← catalogue

The Web of Life

by Robert Herrick · English · Gutenberg #7828 · 510,648 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Web of Life
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Web of Life

Author: Robert Herrick


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7828]
                Most recently updated: August 19, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7828

Credits: Produced by Susan Skinner, Eric Eldred and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEB OF LIFE ***




Produced by Susan Skinner, Eric Eldred and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team










THE WEB OF LIFE

BY

ROBERT HERRICK


AUTHOR OF "THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM," "THE MAN WHO WINS,"
"LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS AND OTHER STORIES"


TO G. R. C.


  "_Hear from the spirit world this mystery:
   Creation is summed up, O man, in thee;
   Angel and demon, man and beast, art thou,
   Yea, thou art all thou dost appear to be!_"




THE WEB OF LIFE




PART I




CHAPTER I


The young surgeon examined the man as he lay on the hospital chair in which
ward attendants had left him. The surgeon's fingers touched him deftly,
here and there, as if to test the endurance of the flesh he had to deal
with. The head nurse followed his swift movements, wearily moving an
incandescent light hither and thither, observing the surgeon with languid
interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched
the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased
themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer
weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and
stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so
long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last week in March, and now
at ten o'clock not a capful of air strayed into the room, even through the
open windows that faced the lake.

The patient groaned when the surgeon's fingers first touched him, then
relapsed into the spluttering, labored respiration of a man in liquor or in
heavy pain. A stolid young man who carried the case of instruments freshly
steaming from their antiseptic bath made an observation which the surgeon
apparently did not hear. He was thinking, now, his thin face set in a
frown, the upper teeth biting hard over the under lip and drawing up the
pointed beard. While he thought, he watched the man extended on the chair,
watched him like an alert cat, to extract from him some hint as to what he
should do. This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants
of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse
held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her
figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily,
as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man
"shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening
dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving room, redolent of
bloody tasks. Evidently he had been out to some dinner or party, and when
the injured man was brought in had merely donned his rumpled linen jacket
with its right sleeve half torn from the socket. A spot of blood had
already spurted into the white bosom of his shirt, smearing its way over
the pearl button, and running under the crisp fold of the shirt. The head
nurse was too tired and listless to be impatient, but she had been called
out of hours on this emergency case, and she was not used to the surgeon's
preoccupation. Such things usually went off rapidly at St. Isidore's, and
she could hear the tinkle of the bell as the hall door opened for another
case. It would be midnight before she could get back to bed! The hospital
was short-handed, as usual.

The younger nurse was not watching the patient, nor the good-looking young
surgeon, who seemed to be the special property of her superior. Even in her
few months of training she had learned to keep herself calm and
serviceable, and not to let her mind speculate idly. She was gazing out of
the window into the dull night. Some locomotives in the railroad yards just
outside were puffing lazily, breathing themselves deeply in the damp,
spring air. One hoarser note than the others struck familiarly on the
nurse's ear. That was the voice of the engine on the ten-thirty through
express, which was waiting to take its train to the east. She knew that
engine's throb, for it was the engine that stood in the yards every evening
while she made her first rounds for the night. It was the one which took
_her_ train round the southern end of the lake, across the sandy
fields, to Michigan, to her home.

The engine puffed away, and she withdrew her gaze and glanced at the
patient. To her, too, the wounded man was but a case, another error of
humanity that had come to St. Isidore's for temporary repairs, to start
once more on its erring course, or, perhaps, to go forth unfinished,
remanded just there to death. The ten-thirty express was now pulling out
through the yards in a powerful clamor of clattering switches and hearty
pulsations that shook the flimsy walls of St. Isidore's, and drew new
groans from the man on the chair. The young nurse's eyes travelled from him
to a woman who stood behind the ward tenders, shielded by them and the
young interne from the group about the hospital chair. This woman, having
no uniform of any sort, must be some one who had come in with the patient,
and had stayed unobserved in the disorder of a night case.

Suddenly the surgeon spoke; his words shot out at the head nurse.

"We will operate now!"

The interne shrugged his shoulders, but he busied himself in selecting and
wiping the instruments. Yet in spite of his decisive words the surgeon
seemed to hesitate.

"Was there any one with this man,--any friend?" he asked the head nurse.

In reply she looked around vaguely, her mind thrown out of gear by this
unexpected delay. Another freak of the handsome surgeon!

"Any relative or friend?" the surgeon iterated peremptorily, looking about
at the attendants.

The little nurse at the foot of the patient, who was not impressed by the
irregularity of the surgeon's request, pointed mutely to the figure behind
the ward tenders. The surgeon wheeled about and glanced almost savagely at
the woman, his eyes travelling swiftly from her head to her feet. The woman
thus directly questioned by the comprehending glance returned his look
freely, resentfully. At last when the surgeon's eyes rested once more on
her face, this time more gently, she answered:

"I am his wife."

This statement in some way humanized the scene. The ward tenders and the
interne stared at her blankly; the nurses looked down in unconscious
comment on the twisted figure by their side. The surgeon drew his hands
from his pockets and stepped toward the woman, questioning her meanwhile
with his nervous, piercing glance. For a moment neither spoke, but some
kind of mute explanation seemed to be going on between them.

She kept her face level with his, revealing it bravely, perhaps defiantly.
Its tense expression, with a few misery-laden lines, answered back to the
inquiry of the nonchalant outsiders: 'Yes, I am his wife, _his_ wife,
the _wife_ of the object over there, brought here to the hospital,
shot in a saloon brawl.' And the surgeon's face, alive with a new
preoccupation, seemed to reply: 'Yes, I know! You need not pain yourself by
telling me.'

The patient groaned again, and the surgeon came back at once to the urgent
present--the case. He led the way to one side, and turning his back upon
the group of assistants he spoke to the woman in low tones.

"This man, your husband, is pretty badly off. He's got at least two bullets
in bad places. There isn't much chance for him--in his condition," he
explained brusquely, as if to reconcile his unusual procedure with
business-like methods.

"But I should operate," he continued; "I shall operate unless there are
objections--unless you object."

His customary imperious manner was struggling with a special feeling for
this woman before him. She did not reply, but waited to hear where her part
might come in. Her eyes did not fall from his face.

"There's a chance," the surgeon went on, "that a certain operation now will
bring him around all right. But to-morrow will be too late."

His words thus far had something foolish in them, and her eyes seemed to
say so. If it was the only chance, and his custom was to operate in such
cases,--if he would have operated had she not been there, why did he go
through this explanation?

"There may be----complications in his recovery," he said at last, in low
tones. "The recovery may not be complete."

She did not seem to understand, and the surgeon frowned at his failure,
after wrenching from himself this frankness. The idea, the personal idea
that he had had to put out of his mind so often in operating in hospital
cases,--that it made little difference whether, indeed, it might be a great
deal wiser if the operation turned out fatally,--possessed his mind. Could
she be realizing that, too, in her obstinate silence? He tried another
explanation.

"If we do not operate, he will probably have a few hours of
consciousness--if you had something to say to him?"

Her face flushed. He humiliated her. He must know that she had nothing to
say to _him_, as well as if he had known the whole story.

"We could make him comfortable, and who knows, to-morrow might not be too
late!" The surgeon ended irritably, impatient at the unprofessional
frankness of his words, and disgusted that he had taken this woman into his
confidence. Did she want him to say: 'See here, there's only one chance in
a thousand that we can save that carcass; and if he gets that chance, it
may not be a whole one--do you care enough for him to run that dangerous
risk?' But she obstinately kept her own counsel. The professional manner
that he ridiculed so often was apparently useful in just such cases as
this. It covered up incompetence and hypocrisy often enough, but one could
not be human and straightforward with women and fools. And women and fools
made up the greater part of a doctor's business.

Yet the voice that said, "I am his wife," rang through his mind and
suggested doubts. Under the miserable story that he had instinctively
imaged, there probably lay some tender truth.

"There's a chance, you see!" he resumed more tenderly, probing her for an
evidence. "All any of us have, except that he is not in a condition for an
operation."

This time her mouth quivered. She was struggling for words. "Why do you ask
me?" she gasped. "What--" but her voice failed her.

"I should operate," the surgeon replied gently, anticipating her question.
"I, we should think it better that way, only sometimes relatives object."

He thought that he had probed true and had found what he was after.

"It is a chance," she said audibly, finding her voice. "You must do what
you think--best. I have nothing to say to him. You need not delay for
that."

"Very well," the surgeon replied, relieved that his irregular confidence
had resulted in the conventional decision, and that he had not brought on
himself a responsibility shared with her. "You had best step into the
office. You can do no good here."

Then, dismissing the unusual from his mind, he stepped quickly back to the
patient. The younger nurse was bathing the swollen, sodden face with apiece
of gauze; the head nurse, annoyed at the delay, bustled about, preparing
the dressings under the direction of the interne.

The wife had not obeyed the doctor's direction to leave the room, however,
and remained at the window, staring out into the soft night. At last, when
the preparations were completed, the younger nurse came and touched her.
"You can sit in the office, next door; they may be some time," she urged
gently.

As the woman turned to follow the nurse, the surgeon glanced at her once
more. He was conscious of her calm tread, her admirable self-control. The
sad, passive face with its broad, white brow was the face of a woman who
was just waking to terrible facts, who was struggling to comprehend a world
that had caught her unawares. She had removed her hat and was carrying it
loosely in her hand that had fallen to her side. Her hair swept back in two
waves above the temples with a simplicity that made the head distinguished.
Even the nurses' caps betrayed stray curls or rolls. Her figure was large,
and the articulation was perfect as she walked, showing that she had had
the run of fields in her girlhood. Yet she did not stoop as is the habit of
country girls; nor was there any unevenness of physique due to hard, manual
labor.

As she passed the huddle of human flesh stretched out in the wheel-chair, a
wave of color swept over her face. Then she looked up to the surgeon and
seemed to speak to him, as to the one human being in a world of puppets.
'You understand; you understand. It is terrible!'

The surgeon's brown eyes answered hers, but he was puzzled. Had he probed
her aright? It was one of those intimate moments that come to nervously
organized people, when the petty detail of acquaintanceship and fact is
needless, when each one stands nearly confessed to the other. And then she
left the room.

The surgeon proceeded without a word, working intently, swiftly,
dexterously. At first the head nurse was too busy in handling bowls and
holding instruments to think, even professionally, of the operation. The
interne, however, gazed in admiration, emitting exclamations of delight as
the surgeon rapidly took one step after another. Then he was sent for
something, and the head nurse, her chief duties performed, drew herself
upright for a breath, and her keen, little black eyes noticed an
involuntary tremble, a pause, an uncertainty at a critical moment in the
doctor's tense arm. A wilful current of thought had disturbed his action.
The sharp head nurse wondered if Dr. Sommers had had any wine that evening,
but she dismissed this suspicion scornfully, as slander against the
ornament of the Surgical Ward of St. Isidore's. He was tired: the languid
summer air thus early in the year would shake any man's nerve. But the head
nurse understood well that such a wavering of will or muscle must not occur
again, or the hairbreadth chance the drunken fellow had----

She watched that bared arm, her breath held. The long square fingers closed
once more with a firm grip on the instrument. "Miss Lemoris, some No. 3
gauze." Then not a sound until the thing was done, and the surgeon had
turned away to cleanse his hands in the bowl of purple antiseptic wash.

"My!" the head nurse exclaimed, "Dr. Trip ain't in it." But the surgeon's
face wore a preoccupied, sombre look, irresponsive to the nurse's
admiration. While she helped the interne with the complicated dressing, the
little nurse made ready for removal to the ward. Then when one of the ward
tenders had wheeled the muffled figure into the corridor, she hurried
across to the office.

"It's all over," she whispered blithely to the wife, who sat in a dull
abstraction, oblivious of the hospital flurry. "And it's going to be all
right, I just know. Dr. Sommers is _so_ clever, he'd save a dead man.
You had better go now. No use to see him to-night, for he won't come out of
the opiate until near morning. You can come tomorrow morning, and p'r'aps
Dr. Sommers will get you a pass in. Visitors only Thursdays and Sunday
afternoons usually."

She hurried off to her duties in the ward. The woman did not rise at once.
She did not readjust her thoughts readily; she seemed to be waiting in the
chance of seeing some one. The surgeon did not come out of the receiving
room; there was a sound of wheels in the corridor just outside the office
door, followed by the sound of shuffling feet. Through the open door she
could see two attendants wheeling a stretcher with a man lying motionless
upon it. They waited in the hall outside under a gas-jet, which cast a
flickering light upon the outstretched form. This was the next case, which
had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,--a
hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a
pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had
fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She
was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention
to another case. As she passed the stretcher, the bearers shifted their
burden to give her room. The form on the stretcher moaned indistinctly.

She looked at the unsightly mass, in her heart envious of his condition.
There were things in this world much more evil than this bruised flesh of
what had once been a human being.




CHAPTER II


The next morning Dr. Sommers took his successor through, the surgical ward.
Dr. Raymond, whose place he had been holding for a month, was a young,
carefully dressed man, fresh from a famous eastern hospital. The nurses
eyed him favorably. He was absolutely correct. When the surgeons reached
the bed marked 8, Dr. Sommers paused. It was the case he had operated on
the night before. He glanced inquiringly at the metal tablet which hung
from the iron cross-bars above the patient's head. On it was printed in
large black letters the patient's name, ARTHUR C. PRESTON; on the next line
in smaller letters, Admitted March 26th. The remaining space on the card
was left blank to receive the statement of regimen, etc. A nurse was giving
the patient an iced drink. After swallowing feebly, the man relapsed into a
semi-stupor, his eyes opening and closing vacantly.

