Brush returned to Kansas City by train. It was the first time in his life he had traveled by train on a Sunday. Even so, he was almost late for his appointment in front of the Public Library. He barely had time to rush back to his room at Mrs. Kubinsky’s, change into his best suit, and run next door to take a look at Elizabeth. Elizabeth had entered Queenie’s house a big-eyed pale child that smelled bad; already, however, she had taken on color, and Queenie gave a good account of her disposition.
The girls were already at the Library steps when Brush came running up the hill. They pretended to be deep in conversation.
“I’m only one minute late,” he said. “I just got in from out of town an hour ago.”
“This is my sister Lottie,” said Roberta.
“Yes,” said Brush, smiling. “I remember you from that night I was at your farm.”
Lottie threw a quick glance at him and did not answer. She was not so tall as her sister; she had brown eyes and hair and gave the impression of being matter-of-fact.
“Would you like an ice-cream soda?” asked Brush. “Let’s go to the drug store and have one first.”
Making conversation was not easy. The girls sat on the high stools, earnestly engaged with the straws in their mouths.
“Is it too cold to go out to the park on the bluffs?” asked Brush.
“No, I guess not,” said Lottie; so they all climbed on to a street car. The car was almost full and Roberta took a seat some distance from them.
“What are you interested in?” asked Brush.
“I?” asked Lottie. “Oh, nothing. Anything. Pigs and chickens, I guess, mostly. You see, Mr. Brush,” she added, dryly, looking into his eyes, yet giving the impression that she did not see him, “I’m just a farmer’s daughter—I don’t go in for big ideas.”
“I see,” said Brush, uncomfortably.
Lottie turned her head and looked out of the window, as though she were sitting beside a stranger.
Brush cleared his throat several times, then said: “When we get to the park I want to show you some marks left by the ice-cap.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You see, the North Pole ice used to come all the way down to here. It stopped at Kansas City; that’s what made the rivers. The ice was two thousand feet thick right where we are now. It was so heavy that it crushed the earth out of shape as far as . . . as far as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.”
“Well!”
“Naturally it carried some big rocks along with it, and those rocks ground down the big rocks under them and it’s the marks of that grinding that I’m going to show you in the park.”
“That’ll be fine,” said Lottie, without expression. She turned about and glanced at Roberta, who was sitting five seats behind her. She asked Brush, “When did all this happen?”
“About eight hundred thousand years ago.”
Lottie gazed at him with cold irony, then turned her head away. Another silence ensued. Brush broke it by saying, urgently:
“Lottie, I want you to help me in persuading Roberta. I think it’s tremendously important.”
“Well, it was all an awful mess,” said Lottie, just as quickly, “and I think the less we see of you the better.”
“When I’ve done wrong,” said Brush, in a low voice, “I can’t wait until I’ve done everything I can to make it all right.”
“You both did wrong. But at least it’s all over now and there’s nothing more that can be done about it,” replied Lottie, decisively; then added, “Anyway, let’s get to the park before we talk about it.”
Brush glanced at her sideways. “Can I say one more thing before we change the subject?” he asked.
“I suppose so. What is it?”
“Try not to have a prejudice against me before you know me. I’m not the usual kind of traveling salesman.”
Lottie looked at him with a faint smile. “I think I understand that,” she said, and thereafter things went a little better. Descending from the street car, Lottie gave Roberta a sharp pinch on the elbow.
When they reached the park they sat down on a bench overlooking the river. Lottie sat in the middle tracing designs on the ground with the tip of her umbrella. Brush waited a moment and then plunged into the heart of the matter:
“Don’t you see, Lottie, that all serious-minded people would agree that I’m really her husband already?”
“No.”
“Don’t you see that we can never marry anyone else, unless one of us two is dead? There’s . . . there’s one of the Ten Commandments about that.”
Lottie bit her upper lip and looked at the ground. Brush tried another approach:
“Lottie, what does Roberta want? Does she want to stay in that restaurant? I think it’s an awful place. I can’t let her do that. I owe her a living for the rest of her life and I can afford it easily. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. Can’t you tell me what she wants?”
