The girls

by Edna Ferber

Lottie, still breathing fast, was the first to rise. "I had to," she explained, "or bust."

"Sure," said the poet and Charley, together. Charley continued. "Lotta, I'll sit in the front seat going home. You and Jesse can get chummy in the back——"

"Oh, no—" But when they were ready to go it had, somehow, arranged itself in that way. Charley invariably gained her own end thus. "Will you let me drive part of the way, Mr. Gartz? Please!"

He shook a worried head. "Why, say, I'd like to, Miss Charley, but I'm afraid you don't understand this little ol' bus of mine. I'm afraid I'd be nervous with anybody else running it. You'd better just let me——"

But in the end it was Charley's slim strong hands that guided the wheel. Ben Gartz sat beside her, tense, watchful, working brakes that were not there. Under the girl's expert guidance the car took the hills like a hawk, swooped, flew, purred. "Say, you better slow down a little," Ben cautioned her again and again. Then, grudgingly, glancing sideways at her lovely young profile, vivid, electric, laughing, "You're some driver, kid!"

Lottie, in the back seat, was being charmed by Jesse Dick. She felt as if she had known him for years. He talked little—that is, he would express himself with tremendous enthusiasm on a topic so that you caught the spark of his warmth. Then he would fall silent and his silence was a glowing thing. He sat slumped down on the middle of his spine in a corner of the seat. He rarely glanced at Charley. His eyes flattered Lottie. She found herself being witty and a little hard. She thought now: "Here's one that's different enough. And I haven't an idea of what's going on in his handsome head. Not an idea. Not—" she giggled a little and Jesse Dick was so companionable that he did not even ask her what she was laughing at—"not an iota of an idea."

In August Lottie accompanied her mother and Aunt Charlotte up to one of the Michigan lake resorts. They went there every summer. The food was good, the air superb, the people typical of any Michigan first-class resort. Jeannette had gone to spend ten days in a girls' camp in Wisconsin. She had a job promised for September. The Paysons had a three-room cottage near the hotel and under the hotel's management; took their meals in the hotel dining room. The cottage boasted a vine-covered porch and a tiny garden. The days were not half bad. Mrs. Payson played bridge occasionally. Aunt Charlotte rocked and knitted and watched the young girls in their gay sweaters and flat-heeled white shoes and smart loud skirts. Lottie even played golf occasionally, when her mother and Aunt Charlotte were napping or resting, or safely disposed of on their own cottage porch or hotel veranda. There were few men during the week. On Fridays husbands and fiancés swarmed down on train and boat for the week-end. On Saturday night there was a dance. Lottie, sitting on the porch of their little cottage, could hear the music. Her mother and Aunt Charlotte were always in bed by ten-thirty, at the latest. Often it was an hour earlier than that. The evenings were terrible beyond words. Long, black, velvety nights during which she sat alone on the little porch guarding the two sleeping occupants of the cottage; staring out into the darkness. The crickets cheeped and chirped. A young girl's laugh rang out from the hotel veranda beyond. A man's voice sounded, low, resonant, as two quiet figures wound their way along one of the little paths that led down to the water. A blundering moth bumped its head against the screen door. A little group of hotel kitchen-girls and dish-washers skirted the back of the cottage on their way to their quarters, talking gutturally. The evenings were terrible beyond words.

CHAPTER XIII

It was Lottie Payson's last August of that sort. When next August came round there she was folding gauze, rolling bandages, stitching pneumonia jackets with the rest of them at the Michigan Avenue Red Cross shop and thinking to herself that the conversation of the women busy about the long tables or at the machines was startlingly like that of the old Reading Club. The Reading Club was, in fact, there almost in its entirety. The Girls' faces, framed in the white linen folds of their Red Cross coifs, looked strangely purified and aloof. Beck Schaefer alone wore her cap with a certain diablerie. She was captain of her section and her official coif was scarlet. She looked like Carmen strayed into a nunnery. A strange new spirit had come upon Chicago that summer. People talked high, and worked hard, prayed a good deal, gave their money away liberally and did not go to northern Michigan to escape the heat. Lottie sewed at the Red Cross shop three days every week. Even Mrs. Carrie Payson seemed to realize that driving about the parks and boulevards on summer afternoons was not quite the thing. When autumn came she was selling Liberty Bonds in the sure-fire manner of a professional. As for great-aunt Charlotte—the hand that had sewed and folded and stitched during the four years of the '60s and that had fashioned the prize-winning patchwork silk quilt in the '70s had not lost its cunning. She knitted with a speed and perfection nothing short of miraculous, turning out a sweater in three days, a pair of socks in two. The dip, bite, and recovery of her needles was machine-like in its regularity. She folded and rolled bandages as well, having enrolled in a Red Cross shop established in the parlours of a near-by hotel. Even Jeannette had been caught by the spirit of the new order. Her wage as stenographer was a queenly sum these days; and while she could not resist silk stockings, new hats, expensive blouses, and gloves, and talked of a fur coat for the coming winter (every self-respecting stenographer boasted one by December) she still had enough left to contribute freely to every drive, fund, association, and relief committee connected with the war. She had long ago paid back the hundred dollars to that Otto who had been whisked away in the first draft. Even Hulda in the kitchen had deserted her yards of crochet for a hank of wool. Henry Kemp worked nights as a member of the district draft board. Charley danced in benefits all the way from Lake Forest to South Chicago, and enrolled as Emergency Driver for Sunday work. Alone, of all the family, Belle remained aloof. True, she knitted now and then, languidly. But the Red Cross sewing gave her a headache, she said; the excitement affected her digestive disorder. She was anti-war, anti-draft, anti-Wilson.

And Ben Gartz thrived. If anyone had ever doubted Ben Gartz's business foresight that person was forever silenced now. On every martial male left arm—rookie or general, gob or admiral—reposed a wrist watch. And now when Ben Gartz offered Henry a plump brown cylinder with the customary "Have a cigar!" Henry took it reluctantly, if reverently, eyed its scarlet and gold belly-band with appreciation, and knew better than to proffer one of his own inferior brand in return. "I'll smoke it after dinner," he would say, and tuck it away in his vest pocket. Henry Kemp had aged in the last year. His business was keeping its head barely above water with the makeshift of American manufactured products.