Part 13

"Not to this sort of thing. Yes, there's a million and a half of us here, and this little quarter of a square mile is probably the most crowded and the most active of any on the globe, and yet it isn't found worth while to keep it clean, or even decent, small as it is. On days like this you feel as if you just wanted to remove the inhabitants and annex the whole place to the Stock-yards."

Mrs. Floyd paused in the adjustment of her bedraggled skirts and looked up fiercely.

"Why remove the inhabitants?" she inquired.

"Frances!" called her husband.

"Why, indeed?" asked Winthrop. "I never saw such a beastly rabble in my life."

"Nor I," she cried. All her smouldering resentment against the town broke out with the appearance of a new Eastern ally.

"Except in Madrid or Naples." Winthrop had travelled in his younger days; he never made these European comparisons except under extreme provocation.

"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd, plaintively.

"Because there's no standard of manners--no resident country gentry to provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What little culture we have in the country generally we find principally in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."

He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he admitted further, "to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to live it in such a place as this!"

But pity was not an important factor in Winthrop's Western mission. The Chicago office was costing too much and earning too little. There was to be a general reduction and scaling-down; the most important part of Winthrop's baggage was the pruning-knife.

He remained a week. He used the knife pretty thoroughly. He snipped Atwater's plans for Walworth's house into very small pieces. He left Walworth in a great state of depression--a depression deeper than any he had felt since his failure in coffee and spices.

His last evening in Chicago he spent in Walworth's library. It was a sober little room, and Walworth was the soberest man in it. His wife made only an occasional emergence from her unquiet silence; she no longer looked on Winthrop as an ally. The Fairchilds were there, and the Ogdens dropped in during the course of the evening. Fairchild and Winthrop did most of the talking.

Winthrop's sensibilities had now lost their keenest edge; the weather had improved, and the general aspect of things was a little less disgusting. He listened to Fairchild with the cautious reserve of a maturity that was accustomed to meet elderly strangers. He acknowledged, too, that the city was a big fact, and perhaps a more complicated fact than, he had imagined.

"You have seen the foundations," Fairchild said to him. The old gentleman lay back in his chair and spoke in a quiet and dispassionate tone. "It has taken fifty years to put them in, but the work is finally done and well done. And now we are beginning to build on these foundations. We might have put up our building first and then put in the underpinning afterwards. That is a common way, but ours will be found to have its advantages."

"I dare say," admitted Winthrop; "but you have made an awful muss doing it."

"Well," rejoined Fairchild, "you may look at the external aspect of things, which is distressing enough, I acknowledge, or you may consider the people themselves, who are perhaps the real essential."

"Winthrop finds them rather distressing too." It was Walworth who spoke; his voice came in a muffled tone from the darkest comer of the room.

"What have we done to him?" demanded Jessie Ogden, quickly. "Haven't we received him well?"

Winthrop had no ground for individual complaint, and he hastened to make this clear. Personally, he had been made a great deal of. He was rather a large figure at home, and he naturally grew larger still the farther he travelled West.

"I don't think it can be denied," pursued Fairchild, tranquilly, "that new-comers are pretty well received here, whether they come to stay or to pass on or to go back. All that a man has to do, in order to insure good treatment, is to put a certain valuation on himself. That done, the more he claims, the more he receives; we take him at his own figure. The more I think of it, the more I am astonished at so much humility among people who have accomplished such great results. Commercially, we feel our own footing; socially, we are rather abashed by the pretensions that any new arrival chooses to make. We are a little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of each other."

"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that. Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."

"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of watching and waiting for cues--people of plain origin who are beginning to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke like a princess of the blood-royal.

"That is the point," said Fairchild. "Individually, we may be of a rather humble grade of atoms, but we are crystallizing into a compound that is going to exercise a tremendous force. To him that hath eyes this crystallization, this organization, is the great thing to note just now."

"I acknowledge to have seen the ferment of activity, as they call it," said Winthrop.

"You may have seen the boiling of the kettle," returned Fairchild, "but you have hardly seen the force that feeds the flame. The big buildings are all well enough, and the big crowds in the streets, and the reports of the banks and railways and the Board of Trade. But there is something, now, beyond and behind all that."

"Let me tell Winthrop," broke in Mrs. Floyd. "Since I can't take him to our club, I must bring the club to him. At our last meeting"--there was a sub-acid relish in all this--"it developed that the present intellectual situation in Chicago is precisely that of Florence in the days of the-the--"

"Medici," suggested Ogden.

"Yes, the Medici," said Ann Wilde, loudly. She looked at him with a sharp aversion; he seemed to be taking part in her sister's joke. "That's just exactly what my paper said; the Florence of the Medici after the dispersal of the Greek scholars from Constantinople by the Turks."

