Long Distance

by Edna Ferber

　　

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Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The woodenchicken was mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board wasmounted on four tiny wheels. The whole would eventually bepulled on a string guided by the plump, moist hand of someblissful five-year-old.You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon ChetBall. Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrastwith any wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse.Everything about him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands thatheld the ridiculous chick to the great muscular pillar of hisneck, was in direct opposition to his task, his surroundings, andhis attitude.Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); hisjob that of lineman for the Gas, Light & Power Company; hisnormal working position astride the top of a telegraph pole,supported in his perilous perch by a lineman's leather belt andthe kindly fates, both of which are likely to trick you in anemergency.Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbing complacently atthe absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings wouldsound like pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Theplace was all greensward, and terraces, and sundials, andbeeches, and even those rhododendrons without which no Englishnovel or country estate is complete. The presence of Chet Ballamong his pillows and some hundreds similarly disposed revealedto you at once the fact that this particular English estate wasnow transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9.The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beadyblack paint eyes), Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate hadnot told him to stop painting when the chicken was completed.Miss Kate was at the other end of the sunny garden walk, bendingover a wheel chair. So Chet went on painting, placidly. One byone, with meticulous nicety, he painted all his fingernails abright and cheery yellow. Then he did the whole of his leftthumb and was starting on the second joint of the index fingerwhen Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently fromhis strong hands."You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said.Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell."Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly paintedwooden chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fellupon a letter bearing an American postmark and addressed toSergeant Chester Ball, with a lot of cryptic figures and lettersstrung out after it, such as A.E.F. and Co. 11."Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into hervoice. But Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said,"Yeh?""I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat one."Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And MissKate began to read in her clear young voice, there in thesunshine and scent of the centuries-old English garden.It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. It reached outacross the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicagodays, before he had even heard of English gardens.Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have allmen whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman.He could shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open histool kit, wield his pliers with expert deftness, and climb downagain in record time. It was his pleasure--and seemingly thepleasure and privilege of all lineman's gangs the world over--towhistle blithely and to call impudently to any passing petticoatthat caught his fancy.Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would clingprotected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance ofthe law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening thetedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passingin the street below, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"There was nothing vicious in it. Chet would have come to the aidof beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with ablue shirt as clean and a shave as smooth and a haircut as roundas Chet Ball's has no meanness in him. A certain daredeviltrywent hand in hand with his work--a calling in which a carelessload dispatcher, a cut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instantdeath. Usually the girls laughed and called back to them or wenton more quickly, the color in their cheeks a little higher.But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weekjob on the new plant of the Western Castings Company, Chet Ball,glancing down from his dizzy perch atop an electric-light pole,espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn't know hername or anything about her, except that she was pretty. Youcould see that from a distance even more remote than Chet's. Butyou couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to be trifled with.We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't.So then: "Hoo-hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Waitfor me and I'll be down."Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so highabove the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than wastheir wont, which would make them border on the red."You big ape, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice."If you had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to adecent girl like that. If you were down here I'd slap the faceof you. You know you're safe up there."The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball'ssturdy legs were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels duginto the soft pine of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds.He walked up to Stasia and stood squarely in front of her, sixfeet of brawn and brazen nerve. One ruddy cheek he presented toher astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he said. Andwaited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irishheart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the manbefore her. Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smoothcheek. It was a ringing slap. You saw the four marks of herfingers upon his face. Chet straightened, his blue eyes bluer.Stasia looked up at him, her eyes wide. Then down at her ownhand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her hand came up toher own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And as sheran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there,looking after her.Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball wasstanding at the foot of the pole, waiting.They were to have been married that next June. But that nextJune Chet Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in asmall woodsy spot somewhere in France, was one reason why theAmerican artillery in that same woodsy spot was getting such adeadly range on the enemy. Chet's costume was so devised thateven through field glasses (made in Germany) you couldn't tellwhere tree left off and Chet began.Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree inwhich Chet was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there,more than ever indiscernible among its tender foliage.Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken,Miss Kate, and the letter.His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modernwar surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heelsinto the pine of a G. L. & P. Company pole. But the otherthing--they put it down under the broad general head of shock.In the lovely English garden they set him to weaving and paintingas a means of soothing the shattered nerves. He had madeeverything from pottery jars to bead chains, from baskets torugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the doctors, whenthey stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "thememory center." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidlypainting toys or weaving chains with his great, square-tippedfingers--the fingers that had wielded the pliers so cleverly inhis pole-climbing days."It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend,"said the nerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it.Sometimes just a word-- the right word--will set the thing inmotion again. Does he get any letters?""His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't knowyet about-- about this. I've written his letters for him. Sheknows now that his leg is healed and she wonders----"That had been a month ago. Today Miss Kate slit the envelopepost- marked Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow woodenchicken, pride in his eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was atroubled, baffled look as she began to read:Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when itrains in Chicago it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than anyplace in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're readingso much about. They say for rain and mud that place takes theprize.I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chetdarling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else andnobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's somethingyou're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just theleg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any differencewith me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care howbad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without anyfeatures at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever'shappened to the outside of you, they can't change yourinsides. And you're the same man that called out to me thatday, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you apiece of my mind, climbed down off the pole, and put your faceup to be slapped, God bless the boy in you----A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly.Chet Ball was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in hishand."What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voiceeasy and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood.""What'm I doin' with it?""You've just finished painting it."Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a briefmoment, struggling between anger and amusement. And betweenanger and amusement he put it down on the table none too gentlyand stood up, yawning a little."That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in uttercontrition: "Oh, beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! Ididn't----"But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate'sface. She was registering joy--pure joy.

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