“Well, to tell the truth, Mr. Brush, she . . .”
“You must call me George, Lottie. Don’t you realize you’re practically my sister?”
“All right. All right. George—to tell the truth, there’s only one thing in the world that Roberta wants, and that is . . .” She glanced sideways at Roberta. Roberta was sobbing. Lottie paused, then stood up and whispered into her sister’s ear: “Roberta, do go off for a few minutes’ walk while I talk to him. Will you, honey?”
Roberta nodded, rose, and sat down on the next bench.
Lottie continued: “She wants papa to like her again.” Brush stared at her. “She wants papa to have a good opinion of her; that’s all. She was papa’s favorite girl of the three of us. It’s been terrible for him, really it has.”
Brush whispered: “But you see I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about what happened.”
“Well . . .” began Lottie, then rejected her impulse to recount the past, and resumed her former thought: “What I think is, if perhaps—when she knows you better and all that—if perhaps you married Roberta, then some day you could call on papa and show him you’re not an ordinary traveling salesman . . . and you could talk to him about the Bible and things like that . . . and then he’d forgive Roberta.”
“Then that’s fine, Lottie. That’s all I ask to do.”
“But, George, don’t you see? What good is it you two being married, if you don’t love each other? What I thought was—”
Brush leaned over her earnestly and said: “I’ll love her pretty well. I’ll love her almost perfectly, you’ll see. She’ll never notice the difference. I’ll tell you, confidentially, that there’s only one other girl in the world I love more.”
Lottie looked at him long and a little sadly. Then she smiled and put a hand on his arm. “George, you’re kind of crazy,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered, hastily, “I know what you mean, if you notice carefully, you’ll see that I’m very logical.”
There was a pause. Then Brush leaned forward and, looking at his shoes, asked, “Lottie . . . why did your father send Roberta away.”
“Why . . . because . . . because . . .”
Brush raised his chin and looked at her.
“She was very sick and. . . . I thought you knew.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Of course. You couldn’t have known.”
“No, I never knew,” breathed Brush.
“Well, on the farm . . . we all went through quite a time . . . papa and . . . mamma . . . and Roberta . . . and I.”
They gazed into one another’s eyes for a moment.
“Lottie, I think you’re fine,” said Brush. “I hope I know you all my life.”
Lottie became confused and looked away. “I guess you will,” she said, almost inaudibly. But she had something else to say. It was such a difficult thing to say that she fell into a false casualness and for a moment her gestures became affected and contradictory: “I was thinking that . . . you might marry Roberta just to please papa . . . then separate right away . . . and after a while get a divorce.”
Brush also turned red. “No,” he said. “You see, there are two things against that. One thing is that I never believe in divorce, and if anybody stops to think about it they can see why. And the other thing is that I never believe in doing anything just for show. I . . . I don’t believe in that. . . . Oh, Lottie, don’t you see that everything’s all right? That we’re going to have a fine American home?”
“Well, I’ve said all I’m going to say. You two’ll have to decide it for yourselves from now on.”
“Are you going to advise her to get married to me, though?”
“George, unless people love each other I don’t think—”
“Lottie, when you have a hard decision to make, you know what you should do? You should go back to the first principles of the matter. You shouldn’t ask what you want to do. You should look at it as though it were somebody else and not yourself. And, that’s all very clear in this case. Lottie, I’ll take the responsibility. I know I’m right. I know I’ll love and protect Roberta until I die.”
“All right,” said Lottie.
“Will you go and ask her to come here? And, Lottie, listen: we’ll have a nice home somewhere and you can come in all the time for Sunday dinner, and the whole family can come in from the farm, too. We’ll have some fine times, you’ll see. For instance, I have a very good tenor voice and the people are always asking me to sing for them. . . . Oh, Lottie, all this that began so badly will end up all right; it’ll end up all the better. Now do you see how important it is?”
Lottie, a little dizzy in the conflict of ideas, went over to where Roberta was sitting. They had a long whispered conversation.
