Part 12

"No, indeed. There's plenty that like it. The place gets more crowded every day. Why, Mr. Gorham," Miss Berry dropped her rather sad, musing tone, and spoke feelingly. "That Midway is just a representation of matter, and this great White City is an emblem of mind. In the Midway it's some dirty and all barbaric. It deafens you with noise; the worst folks in there are avaricious and bad, and the best are just children in their ignorance, and when you're feelin' bewildered with the smells and sounds and sights, always changin' like one o' these kaleidoscopes, and when you come out o' that mile-long babel where you've been elbowed and cheated, you pass under a bridge--and all of a sudden you are in a great, beautiful silence. The angels on the Woman's Buildin' smile down and bless you, and you know that in what seemed like one step, you've passed out o' darkness into light." Aunt Love paused thoughtfully. "It's come to me, Mr. Gorham, that perhaps dyin' is goin' to be somethin' like crossin' the dividin' line that separates the Midway from the White City. I've asked myself when I've passed under that bridge and felt the difference down so deep, what did make it so strong? 'T ain't only the quiet and the grandeur o' those buildin's compared with the fantastic things you've left behind; I believe it's just the fact that the makers o' the Fair believed in God and put Him and their enlightenment from Him into what they did; and we feel it some like we'd feel an electric shock."

Page nodded. "You make me more interested than ever in my prospect of sightseeing," he said. "Now I propose that you show me the way to that cafe where you say the others will come this evening, and we will take lunch together there. Not a word of objection, Aunt Love. This is a great day. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us charge on the cafe under the candle-snuffers."

The two friends descended to the street, and Page, submitting to Miss Berry's guidance, was led through the archway running beneath the eastern corridor of the Art Building. "I won't attempt to take you through the buildin' itself," said Miss Berry, "'cause I know well enough I shouldn't get you through before the middle o' the afternoon; partly 'cause you'd stop to look at the statuary, and partly 'cause the first thing I always do when I get in there is to lose myself. I've thought, up to this summer, that I had a pretty good bump o' locality; but land! let me turn around in that place a few times and all those signs, 'East Wall,' 'North Wall,' and the rest, don't mean any more to me than Greek would. You'll see how 't is when you try it."

Page was only half listening. He paused by the brink of the water, fascinated by the sparkling, shining, noonday beauty before him. Gondolas were stealing from beneath the bridges, and electric launches passing and repassing silently and smoothly over the changing waves.

"We must get into one of those boats, Aunt Love," he said with enthusiasm.

"You can't sail to the restaurant. That's right over yonder," observed Miss Berry practically, indicating with her parasol the many-towered roof of the Marine Cafe.

Page sighed. "Do what you like with me," he answered resignedly. "I can see already that the summer will be too short."

"If your breath ain't, that's all you need fret about," returned Miss Lovina, as they started eastward, along the bank of the pond. "Many's the time in the last weeks I've wished I only weighed one hundred. Don't those ducks and swans have it comfortable?"

Page watched the undulating motions of the pretty birds that eyed them as they passed.

"No, I didn't bring my lunch; hadn't the least notion o' stayin'," replied Miss Berry over her shoulder, to the graceful followers who soon veered away, secure of dining sumptuously every day.

"These here steps," remarked Aunt Love, as she climbed up to Costa Rica's entrance and down on the other side, "do seem an awful aggravation when you're tired, which I ain't now, of course. There's no gettin' out of 'em except by walkin' all around Robin Hood's barn."

Page found his companion surprisingly intelligent as to the names of the buildings they passed lingeringly on the way to the cafe, and once arrived at that haven, they proceeded to take a leisurely lunch, after which Miss Berry allowed herself to be easily persuaded to ride around the lagoon in an electric launch.

Page found so much to interest him in this initial trip, the quiet gliding motion, cool air, and constantly stimulating panorama were so charming, that he scarcely knew when to abandon this certain good for one more doubtful. At last, however, he and Miss Berry found themselves roaming beneath the gilded towers of the Electricity Building. Miss Lovina gazed benevolently and uncomprehendingly upon one and another evidence of marvelous achievement, waiting patiently whenever Page paused to examine and question.