"Oh, murder!" said Walworth to himself; "what will Ann rig up next?"

"The Florentines of that day," pursued his sister-in-law, "didn't know so very much, perhaps, but they were bound to learn, and that was the main thing. And it's just so here."

"Quite right," said Fairchild; "we know what there is to learn, and we are determined to master it. Our Constantinoples are Berlin and London and the rest--yes, Boston, too; and all their learned exiles are flocking here to instruct us."

"And the books that are coming in!" cried Jessie Ogden. She was no great reader, and she spoke less as a student than as a Chicagoan--that is, she spoke more ardently than any student could have spoken. "Does the enemy know that four of the biggest buildings in this big city are built of books?"

"The new libraries," her husband explained--"the ones that are going to make us the literary centre."

"Dear me," said Winthrop, "are you expecting that?"

"And we expect to be the financial centre, and presently the political centre, too--Chicago, plus New York and Washington."

"And where is Boston?"

"A little behind," said Fairchild. "New York is the main-mast yet; Chicago ranks as foremast--at present; while Boston is--"

"The mizzen-mast," completed Ogden.

"And we Chicago folks stand at the bow," chimed in his wife, "and sniff the first freshness of the breeze."

"Yes," said Winthrop, in satirical assent; "the 'Windy City.'"

"Don't abuse our wind," cried Mrs. Floyd; "we should all die like flies without it."

"That's so," assented her husband. "The wind is our only scavenger."

"I see," said Winthrop. "If you can only be big you don't mind being dirty."

Then, half in amusement, half in amaze, he concentrated his attention on the banker. "Can it be that there are really any such expectations here as these?" He addressed Fairchild exclusively--the oldest and most sedate of the circle.

"Why not?" returned Fairchild. "Does it seem unreasonable that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis?"

"And you personally--is this your own belief?"

Fairchild leaned back his fine old head on the padded top of his chair and looked at his questioner with the kind of pity that has a faint tinge of weariness. His wife sat beside him silent, but with her hand on his, and when he answered she pressed it meaningly; for to the Chicagoan--even the middle-aged female Chicagoan--the name of the town, in its formal, ceremonial use, has a power that no other word in the language quite possesses. It is a shibboleth, as regards its pronunciation; it is a trumpet-call, as regards its effect. It has all the electrifying and unifying power of a college yell.

"Chicago is Chicago," he said. "It is the belief of all of us. It is inevitable; nothing can stop us now."

But Winthrop Floyd was glad to withdraw himself on the morrow from his temporary enlistment--or drafting--under the vociferous banner of the Western capital. He did all in his power, as well, to oppose its manifest destiny by transmitting to Walworth, immediately after his return to Boston, a full corporate confirmation of his own anathema against Walworth's office and house. The Chicago representative of the Massachusetts Brass Company was recommended to secure less expensive quarters at the earliest opportunity, and was directed to drop his architectural scheme forthwith.

Walworth at once adjusted matters with Atwater. The architect received his "reconsideration" with composure, but he was doubtless nettled to be balked in a work in which he had taken unusual personal interest, and he was also disappointed merely to be paid for his plans when he had looked for the fees that follow construction. These considerations may have had their influence on the account which he rendered a month later to the Ogdens--friends and relatives of the Floyds, and introduced, too, by them. This account was handed in much more promptly than is generally the case with an accredited client in other professions--the legal or the medical, let us say--and its final footing caused Ogden considerable consternation.

The account was mailed to the house instead of to the bank, and the stationery employed was such as to suggest a personal matter between gentlemen rather than a purely business matter between architect and client; and Ogden opened it under his wife's eyes to learn that design had cost him more than construction.

"Your drawings are more of an item than your porch itself," he said, rather faintly. "I shall have to step up there and see about it."

XIX

Late one afternoon Ogden drew down his desk-top, put on his street-coat, felt in his pocket to be sure that Atwater's tasteful memorandum was still there, and took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor. He had been as conscious of that memorandum all through the day as he would have been of a mustard-plaster. On taking it out and recreasing its immaculate folds he almost felt as if he were about to dispute a debt of honor.

Atwater was in, but he was completely taken up in radiating his careful affability upon some promising clients who wanted not only doors but the house that went with them. Ogden got no closer to him than to secure the attention of the clerk whose duty it was to mediate between the contractors and the plans they were to follow.

He was an alert, nervous young man, with a big shock of unruly hair and a pair of large, luminous eyes behind his hooked and shimmering spectacles. He ran his long, lean, inky fingers through his hair, and transferred his wide eyes from the memorandum to the man who had brought it in.