As he lay under the covering of a sheet, his arms thrust out bare from the
short-sleeved hospital shirt, his unshaven flushed face contrasting with
the pallid and puffy flesh of neck and arms, he gave an impression of
sensuality emphasized by undress. The head was massive and well formed, and
beneath the bloat of fever and dissipation there showed traces of
refinement. The soft hands and neat finger-nails, the carefully trimmed
hair, were sufficient indications of a kind of luxury. The animalism of the
man, however, had developed so early in life that it had obliterated all
strong markings of character. The flaccid, rather fleshy features were
those of the sensual, prodigal young American, who haunts hotels. Clean
shaven and well dressed, the fellow would be indistinguishable from the
thousands of overfed and overdrunk young business men, to be seen every day
in the vulgar luxury of Pullman cars, hotel lobbies, and large bar-rooms.

The young surgeon studied the patient thoughtfully. He explained the case
briefly to his successor, as he had all the others, and before leaving the
bed, he had the nurse take the patient's temperature. "Only two degrees of
fever," he commented mechanically; "that is very good. Has his wife--has
any one been in to see him?" The head nurse, who stood like an automaton at
the foot of the bed, replied that she had seen no one; in any case, the
doorkeeper would have refused permission unless explicit orders had been
given.

Then the doctors continued their rounds, followed by the correct head
nurse. When they reached the end of the ward, Dr. Sommers remarked
disconnectedly: "No. 8 there, the man with the gun-shot wounds, will get
well, I think; but I shouldn't wonder if mental complications followed. I
have seen cases like that at the Bicetre, where operations on an alcoholic
patient produced paresis. The man got well," he added harshly, as if
kicking aside some dull formula; "but he was a hopeless idiot."

The new surgeon stared politely without replying. Such an unprofessional
and uncalled-for expression of opinion was a new experience to him. In the
Boston hospital resident surgeons did not make unguarded confidences even
to their colleagues.

The two men finished their inspection without further incident, and went to
the office to examine the system of records. After Sommers had left his
successor, he learned from the clerk that "No. 8" had been entered as,
"Commercial traveller; shot three times in a saloon row." Mrs. Preston had
called,--from her and the police this information came,--had been informed
that her husband was doing well, but had not asked to see him. She had left
an address at some unknown place a dozen miles south.

The surgeon's knowledge of the case ended there. As in so many instances,
he knew solely the point of tragedy: the before and the after went on
outside the hospital walls, beyond his ken. While he was busy in getting
away from the hospital, in packing up the few things left in his room, he
thought no more about Preston's case or any case. But the last thing he did
before leaving St. Isidore's was to visit the surgical ward once more and
glance at No. 8's chart. The patient was resting quietly; there was every
promise of recovery.

He left the grimy brick hospital, and made his way toward the rooms he had
engaged in a neighborhood farther south. The weather was unseasonably warm
and enervating, and he walked slowly, taking the broad boulevard in
preference to the more noisome avenues, which were thick with slush and
mud. It was early in the afternoon, and the few carriages on the boulevard
were standing in front of the fashionable garment shops that occupied the
city end of the drive. He had an unusual, oppressive feeling of idleness;
it was the first time since he had left the little Ohio college, where he
had spent his undergraduate years, that he had known this emptiness of
purpose. There was nothing for him to do now, except to dine at the
Hitchcocks' to-night. There would be little definite occupation probably
for weeks, months, until he found some practice. Always hitherto, there had
been a succession of duties, tasks, ends that he set himself one on the
heels of another, occupying his mind, relieving his will of all
responsibility.

He was cast out now from his youth, as it were, at thirty-two, to find his
place in the city, to create his little world. And for the first time since
he had entered Chicago, seven months before, the city wore a face of
strangeness, of complete indifference. It hummed on, like a self-absorbed
machine: all he had to do was not to get caught in it, involved, wrecked.
For nearly a year he had been a part of it; and yet busy as he had been in
the hospital, he had not sought to place himself strongly. He had gone in
and out, here and there, for amusement, but he had returned to the
hospital. Now the city was to be his home: somewhere in it he must dig his
own little burrow.

Unconsciously his gait expressed his detachment. He sauntered idly, looking
with fresh curiosity at the big, smoke-darkened houses on the boulevard. At
Twenty-Second Street, a cable train clanged its way harshly across his
path. As he looked up, he caught sight of the lake at the end of the
street,--a narrow blue slab of water between two walls. The vista had a
strangely foreign air. But the street itself, with its drays lumbering into
the hidden depths of slimy pools, its dirty, foot-stained cement walks, had
the indubitable aspect of Chicago.

Along the boulevard carriages were passing more frequently. The clank of
metal chains, the beat of hoofs upon the good road-bed, sounded smartly on
the ear. The houses became larger, newer, more flamboyant; richly dressed,
handsome women were coming and going between them and their broughams. When
Sommers turned to look back, the boulevard disappeared in the vague, murky
region of mephitic cloud, beneath which the husbands of those women were
toiling, striving, creating. He walked on and on, enjoying his leisure,
speculating idly about the people and the houses. At last, as he neared
Fortieth Street, the carriages passed less frequently. He turned back with
a little chill, a feeling that he had left the warm, living thing and was
too much alone. This time he came through Prairie and Calumet Avenues.
Here, on the asphalt pavements, the broughams and hansoms rolled
noiselessly to and fro among the opulent houses with tidy front grass plots
and shining steps. The avenues were alive with afternoon callers. At
several points there were long lines of carriages, attending a reception,
or a funeral, or a marriage.

The air and the relaxation of all purpose tired him. The scene of the
previous evening hung about his mind, coloring the abiding sense of
loneliness. His last triumph in the delicate art of his profession had
given him no exhilarating sense of power. He saw the woman's face,
miserable and submissive, and he wondered. But he brought himself up with a
jerk: this was the danger of permitting any personal feeling or speculation
to creep into professional matters.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his new rooms on Twenty-Eighth Street, there was an odor of stale
tobacco, permeating the confusion created by a careless person. Dresser had
been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had known as
a student in Europe, wandering almost penniless down State Street, and had
offered him a lodging-place.

"How did it come out?" Sommers asked the big, blond young man with a
beer-stained mustache.

The big fellow stopped, before answering, to stuff a pipe with tobacco,
punching it in with a fat thumb.

"They'll give me a job--mean one--three dollars a day--nine to five--under
the roof in a big loft, tenth story--with a lot of women hirelings. Regular
sweatshop--educational sweatshop."

Sommers took up some letters from the table and opened them.

"Well, I've got to scare up some patients to live on, even to make three
dollars a day."

"You!" Dresser exclaimed, eying the letters with naive envy. "You are pals
with the fat-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy,
and one of these days you will marry one of their daughters. Then you will
join the bank accounts, and good-by."

He continued to rail, half jestingly, half in earnest, at McNamara and
Hills,--where he had obtained work, thanks to a letter which Sommers had
procured for him,--at his companion's relations with the well-to-do, which
he exaggerated offensively, and at the well-to-do themselves.

"It was lucky for you," Sommers remarked good-humoredly, "that I was thick
enough with the bloodsuckers to get you that letter from Hitchcock. One of
us will have to stand in with the 'swilling, fat-fed capitalist.'"

"Are those Hitchcocks rich?" Dresser asked, his eye resting wistfully on a
square note that the young doctor had laid aside.

"I suppose so," Sommers answered. "Shall we go and have some beer?"

Dresser's blue eyes still followed the little pile of letters--eyes hot
with desires and regrets. A lust burned in them, as his companion could
feel instinctively, a lust to taste luxury. Under its domination Dresser
was not unlike the patient in No. 8.

When they turned into the boulevard, which was crowded at this hour of
twilight, men were driving themselves home in high carts, and through the
windows of the broughams shone the luxuries of evening attire. Dresser's
glance shifted from face to face, from one trap to another, sucking in the
glitter of the showy scene. The flashing procession on the boulevard
pricked his hungry senses, goaded his ambitions. The men and women in the
carriages were the bait; the men and women on the street sniffed it,
cravingly, enviously.

"There's plenty of swag in the place," Dresser remarked.




CHAPTER III


The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in
Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before the
Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr. Sommers to
Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of the regiment in which
Isaac Sommers served as surgeon. Although the families had seen little of
one another since the war, yet Alexander Hitchcock's greeting to the young
doctor when he met the latter in Paris had been more than cordial.
Something in the generous, lingering hand-shake of the Chicago merchant had
made the younger man feel the strength of old ties.

"I knew your mother," Colonel Hitchcock had said, smiling gently into the
young student's face. "I knew her very well, and your father, too,--he was
a brave man, a remarkable man."

He had sympathetically rolled the hand he still retained in his broad palm.

"If Marion had only been Chicago! You say he died two years ago? And your
mother long ago? Where will you settle?"

With this abrupt question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly
intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came
to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the
vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a
good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since
the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago
agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed to say. 'We mustn't
lose you.'

Those pleasant days in Paris had been rendered more memorable to the young
doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss Hitchcock--a
friendship quite independent of anything her family might feel for him. She
let him see that she made her own world, and that she would welcome him as
a member of it. Accustomed as he had been only to the primitive daughters
of the local society in Marion and Exonia, or the chance intercourse with
unassorted women in Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course,
and in European pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and
delightful picture. That it was but one generation from Hill's Crossing,
Maine, to this self-possessed, carefully finished young woman, was
unbelievable. Tall and finished in detail, from the delicate hands and fine
ears to the sharply moulded chin, she presented a puzzling contrast to the
short, thick, sturdy figure of her mother. And her quick appropriation of
the blessings of wealth, her immediate enjoyment of the aristocratic
assurances that the Hitchcock position had given her in Chicago, showed
markedly in contrast with the tentativeness of Mrs. Hitchcock. Louise
Hitchcock handled her world with perfect self-command; Mrs. Hitchcock was
rather breathless over every manifestation of social change.

Parker Hitchcock, the son, Sommers had not seen until his coming to
Chicago. At a first glance, then, he could feel that in the son the family
had taken a further leap from the simplicity of the older generation.
Incidentally the young man's cool scrutiny had instructed him that the
family had not committed Parker Hitchcock to _him_. Young Hitchcock
had returned recently to the family lumber yards on the West Side and the
family residence on Michigan Avenue, with about equal disgust, so Sommers
judged, for both _milieux_. Even more than his sister, Parker was
conscious of the difference between the old state of things and the new.
Society in Chicago was becoming highly organized, a legitimate business of
the second generation of wealth. The family had the money to spend, and at
Yale in winter, at Newport and Beverly and Bar Harbor in summer, he had
learned how to spend it, had watched admiringly how others spent their
wealth. He had begun to educate his family in spending,--in using to
brilliant advantage the fruits of thirty years' hard work and frugality.
With his cousin Caspar Porter he maintained a small polo stable at Lake
Hurst, the new country club. On fair days he left the lumber yards at noon,
while Alexander Hitchcock was still shut in behind the dusty glass doors of
his office. His name was much oftener in the paragraphs of the city press
than his parents': he was leading the family to new ideals.

Ideals, Sommers judged, that were not agreeable to old Colonel Hitchcock,
slightly menacing even in the eyes of the daughter, whose horizon was
wider. Sommers had noticed the little signs of this heated family
atmosphere. A mist of undiscussed views hung about the house, out of which
flashed now and then a sharp speech, a bitter sigh. He had been at the
house a good deal in a thoroughly informal manner. The Hitchcocks rarely
entertained in the "new" way, for Mrs. Hitchcock had a terror of formality.
A dinner, as she understood it, meant a gathering of a few old friends,
much hearty food served in unpretentious abundance, and a very little bad
wine. The type of these entertainments had improved lately under Miss
Hitchcock's influence, but it remained essentially the same,--an occasion
for copious feeding and gossipy, neighborly chat.

To-night, as Sommers approached the sprawling green stone house on Michigan
Avenue, there were signs of unusual animation about the entrance. As he
reached the steps a hansom deposited the bulky figure of Brome Porter, Mrs.
Hitchcock's brother-in-law. The older man scowled interrogatively at the
young doctor, as if to say: 'You here? What the devil of a crowd has Alec
raked together?' But the two men exchanged essential courtesies and entered
the house together.

Porter, Sommers had heard, had once been Alexander Hitchcock's partner in
the lumber business, but had withdrawn from the firm years before. Brome
Porter was now a banker, as much as he was any one thing. It was easy to
see that the pedestrian business of selling lumber would not satisfy Brome
Porter. Popularly "rated at five millions," his fortune had not come out of
lumber. Alexander Hitchcock, with all his thrift, had not put by over a
million. Banking, too, would seem to be a tame enterprise for Brome Porter.
Mines, railroads, land speculations--he had put his hand into them all
masterfully. Large of limb and awkward, with a pallid, rather stolid face,
he looked as if Chicago had laid a heavy hand upon his liver, as if the
Carlsbad pilgrimage were a yearly necessity. 'Heavy eating and drinking,
strong excitements--too many of them,' commented the professional glance of
the doctor. 'Brute force, padded superficially by civilization,' Sommers
added to himself, disliking Porter's cold eye shots at him. 'Young man,'
his little buried eyes seemed to say, 'young man, if you know what's good
for you; if you are the right sort; if you do the proper thing, we'll push
you. Everything in this world depends on being in the right carriage.'
Sommers was tempted whenever he met him to ask him for a good tip: he
seemed always to have just come from New York; and when this barbarian went
to Rome, it was for a purpose, which expressed itself sooner or later over
the stock-ticker. But the tip had not come yet.