"There's one place here," she volunteered at last, "where I will say for 'em they've done a cute thing. They've harnessed chain lightnin' so it pulls up and down a zigzag path just as tame as my cow'll go to pasture. Come and see it, Mr. Gorham."

So Page was piloted through the spectacular southeast portion of the building, where color and movement thrilled through every phase of intensity, from the steady glow of the living green pillars of the Egyptian temple, to the various whirling globes and wheels, and the racing bubbles of changing light which sped along their irregular tracks.

"Ah, here are the telephones," remarked Page.

"Yes; do you know, Mr. Gorham, till I came to Chicago I'd never seen a telephone? I find folks don't make anything of 'em here. Mrs. Van Tassel ain't any more afraid of her telephone than she is of her sewin' machine. When I first came I used to jump a foot every time that sharp little bell rung; but I made up my mind that I was havin' advantages, and that I wasn't goin' to slight 'em. I made up my mind I was goin' to speak into that box, no matter how fast the chills traveled up my back, and I did it; it makes me as weak as a kitten yet, but I just will be up with the times I live in if I get a chance; and ain't a telephone a perfect wonder now?"

"It is, indeed, and they are improving them all the time. I see there is a long-distance telephone. How should you like to talk to New York?"

"I shouldn't like to make a fool o' myself that way or any other, Gorham Page."

"But really, Aunt Love"--

"Save your breath, Mr. Gorham. I know this buildin's full o' queer doin's and it's a good place to play jokes on a body, but there's limits to even a greenhorn's credulity."

"I was never more in earnest, I assure you. It is possible to talk to New York."

Miss Berry regarded her companion severely. "Then it's blasphemous. That's all I've got to say."

"Why, I don't see that."

"Do you s'pose the Lord would have put New York a thousand miles away from Chicago if he'd expected 'em to talk to each other?"

Page laughed. "I never thought of that before as a reason for the antagonism between the two cities. Nonsense, Aunt Love; the world moves, and you must move with it. You shall speak to New York and be proud of yourself ever afterward. You know it is to be expected that science will do everything possible toward annihilating space."

Page ascended the steps toward a silk-curtained cabinet; a uniformed boy opened its glass door.

After remaining in the closet a minute and speaking a few sentences into the telephone, he beckoned to Miss Berry who had remained standing at the foot of the steps looking very apprehensive.

"Now, Aunt Love," he said encouragingly, as she slowly approached, a do-or-die expression on her face. Had Miss Berry been of the Romish church instead of being a "Con'regationalist in good and regular standing," she would assuredly have crossed herself before entering that tasteful little apartment.

Page smiled into his mustache as he placed the receiver in her hand, fervently wishing that he might hear both sides of the impending dialogue.

"Mr. Gorham," said Miss Berry, addressing him over her shoulder impressively, "think of the miles, the hours, I traveled; the rivers and lakes I crossed; the mountains I tunneled"--

"Yes, yes, Aunt Love; but don't keep our New York friend waiting."

"I feel prickly, Gorham. I think I'm goin' to faint."

"Oh no, you're not. Just say Hello," returned Page cheerily, his eyes twinkling.

"Hello," quavered Miss Lovina, and promptly the answer came:--

_New York_. Is this Miss Berry?

_Miss Berry_. How did you know my name?

_New York_. A gentleman just told me to expect you. I am happy to meet you, or to hear you, all the way from New York.

_Miss Berry_. Go away!

_New York_. Aren't you a little unreasonable, madam? I'm a good way off already.

_Miss Berry_. How am I to be sure you ain't in the next room, sir?

_New York_. Do you hear me so distinctly?

_Miss Berry_. It is the most wonderful thing in the world if you are real.

_New York_. Oh, I am real, I assure you, madam. I see you have been making trips to the Midway, and your confidence in human nature is shaken.

_Miss Berry_. You're just right there. I should like to talk to you about the Midway. Have you been to the Fair yet?