"No," he said presently; "it's all right--there's no mistake. Mr. Atwater took a good deal of interest in this work. He sketched out some of the drawings himself, to start with, and he even touched up a few of them to finish with."

"Touched up a few of them to finish with?" George repeated, inquiringly.

"Yes; he don't do that often. When he does, it makes a difference; it ought to."

The whole matter was coming to assume the aspect of a personal favor; it was a debt of honor, after all. The grocer, the upholsterer, and the rest of them might wait; it would give them time to learn the value of an elegant "presence" and the compelling force of personal acquaintance.

The doors, hung and paid for, swung open many times during the following winter and spring, to admit people whom, as his wife assured him, it was an advantage to know. He became conscious that she was actuated by motives quite different from his, and that she had a standard quite at variance from any that he himself would have set up. She strained for people that he would not have turned his hand for. Most of these had familiar names, and it sometimes seemed to him as if many of them had had their place in the social yearnings of Cornelia McNabb. Certainly, his wife's attitude was quite different from that of the Floyds, who had been disposed to pooh-pooh quietly almost everybody, and also from that of her own parents, who simply accepted the circle that chance and association had formed for them, and met everybody on the same dead level of good-will.

During Lent his wife arranged a small musicale; another Mary Munson had arrived--this time from Cincinnati. The names of the performers included only those of amateurs of the better sort--since she knew that good professional services were quite beyond her reach; yet chairs, awning, and refreshments called for the expense of outside supervision. The morning before it she put a slip of paper into his hands.

"You are going right past the _Tribune._ Won't you just leave this with them?"

It was an announcement of her musicale. It included a list of names--not those of the performers, but those of the listeners.

"All old friends--in print," her husband commented. "What do you care for these people? Why don't you ask the Fairchilds?--they're quiet, but they're nice; and they like music. Why don't you have your father and mother? I haven't seen either of them for a month."

His wife writhed delicately in protest. Her winter had increased her paleness. The blue veins were bluer in her temples; her large eyes looked larger yet, and there were faint circles under them.

"Well, Cecilia doesn't fancy Mrs. Fairchild very much, in the first place--"

George bit his lip. By the curious workings of chance he had never yet seen Cecilia Ingles, but he no longer joked about her non-actuality. She appeared to be looming up as the great power in his household.

"--and besides," she proceeded, "who would recognize their names if they saw them in print?"

George stood like a looker-on at a transformation-scene, before whose eyes the gauze veils are lifted one by one in slow succession.

"Oh, then," he said, and less in jest than in earnest, "there is no use in enjoying ourselves unless we put it in the papers, and no use of putting it in the papers unless we can give a list of names, and no--"

"Now, George!" She flushed with vexation.

"--and no use of putting in a list of names unless they are names that will be generally recognized. Well, that _does_ cut out the Fairchilds, and your poor mother, too. And mine." He looked at her narrowly.

"Now, George," she cried again, "how can you be so disagreeable? You know papa and mamma wouldn't care anything for this; nor your mother, either. And it isn't the only thing I'm ever going to have. I can ask her yet, though, if you want me to."

"Oh, fiddlesticks! Only don't lose your head. Here; give me that precious notice. Perhaps, before long, people who are after names will be just as anxious to get yours."

"You silly boy!" she cried, striking him lightly across the shoulder. But she was pleased and gratified by this, and she was not able to conceal it.

Following Lent there was the usual social aftermath. For Mrs. George Milward Ogden the major stress of the season was over, but she gave a few luncheons, and she went to a good many others. These little functions sent dozens of ladies tripping through the raw winds and the slushy streets of spring. The lake, weltering under the gray skies of March, dashed its vicious sprays high over the sea-wall, and sent its cruel blasts gashingly through the streets that ended on its confines. And at such signals asthma and bronchitis and pneumonia dug their clutching fingers into the throats and lungs of thousands of tender sufferers.

Jessie's supplementary doings were of too informal a nature to demand the entrance of outside help, but at the same time they were of a kind to lay the maximum strain upon the small and simply organized household which was all that her husband was as yet able to maintain. About every so often the domestic tension overtook the breaking-point. An interregnum would follow, and then a change of dynasty. The blame for these economic hitches George was obliged to distribute with an even hand. He acknowledged frankly the mere muddishness of most of the peasant material that oozed in and out of his kitchen; but he was also obliged to recognize the utter tactlessness of his wife and the folly of her unguarded exhibitions of conscious superiority. She had never before been able to issue directions to two servants, and she had never acquired the practical experience necessary for the control of even one. She referred to her servants in their own hearing _as_ servants; and this did not seem to her as inconsiderate from the point of humanity or unwise as a mere matter of policy.