As Sommers was reaching the end of his conversational rope with Porter,
other guests arrived. Among them was Dr. Lindsay, a famous specialist in
throat diseases. The older doctor nodded genially to Sommers with the air
of saying: 'I am so glad to find you _here_. This is the right place
for a promising young man.'

And Sommers in a flash suspected why he had been bidden: the good-natured
Miss Hitchcock wished to bring him a little closer to this influential
member of his profession.

"Shall we wait for them?" Dr. Lindsay asked, joining Sommers. "Porter has
got hold of Carson, and they'll keep up their stories until some one hauls
them out. My wife and daughter have already gone down. How is St.
Isidore's?"

"I left to-day. My term is up. I feel homesick already," the young doctor
answered with a smile. "Chicago is so big," he added. "I didn't know it
before."

"It's quite a village, quite a village," Dr. Lindsay answered thoughtfully.
"We'll have some more talk later, won't we?" he added confidentially, as
they passed downstairs.

The Hitchcock house revealed itself in the floods of electric light as
large and undeniably ugly. Built before artistic ambitions and cosmopolitan
architects had undertaken to soften American angularities, it was merely a
commodious building, ample enough for a dozen Hitchcocks to loll about in.
Decoratively, it might be described as a museum of survivals from the
various stages of family history. At each advance in prosperity, in social
ideals, some of the former possessions had been swept out of the lower
rooms to the upper stories, in turn to be ousted by their more modern
neighbors. Thus one might begin with the rear rooms of the third story to
study the successive deposits. There the billiard chairs once did service
in the old home on the West Side. In the hall beside the Westminster clock
stood a "sofa," covered with figured velours. That had once adorned the old
Twentieth Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not
sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor
above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same
way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should degrade
the huge steel engraving of the Aurora, which hung prominently at the foot
of the stairs, in spite of its light oak frame, which was in shocking
contrast with the mahogany panels of the walls. Flanking the staircase were
other engravings,--Landseer's stags and the inevitable Queen Louise. Yet
through the open arch, in a pleasant study, one could see a good Zorn, a
Venom portrait, and some prints. This nook, formerly the library, had been
given over to the energetic Miss Hitchcock. It was done in
Shereton,--imitation, but good imitation. From this vantage point the
younger generation planned an extended attack upon the irregular household
gods.

Sommers realized for the first time how the Aurora and the Queen Louise
must worry Miss Hitchcock; how the neat Swedish maids and the hat-stand in
the hall must offend young Hitchcock. The incongruities of the house had
never disturbed him. So far as he had noticed them, they accorded well with
the simple characters of his host and hostess. In them, as in the house, a
keen observer could trace the series of developments that had taken place
since they had left Hill's Crossing. Yet the full gray beard with the broad
shaved upper lip still gave the Chicago merchant the air of a New England
worthy. And Alexander, in contrast with his brother-in-law, had knotty
hands and a tanned complexion that years of "inside business" had not
sufficed to smooth. The little habit of kneading the palm which you felt
when he shook hands, and the broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the
years passed him on from success to success. Mrs. Hitchcock still slurred
the present participle and indulged in other idiomatic freedoms that
endeared her to Sommers. These two, plainly, were not of the generation
that is tainted by ambition. Their story was too well known, from the
boarding-house struggle to this sprawling stone house, to be worth the
varnishing. Indeed, they would not tolerate any such detractions from their
well-earned reputation. The Brome Porters might draw distinctions and
prepare for a new social aristocracy; but to them old times were sweet and
old friends dear.

As the guests gathered in the large "front room," Alexander Hitchcock stood
above them, as the finest, most courteous spirit. There was race in
him--sweetness and strength and refinement--the qualities of the best
manhood of democracy. This effect of simplicity and sweetness was
heightened in the daughter, Louise. She had been born in Chicago, in the
first years of the Hitchcock fight. She remembered the time when the
billiard-room chairs were quite the most noted possessions in the basement
and three-story brick house on West Adams Street. She had followed the
chairs in the course of the Hitchcock evolution until her aunt had insisted
on her being sent east to the Beaumanor Park School. Two years of "refined
influences" in this famous establishment, with a dozen other girls from
new-rich families, had softened her tones and prolonged her participles,
but had touched her not essentially. Though she shared with her younger
brother the feeling that the Hitchcocks were not getting the most out of
their opportunities, she could understand the older people more than he. If
she sympathized with her father's belief that the boy ought to learn to
sell lumber, or "do something for himself," yet she liked the fact that he
played polo. It was the right thing to be energetic, upright, respected; it
was also nice to spend your money as others did. And it was very, very nice
to have the money to spend.

To-night, as Sommers came across the hall to the drawing-room, she left the
group about the door to welcome him. "Weren't you surprised," she asked him
with an ironical laugh, "at the people, I mean--all ages and kinds? You see
Parker had to be appeased. He didn't want to stay, and I don't know why he
should. So we gave him Laura Lindsay." She nodded good-naturedly in the
direction of a young girl, whose sharp thin little face was turned joyfully
toward the handsome Parker. "And we added our cousin Caspar, not for
conversation, but to give an illusion of youth and gayety. Caspar is the
captain of the polo team. By the way, what do you think of polo?"

"I never had occasion to think," the young doctor replied, scrutinizing a
heavy, florid-faced young man whom he took to be Caspar Porter.

"Well, polo is with us at breakfast and dinner. Papa doesn't approve,
doesn't believe in young men keeping a stable as Caspar does. Mamma doesn't
know what she believes. I am arbitrator--it's terrible, the new
generation," she broke off whimsically.

"Which has the right of it?" Sommers asked idly. "The fathers who made the
money, or the sons who want to enjoy it?"

"Both; neither," she laughed back with an air of comfortable tolerance. She
might have added, 'You see, I like both kinds--you and Parker's set.'

"Do you know, Dr. Lindsay is here?"

Sommers smiled as he replied,--

"Yes; was it arranged?"

The girl blushed, and moved away.

"He was anxious to meet you."

"Of course," the doctor replied ironically.

"I could tell you more," she added alluringly.

"I have no doubt. Perhaps you had better not, however."

Miss Hitchcock ceased to smile and looked at him without reply. She had
something on the tip of her tongue to tell him, something she had thought
of pleasantly for the last three days, but she suspected that this man was
not one who would like to take his good fortune from a woman's hand.

"Dr. Lindsay is an old friend; we have known him for years." She spoke
neutrally. Sommers merely nodded.

"He is very successful, _very_," she added, giving in to her desire a
little.

"Chicago is a good place for a throat specialist."

"He is said to be the most--"

"What?"

"You know--has the largest income of any doctor in the city."
Sommers did not reply. At length the girl ventured once more.

"I hope you will be nice to him."

"There won't be any question of it."

"You can be so stiff, so set; I have counted a great deal on this."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers exclaimed awkwardly. "Who is the man with Mr.
Porter?"

"Railway Gazette Carson? That's what he is called. He swallows
railroads--absorbs 'em. He was a lawyer. They have a house on the North
Side and a picture, a Sargent. But I'll keep the story. Come! you must meet
Mrs. Lindsay."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers murmured to himself, as Miss Hitchcock moved
across the room.




CHAPTER IV

At the table there were awkward silences, followed by spasmodic local
bursts of talk. Sommers, who sat between Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Lindsay,
fell to listening to his host.

"I was taken for you to-day, Brome," Mr. Hitchcock said, with a touch of
humor in his voice.

Porter laughed at the apparent absurdity of the accusation.

"I was detained at the office over at the yards. The men and the girls had
pretty nearly all gone. I was just about to leave, when a fellow opened the
door--he looked like a Swede or a Norwegian.

"'Is the boss here?' he asked.

"'Yes,' said I; 'what can I do for you?'

"'I wants a yob, a yob,' he shouted, 'and no foolin'. I worked for de boss
ten years and never lost a day!'

"I thought the man was drunk. 'Who did you work for?' I asked. 'For
Pullman, in de vorks,' he said; then I saw how it was. He was one of the
strikers, or had lost his job before the strike. Some one told him you were
in with me, Brome, and a director of the Pullman works. He had footed it
clear in from Pullman to find you, to lay hands on you personally."

Porter laughed rather grimly.

"That's the first sign!" Carson exclaimed.

"They'll have enough of it before the works open," Porter added.

Parker Hitchcock looked bored. Such things were not in good form; they came
from the trade element in the family. His cousin Caspar had Miss Lindsay's
attention. She was describing a Polish estate where she had visited the
preceding summer.

"Did you send him round to our office?" Porter asked jokingly.

Sommers's keen eyes rested on his host's face inquiringly.

"No-oh," Alexander Hitchcock drawled; "I had a talk with him."

"They are rather dangerous people to talk with," Dr. Lindsay remarked.

"He was a Norwegian, a big, fine-looking man. He was _all right_. He
couldn't talk much English, but he knew that his folks were hungry. 'You
gif me a yob,' he kept saying, until I explained I wasn't in the business,
had nothing to do with the Pullman works. Then he sat down and looked at
the floor. 'I vas fooled.' Well, it seems he did inlaying work, fine
cabinet work, and got good pay. He built a house for himself out in some
place, and he was fired among the first last winter,--I guess because he
didn't live in Pullman."

"That's the story they use," Brome Porter said sceptically. "You should
call the watchman; they're apt to be dangerous."

"A crowd of 'em," put in Carson, "were at the Pullman office this morning;
wanted to _arbitrate_."

He spoke deprecatingly of their innocence, but Porter's tones were harsh.

"To arbitrate! to arbitrate! when we are making money by having 'em quit."

Miss Hitchcock turned apprehensively to her companion. Her handsome, clear
face was perplexed; she was distressed over the way the talk was going.

"It's as bad as polo!" she exclaimed, in low tones. But the doctor did not
hear her.

"Is it so," he was asking Colonel Hitchcock, "that the men who had been
thrifty enough to get homes outside of Pullman had to go first because they
didn't pay rent to the company? I heard the same story from a patient in
the hospital."

By this time Caspar Porter had turned his attention to the conversation at
the other end of the table. His florid face was agape with astonishment at
the doctor's temerity. Parker Hitchcock shrugged his shoulders and
muttered something to Miss Lindsay. The older men moved in their chairs.
It was an unhappy topic for dinner conversation in this circle.

"Well, I don't know," Colonel Hitchcock replied, a slight smile creeping
across his face. "Some say yes, and some say no. Perhaps Porter can tell
you."

"We leave all that to the superintendent," the latter replied stiffly. "I
haven't looked into it. The works isn't a hospital."

"That's a minor point," Carson added, in a high-pitched voice. "The real
thing is whether a corporation can manage its own affairs as it thinks best
or not."

"The thrifty and the shiftless," interposed Dr.

Lindsay, nodding to his young colleague.

"Well, the directors are a unit. That settles the matter," Porter ended
dogmatically. "The men may starve, but they'll never get back now."

The young doctor's face set in rather rigid lines. He had made a mistake,
had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss
Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching
for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable
slough, when Brome Porter began again sententiously:

"The laborer has got some hard lessons to learn. This trouble is only a
small part of the bigger trouble. He wants to get more than he is worth.
And all our education, the higher education, is a bad thing." He turned
with marked emphasis toward the young doctor. "That's why I wouldn't give a
dollar to any begging college--not a dollar to make a lot of discontented,
lazy duffers who go round exciting workingmen to think they're badly
treated. Every dollar given a man to educate himself above his natural
position is a dollar given to disturb society."

Before Sommers could accept the challenge in this speech, Miss Hitchcock
asked,--

"But what did you do with your visitor, papa?"

"Well, we had some more talk," he replied evasively. "Maybe that's why I
missed you, Brome, at the club. He stayed most an hour."

"Did he go then?" the girl pressed on mischievously.

"Well, I gave him a 'yob' over at the yards. It wasn't much of a 'yob'
though."

This speech aroused some laughter, and the talk drifted on in little waves
into safer channels. The episode, however, seemed to have made an undue
impression upon Sommers. Miss Hitchcock's efforts to bring him into the
conversation failed. As for Mrs. Lindsay, he paid her not the slightest
attention. He was coolly taking his own time to think, without any sense of
social responsibility.

"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low,
insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one
wants you to?"

Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream.
Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled.

"I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly.

"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head
to catch every syllable of his reply.

"I seemed to see things in a flash--to feel an iron crust of prejudice."

The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young
doctor tried again to phrase the matter.

"These people--I mean your comfortable rich--seem to have taken a kind of
oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you
must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he
blundered on.

"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising
her head and glancing over the table.

"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks
sound 'young' even to me."


"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk
business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"

She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half
lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.

"Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand."

It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the
aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock
was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited,
personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further
opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even
tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end.

"I hope you will talk with Dr. Lindsay. He is a very able man. And," she
hesitated a moment and then looked frankly at him, "he can do so much for a
young doctor who has his way to make."

"Don't you think that might make it harder for me to talk to him?" Sommers
asked, irritated by her lack of tact.

The girl's face flushed, and she pressed her lips together as if to push
back a sharp reply.