“But he’s crazy,” said Roberta.
“Yes,” said Lottie, “I know. But he’s crazy in a sort of nice way.” She began laughing. “I’d marry him in a minute, myself.”
“You would, Lottie?”
“Yes, I think I would; only, he hasn’t asked me.”
Whereupon they both began laughing into their damp handkerchiefs. “One more ice-cream soda and I’d do it,” said Lottie.
“But, Lottie, he’s terrible!”
“I know. But I’ve decided I prefer him that way. Compare him, I mean, with Gus Brubacker, back home, or Oscy Deschauer. Besides, he told me to tell you he had a fine tenor voice.”
“What’ll we talk about?”
“What?”
“What’ll we talk about? What’ll we talk about when we’re married?”
“Oh, he’s full of conversation. Didn’t you hear him telling me all about the ice that used to be over Kansas City? Besides, he’s so rich that you can have a radio.”
“Is he rich?”
“He talks that way. Hurry, Berta, and make up your mind. He’s waiting and he’ll think we’re laughing at him.”
“Lottie, help me! Shall I?”
“Don’t ask me! Don’t you like him?”
Roberta shook her head, her face suddenly somber. “You know why I could never like him.”
“Listen, Berta, he’ll never drag that up, never. I know. There’s nothing mean about him. He’s kind of stupid, but he’s good as gold. If you ask me, I say you ought to marry him. Then take him to see papa.”
“All right, I will,” said Roberta, rising.
“Wait ’til I blow my nose,” said Lottie.
While this was going on Brush sat on the bench, thinking. He had taken Lottie’s umbrella and was abstractedly tracing initials on the gravel: a large R for Roberta, then an A for Adele, the widow to whom he had proposed marriage on his twenty-first birthday; and F for Frances, Miss Smith, his chemistry teacher in the Ludington High School; at a distance from these initials an M.T. for Marian Truby; whereupon, in a flood of reminiscence, he wrote a J for Jessie Mayhew, a V and S, a C; then erased them all and traced a large R and sat looking at it, Roberta and Lottie were laughing?—laughing or crying?
Finally they came toward him hand in hand. He rose and said: “Before I ask you to marry me again, there’s something else I ought to tell you. I forgot to tell you before that I . . . I own a little girl. A friend of mine died and left me his little girl. She’s the brightest little girl that you could find anywhere, and I know you’ll like her.”
This seemed to make no change in the situation and Roberta accepted his proposal.
He took her hand and said: “It’s going to be fine, Roberta. You’ll see. What you’ll want to do will always be the first thing in my mind. At first, though, I’ll have to be away a good deal on the road, but I’ll write you a letter every day. Later I think I can get the firm to give me the Illinois and Ohio territory. We’re going to have a wonderful life together . . . you’ll see. There’ll be lots of times when we’ll be laughing a lot . . . while we’re washing the dishes, and so on . . . and soon we’ll have a little house of our own. I’m very good at fixing things, like electric lights and furnaces. And I’m good at carpentering, too. I’ll build you an arbor in the back yard where you can sit and sew. And Lottie can come and stay with us long as she wants to. We could never find a better friend than Lottie. . . . Don’t you think it sounds . . . like it’ll be fine?”
Roberta, standing with lowered eyes, said, “Yes.”
“I know I’m kind of funny in some ways,” he added, smiling, “but that’s only these earlier years when I’m trying to think things out. By the time I’m thirty all that kind of thing will be clearer to me, and . . . and it’ll all be settled.”
They were married on Wednesday and had their photograph taken—Queenie, Elizabeth, Lottie, Roberta, and Brush. Brush received a three-weeks vacation from his firm and they moved into a four-room apartment over a drug store. The first installment was paid on a second-hand edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. On the first Sunday after the wedding the Weyerhauser family came into town from the farm to go to church with them and to stay to Sunday dinner. Brush sat at the end of the pew, his arm lightly but proudly lying along the back of it. During the sermon Elizabeth put her head on his lap and went to sleep, and his eyes made a guarded journey about the congregation to ascertain how other fathers met this situation. After church the three younger women busied themselves in the kitchen. Mrs. Weyerhauser had the shock of hearing herself called Grandma—for, Herb having died, Brush and Roberta were now Papa and Ma. The manners of the host and his father-in-law towards one another were still somewhat stately, but they gave promise of becoming more easy with time.