_New York_. No; and alas, I'm afraid I'm not coming; but if I do, I'm going to the Midway the first thing.

_Miss Berry_. Now, young man, you just stand there a minute, and I'll convince you--"Hey?" for Gorham was pulling her sleeve.

"There are some more people waiting to speak, Aunt Love."

"What? Oh," Miss Berry looked dazed, relinquished the receiver, and moved like a somnambulist out of the cabinet.

"You might have said good-by to your new friend," suggested Page.

"Mr. Gorham, tell me," spoke Aunt Love beseechingly. "If I was ever good to you, if you ever liked my cookies, tell me the truth. Was that all hocus-pocus, or was it genuine?"

"Why, it was genuine, Aunt Love. It is done every day in business."

"Well," Miss Berry stepped off energetically. "All is, then, I've capped the climax o' my life. I don't calc'late to ever call anything wonderful again."

But she did. Page took her upstairs to the gallery where a door opened by magic when her foot touched the threshold; where the tel-autograph reproduced a writer's chirography while transmitting his thoughts; where a metal rod, passing along a person's spine, caused blue flames to leap forth, crackling and spitting in Mephistophelean fashion, a cure which Miss Berry thought worse than any known disease. She saw there, too, the smallest steam-engine in the world, reposing its miniature perfection in a walnut shell, and displaying its exquisite mechanism only beneath a magnifying glass.

But the cooking of food and the hatching of chickens by electricity appealed to Aunt Love so engrossingly that, after repeated vain efforts to woo her away from both these attractions, Page finally took his leave of her there, and his parting view showed Miss Berry gazing through the side of an incubator where chicks were in every stage of existence, from the first thrust of a yellow beak through the eggshell, to the freed and bedraggled little wretch whose sole aim in life seemed to be to half hop and half tumble across the incubator until its wet body rested directly upon an incandescent light. These eventful journeys, with their apparently suicidal goal, so absorbed Miss Berry that she could do little more than wave her hand after Page as he set briskly off for pastures new.

*CHAPTER XVII.*

*THE BRONZE BABY.*

Somebody says that we only really live when we do not know that time is passing. If that be true, Miss Berry lived intensely during the period she passed in the gallery of the Electricity Building that afternoon.

"I wonder how late it is!" she asked herself at last with a start. "The folks'll think I'm lost. I must hurry home directly."

But she sighed as she said it. To "hurry home" from this city of magnificent distances was but a form of words.

"If I could only borrow the wings off 'n some o' those angels!" she murmured as she hastened down the nearest flight of stairs; but doubtful as she was of the lateness of the hour, she could not keep her mind from straying back to the strange scenes in the miniature world she had been watching. Next the incubator had been a little sandy inclosure in the midst of which stood a small curtained house where the young chickens could be brooded at will, and across whose front ran the defiant legend, "Who cares for mother now!"

"I wonder how soon electricity'll take the place o' folks," she mused. "Seems if 't won't take long. Yes, yes," she went on in answer to a faint peeping that came from beneath her wrap, "we'll get home some time to-night," and she hurried faster still, a pleased smile breaking over her face; for Aunt Love was not alone. She had at the present moment one of those emancipated chicks in a pasteboard box pressed to her side.

"I believe I'll take the Internal Road, and then the cars," she said to herself. "There'll be an awful crowd at Sixtieth Street, but I can stand consid'able squeezin'. I know I'm late."

She was late. Not that it mattered. She was to dine in solitary state that evening in any case; but she had meant to reach the house in time to carry the information of Mr. Page's arrival and his plan to meet his friends; and in this she was disappointed. Only Blitzen was left at home to give her his customary boisterous greeting, and she had before her the difficult task of explaining and introducing to him her ball of yellow fluff and impressing its sacredness upon his volatile mind.

Jack was the first to arrive at the rendezvous that evening, and to his satisfaction Mildred was second. She sauntered up to the steps accompanied by a young army officer at whom Jack stared down from his post on the balcony. He had, however, sufficient self-control to swallow his discontent. Mildred had somehow taught him this self-control in the short space of a week, and he managed to walk to meet her with an air of nonchalance suited to that with which she slowly mounted the steps after dismissing her escort.