"That is unfair. We are going now--but sometime we must talk it out."

The men stretched themselves and rearranged their chairs in little groups.
Parker Hitchcock, Carson, and young Porter--were talking horses; they made
no effort to include the young doctor in their corner. He was beginning to
feel uncomfortably stranded in the middle of the long room, when Dr.
Lindsay crossed to his side. The talk at dinner had not put the
distinguished specialist in a sympathetic light, but the younger man felt
grateful for this act of cordiality. They chatted about St. Isidore's,
about the medical schools in Chicago, and the medical societies. At last
Dr. Lindsay suggested casually, as he refilled his liqueur-glass:

"You have made some plans?"

"No, not serious ones. I have thought of taking a vacation. Then there is
another hospital berth I could have. Head of a small hospital in a mining
town. But I don't like to leave Chicago, on the whole."

"You are right," the older physician remarked slowly. "Such a place would
bury you; you would never be heard of."

Sommers smiled at the penalty held out, but he did not protest.

"There isn't any career in hospital work, anyway, for a steady thing. You
get side-tracked."

"I like it better than family practice," Sommers jerked out. "You don't
have to fuss with people, women especially. Then I like the excitement of
it."

"That won't last long," the older man smiled indulgently. "And you'll have
a wife some day, who will make you take a different view. But there are
other things--office practice."

He dilated on the advantages of office practice, while the younger man
smoked and listened deferentially. Office practice offered a pleasant
compromise between the strenuous scientific work of the hospital and the
grind of family practice. There were no night visits, no dreary work with
the poor--or only as much as you cared to do,--and it paid well, if you
took to it. Sommers reflected that the world said it paid Lindsay about
fifty thousand a year. It led, also, to lectureships, trusteeships--a mass
of affairs that made a man prominent and important in the community.

Sommers listened attentively without questioning the agreeable, tactful
doctor. He could see that something was in the air, that Lindsay was not a
man to talk with this degree of intimacy out of pure charity or vanity. But
the great specialist said nothing very definite after all: he let fall,
casually, the fact that good men for office work--men of experience who
were skilful and tactful--were rare. He had just lost a valuable doctor
from his staff.

When the men returned to the drawing-room, Parker Hitchcock and his cousin
took themselves off. The Lindsays went soon after. Sommers, who had
regained his good sense; tried to make his apologies to Miss Hitchcock.

"Don't go yet," she answered cordially. "They will all be disposed of soon,
and we can have that talk. Go and look at my prints."

In a few moments she came up behind him as he was studying the brush work
of a little canvas. "I have been thinking of what you said at the table,
Dr. Sommers. I have tried to think what you mean, but I can't."

Her eyes opened in frank, tolerant inquiry. Sommers had seen her like this
a few times, and always with a feeling of nearness.

"I don't believe that I can make you understand," he began.

"Try!"

"The feelings that make us act are generally too vague to be defended. All
that I could do would be to describe a mood, a passion that takes me now
and then, and makes me want to smash things."

She nodded her head comprehendingly.

"Yes, I know that."

"Not from the same reason," Sommers laughed.

"I will tell you what it is: you think the rich are unfair. You didn't like
Uncle Brome's talk about the Pullman people."

"No, and more than that," he protested; "I don't know anything about the
Pullman matter; but I hate the--successful. I guess that's about it."

"You think they are corrupt and luxurious and all that?"

As she spoke she waved one hand negligently toward the Aurora in the hall.
They both laughed at the unspoken argument.

"If you feel like that _here_--"

"I feel that way pretty much all the time in America," he said bluntly. "It
isn't this house or that, this man's millions or that man's; it's the whole
thing."

Miss Hitchcock looked nonplussed.


"Life is based on getting something others haven't,--as much of it as you
can and as fast as you can. I never felt that so constantly as I have the
last few months. Do you think," he went on hastily, "that Lindsay, that any
doctor, can _earn_ fifty thousand a year?"

"I don't know. I hate views." Her voice sounded weary and defeated.

Sommers rose to his feet, exclaiming, "I thought there were some pretty
definite ones, this evening."

Miss Hitchcock started, but refused to take the challenge.

They faced each other for a moment without speaking. Sommers could see that
his blundering words had placed him in a worse position than before. At the
same time he was aware that he regretted it; that "views" were
comparatively unimportant to a young woman; and that this woman, at least,
was far better than views.

"Good night," she murmured, lowering her eyes as she gave him her hand. He
hesitated a moment, searching for an intelligent word, but finally he
turned away without any further attempt to explain himself.

It was good to be out in the soft March night, to feel once more the free
streets, which alone carry the atmosphere of unprivileged humanity. The
mood of the evening was doubtless foolish, boyish, but it was none the less
keen and convincing. He had never before had the inner, unknown elements of
his nature so stirred; had never felt this blind, raging protest.
It was a muddle of impressions: the picture of the poor soul with his
clamor for a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived
as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he
remembered to have seen only once before, when the young polo captain was
stupid drunk; the silly young cub of a Hitchcock. Even the girl was one of
them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the
scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs
for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago was
so emptily imitative, an echo of an echo!

There was Carson: he was your image of modern power--the lean, hungry,
seamed face, surmounted by a dirty-gray pall. He was clawing his way to the
top of the heap.

Sommers stopped to laugh at himself. His fury was foolish, a mere
generalization of discontent from very little data. Still, it was a relief
to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent
stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street.
His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and
squalor. The public part of it--the street and the sidewalks--was equally
dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping
down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his
preoccupation he stumbled occasionally into some stagnant pool.

Should he take Lindsay's job, if he had the chance? Obstinately his mind
reverted to a newspaper paragraph that had caught his eye months before: on
the occasion of some disturbance over women students in the Western Medical
College, Dr. Lindsay had told the men that "physicians should be especially
considerate of women, if for no other reason, _because their success in
their profession would depend very largely on women_." Certainly, if he
had to decide to-night, he would rather return to Marion, Ohio, than join
his staff. Such a retreat from the glories of Chicago would be
inconceivable to old Hitchcock and to the girl. He reflected that he should
not like to put himself away from her forever.

St. Isidore's loomed ahead in the quiet street, its windows dark except for
the night light in the ward kitchens. He should like to turn in there for a
few minutes, to see how the fellow was coming on. The brute ought not to
pull through. But it was too late: a new regime had begun; his little
period of sway had passed, leaving as a last proof of his art this human
jetsam saved for the nonce. And there rose in his heated mind the pitiful
face of a resolute woman, questioning him: "You held the keys of life and
death. Which have you given _me_?"




CHAPTER V


The Athenian Building raises its knife-like facade in the centre of
Chicago, thirteen stories in all; to the lake it presents a broad wall of
steel and glass. It is a hive of doctors. Layer after layer, their offices
rise, circling the gulf of the elevator-well. At the very crown of the
building Dr. Frederick H. Lindsay and his numerous staff occupy almost the
entire floor. In one corner, however, a small room embedded in the heavy
cornice is rented by a dentist, Dr. Ephraim Leonard. The dentist's office
is a snug little hole, scarcely large enough for a desk, a chair, a case of
instruments, a "laboratory," and a network of electric appliances. From the
one broad window the eye rests upon the blue shield of lake; nearer, almost
at the foot of the building, run the ribboned tracks of the railroad yards.
They disappear to the south in a smoky haze; to the north they end at the
foot of a lofty grain elevator. Beyond, factories quietly belch sooty
clouds.

Dr. Lindsay coveted this office, but Dr. Leonard clung tenaciously to his
little strip, every inch that he could possibly pay rent for. He had been
there since that story was finished. The broad view rested him. When he
ceased to peer into a patient's mouth, he pushed up his spectacles and took
a long look over the lake. Sometimes, if the patient was human and had
enough temperament to appreciate his treasure, he would idle away a quarter
of an hour chatting, enjoying the sun and the clear air of the lake. When
the last patient had gone, he would take the chair and have the view to
himself, as from a proscenium box.

The little office was a busy place: besides the patients there were coming
and going a stream of people,--agents, canvassers, acquaintances, and
promoters of schemes. A scheme was always brewing in the dentist's office.
Now it was a plan to exploit a new suburb innumerable miles to the west.
Again it was a patent contrivance in dentistry. Sometimes the scheme was
nothing more than a risky venture in stocks. These affairs were conducted
with an air of great secrecy in violent whisperings, emphasized by blows of
the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly
informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one
inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes,
it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived
without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to
have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They
were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization,
needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of
capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into
the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh
to the secret chamber of his soul. But his face was turned outward to
receive the next scheme.

This time it happened to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from
dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the
chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He
was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in
the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat
and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little office
clerk had left, the talk about the gas generator ceased, and the woman
turned her wistful face to the old dentist. There was a sombre pause.

"Yes," the dentist muttered finally, "I saw it in the paper Tuesday, no,
Monday--it was Monday, wasn't it? and I hoped you'd come in."

The woman moved her hands restlessly, as if to ask where else she could go.

"They most always do turn up," he continued bluntly; "them that no one
wants, like your husband. What are you going to do?"

The woman turned her face back to the lake; it was evident that she had no
plan.

"I thought," the dentist began, recalling her story, "I thought when you'd
started in the schools--it was a mighty hard thing to do to get you in; it
took all my pull on Mahoney."

The woman's face flushed. "I know," she murmured. "They don't want married
women. But if it hadn't been for Mahoney--"

"Then," interrupted the dentist, "he'd been good enough to let you alone
for most a year, and I thought you were out of your troubles."

"I knew he would come back," she interposed quietly.

"But now he comes back just as everything is nice, and worse, you come
across him when he is nigh bein' shot to death. Then, worse yet, by what
the papers said, you went to the hospital with him and gave the whole thing
away. When I saw the name, Alves Preston, printed out, I swore."

Mrs. Preston smiled at his vehemence.

"Tell me, Alves," the old man asked in a rambling manner, "how did you ever
come to marry him? I've wanted to ask you that from the first."

Mrs. Preston rose from the chair and pulled her cloak about her.

"I couldn't make you understand; I don't myself _now_."

"D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently.

"Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl
away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and
he--"

But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture.

"It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance,
no chance. I can't tell you now all the things."

"Well," the dentist said soothingly, "let's see just how bad it is. Has
your boss, the superintendent, or the principal spoke to you, turned you
out? I see the reporter went around to the school, nosing after something."

"They'd just transferred me--miles south," she answered indifferently. "I
was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and
think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all
foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing
to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few months
before they dismiss you."

"I didn't know any one was ever dismissed from a Chicago school," the
dentist remarked.

"Oh, sometimes when the superintendents or the supervisors don't want you.
There is a supervisor in the Everglade district--" she stopped a moment,
and then continued tranquilly--"he was very intimate at first. I thought he
wanted to help me to get on in the school. But he wanted--other things.
Perhaps when he doesn't--succeed--that will be the end."

"It'll blow over," the dentist said encouragingly. "If the supervisor
troubles you much, I'll see Mahoney. You've changed your boarding-place?"

"Yes--but," she admitted in a moment, "they know it at the hospital."

Dr. Leonard rubbed his bristly face irritably.

"I've been to see him--it seemed I ought to--I was the only one who
WOULD in the whole world--the only one to speak a word to him."

"That makes it worse," the dentist commented depressingly. "I don't know as
you could get free now if you wanted to. You've put your hand to the plough
again, my girl, and it's a long furrow."

"What do you mean?"

"The hospital folks know you're his wife, and they'll expect you to take
him in when he gets better."

"I suppose so," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But I suppose, anyway, I should
take care of him until he can go away."

Dr. Leonard threw up his hands in disgust.

"Alves, why don't you go straight off and get a divorce--for desertion?"

Mrs. Preston opened the heavy lids of her eyes; her face slowly flushed.

"That would be the end of it?" she asked, in a low voice.

"Of course! I'll give you the money, and testify for you. Go right ahead,
now he is laid up, and have it all ready when he gets out."

"I couldn't do that," Mrs. Preston answered, the color fading from her
face, and the white lids closing over the eyes. "Besides, he may never
recover fully. I don't think they expect him to at the hospital."

"All the more reason," protested the dentist. "It's mighty hard," he added
sympathetically. "Women are mostly children, the better sort, and you feel
bad, even when they're in trouble through their own foolishness."

"There is no release, no divorce," Mrs. Preston continued. "A thing is
done, and it's done. There's no ending it in this life. You can run away,
or close your eyes, but you don't escape. He has been--my husband."

"That's silly! Now let me tell you what I'll do." The dentist squared
himself and raised the little lignum-vitae mallet, which he used to drive
home his fillings.

"Don't you fool round any more. You can't love that fellow,--think you
never did now,--and he's given you no reason to be very nice to him. You
just drop him where you are, and start out alone and make the best of it.
You can't do that in Chicago now. Get out of Chicago to-morrer. Go east.
Take your maiden name; no one is goin' to be hurt by not knowin' you're
married. I guess you ain't likely to try it again."

He paused for objections, and evidently found one himself.

"If you ain't got the money handy, I'll just fix you up. That gas generator
I was talking to you about is going to make me mints of money. You can go
right away to my sister-in-law in Worcester, Ohio. Guess _he_ won't
trouble you much there. What do you say?"

She had nothing very cogent to say, but the dentist felt an impalpable
obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as
he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which
he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination
once enlisted for the plan, he held to it, arguing, counselling, bullying.
"If it's the money," he ended, "you needn't bother. I'll just put it on the
bill. When I am rich, it won't make no difference, nor when you are,
either."