Apparently all was well with the new household, but only apparently, for some flaws began very gradually to reveal themselves. Roberta had been correct in her doubt as to what they would talk about when they were married. For some reason Brush, who had never in his life been at a loss for things to talk about, now found himself hard put to it to fill the long evenings with interesting matter. He took to taking notes during the day on subjects that would serve, and when Roberta called him to dinner he would take out his purse and run his eyes over the topics he had collected. He tried putting forth some of the theories that never ceased fermenting in his mind, and though Roberta listened with lowered eyes (their eyes never met at any time) he found that his eagerness to propound them had somehow left him in this company. He discovered that there was one subject that never failed to arouse Roberta’s interest—the lives and appearance of motion-picture actors—and he took to culling from the papers such items on these subjects as were suitable for retelling in a Christian home.
Another flaw appeared when Brush became aware that he and Roberta were engaged in a furtive, unceasing, game of strategy to obtain the first place in Elizabeth’s affection. The worst of it for Brush lay in the fact that Elizabeth all too often showed a marked preference for himself. This filled him with a satisfaction of which he was soon ashamed. He tried time after time to give the advantage to Roberta, only to be filled with ignoble pleasure when the effort did not succeed.
On the last night before he set out on his long three-months trip (the firm of Caulkins assured him that his approach suited the southern territory more than the northern and refused to consider his application for a change) Lottie came into Kansas City for the farewell dinner. She had a long, earnest conversation with Roberta in the afternoon, and during dinner Brush noted that they had both been crying. He looked at them in surprise, but made no comment. That was left to Elizabeth.
“Mamma cried,” said Elizabeth.
“Eat prettily now!” said Roberta, hastily.
Brush was about to inquire further, when he caught sight of Lottie’s raised eyebrows sending him a signal.
Brush had a theory that children should be permitted to see the stars. The custom that put them to bed at dusk seemed to him to overlook the fact that a frequent view of the stars was an important element in the spiritual education of mankind. For this evening he had obtained permission to delay Elizabeth’s retirement until after dark. Roberta dressed her for the open air and Brush carried her up the ladder to the trap door that opened upon the roof. He moved a soap-box across the floor of tar paper and gravel to the chimney and, seating himself on it, held Elizabeth in his arms and waited for the benefits to show themselves. The child lay humming contentedly to herself, and looking down at her, Brush seemed to observe a strange indifference to the sky. She smiled up at him, a smile that seemed to allude to their wickedness in evading her mother’s rules on an early departure to bed.
They were silent for a time. Then Brush put her to her nightly test.
“What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth Martin Brush.”
“What do you do if you’re lost?”
“Policeman.”
“Where do you live?”
“Twelve twelve Brinkley Street.”
“What do you do?”
“Tell the trufe . . .”
“Yes.”
“. . . love God . . .”
“Yes.”
“. . . and brush my teef.”
“That’s right.”
She was able to tell what country she belonged to; she counted to twenty, and repeated a portion of the alphabet. She was then allowed to relax. After a long silence he looked down to see that her wide eyes were gazing tranquilly at the stars.
The trap door was raised. “She ought to go to bed now, dear,” said Roberta.
“All right. We’re coming.”
Roberta waited, holding the trap door open. As he took it he said in a low voice: “Roberta, is something the matter?”
She made no answer. While Elizabeth was being put to bed, Brush sat by Lottie, having another cup of coffee. Lottie’s face was thoughtful. She played with the spoon in her saucer.
“George,” she said, “there’s no need to keep up this apartment while you’re gone so long. Why can’t Roberta come back to the farm? There’s plenty for her to do there and it would be much better for the baby, especially when the hot weather comes.”