"Who is the military?" he asked lightly.

"A cousin of Helen Eames. He has been showing us over the Battle Ship."

"Indeed? I was there this afternoon too."

"Were you? It is awfully stuffy down below in that museum, isn't it? Our party was glad to retreat to a private room and have a sherry cobbler. Everything is beginning to be crowded now."

"What interests me," said Jack, placing a chair by one of the tables for Mildred as he spoke, "is to know how soon you are going to give me a day."

"Oh, any time," returned the girl as she seated herself.

"Any time! That is what you always say, but when I try to pin you down you slip away."

"Wouldn't anybody?" smiled the other. There was something about the curves at the corners of Mildred's upper lip and its downward dip in the middle that made her smile more provoking than other girls'.

"There! You are slipping away again."

"No, indeed. I am far too tired and this is too comfortable."

"You have had an engagement every day since I have been here. You can't deny it. What sort of a way is that to treat a guest?"

"You aren't my guest, you are Clover's."

"Clover is a daisy and always was," exclaimed Jack, regardless of paradox. "She is the sweetest girl in the world."

"Of course," returned Mildred, raising a glass of water to her lips as coolly as though she liked this.

"I ought to have gone with you that first evening," said Van Tassel gloomily.

Mildred set down her glass and looked at the speaker with an unfathomable expression as she spoke slowly:--

"'There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to'"--

"Would it, Mildred?" Jack broke in with a sort of earnest excitement. "Would it have led on to fortune?"

The girl colored under the glowing gaze.

"If I had gone with you, would you have had fewer engagements and more time for me since then?"

"How can I tell?" she returned, with a low laugh of enjoyment. Jack was fairly dramatic. He was really entertaining.

"I didn't know exactly what my feeling was then; but I knew afterward," he went on. "Ogden wasn't any part of our past. I didn't want to share you with him that night."

"He didn't want to share me with you either, so you were both satisfied," returned Mildred demurely.

"Was he satisfied?" asked Van Tassel savagely. "Methinks not. I notice that whatever your engagements have been this week, he has not been in them."

"How observing you are!"

"Yes. He is done for. It would be interesting to know how many scalps that makes, Mildred."

"Look here, Jack," the girl was not smiling, and her eyes darkened as she met his; "if you will practice conservation of energy now, I will give you a capital opportunity to air your talents in amateur theatricals next winter. You are the very man we have been looking for."

"Can I make love to you?"

"That depends on your versatility."

"Or my patience in standing in line. I've been standing in line all the week. Don't you think it is about time I got there?"

"What do you call this?" Mildred gave him a tantalizing glance from under her half-dropped lids. "I arrive early at the rendezvous. We sit _tete-a-tete_, and how do you make use of the time?"

Color flashed all over Jack's face.

"I am a fool," he agreed.

"That must be why you always speak the truth so indiscreetly. I never thought of that as the reason, really. Now let us decide what to order before Clover comes. What can make her so late?"

The fact was that Clover, wanting to stop a minute to look at some pieces of old china and silver in the Louisiana house, had had the usual curious experience in World's Fair minutes. In a city of enchantment, how could it be expected that sixty seconds should be of the conventional length? She had set aside plenty of time also just to walk through the middle of the Art Building; and as every woman knows, it was always impossible to pass so near "The Young Athlete" without pausing, if but for a brief acknowledgment.

Gorham Page had just been admiring the bronze, and had stepped aside to look at the photographs on a neighboring table when Clover advanced. He was short-sighted, and she wore an Eton suit and a sailor hat, the garb of ninety-nine out of every hundred women in the summer of '93; but he knew her at once, and paused. After a moment's watching he approached her.

She colored faintly with surprise as she returned his greeting.

"The subtle differences in the nature of man and woman are more interesting than the obvious ones," he said.

"What are you leading up to now?" she asked. "I expected your first words to be an explanation or an apology, or both. How does it happen that this is the place where we first meet?"