Mrs. Preston took one of his furry hands in hers, and pressed it. She knew
that the ventures had not yet made him rich. Thirty years in Chicago had
not filled his purse.

"I'd do it for you, same as for one of my daughters. It's just as easy as
having a tooth out, and you start over as good as new."

"It isn't that," she smiled. "You can't start over as good as new if you
are a woman. I couldn't run away. I've put myself into it a second time,
without thinking. I chose then just as before, when I followed him to the
hospital. When the doctor asked me if he should try to save his life, I
wanted him to die--oh, how I longed that the doctor would refuse to try!
Well, he's alive. It is for life."

She seemed to see before her a long, toilsome ascent, to which she had been
driven to put her feet.

"Think it over," the dentist counselled at last, despondently. "Sleep on
it. There's Worcester, Ohio, and my sister-in-law."

Mrs. Preston smiled, and put on her hat.

"I've taken a lot of your time."

"That's no account, but I can't see what you came for. You won't let a
feller help you."

"There wasn't any good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There
isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that
means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see
things--horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and
then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,--because you really care.
Now I can go away, and keep silent for a long time."

"You make too much of it," the dentist protested. He busied himself in
putting the little steel instruments into their purple plush beds and
locking the drawers.

"Yes, I make too much of it," Mrs. Preston acknowledged quietly, as she
opened the door. "Good night."

"I guess she loves him still and don't like to own it. Women are generally
so," the dentist commented, when he was left alone. He picked up a sheaf of
stock certificates and eyed them critically. "They're nicer than the Placer
Mining ones. They just look fit to eat."

He locked the certificates of stock in the new company into a tiny safe,
and prepared to pull down the shade. In the railroad yards below, the great
eyes of the locomotives glared though the March dusk. As the suburban
trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up
above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and
steam were sucked together into the vortex of a cross street.

'I wished I hadn't let her go alone,' the dentist mused. 'Some day she'll
just go over there into the lake.'

When Mrs. Preston shut the dentist's door behind her, an office door on the
opposite side of the hall opened abruptly, and a young man strode into the
hall. She recognized him as the young surgeon who had operated upon her
husband at St. Isidore's. She stepped behind the iron grating of the
elevator well and watched him as he waited for the steel car to bob up from
the lower stories. She was ashamed to meet him, especially now that she
felt committed to the sordid future.

The little car arrived; the doctor stepped in and disappeared. The door
from which he came was covered with a long list of names. She read the name
freshly painted in at the bottom,--Dr. Howard Sommers.




CHAPTER VI


For Sommers had joined the staff of the great specialist, and resorted
daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had
served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of
incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing
popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work
promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital
practice he cared to take; and the new aspect of his profession--commercial
medicine he dubbed it--was at least entertaining. If one wished to see the
people of Chicago at near range,--those who had made the city what it is,
and were making it what it will be,--this was pretty nearly the best chance
in the world.

When he had mentioned Lindsay's offer to Dresser, who was rising at
laborious hours and toiling in the McNamara and Hill's offices, he realized
how unmentionable and trifling were his grounds for hesitation. Dresser's
enthusiasm almost persuaded him that Lindsay had given him something
valuable. And if he found it difficult to explain his distaste for the
thing to Dresser, what would he have to say to other people--to the
Hitchcocks? Yet he made his reservations to himself at least: he was not
committed to his "career"; he should be merely a spectator, a free-lance, a
critic, who keeps the precious treasure of his own independence. Almost at
the start, however, he was made to realize that this nonchalance, which
vindicated himself in his own eyes, could not be evident to others. As he
was entering the Athenian hive one morning, he passed the Hitchcock
brougham drawn up by the curb near a jeweller's shop. Miss Hitchcock, who
was preparing to alight, gave him a cordial smile and an intelligent glance
that was not without a trace of malice. When he crossed the pavement to
speak to her, she fulfilled the malice of her glance:

"You find Dr. Lindsay isn't so bad, after all?" There was no time for
explanation. She passed on into the jeweller's with another smile on her
mobile face. He had to do his stammering to himself, annoyed at the quip of
triumph, at the blithe sneer, over his young vaporings. This trivial
annoyance was accentuated by the effusive cordiality of the great Lindsay,
whom he met in the elevator. Sommers did not like this _camaraderie_
of manner. He had seen Lindsay snub many a poor interne. In his mail, this
same morning, came a note from Mrs. E. G. Carson, inviting him to dinner: a
sign that something notable was expected of his career, for the Carsons
were thrifty of their favors, and were in no position to make social
experiments. Such was the merry way of the world, elsewhere as here, he
reflected, as he turned to the routine of the day.

The office was in full blast: the telephones rang sharply every few
minutes, telling in their irritable little clang of some prosperous patient
who desired a panacea for human ailments; the reception-room was already
crowded with waiting patients of the second class, those who could not
command appointments by telephone. Whenever the door into this room opened,
these expectant ones moved nervously, each one hoping to be called. Then,
as the door into the private offices closed, the ones left behind fell back
with sighs to the magazines and illustrated papers with which they sought
to distract their fears or their ennui.

The thin, tall building shivered slightly at the blows of the fresh April
wind. The big windows of the reception-room admitted broad bands of
sunlight. The lake dazzled beneath in gorgeous green and blue shades.
Spring had bustled into town from the prairies, insinuating itself into the
dirty, cavernous streets, sailing in boisterously over the gleaming lake,
eddying in steam wreaths about the lofty buildings. The subtle monitions of
the air permeated the atmosphere of antiseptics in the office, and whipped
the turbulent spirits of Sommers until, at the lunch hour, he deserted the
Athenian Building and telephoned for his horse.

This saddle horse was one of the compensations for conformity. He had been
too busy lately, however, to enjoy it. From the bellow of the city he
cantered down the boulevards toward the great parks. As he passed the
Hitchcock house he was minded to see if Miss Hitchcock would join him. In
the autumn she had ridden with him occasionally, waiving conventionalities,
but lately she had made excuses. He divined that Parker Hitchcock had
sneered at such countrified behavior. She was to go away in a few days for
a round of visits in the South, and he wanted to see her; but a carriage
drew up before the house, and his horse carried him briskly past down the
avenue. From one boulevard to another he passed, keeping his eyes straight
ahead, avoiding the sight of the comfortable, ugly houses, anxious to
escape them and their associations, pressing on for a beyond, for something
other than this vast, roaring, complacent city. The great park itself was
filled with people, carriages, bicycles. A stream of carts and horse-back
riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new
game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway,
where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch
of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse
picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay
scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward
the crumbling Spanish convent. In this place there was a fine sense of
repose, of vast quiet. Everything was dead; the soft spring air gave no
life. Even in the geniality of the April day, with the brilliant,
theatrical waters of the lake in the distance, the scene was gaunt, savage.
To the north, a broad dark shadow that stretched out into the lake defined
the city. Nearer, the ample wings of the white Art Building seemed to stand
guard against the improprieties of civilization. To the far south, a line
of thin trees marked the outer desert of the prairie. Behind, in the west,
were straggling flat-buildings, mammoth deserted hotels, one of which was
crowned with a spidery steel tower. Nearer, a frivolous Grecian temple had
been wheeled to the confines of the park, and dumped by the roadside to
serve as a saloon.

Sommers rose in his stirrups and gazed about him over the rotting buildings
of the play-city, the scrawny acres that ended in the hard black line of
the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make
some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly
content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No
evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the
waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar
dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous
clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a
thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it
shut down on the illimitable, tawdry sweep of defaced earth.

The horse started: a human figure, a woman's dress, disturbing here in the
desert expanse, had moved in front of him. Sommers hit the horse with his
crop and was about to gallop on, when something in the way the woman held
herself caught his attention. She was leaning against the wind, her skirt
streaming behind her, her face thrust into the air. Sommers reined in his
horse and jumped down.

"How is your husband?" he asked brusquely.

Mrs. Preston looked up with a smile of glad recognition, but she did not
answer immediately.

"You remember, don't you?" the doctor said kindly. "You are Mrs. Preston,
aren't you? I am the doctor who operated on your husband a few weeks ago at
the hospital."

"Yes, I remember," she replied, almost sullenly.

"How is he? I left St. Isidore's the next day. Is he still in the
hospital?"

"They discharged him last Monday," Mrs. Preston answered, in the same dull
tone.

"Ah!" The doctor jerked the bridle which he held in his left hand and
prepared to mount. "So he made a quick recovery."

"No, no! I didn't say that," she replied passionately. "You knew, you knew
_that_ couldn't be. He has--he is--I don't know how to say it."

Sommers slipped the bridle-rein over the horse's head and walked on by her
side. She looked down at the roadway, as if to hide her burning face.

"Where is he now?" the doctor asked, finally, more gently.

"With me, down there." Mrs. Preston waved her hand vaguely toward the
southern prairie. They began to walk more briskly, with a tacit purpose in
their motion. When the wagon road forked, Mrs. Preston took the branch that
led south out of the park. It opened into a high-banked macadamized avenue
bordered by broken wooden sidewalks. The vast flat land began to design
itself, as the sun faded out behind the irregular lines of buildings two
miles to the west. A block south, a huge red chimney was pouring tranquilly
its volume of dank smoke into the air. On the southern horizon a sooty
cloud hovered above the mills of South Chicago. But, except for the monster
chimney, the country ahead of the two was bare, vacant, deserted. The
avenue traversed empty lots, mere squares of sand and marsh, cut up in
regular patches for future house-builders. Here and there an advertising
landowner had cemented a few rods of walk and planted a few trees to trap
the possible purchaser into thinking the place "improved." But the cement
walks were crumbling, the trees had died, and rank thorny weeds choked
about their roots. The cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on
either side of an embankment.

"My God, what a place!" the young doctor exclaimed. "The refuse acres of
the earth."

The woman smiled bitterly, tranquilly, while her glance roamed over the
familiar landscape.

"Yet it is better than the rest, back there," she protested, in a low
voice. "At least, there is something open, and a little green in spring,
and the nights are calm. It seems the least little bit like what it used to
be in Wisconsin on the lake. But there we had such lovely woodsy hills, and
great meadows, and fields with cattle, and God's real peace, not this
vacuum." Her voice grew faint.

"You liked it there?" the doctor asked musingly.

"It's all that I have ever known that was--as it should be. My father had a
farm," she explained more easily, "and until he died and I was sent to
Rockminster College to school, my life was there, by the lake, on the farm,
at the seminary on the hill, where my brother was studying--"

The visions of the past developed with endless clews, which she could not
follow aloud. After waiting for her to resume, Sommers asked tentatively:

"Why don't you go back, then?"

She flashed a rapid, indignant glance at him.

"Now! Go back to what?--With _him_!"

Her lips set tight. He had been stupid, had hit at random.

"No, no," she continued, answering her own heart; "they would never
understand. There is never any going back--and, sometimes, not much going
ahead," she ended, with an effort to laugh.

They stopped while the horse nibbled at a tall weed in the roadway. They
had got fairly into the prairie, and now at some distance on left and right
gawky Queen Anne houses appeared. But along their path the waste was
unbroken. The swamp on either side of the road was filled with birds, who
flew in and out and perched on the dry planks in the walks. An abandoned
electric-car track, raised aloft on a high embankment, crossed the avenue.
Here and there a useless hydrant thrust its head far above the muddy soil,
sometimes out of the swamp itself. They had left the lake behind them, but
the freshening evening breeze brought its damp breath across their faces.

"How came you to get into this spot?" the doctor asked, after his searching
eyes had roamed over the misty landscape, half swamp, half city suburb.

"I was transferred--about the time of the operation. My school is over
there," she pointed vaguely toward the southwest. "I could not afford to
live any distance from the school," she added bluntly. "Besides, I wanted
to be alone."

So she taught, Sommers reflected, yet she had none of the professional air,
the faded niceness of face and manner which he associated with the city
school-teacher.

"I haven't taught long," she volunteered, "only about a year. First I was
over by Lincoln Park, near where I had been living."

"Do you like the teaching?" Sommers asked.

"I hate it," she remarked calmly, without any show of passion. "It takes a
little of one's life every day, and leaves you a little more dead."

They walked in silence for a few minutes, and then Mrs. Preston suddenly
stopped.

"Why do you come?" she exclaimed. "Why do you want to know? It can do no
good,--I know it can do no good, and it is worse to have any
one--_you_--know the hateful thing. I want to crush it in myself,
never to tell, no,--no one," she stopped incoherently.

"I shall go," the doctor replied calmly, compassionately. "And it is best
to tell."

Her rebellious face came back to its wonted repose.

"Yes, I suppose I make it worse. It is best to tell--sometime."




CHAPTER VII


As they proceeded, more briskly now, she talked of her life in the Chicago
schools. She had taken the work when nothing else offered in the day of her
calamity. She described the struggle for appointment. If it had not been
for her father's old friend, a dentist, she would never have succeeded in
entering the system. A woman, she explained, must be a Roman Catholic, or
have some influence with the Board, to get an appointment. Qualifications?
She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required,
but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in
pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have
passed the necessary examinations.

In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great
American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its
injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as
many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the
superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the
principals--petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed
gossip, scandal, intrigue. There were the "soft places"; the deceitful, the
easy, the harsh principals; the teachers' institutes to which the poor
teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules,
counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great
engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in
some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to
revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger.
The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work,"
"discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely
the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about the human atom.

