For physically, she got tired of it herself. Thank Heaven the rush which had been accumulating for weeks would be over this evening! It was an added misfortune that the old friend visiting in Elgin had 'phoned that Emily must come to see her this very afternoon, or miss her altogether. So here she and Martha, in the midst of the preparations, were slipping across counties together, as if distance was nothing. And truly to Martha Kenworthy it was nothing worth raising an eyelash excitedly about. They slipped silently by cornfields, with straight little lines of green checking away geometrically for level miles. They slipped by alfalfa-green fields, clover-green fields, oat-green fields, wheat-green fields, farmhouses, high loads of balancing hay, milk trucks. The sun was hot. The air was clear. The sky was blue. And on the horizon magnificently distant, beyond those subtle sloping fields, rose towering white and blooming higher, in puff upon puff and fold upon fold, huge white culminating clouds of dreams. Emily, lulled almost to unconsciousness, saw a black one rising ominously among them.
* * * * * * * * *
"Look at that!" she murmured, breaking a fragrant silence.
Martha looked.
"We should worry!" she replied. She was right, of course. Nothing less than an earthquake could spoil the climax of the women's triumph now.
The growth of their conception, the building of their dream into concrete foundations and that perfect dancing floor, was a thing that every woman who had had a hand in it was wondering over this week, and Emily had more reason than most of them to wonder. For she was by nature less a committee woman than any of them. She had to think out every step of her participation in it, to believe she was really part of it. She always forgot even her most important motives, and puzzled afterwards over all the reasons for her actions which at the time had seemed obvious. In her early married life she had been too poor and too busy to consider the women's club. Besides, it had been bullied then by the aunt whose house Emily had escaped from by marriage. And after the aunt died, and Emily moved again into the good house her grandfather and aunt had been rebuilding for some seventy years, she had not wanted to take her place in the circle which might, she suspected, be discussing the gossip about her husband's speculation with some money her aunt had intrusted to him. And she had had a baby then, soon after she had come back to the house, a poor little starving son who kept her and Bob bending over him night and day for nearly two years. And then Jim had come to them, bringing his tragic son. And her old girlish love for him had risen like a flood, like a flood that never burst its dam, but pushed and pounded there against it—till Jim died.
Life had collapsed then. Just collapsed. It had no content at all. She had come to realize that most of the years of her married life had been given their value by her love of her first lover, her husband's brother. From the day he took his departure from town until the next time he came to see his mother, she had lived in anticipation of the days when he would be about the house, "jollying" in his charming way, his frail and doting mother, and playing about with Martha, and every minute, under his discreet and brotherly words, loving her, the girl he had so incredibly missed marrying. There had been for her then that certainty, and besides that, some place in the depth of her mind a vague, foolish, romantic, unacknowledged hope of some time, some place, loving him altogether. She had to believe that that little hope had been the mainspring of her life. For, after his death, without it, she couldn't go on, she had thought desperately. Life had stopped.
And just then that woman, Mrs. Benton, who had lived in the next block for years, suddenly strode into Emily's consciousness, in the same way that a few years before she had landed with a running jump in the defenseless mind of the community. Mrs. Benton had had an only daughter who had been drowned. She had brooded over the fact for a while, and then risen and said she was going to have every child in that inland town taught to swim. As a memorial to that daughter she would make the town a swimming beach. She had bought a wooded stretch of the river bank. She had dammed the river. She had made a great dark bottomless swimming place for the strong lads, and little clear wading pools for the toddlers. She had made sunny diving places and shady diving places and steep gravel banks and grassy inclines, and dressing rooms of varieties. And all summer she stationed guards there and instructors, and got Johnnie Weismuller to come down to her yearly water festivals, to do his stunts and encourage the winners of all the water races. It was impossible to imagine a swimming beach more skillfully managed. The Rotarians had to acknowledge that the beach was the town's best booster. Who could deny that farmers came now to trade in that town, with their Fords and their Cadillacs packed full of eager bathing suits who had been kept in order the whole week by the promise of a swim on Saturday?
After that, she had gone on to improve the city and ruin the temper of the taxpayers. She had built and she had paved and she had investigated, she had reformed and she had tested laws, and she had hoisted taxes. Men said horrid things about Mrs. Benton. They said, "she was out to raise municipal hell," and that she was "just too damned efficient to live." And when a small boy, a mere little unconsidered Hicks child, quarreling with his playmate, cried, "You needn't think you can go Bentoning around my back yard," they took up the verb derisively and put it into all the male mouths of the county, where it lives to this day.
No sooner had the beach become a success beyond any expectation, than Mrs. Benton had addressed the women's club. "Our children," she said, "swim now from June to October de luxe; and from October to June they dance—how? Behind the Greek's candyshop, where those obscene pictures were found, in the old hall that has no ventilation, or the old opera house controlled by bootleggers. Why should the women not build a winter gathering-place for their children equal to the summer center?" The women had said, "We will." "I wish I could afford to do it all myself," she said. And the plan they made knocked the breath out of their menfolk. Why, demanded husbands, couldn't they listen to common sense and build an ordinary hall? They didn't want a cheap hall. Why couldn't they build it in the town park? It was too low there, and hot and crowded. Why must it be built on the hill across the river from the beach, to which no paved road led, and no bridge was convenient? They some way liked that hill. Why not pave a road and build a bridge and make a great new municipal parking place, which had to be done sooner or later? The city council refused to have any such white elephant forced upon them. White elephant, indeed, the women echoed, Mrs. Benton leading them. A mere kitten for the baby to play with.