When they reached the Hyde Park apartment Charley and the poet were seated on the outer steps in the sun. The poet wore becoming shabby gray tweeds, a soft shirt and no hat. Lottie admitted to herself that he looked charming—even distinguished.
"Don't you own one?" she asked. He quirked one eyebrow. "A hat, I mean."
"Oh." He glanced at Ben's derby. Then he took from one capacious pocket a soft cloth cap and put it on. He glanced then at his hands, affecting great embarrassment. "My gloves!—stick!" He glanced frantically up and down the street. "My spats!"
The three laughed. Ben joined in a little late, and evidently bewildered.
Charley presented her contribution to the picnic lunch. Gussie had baked a caramel cake the day before. Sweaters, boxes, coats, baskets, bundles—they were off.
They headed for Palos Park. Hideous as is the countryside about Chicago in most directions, this spot to the southwest is a thing of loveliness in May and in October. Gently sloping hills relieve the flat monotony of the Illinois prairie landscape. The green of the fields and trees was so tender as to carry with it a suggestion of gold. Jesse and Charley occupied the back seat. Lottie sat in front with Ben Gartz. He drove badly, especially on the hills. The two in the back seat politely refrained from comment or criticism. But on the last steep hill the protesting knock of the tortured engine wrung interference from Charley. To her an engine was a precious thing. She could no more have mistreated it than she could have kicked a baby. "Shift to second!" she cried now, in actual pain. "Can't you hear her knocking!"
They struck camp on a wooded knoll a little ways back from the road and with a view of the countryside for miles around. Ben Gartz presented that most pathetic and incongruous of human spectacles—a fat man, in a derby, at a picnic.
He made himself useful, gathered wood, produced matches, carried water, arranged seats made up of cushions and robes from the car and was not at all offended when the others expressed a preference for the ground.
"Say, this is great!" he exclaimed, again and again, "Yessir! Nothing like getting away from the city, let me tell you, into God's big outdoors." The three smiled at what they took to be an unexpected burst of humour and were startled to see that he was quite serious. Ben tucked a napkin under his vest and played the waiter. He praised the wieners, the coffee, the bacon, the salad. He ate prodigiously, and smiled genially on Lottie and winked an eye in her direction at the same time nodding toward Charley and Jesse to indicate that he was a party to some very special secret that Lottie shared with him. He sat cross-legged on the ground and suffered. When the luncheon was finished he fell upon his cigar with almost a groan of relief.
"Have a cigar, sir?" He proffered a plump brown cylinder to Jesse Dick.