Her manner of telling it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and
discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of
her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a
precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal,
not the special story of the special case.

"The first weeks I was nearly lost; the drawing teacher didn't like me, and
reported my room for disorder; the 'cat'--that is what they call the
principal--kept running in and watching, and the pupils--there were
seventy-five--I could barely keep them quiet. There was no teaching. How
could one teach all those? Most of our time, even in 'good' rooms, is taken
up in keeping order. I was afraid each day would be my last, when Miss
M'Gann, who was the most friendly one of the teachers, told me what to do.
'Give the drawing teacher something nice from your lunch, and ask her in to
eat with you. She is an ignorant old fool, but her brother is high up in a
German ward. And give the cat taffy. Ask him how he works out the
arithmetic lessons, and about his sassing the assistant superintendent, and
make yourself agreeable.'

"I did as I was told," she ended with a smile, "and things went better for
a time. But there was always the married teachers' scare. Every month or so
some one starts the rumor that the Board is going to remove all married
teachers; there are complaints that the married women crowd out the
girls--those who have to support themselves."

They both laughed at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to
do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she
mentioned certain farcical incidents.

"Once I saw a principal hurl a book at a sleepy teacher, who was nodding in
his lecture at the Institute. Poor woman! she is so nearly deaf that she
can hear nothing, and they say she can never remember where the lessons
are: the pupils conduct the recitations. But she has taught in that school
for twenty-three years, and she is a political influence in the ward.
Imagine it!"

They laughed again, and the world seemed lighter. Sommers looked at his
companion more closely and appreciatively. Her tone of irony, of amused and
impartial spectatorship, entertained him. Would he, caught like this,
wedged into an iron system, take it so lightly, accept it so humanly? It
was the best the world held out for her: to be permitted to remain in the
system, to serve out her twenty or thirty years, drying up in the thin, hot
air of the schoolroom; then, ultimately, when released, to have the means
to subsist in some third-rate boarding-house until the end. Or marry again?
But the dark lines under the eyes, the curve of experience at the mouth,
did not warrant that supposition. She had had her trial of that
alternative.

She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had
touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied
probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most
casual--too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly
easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there
is slight probability of a common future.

At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long
intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of
gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use
indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an
advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a
tiny hub, _This is Ninety-first Street_; and at right angles on
another spoke, _This is Washington Avenue_. He remembered vaguely
having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been
drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it
probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,--to the Gulf for all he
knew.

Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck
farm bordered one side; a line of tall willows suggested faintly the
country. Just beyond the tracks of a railroad the ground rose almost
imperceptibly, and a grove of stunted oaks covered the miniature hill. The
bronzed leaves still hanging from the trees made something like shade
beside the road.

"That is better," Sommers exclaimed, relieved to find a little oasis in the
desert of sand and weeds.

The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And
beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you
can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes,
mostly,--operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the
railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of
English,--and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the
Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And
we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the
principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I
am left alone to reign among my young barbarians."

When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and
entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred
feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It
was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just
beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an
open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney
Island Avenue,--the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding
villages with Chicago.

An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a
year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to
live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had
got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with
crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a
quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a
bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines.

Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after
they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still
for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks
beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the
solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune
and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car,
passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open
lot--a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote.

The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad
horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in
the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out
of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs
had begun their monotonous chant.




CHAPTER VIII


"Shall we go in?" the doctor asked at last.

Mrs. Preston started, and her hand closed instinctively upon the gate, as
if to bar further entrance to her privacy. Then without reply she opened
the gate, led the way across the tiny lawn, and unlocked the cottage door.
They entered a large room, from which some narrow stairs led to the
chambers above. Floor and walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted
of two wooden chairs, a small coal-stove, and a pine table of considerable
size. This was covered with books, school exercises, and a few dishes. Mrs.
Preston brusquely flung off her cape and hat, and faced the doctor.

"I might as well tell you the main thing before you see him. He--"

"That is scarcely necessary," Sommers replied gently. "I probably know what
you are thinking of."

A flush, caused by the revealed shame, crept over her face, lighting it to
the extreme corners under the temples and ears. As she stood there,
humiliated, yet defiant of him and of the world, Sommers remembered the
first time he had seen her that night at the hospital. He read her,
somehow, extraordinarily well; he knew the misery, the longing, the anger,
the hate, the stubborn power to fight. Her deep eyes glanced at him
frankly, willing to be read by this stranger out of the multitude of men.
They had no more need of words now than at that first moment in the
operating room at St. Isidore's. They were man and woman, in the presence
of a fate that could not be softened by words.

"You are right," she said softly. "Yet sometime I want to tell you
things--not now. I will go and see how he is."

When she had left the room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in
the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable,
imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was
very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken
phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience
of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background--the sense of dealing
with a human soul nakedly.

"Will you come now?"

Mrs. Preston had returned and held the stair-door open for him. Sommers
looked at her searchingly, curious to find where this power lay. Her face
had grown white and set. The features and the figure were those of a large
woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the
gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above
the large brow and features made her seem older than she was. The deep-set
eyes, the quivering lips, and the thin nostrils gave life to the passive,
restrained face. The passions of her life lay just beneath the surface of
flesh.

"He is very talkative, and wanders--"

The doctor nodded and followed her up the steep stairs, which were closed
at the head by a stout door. The upper story was divided about equally into
two rooms. The east room, to which Mrs. Preston opened the door, was
plainly furnished, yet in comparison with the room below it seemed almost
luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the
lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that
lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake.
Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island
Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon.
Near this window on a lounge lay the patient.

Preston's personal appearance had not improved during his illness: his
face, over the lower half of which a black beard had grown rankly, was
puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch
were white and flabby. As he half rose and extended his hand to the doctor,
he betrayed, indefinably, remote traces of superior breeding.

"Excuse me, doctor," he said apologetically. "Mrs. Preston keeps me a close
prisoner. But she won't have the whip-hand very long."

He laughed boisterously, as Sommers shook hands and sat down.

"Women know they've got you while you are sick. They like to keep an eye on
a man, eh?"

He laughed again, confidentially, as if the doctor, being a man, would
appreciate the point. Then he continued, nervously, without pause:

"But I have some business to attend to. I must get out of this as soon as
you can patch me up so I can walk straight. I ought to have been in Denver
a month ago. There's a man out there, who comes in from his ranch two
hundred miles to see me. He is a fine fellow, strapping, big six-footer.
_He_ knows how to put in his time day and night, when he gets to town.
I remember one time we were in Frisco together--ever been in Frisco? It's a
great place for a good dinner, and all you want to drink. Drink--my! I've
seen the time--"

He rambled on, now and then pausing to laugh boisterously at some
recollection. As his whirligig tale touched upon indecent episodes, his
voice lowered and he sought for convenient euphemisms, helped out by
sympathetic nods. Mrs. Preston made several attempts to interrupt his
aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the
presence of the doctor. His mind was like a bag of loosely associated
ideas. Any jar seemed to set loose a long line of reminiscences, very
vaguely connected. The doctor encouraged him to talk, to develop himself,
to reveal the story of his roadside debaucheries. He listened attentively,
evincing an interest in the incoherent tale. Mrs. Preston watched the
doctor's face with restless eyes.

Finally Preston ended his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a
little whiskey to keep me going. Tell _her_, won't you?--to let me
have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't
had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I
tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell--his
father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan--well--we had one or two drinks,
and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some
one grabbed me, and I was thrown into the street--"

Mrs. Preston exclaimed, "Do you want to hear _more_?"

Sommers rose. "I'll come again to see you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave
something that will help you. Good night."

"It was good of you to take this interest, doctor. I am glad to have met
you, Doctor--?"

"Sommers," suggested the doctor, smiling at the evidences of forgotten
breeding that cropped out of the general decay.

"Well, Dr. Sommers, I hope we shall meet again when I am more myself."


When they returned to the room below, Mrs. Preston lit a lamp. After some
minutes Sommers asked, "How long has this been going on?"

"For years--before he left college; he was taken out of Yale because of it.
All I know is what he tells when he is not--responsible."

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.

"_I_ never knew," Mrs. Preston added quickly, "until we had been
married a year. He was away so much of the time, and he was very different
then--I mean he didn't ramble on as he does now. He was not flabby and
childish, not before the operation."

The doctor turned his face away.

"About two years ago some of the men he was with brought him home, drunk.
Afterward he didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time,
travelling, going from place to place, always living in hotels, always
drinking until some illness brought him back."

"And this time?" the doctor asked.

Mrs. Preston shut her lips, as if there were things she could not say yet.

"I was not living with him." In a few moments, she continued quietly: "I
suppose I should have been but for one thing. He told me he was going to
New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile
from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that. I had
suspected for months that there were other women; but seeing it, knowing
that he knew I had seen it! I nearly starved before I got work."

Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as
obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the
facts undimmed by passionate speech.

"As I told you, an old friend of my father's helped me to get work. That
kept me from ending it just there. As the months went on and he did not try
to find me, I got used to the round, to the school, the living on, dead and
alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in
another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have--I don't know. But
accidentally _he_ was brought back. I was going home from a teachers'
meeting that night. I saw him lying on the pavement, thrown out of the
saloon, as he told you. A crowd gathered. He was unconscious. I wanted to
run away, to leave him, to escape. He groaned. I couldn't--I couldn't."

She sighed wearily at the memory of her illogical act. The doctor nodded
sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point of decision in her life.
He understood what it meant to her.

"There was no one else to take him--to be responsible. He had been mine.
After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it never can. You
have to take your failures; you have to endure."

"Has he any relatives?" Sommers asked.

"A few; they were done with him long ago. They had money, and they wanted
to get rid of him. They put him into a business that would keep him away
from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself--going about
everywhere, always travelling, always with men who drink and live in hotels
as he has. They shoved him into the world to let the world, or any one who
would, take care of him."

It had been her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take
charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given up seeking
for escape.

"He is helpless now," she added, as for excuse. "It would be cruel."

For a moment the doctor's face looked hard. Was it, he seemed to be turning
over in his mind, that she loved him a little in the depths of her heart?
That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent
glance at her calm face rendered that supposition impossible. She was
merely largely human, with a sense of remote claims.

"And now what will you do?" he asked.

Her eyes were brooding on that now. Finally she exclaimed with an impatient
gesture:

"How can I tell! He may get strong enough to leave me--in peace. He may
come back again to rest and get well. And that may go on and on until one
of us dies, or I am discharged. As I told you, they are trying now to
exclude married teachers from the schools. And I am married!"

Sommers saw that she had faced the sordid situation; that she expected no
relief from the clouds. He got up and looked at his watch.

"I shall come again. We will see what can be done."

This was a convention of the profession. Nothing could be done for that
man, and he knew it. She knew it also. She smiled mournfully as they shook
hands. Yet as he moved toward the door she asked in a low tone:

"Won't you tell me what you call it? There is no use in not telling me."

"Paresis," Sommers replied shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he
added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps
inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated by the
operation."

His glance met hers, and they both fell silent before the common thought.
In the practice of his profession he had done this for her, in obedience to
the cowardly rules of that profession. He had saved life--animation--to
this mass of corruption. Except for his skill, this waste being would have
gone its way quietly to death, thereby purifying all life by that little.
He added at last in a mechanical tone:

"That results sometimes from such an operation. You can't tell how it will
affect the brain, especially when the history of the case is a bad one. He
will have to be sent away to an institution if--; but the only thing now
is to wait to see what will happen. Good night. I shall see you in a few
days," he concluded abruptly.

He was determined to speculate no more, to give her no hopes that might
prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have
convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal
physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional
to speculate in this loose fashion about the outcome of an operation.

Mrs. Preston watched him as he crossed the lawn and untied his horse. She
had not thanked him for coming, for promising to come again, he reflected
with relief. She was no weak, dependent fool. He rode down the sodded lane,
and as his horse picked his way carefully toward the avenue where the
electric cars were shooting back and forth like magnified fireflies, he
turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed
from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's
form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding
enough, isolated and withdrawn as the life of the woman within it. She was
set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor,
or restlessly babbling over his dirty tale. God knew why! Yet, physician
and unsentimental thinker that he was, he felt to a certain degree the
inevitableness of her fate. The common thing would be to shake the dirt
from one's shoes, to turn one's back on the diseased and mistaken being,
"to put it away where it would not trouble,"--but she did not seek to
escape.

And he had been the instrument to execute for her this decree of fate, to
bind it permanently, a lifetime curse.

The frogs were making merry in the marshy fields along the avenue. Their
robust chorus mingled with the whir of the cars. Soft, dark clouds were
driving lakeward. The blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago
silently opened and belched flame, and silently closed again. A rosy vapor,
as from some Tartarean breathing, hovered about the mouths of the furnaces.
Moment by moment these mouths opened and belched and closed. It was the
fiery respiration of a gigantic beast, of a long worm whose dark body
enveloped the smoky city. The beast heaved and panted and rested, again and
again--the beast that lay on its belly for many a mile, whose ample stomach
was the city, there northward, hid in smoke.