“But, Lottie, this is our home. I think it’s very important that a married couple has a separate home of their own, even if the husband has to be away some of the time.”
“George, are you very happy with Roberta?”
“Why, yes, of course! I’m the happiest man in town. It’s not like you, Lottie, to ask things like that.”
“Roberta wants to go back to the farm.”
There was silence for a minute, then Brush said: “I’ll give up the business. I’ll get a job in town here somewhere . . . because my home’s more important to me than my business is.”
“No, that wouldn’t help. George, I don’t want to hurt you or anything. . . . We’re both tremendously fond of you, George, you know that. But . . .”
“What is it? What are you trying to say?”
“George, don’t you see? Roberta wants to live alone.”
Brush turned white, but did not raise his eyes. Then he rose and said: “I think I’d better take a walk.”
Lottie went to him and put her arm around his shoulder and said: “George, don’t be mad at me. I’m only trying to help you see what’s best.”
Brush muttered: “But that’s terrible. I don’t see how you can say a thing like that.”
“George, you’re both awfully nice people, but you know as well as I do that you don’t really suit each other. Everything’s fine now; you’ve been married and that awful thing in the past is all settled and forgotten. Don’t you think—?”
But by now Brush was standing by the door with blazing eyes. He said: “Are you going to be one of those city people, too, with ideas like that? I’m ashamed of you, Lottie. Don’t you know about God’s laws? Roberta and I have been married and we’ll be married until we die. The only reason you can say a thing like that is because you’ve never been married and don’t know what an important thing it is. Roberta and I are one person, don’t you understand that? I’m going for a walk. I’ve got to get some air.”
Roberta had come into the room. “All I want is to live by myself, George,” she said. “I like you very much, George, but . . . we’re different, you know we are.” Whereupon she rushed into the kitchen, shutting the door behind her.
Brush said: “Isn’t this just what all married people go through? . . . and then they come out of it?”
“George!” said Lottie, sadly.
Brush put on his hat and coat. Then he said: “Why don’t you say it right out? You want me to get a divorce like all those people in the newspapers, and so go on smoking and . . . giggling and drinking to the cemetery. That’s what you want. You want us to lead lives like . . . like senseless, silly people that have no ideas and no religion and no thoughts about the human race. It’s not important if Roberta and I are different, as she calls it. It’s not important if we don’t get on like some couples do. We’re married, and it’s for the good of society and morals that we stay together until we die.”
“George,” said Lottie, in a level voice, “go into the kitchen and tell Roberta you love her more than anyone in the world. More than anybody ever loved anybody else. Go on. Go on, do it. That’s what a marriage promise is.”
They looked at one another darkly.
“Let her have Elizabeth,” continued Lottie. “She’ll be perfectly happy with her; but don’t make her stay in this apartment for three months, pretending that she’s waiting for the—”
Brush’s train left at midnight. His suitcases stood ready beside the door. He picked them up, then suddenly in wild emotion hurled them against the wall.
“I don’t want to go on!” he cried. “What good does it do to go to work if I haven’t got a home to work for?” He put his hands over his face. “I don’t want to live,” he said. “Everything goes wrong.”
Lottie went over to him. She tried to pull one of his hands down from his face, but he would not let it go.
“George, don’t act so,” she said, quietly. “You’re the finest person I ever knew . . . but this is an entirely different kind of thing. Be frank, look at things simply. See? Be kind to Roberta; this is the way to be kind to Roberta.”
He put his hands down and looked at her. “Isn’t the principle of a thing more important than the people that live under the principle?” he asked.
“Nobody’s strong enough to live up to the rules,” said Lottie, with the beginning of a smile in her gravity. “I guess we’re all allowed an exception once in a while. . . . Say a nice good-by to Roberta.”
Roberta had silently come into the room. He kissed them both good-by and, although it was only nine o’clock, went to the station. He walked around the station feverishly, then went up to one of the shops.
“Do you sell pipes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll take one . . . that one. What’s the best kind of pipe tobacco that you’ve got?”
With his new possessions he went into the smoking-room and tried to look matters over in a new light.