself. When do you expect to get your wings?” “Oh, in a couple of weeks.” “How’s Gladys and Bunny?” “Oh, they’re all right,” said Joe; a funny constraint came into his voice and he blushed. “They’re in Tulsa with Mrs. Higgins.”

She went to bed and lay there without moving, feeling desperately quiet and cool; she was too tired to sleep. When morning came she went around to the garage to get her car. She felt in the pocket on the door to see if her handbag was there that always had her little pearlhandled revolver in it, and drove out to the aviation camp. At the gate the sentry wouldn’t let her by, so she sent a note to Colonel Morrissey who was a friend of Dad’s, saying that she must see him at once. The corporal was very nice and got her a chair in the little office at the gate and a few minutes later said he had Colonel Morrissey on the wire. She started to talk to him but she couldn’t think what to say. The desk and the office and the corporal began swaying giddily and she fainted.

She came to in a staffcar with Joe Washburn who was taking her back to the hotel. He was patting her hand saying, “That’s all right, Daughter.” She was clinging to him and crying like a little tiny girl. They put her to bed at the hotel and gave her bromides and the doctor wouldn’t let her get up until after the funeral was over.

She got a reputation for being a little crazy after that. She stayed on in San Antonio. Everything was very gay and tense. All day she worked in a canteen and evenings she went out, supper and dancing, every night with a different aviation officer. Everybody had taken to drinking a great deal. It was like when she used to go to highschool dances, she felt herself moving in a brilliantly lighted daze of suppers and lights and dancing and champagne and different colored faces and stiff identical bodies of men dancing with her, only now she had a kidding line and let them hug her and kiss her in taxicabs, in phonebooths, in people’s backyards.

One night she met Joe Washburn at a party Ida Olsen was giving for some boys who were leaving for overseas. It was the first time she’d ever seen Joe drink. He wasn’t drunk but she could see that he’d been drinking a great deal. They went and sat side by side on the back steps of the kitchen in the dark. It was a clear hot night full of dryflies with a hard hot wind rustling the dry twigs of all the trees. Suddenly she took Joe’s hand: “Oh, Joe, this is awful.”

Joe began to talk about how unhappy he was with his wife, how he was making big money through his oil leases and didn’t give a damn about it, how sick he was of the army. They’d made him an instructor and wouldn’t let him go overseas and he was almost crazy out there in camp. “Oh, Joe, I want to go overseas too. I’m leading such a silly life here.” “You have been actin’ kinder wild, Daughter, since Bud died,” came Joe’s soft deep drawling voice. “Oh, Joe, I wisht I was dead,” she said and put her head on his knee and began to cry. “Don’t cry, Daughter, don’t cry,” he began to say, then suddenly he was kissing her. His kisses were hard and crazy and made her go all limp against him.

“I don’t love anybody but you, Joe,” she suddenly said quietly. But he already had control of himself; “Daughter, forgive me,” he said in a quiet lawyer’s voice, “I don’t know what I was thinking of, I must be crazy… this war is making us all crazy… Good night… Say… er… erase this all from the record, will you?”

That night she couldn’t sleep a wink. At six in the morning she got into her car, filled up with gas and oil and started for Dallas. It was a bright fall morning with blue mist in the hollows. Dry cornstalks rustled on the long hills red and yellow with fall. It was late when she got home. Dad was sitting up reading the war news in pyjamas and bathrobe. “Well, it won’t be long now, Daughter,” he said. “The Hindenburg line is crumpling up. I knew our boys could do it once they got started.” Dad’s face was more lined with his hair whiter than she’d remembered it. She heated up a can of Campbell’s soup as she hadn’t taken any time to eat. They had a cosy little supper together and read a funny letter of Buster’s from Camp Merritt where his outfit was waiting to go overseas. When she went to bed in her own room it was like being a little girl again, she’d always loved times when she got a chance to have a cosy chat with Dad all alone; she went to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

She stayed on in Dallas taking care of Dad; it was only sometimes when she thought of Joe Washburn that she felt she couldn’t stand it another minute. The fake armistice came and then the real armistice, everybody was crazy for a week like a New Orleans mardigras. Daughter decided that she was going to be an old maid and keep house for Dad. Buster came home looking very tanned and full of army slang. She started attending lectures at Southern Methodist, doing church work, getting books out of the circulating library, baking angelcake; when young girlfriends of Buster’s came to the house she acted as a chaperon.

Thanksgiving Joe Washburn and his wife came to dinner with them. Old Emma was sick so Daughter cooked the turkey herself. It was only when they’d all sat down to table, with the yellow candles lighted in the silver candlesticks and the salted nuts set out in the little silver trays and the decoration of pink and purple mapleleaves, that she remembered Bud. She suddenly began to feel faint and ran into her room. She lay face down on the bed listening to their grave voices. Joe came to the door to see what was the matter. She jumped up laughing, and almost scared Joe to death by kissing him square on the mouth. “I’m all right Joe,” she said. “How’s yourself?”

Then she ran to the table and started cheering everybody up, so that they all enjoyed their dinner. When they were drinking their coffee in the other room she told them that she’d signed up to go overseas for six months with the Near East Relief, that had been recruiting at Southern Methodist. Dad was furious and Buster said she ought to stay home now the war was over, but Daughter said, others had given their lives to save the world from the Germans and that she certainly could give up six months to relief work. When she said that they all thought of Bud and were quiet.

It wasn’t actually true that she’d signed up, but she did the next morning and got around Miss Frazier, a returned missionary from China who was arranging it, so that they sent her up to New York that week, with orders to sail immediately with the office in Rome as her first destination. She was so widely excited all the time she was getting her passport and having her uniform fitted, she hardly noticed how glum Dad and Buster looked. She only had a day in New York. When the boat backed out of the dock with its siren screaming and started steaming down the North River, she stood on the front deck with her hair blowing in the wind, sniffing the funny steamboard harbor overseas smell and feeling like a twoyearold.