CHAPTER IX


Long after the horse's hoofs had ceased to beat in the still evening, Mrs.
Preston sat by the open window in the bare cottage room, her head resting
on her arms, her eyes peering into the soft darkness in the path of the
shadowy figure that had passed down Stoney Island Avenue into the night
beyond her ken. She had not asked him to return. But he had promised to.
Indeed, he did not seem to be far away: she could feel his gentle eyes, his
imperious face, his sympathetic voice. It was not much that she could make
of him; but her imagination built gratefully on his few words and simple
acts, until he became--as when he had spoken to her at the hospital--a
masterful spirit, dominating that vague, warm land of dreams in which she
took refuge during waking hours.

She should see him again--she must see him again, that was all. And yet
what was the good of it? Only a new pain in thus revealing her sores--a
pain mixed with a subtle anaesthetic, sweeter than anything she had known
in this life. In the end she would have to do without this anodyne; would
have to meet her hard and brutal world. Just now, while the yoke was hot to
the neck, she might take this mercy to temper the anguish. On the long hill
road before her it would be a grateful memory. It seemed now that she had
put herself to the yoke, had taken the hill road very lightly. She had not
thought of accepting the dentist's advice. With the fierce energy of her
crushed, spoiled youth, she had taken her measures: had found this little
cottage, hid in the oak copse; had prepared it with her own hands; had gone
to the hospital to fetch her husband. That never ending journey from the
hospital to the cottage! His ceaseless babble, the foul overflow from his
feeble mind, had sapped her courage.

Her head dropped weakly upon her arms; useless tears started. Before that
day she had had some joy in this cottage. There were glorious sunrises from
the lake and sunsets over the desolate marshes. The rank swamp grasses were
growing long, covering decently the unkempt soil. At night, alone, she had
comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the
prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were
like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as
they fled to and fro into the roaring cavern of the city, outward to the
silent country, to the happier, freer regions of man. As they rushed, they
bore her with them to those shadowy lands far away in the sweet stillness
of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days
were beset with visions like these--visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil
world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not
lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as
her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she
had never been, that which she could not be now--it must exist somewhere.
Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by
the desire for happiness,--inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her,
night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished,
the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in the still
afternoons as she wandered over this vast waste of houseless blocks. Up and
down the endless checker-board of empty streets and avenues she had roamed,
gleaning what joys were to be had in the metallic atmosphere, the stunted
copses, the marshy pools spotted with the blue shields of fleur-de-lys. For
even here, in the refuse corner of the great city, Nature doled out
niggardly gifts of green growth--proofs of her unquenchable bounty.

This hunger for joy had included no desire for companionship. When her
child died, the last person had slipped out of her world. To-night there
was a strange, almost fearful sense that this vacant, tenantless life might
change. Was there some one among these dull figures that would take life,
speak, touch _her_?

There was a movement in the rooms above. She started. Had she locked the
door securely? Preston had tried before to drag himself out of the cottage,
across the intervening lot, to the saloon on Stoney Island Avenue, whose
immense black and gold sign he could see from his chamber. That must not
happen here, in the neighborhood of the Everglade School. She must keep him
well concealed until he should be strong enough to go far away, on the old
round of travel and debauch, from city to city, wearing out his brutishness
and returning to her only when spent.

The movements above increased. He was pounding at the door.

"Are you going to let me starve? Where are you?" the sick man called out
querulously.

She sprang up; she had forgotten to get supper. When she took the food
upstairs, Preston was dragging himself about the room. He was excited, and
anxious to talk.

"Did that doctor fix me up? I don't remember seeing him in the hospital."

"He operated when you were received. He left the next day," she answered.

"It must have been a neat job. I guess I was in a pretty tough state," he
mused more quietly. "How did he happen to look me up?"

"I met him accidentally in the park," she explained briefly, anxious to
have done with the subject. "He offered to come back with me to see you.
Perhaps," she added more bitterly, "he wanted to see what he had done."

"I suppose he knows?"

She nodded.

"Well, I can't see why he bothers around. I don't want his attentions."

As she prepared to leave the room, after pulling down the shades and
opening the bed, he said apologetically:

"It was pretty good of you to take me in after--I have treated you badly,
Alves. But it's no use in going back over that. I guess I was made so.
There are lots of men like that, or worse."

"I suppose so," she assented coldly.

"Why are you so stiff with me? You hardly look at me, and you touch me as
if I were a piece of dirt. Supposing I take a brace and we start over,
somewhere else? I am tired of knocking round. Come over and kiss me, won't
you?"

Mrs. Preston paused in her work, the color mounting in her face. At first
she made no reply, but as she crossed to the door, she said in a cool,
distant tone:

"I don't think I shall ever kiss you again or let you touch me, if I can
help it. Do you happen to remember where I saw you last--I mean before I
found you in the street--six months ago?"

His face grew troubled, as if he were trying to recollect.

"Oh! that woman? Well, that's past."

"Yes, that woman. I took you here," she continued, her full voice gathering
passion, "because you are helpless and an outcast. And because I had taken
you before, ignorantly, I feel bound to defend you as you never defended
_me_. But I am not bound to do more, and you have sense enough--"

"You were ready enough to bind yourself, if I remember."

She answered meekly:

"I can't think it was the same woman who did that--who was blind and cheap
enough to do that. Something has shown me that I am other than the foolish
creature you took so easily with a marriage ring, because you could not
have her in an easier way! But the old, silly country girl has gone and
left me this----Why did it have to be?" she exclaimed more incoherently.
"Why did you not let me read what you are? I had only a few wretched weeks
to learn you--and I was ignorant and foolish and young. You had me helpless
at Barrington! Was it such a clever thing to cheat a girl from a Wisconsin
village?"

Preston answered apologetically,--

"Well, I married you."

"Married me! You make a good deal of that! Perhaps it would have been
better if you had not married me. My child and I could have died together
then. But I was _married_, and so I struggled. The child died, died,
do you hear, because you had left me without money to get it what it
needed. I sat and saw it die. You were--"

She closed her lips as if to repress further words. As she reached the
door, she said in her usual neutral tones:

"So long as you are decent, keep from drinking, and don't get me into
trouble at the school, you may stay and take what I can give you."

"'May stay!'" Preston roared, getting to his feet and making a step to
intercept her before she closed the door. His legs trembled, and he fell.
She knelt over him to see if he had injured himself, and then satisfied
that he was not hurt, she left the room, barring the door from the outside.
She was none too soon in taking this precaution, for as she swung the heavy
oak bar into its socket,--a convenient device of the old German, who had
the reputation of being a miser,--she could hear Preston dragging himself
toward the door, cursing as he stumbled over the furniture. She crept
wearily downstairs into the bare room. Some one was moving in the tiny
kitchen beyond.

"Is that you, Anna?" Mrs. Preston called.

"Ye-es," a slow voice responded. Presently a young woman came forward. She
was large and very fair, with the pale complexion and intense blue eyes of
the Swede.

"I came in and found no one here, so I was cleaning up for you. I have
time. John has gone to a meeting--there are many meetings now and not much
work. You will eat something?"

She went back to the kitchen and returned with warm food.

"Yes, I am faint." Mrs. Preston's arms trembled. She laughed nervously as
she spilled her tea.

"You are not well? You cannot live so--it's no use," the strong Swede
continued monotonously. "The men are bad enough when they are good; but
when they are bad, a woman can do nothing."

"Tell me about the strike."

Anna Svenson laughed contemptuously, as if such affairs were a part of
men's foolishness.

"They're talking of going out, all the railroad men, if the roads use the
Pullmans. That's what John has gone to see about. Work is hard to find, so
they're going to make less of it."

She stood easily, her arms by her side, watching Mrs. Preston eat, and
talking in an even, unexcited tone.

"Father likes the job I told you about--over at the lumber yards. He came
in last Sunday. He says the folks out his way are near starving. Svenson
thinks of quitting his job."

She laughed gently.

"Life is like that," Mrs. Preston assented. "You can't manage it."

"No, why should one?" Anna Svenson replied coolly. "Children come, they
die, they grow up, they fight, they starve, and they have children. It was
so over there; it is so here--only more pay and more drink some days; less
pay, less drink other days. I shall wash the dishes. Sit still."

She came and went quickly, noiselessly. When everything had been done, she
opened a window and leaned out, looking into the darkness. The fact of her
presence seemed to bring peace to the room.

"It is a good night," she said, drawing her head in. "There, Svenson has
lit the lamp. I must go."

"Good night, Anna." Mrs. Preston took her hand. It was large and cool.

"You shake hands?" Mrs. Svenson asked, with a smile. "When I was working
out, people like you never shook hands."

"People like me! What have I that makes me different from you?"

"Oh, nothing; not much," she replied tranquilly.

With a sigh Mrs. Preston took up a bundle of grammar exercises and sorted
them. She was too weary for this task: she could not go on just yet. She
drew her chair over to the window and sat there long quarter hours,
watching the electric cars. They announced themselves from a great distance
by a low singing on the overhead wire; then with a rush and a rumble the
big, lighted things dashed across the void, and rumbled on with a clatter
of smashing iron as they took the switches recklessly. The noise soothed
her; in the quiet intervals she was listening for sounds from upstairs. The
night was still and languorous, one of the peaceful nights of large spaces
when the heavens brood over the earth like a mother over a fretful child.
At last no more cars came booming out of the distance. She shut the windows
and bolted the door; then she prepared slowly to undress.

For the first time in months she looked at herself curiously, taking an
impersonal, calm survey of this body. She sought for signs of slovenly
decay,--thinning rusty hair, untidy nails, grimy hands, dried skin,--those
marks which she had seen in so many teachers who had abandoned themselves
without hope to the unmarried state and had grown careless of their bodies.
As she wound her hair into heavy ropes and braided them, it gave her a
sharp sense of joy, this body of hers, so firm and warm with blood, so
unmarked by her sordid struggle. It was well to be one's self, to own the
tenement of the soul; for a time it had not been hers--she reddened with
the shame of the thought! But she had gained possession once more, never,
never to lose it.

She listened carefully for noises from above; then flung herself on the
couch, utterly wearied. In a moment she was asleep, having shed the years
of pain, and a frank smile crept over the calm face.




CHAPTER X


After giving the invalid his breakfast, and arranging him on his couch
where he could see the cars pass, Mrs. Preston hurried over to the
Everglade School, which was only two blocks west of Stoney Island Avenue.
At noon she slipped out, while the other teachers gathered in one of the
larger rooms to chat and unroll their luncheons. These were wrapped in
little fancy napkins that were carefully shaken and folded to serve for the
next day. As the Everglade teachers had dismissed Mrs. Preston from the
first as queer, her absence from the noon gossip was rather welcome, though
resented.

The recess hour gave Mrs. Preston enough time to carry upstairs a cold
meal, to take a hasty nibble of food, and to hurry back across the vacant
lots before the gong should ring for the afternoon session. At the close of
school she returned to the cottage more deliberately, to finish her house
work before taking her daily walk. Occasionally she found this work already
performed; Anna Svenson's robust form would greet her as she entered the
cottage, with the apologetic phrase, "My fingers were restless." Mrs.
Svenson had an unquenchable appetite for work. The two women would have a
silent cup of tea; then Mrs. Svenson would smile in her broad, apathetic
manner, saying, "One lives, you see, after all," and disappear through the
oak copse. Thus very quickly between the school and the cottage Mrs.
Preston's day arranged itself in a routine.

Three days after the unexpected visit from the doctor, Mrs. Preston found
on her return from the school a woman's bicycle leaning against the gate.
Under the arbor sat the owner of the bicycle, fanning herself with a little
"perky" hat. She wore a short plaid skirt, high shoes elaborately laced,
and a flaming violet waist. Her eyes were travelling over the cottage and
all its premises.

"Miss M'Gann!" Mrs. Preston exclaimed.

"My!" the young woman responded, "but they did send you to kingdom come.
You're the next thing, Alves, to Indiana. I do hope you can get out of this
soon."

Mrs. Preston sat down beside her in the little arbor, and made polite
inquiries about the school where they had taught together, about Jane
M'Gann's "beaux," the "cat," and the "house" where she boarded.

"It was good of you to come all this way to see me," she concluded.

"I wanted a ride. We had a half day off--infectious disease in Rosa
Macraw's room. Besides, I told the girls I'd hunt you out. How _are_
you? You look rather down. Say, you mustn't shut yourself off here where
folks can't get at you. Why don't you live up town, at the house?"

"I can't," Mrs. Preston answered briefly.

"Do you know the news? The 'cat' has gone up higher. They made him
supervisor, 'count of his sly walk, I guess. And we've got a new principal.
He's fine. You can just do what you want with him, if you handle him right.
Oh, do you know Rosemarry King, the girl that used to dress so queer, has
been discharged? She lived in bachelor-girl apartments with a lot of
artists, and they say they were pretty lively. And Miss Cohen is going to
be married, ain't coming back any more after this year. Some of us thought
we could work it so as the new principal--Hoff's his name--would ask to
have you transferred back to one of those places. There's just a chance.
Now I've told all my news and everything!"

At that moment a man's figure appeared at an upper window. He was in a
dressing-gown, and unshaven. Miss M'Gann's keen vision spied him at once.

"You'll get queer, if you stay here!" she said falteringly.
"I guess I am queer already," Mrs. Preston answered with a smile. "Let us
go inside and have some tea."

Miss M'Gann looked the room over critically.

"You must come down to the house some night soon and meet the principal. He
rides a wheel, and we girls see considerable of him. If you are nice to
him, he'll do anything--he is one of the soft kind, sweet on all women, and
likes a little adoration."