"You were very, very kind, Mrs. Van Tassel, and I hope I assured you of my appreciation in my letter; but I found I could get a room at the hotel near you, and then affairs taking a favorable turn I left Boston suddenly, and none too soon; none too soon; I have been here all day. How stupendous it is! You are on your way to the Marine Cafe. May I go with you?"

"Oh, you have seen Jack, or my sister."

"No."

"Then how comes it that you are so well informed?"

"Happily for me, I ran across Aunt Love."

"Oh, that explains her prolonged absence perhaps. Usually it is hard for us to persuade her to spend a whole day down here. We must hurry a little, I think." Clover laughed. "Hurrying is the normal condition of people who try to keep appointments at the Fair."

They threaded their way amid groups and figures in plaster and marble, and emerged from the southern entrance.

"What I started to speak of when I first met you was the contrast of a man's and woman's way of approaching that bronze," said Page. "I went up to it and especially noticed the muscles and veins of the man's hand and the truthful way the fingers sink into the flesh of the baby it supports. You approached it and took hold of the baby's hand and patted his leg. Now why didn't I want to pat that little fellow's fat leg?"

"I give it up," laughed Clover. "I can only say you had very poor taste."

"No, there is a deep reason for the difference. Of course it is a woman's nature to pet a baby."

"What a deep discovery! I congratulate you on the result of your explorations. Do you think you shall write a book about it?"

"I amuse you, Mrs. Van Tassel."

"Yes, you do, I won't deny it." Clover was a trifle ashamed of having been caught in her loving ebullition toward the soft bronze, and was willing to laugh it away.

"Still it is interesting," Page went on musingly, "to observe how affection is outward with women and inward with men."

"That doesn't sound complimentary to us, Mr. Page. I hope you mean well."

Gorham's pensive eyes met her merry ones. "Yes. I revere the wise arrangement by which it takes a man and a woman to make one complete being; and the more I observe and understand refined human nature, the more I think I see the possibilities, and what it was intended that marriage should be. You are a good walker, Mrs. Van Tassel."

"Yes; I am thinking how impatient Mildred and Jack will be with me. I will give you a subject for your analytical mind. Make a record of the broken appointments at the World's Fair and discover the reasons for them. You would have a psychological study of absorbing interest."

"All phases of human nature are interesting."

"Even that where vials of righteous wrath are poured out upon you for delinquency when you know you haven't any defense to offer? You are my defense this time."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Oh, I wouldn't trust you to say anything. I am morally certain that you would tell the truth."

"That isn't so very damaging, is it?"

"Why, certainly. You would tell them that I stopped to make love to the bronze baby; and if Mildred heard that, hungry as she is by this time, you would soon have to formulate exceptions to your rule that women are all affection outwardly. By the way, what a fortunate experience yours must have been."

Page smiled philosophically, and looked approvingly at his light-footed companion.

They arrived at the cafe shortly after Mildred had directed her companion's attention to the menu, and the apparition of the unexpected guest entirely diverted from Clover any comment upon her tardiness.

The cordiality of his welcome pleased Page. He could not know the reason for the nervous energy of his cousin's greeting. The four sat for an hour at table and then took their way by boat to the Court of Honor, where they remained in the launch during the playing of the fountains. Clover, sitting next Page, watched his attitude toward this first view of the evening's spectacle with some curiosity.

He caught her amused gaze once as it rested upon him.

"Sumptuous! Delicate! Wonderful!" he said, breaking a long, absorbed silence.

"What?" returned Clover. "But you haven't suggested yet going down beneath the electric fountains to find out the why and the how of it all; and I am sure you will not rest until you have been on the roof of the Manufactures Building and made friends with the man who manipulates the search light."

"No." Page smiled vaguely and shook his head. "I do not want to go behind the scenes."

"Then the Court of Honor is a wonderful place," said Clover.

"Poetical! Marvelous!" gasped Page.

A gondola decked with soft lanterns stole by. One gondolier swept his oar lazily through the water, the other stood with his hand caught in his bright sash, and poured forth the "_Dammi encor_" from "Faust" with true musical intensity.