Charley had been promoted from stock-girl to saleswoman. She said she supposed now she'd have to save up for black satin slippers, a French frock, a string of pearls, and filet collars and cuffs—the working girl's costume. She announced, further, that her education had reached a point where any blouse not hand made and bearing a thirty-nine dollar price tag was a mere rag in her opinion.
Charley's Saturday afternoons and Sundays were spent in the country about Chicago—at the Indiana sand dunes; at Palos Park when May transformed its trees into puff-balls of apple blossoms; in the woods about Beverly; along the far North Shore. Both she and Lottie were hardened trampers. Lottie was expert at what she called "cooking out." She could build a three-section fire with incredibly little fuel and only one match. Just as you were becoming properly ravenous she had the coffee steaming in one section, the bacon sizzling in another, the sausages boiling in another. Now that the Kemp car was gone these country excursions became fewer for Lottie. She missed them. The electric was impossible for country travel. It often expired even on the boulevards and had to be towed back to the garage. Charley said that Jesse Dick's flivver saved her life and youth these spring days. Together they ranged the countryside in it, a slim volume of poetry (not his own) in Jesse Dick's pocket and a plump packet of sandwiches and fruit in a corner of the seat. You were beginning to see reviews of Jesse Dicks' poems in The Dial, in the New Republic, in the weekly literary supplements of the newspapers. They spoke of his work as being "virile and American." They said it had a "warm human quality." He sang everyday life—the grain-pit, the stockyards, the steel mill, the street corner, the movies. Some of the reviews said, "But this isn't poetry!" Perhaps they had just been reading the thing he called "Halsted Street." You know it:
Halsted street. All the nations of the world.
Mill end sales; shlag stores; Polack women gossiping.
Look at the picture of the bride in her borrowed wedding dress
Outside the Italian photograph gallery——
Perhaps they were right.
Still, while he did not write spring poetry of the May-day variety it is certain that not a peach-pink petal on a wild-crab tree blossoming by the roadway bloomed in vain as Jesse and Charley passed by. Not that they were rhapsodic about it. These two belonged to the new order to whom lyricism was loathsome, adjective anathema. Fine and moving things were received with a trite or even an uncouth word or phrase. After a Brahms symphony you said, "Gee!" It was considered "hickey" or ostentatious to speak of a thing as being exquisite or wonderful. They even revived that humourously vulgar and practically obsolete word, "swell." A green and gold and pink May-day landscape was "elegant." Struck by the beauty of a scene, the majesty of a written passage, the magnificence of the lake in a storm, the glory of an orchard in full bloom, they used the crude and rustic "Gosh!" This only when deeply stirred.
Late in May, Ben Gartz bought a car of unimpressive make but florid complexion. He referred to it always as "the bus." As soon as he had mastered it he drove round to the Paysons' and proposed a Sunday morning ride to Lottie.
"Go on, Lottie," Mrs. Payson said, "it'll do you good."