The burden of this fell principally upon her husband. He was obliged now and then to temporize with an indignant cook to secure a dinner for the evening; on one occasion he employed all his finesse to effect without scandal the removal of a frantic chamber-maid; and he became more familiarly known to the intelligence offices than he had ever expected to be. His wife was manifestly incapable of keeping a house, and he was committed to housekeeping for a year to come.

March passed and April came. One evening they sat together in their little parlor. The weather outside was raw and rainy, and not all of its chill could be kept out by the grate-fire over which Jessie was cowering and shivering. She wore a fleecy wrap on which her thin fingers took a sinuous clutch, and she was nursing a cold whose sniffling discomfort seemed passing into an obstinate cough. She was running over the newspaper carelessly.

"I see Mayme Brainard's 'mother has just died," she said presently. "'On the eighth of April, at her residence'--and all that--'Abigail Brainard, aged fifty-six years.' Wasn't she any older than that? Well, I suppose not. No great change for her, is it?"

"What did she die of?"

"Oh, it was her lungs. It's a wonder that anybody lives through these springs. I can't think why we ever got so close to the lake as this. I don't feel sure of getting through another winter here myself."

She leaned forward to stir the fire, and then lay back, coughing.

"I suppose they'll let Mayme come home, now--for the funeral, anyway. I wonder if shell bring the baby; he swears he won't see it. Cornelia says it's a pretty little thing--Abbie was down there a month ago."

George stared at the fire thoughtfully, and reached mechanically for the poker.

"I don't know how they will feel, now, about staying in that house," she went on. "Cornelia wants to move the whole family over here, but Abbie won't listen to her. I don't know whether she likes her own part of town, but she seems to have taken a strong dislike to this. Anyway, she has never come near _me_, for all you helped them at her brother's wedding. Cornelia appears to think everything of her, though, and I guess she likes Cornelia quite a little. Funny, isn't it, that those two--Goodness, George, don't knock the fire all to pieces. Here; let me have it."

She took the poker from him.

"Dear me, what a miserable flue!" She looked at him discontentedly, as she settled back wearily in her big chair. "And we've really got this house on our hands for a whole year more?" She seemed to feel in this one year the weight of eternity.

"That's what the lease says," he responded, soberly. "What do you say?" his eyes seemed to ask.

She spoke her thoughts presently and at some length. She proposed giving up the house on the first of May. Was it a passing caprice or a serious desire? he wondered.

"Shall you take your porch and your doors with you?" he asked, with a sorry smile. "They cost enough to be worth considering."

"No," she answered, with the simple literalness that builds a stone wall in a moment. "We shouldn't need them in an apartment-house."

"That's the idea, is it?"

"Yes, it strikes me that that would be the best thing all around--an apartment-house, with a cafe or something. Lots of nice people live that way now. Look at Cecilia Ingles's cousin; she is invited everywhere, and she entertains just the same as if she was in her own house. It's too hard work for me to run things like this, and I've just got to get farther away from this miserable lake."

"There's all the furniture."

"We could use some of it."

"And store the rest?"

"Yes--or auction it."

"Small profit in either. What are you going to do with the lease? Store it, or auction it, or use it for furnishing?"

Her lip quivered sensitively. "Why, I supposed--"

"Yes, we _can_ sublet the house--if anybody is found to take it. There was something of a wait before _we_ took it. There might be another."

"There's that Mrs. Cass--"

"I don't know how much she could do in three weeks--a good many people are fixed by this time. Two weeks sooner would have made some difference. I couldn't very well afford to carry the house all through the summer. There's a bottom to our pocket-book, and we are getting to it faster than you think."

This was a figure of speech that called for no direct response. For--

"Well," she went on, "that's my idea: a flat, with our meals. This would give me my chance to get away for a part of the summer--I'm sure I need it."

"Away for a part of the summer?"

"Yes. Mary Munson was saying something about my going to the White Mountains with her in July. They would do me good. Though perhaps the sea-shore might be better; plenty of those Down-east people are indebted to me now."

Another of those gauze veils was lifting. Married life was but a prolongation of girlhood, with all its associations and peregrinations. Where did the husband come in?

They left the house on the first of May. George recognized by this time the essential slightness and incapacity of his wife, and renounced the possibility of a home in any but a modified sense. Part of their goods were sacrificed at auction, part were stored at a rate that would have provided a home for a working-man's family, a few pieces were utilized in filling up a partly furnished flat, and the deserted house remained vacant through the summer. It was not until October that its ornate front and its tasteful decorations caught the eye of the right man, and by October a complication of interests had made a vacant house the very least of Ogden's concerns.