"No, I don't believe I can." Mrs. Preston listened. There was noise in the
chamber above. "Besides, I like it out here. I like the quiet," she added.

Miss M'Gann looked at her incredulously, as if she were waiting to hear
more. As nothing came, she went on:

"We are having high times over the new readers. The 'cat' has done a set of
readers for the fourth and fifth. McNamara and Hills are bringing 'em out.
The Express Book Co. has a lot of money in the old ones, and they are
fighting hard to keep the cat's out of the schools. They're sending men
around to get reports from the teachers. There's a man, one of their
agents, who comes over to the house pretty often. He's a college man, was a
professor at Exonia."

"Excuse me," Mrs. Preston interrupted. The continued noise in the room
overhead had made her more and more nervous. She had not heard Miss
M'Gann's story, which would probably be the preface of a tender personal
episode. "I will be back in a moment," she said, closing the sitting-room
door carefully.

Miss M'Gann sat forward, listening intently. She could hear the stairs
creak under Mrs. Preston's quick steps; then there was silence; then an
angry voice, a man's voice. Excited by this mystery, she rose noiselessly
and set the hall door ajar. She could hear Alves Preston's voice:

"You must not come down. You aren't fit."

"Thank you for your advice," a man's voice replied. "Who's your visitor?
Some man? I am going to see. Don't make a scene."

There was the sound of a scuffle; then the cry of a woman, as she fell back
exhausted from her physical struggle.

"P'r'aps he's murdering her!"

Miss M'Gann opened the door at the foot of the stairs wide enough to detect
a half-clothed man trying to pry open with one arm a heavy door above. She
hesitated for a moment, but when the man had shoved the door back a little
farther, enough for her to see Mrs. Preston struggling with all her force,
she called out:

"Can I help you, Mrs. Preston?"

"No, no, go back! Go out of the house!"

"Well, I never!" Miss M'Gann ejaculated, and retreated to the sitting room,
leaving the door ajar, however.

The struggle ended shortly, and soon the man appeared, plunging, tumbling
over the stairs. Wrenching open the front door he stumbled down the steps
to the road. He was hatless, collarless, and his feet were shod in
slippers. As he reached the gate he looked at himself as if accustomed to
take pride in his personal appearance, drew a handkerchief from his pocket
and wound it negligently about his neck. Then, gazing about to get his
bearings, he aimed for the road. Just as he crossed the car tracks, heading
for the saloon with the big sign, Mrs. Preston entered the room. Her face
was pale and drawn. Miss M'Gann was too embarrassed to speak, and she
pretended to look into the kitchen.

"You will see now why I don't want a transfer," Mrs. Preston began, to
break the awkward silence. "I must look after my husband."

"My!" Miss M'Gann exclaimed, and then restrained herself. She nodded her
head slowly, and crossed to where Mrs. Preston had seated herself.

"But it's terrible to think of you here alone," she remarked gently. She
had intended to put her arm about Mrs. Preston's waist, but something
deterred her. "I wish I could come out and stay right on. I'm going to
spend the night, anyway. Father was that kind," she added in a lower voice.

Mrs. Preston winced under her sympathy and shook her head. "No, no! I am
better alone. You mustn't stay."

"You'd ought to have _some_ woman here," the girl insisted, with the
feminine instinct for the natural league of women. "At least, some one to
look after the house and keep you company."

"I have thought of trying to find a servant," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But
what servant--" she left the sentence unfinished, "even if I could pay the
wages," she continued. "Anna comes in sometimes--she's a young Swede who
has a sister in the school. But I've got to get on alone somehow."

"Well, if that's what getting married is, it's no wonder more of us girls
don't get married, as I told Mr. Dresser."

There was a knock at the outside door. Miss M'Gann quickly barricaded
herself behind the long table, while Mrs. Preston opened the door and
admitted the visitor. Miss M'Gann came forward with evident relief, and
Mrs. Preston introduced her visitors, "Dr. Sommers, Miss M'Gann."

Miss M'Gann greeted the doctor warmly.

"Why, this must be Mr. Dresser's Dr. Sommers." The young doctor bowed and
look annoyed. Miss M'Gann, finding that she could get little from either of
the two silent people, took her leave.

"I'll not forget you, dear," she said, squeezing Mrs. Preston's hand.

When she had ridden away, Mrs. Preston returned to the little sitting room
and dropped wearily into a chair.

"_He_ has just gone, escaped!" she exclaimed. "Just before you came."

The doctor whistled. "Do you know where he's gone to?"

She pointed silently to the low wooden building across the neighboring
avenue.

"If he makes a row, it will all get out. I shall lose my place."

The doctor nodded.

"Has it happened before?"

"He's tried of late. But I have kept him in and barred the door. This time
he forced it open. I was not strong enough to hold it."

The doctor hesitated a moment, and then, as if making a sudden resolve, he
took his hat.

"I'll try to bring him back."

From the open window she could see him walk leisurely down the lane to the
street, and pick his way carefully over the broken planks of the sidewalk
to the avenue. Then he disappeared behind the short shutters that crossed
the door of the saloon.

For some reason this seemed the one thing unbearable in her experience. The
bitterness of it all welled up and overflowed in a few hot tears that stung
her hands as they dropped slowly from the burning eyes. It was a long time
before the little blinds swung out, and the doctor appeared with her
husband. Preston was talking affably, fluently, and now and then he tapped
the doctor familiarly on his shoulders to emphasize a remark. Sommers
responded enough to keep his companion's interest. Once he gently
restrained him, as the hatless man plunged carelessly forward in front of
an approaching car. As the pair neared the house, the woman at the window
could hear the rapid flow of talk. Preston was excited, self-assertive, and
elaborately courteous.

"After you, doctor. Will you come upstairs to my room?" she caught as they
entered the gate. "My wife, doctor, is all right, good woman; but, like the
rest of them, foolish."

And the babbling continued until some one closed the heavy door at the head
of the stairs. Then there was noise, as of a man getting into bed. In time
it was quiet, and just as she was about to make the effort of finding out
what had happened, Sommers came downstairs and signed to her to sit down.

"I have given him a hypodermic injection. He won't trouble you any more
to-night," he said, staring dreamily out into the twilight.




CHAPTER XI


"This is too much for you," Sommers observed finally.

After his meditation he had come to much the same obvious conclusion that
Miss M'Gann had formed previously. The woman moved wearily in her chair.

"It can't go on," the doctor proceeded. "No one can tell what he might do
in his accesses--what violence he would do to you, to himself."

"He may get better," she suggested.

Sommers shook his head slowly.

"I am afraid not; the only thing to be hoped for is that he will get worse,
much worse, as rapidly as possible."

Mrs. Preston stood his questioning eyes as he delivered this unprofessional
opinion.

"Meantime you must protect yourself. The least harm his outbreaks will do
will be to make a scandal, to make it necessary for you to leave your
school."

"What can I do?" she asked, almost irritably.

"There are institutions."

"I have no money."

"And I suppose they would not do, now, while he is apparently getting
better. They would not help him, even if we should get him confined. His is
one of those cases where the common law prescribes liberty."

There was nothing further to say in this direction. Sommers seemed to be
thinking. At last, with an impulsive motion, he exclaimed:

"It should not have been! No, it should not have been."

He paused. Her eyes had lowered from his face. She knew his unexpressed
thought.

"And more than that, if you and I and the world thought straight, he
_would not be here now_."

"No, I suppose not," she acquiesced quietly, following his thought word by
word. "Well, as it is, I guess it's for life--for _my_ life, at
least."

"If one could only love enough--" he mused.

"Love!" she exclaimed passionately, at this blasphemous intrusion. "Does
one love such as that,--the man who betrayed your youth?"

"Not you and I. But one who could love enough--"

Her disdainful smile stopped him.

"I followed him to the hospital. I took him here, I don't know why. I guess
it's my fate. He was once mine, and I can't escape that--but as to love--do
you think I am as low as that?"

"You have no duties except the duties love makes," the doctor suggested.
"He is no longer even the man you married. He is not a man in any sense of
the word. He is merely a failure, a mistake; and if society is afraid to
rid itself of him, society must provide for him."

"Yes, yes," she murmured, as if all this were familiar ground to her mind.
"But I am the nearest member of society--the one whose business it is to
attend to this mistake. It's my contribution," she ended with a feeble
smile.

"Society has no right to expect too much from any one. The whole sacrifice
mustn't fall where it crushes. I say that such a case should be treated by
the public authorities, and should be treated once for all."

She rose and looked into his eyes, as if to say, 'You _were_ society,
and you did not dare.' In a moment she turned away, and said, "Don't you
believe in a soul?"

"Yes," he smiled back. "And that poor soul and others like it, many, many
thousands, who cannot grow, should be at rest--one long rest; to let other
souls grow, unblasted by their foul touch."

"I have thought so," she replied calmly, taking his belief as an equal. "To
let joy into the world somewhere before death." Her wistful tone rang out
into the room. "But that would be murder," she continued. "We should have
to call it murder, shouldn't we? And that is a fearful word. I could never
quite forget it. I should always ask myself if I were right, if I had the
right to judge. I am a coward. The work is too much for me."

"We will not think of it," Sommers replied abruptly, unconsciously putting
himself in company with her, as she had herself with him. "We have but to
follow the conventions of medicine and wait."

"Yes, wait!"

"Medicine, medicine," he continued irritably. "All our medicine is but a
contrivance to keep up the farce, to continue the ills of humanity, to keep
the wretched and diseased where they have no right to be!"

"And you are a doctor! How can you be?"

"Because," he answered in the same tone of unprofessional honesty that he
had used toward her, "like most men, I am a coward and conventional. I have
learned to do as the others do. Medicine and education!" Sommers laughed
ironically. "They are the two sciences where men turn and turn and emit
noise and do nothing. The doctor and the teacher learn a few tricks and
keep on repeating them as the priest does the ceremony of the mass."

"That's about right for the teacher," she laughed. "We cut our cloth almost
all alike."

Unconsciously they drifted farther and farther into intimacy. Sommers
talked as he thought, with question and protest, intolerant of conventions,
of formulas. They forgot the diseased burden that lay in the chamber above,
with its incessant claims, its daily problems. They forgot themselves, thus
strangely brought together and revealed to each other, at one glance as it
were, without the tiresome preliminary acquaintanceship of civilization. It
had grown dark in the room before Sommers came back to the reality of an
evening engagement.

"You can get a train on the railroad west of the avenue," Mrs. Preston
suggested. "But won't you let me give you something to eat?"

"Not this time," Sommers answered, taking his hat "Perhaps when I come
again--in a few days. I want to think--what can be done."

She did not urge him to stay. She was surprised at her boldness in
suggesting it. He had assumed the impersonal, professional manner once
more. That precious hour of free talk had been but an episode, a
relaxation. He gave directions as he went to the door.

"The patient will sleep till to-morrow. It will take two or three days to
get over this relapse."

Then he took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription.

"Should he grow unmanageable, you had better give him one of these
powders--two, if necessary. But no more; they are pretty strong."

He placed the leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his
rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she
was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of
despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her--a
feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her
little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with rare beauty.




CHAPTER XII


The engagement was not one to be missed, at least by a young professional
man who had his way to make, his patients to assemble, in the fierce
struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid
enough,--a lecture at the Carsons' by one of the innumerable lecturers
to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in
Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely
one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage in their
pilgrimage.

They had come from Omaha five years before; they were on their way to New
York, where they would be due five years hence. From railroad law, Carson
had grown to the business of organizing monopolies. Some of his handiworks
in this order of art had been among the first to take the field. He was
resting now, while the country was suffering from its prolonged fit of the
blues, and his wife was organizing their social life. They had picked up a
large house on the North Boulevard, a bargain ready for their needs; it had
been built for the Bidwells, just before the panic.

A rapid glance over the rooms proved to Sommers that Mrs. Carson was as
clever a manipulator of capitalists as her husband. There were a few of the
more important people of the city, such as Alexander Hitchcock, Ferdinand
Dunster, the Polot families, the Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a
few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be
counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a
superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks'
introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was
still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely
during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than
this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them.
Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago.
Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that appeared daily
in print. As such it offered unrivalled opportunities for aspiration.

Sommers had not come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration.
Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too
plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor
part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise
Hitchcock was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly
over, and lingered in the hall on the fringe of the gathering.

Carson had some reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a
portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a
recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the
great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of
modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque
coat, with the negligent lounging air of the hotel foyer, he stared at you,
this Mr. R. Gordon Carson, impudently almost, very much at his ease. Narrow
head, high forehead, thin hair, large eyes, a great protruding nose, a thin
chin, smooth-shaven, yet with a bristly complexion,--there he was, the man
from an Iowa farm, the man from the Sioux Falls court-house, the man from
Omaha, the man now fully ripe from Chicago. Here was no class, no race,
nothing in order; a feature picked up here, another there, a third
developed, a fourth dormant--the whole memorable but unforgivably ordinary.

Not far away, standing in the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself.
The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to
hang in one's own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was
self-assurance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the
deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this one great
expression of egotism.

When the lecture was finished, a little group formed about the host; he was
telling his experience with the great master, a series of anecdotes that
had made his way in circles where success was not enough.

"I knew he was a hard customer," Sommers overheard him saying, "and I gave
him all the rope he wanted. 'It may be two years before I do anything on
your portrait, Mr. Carson,' he said.

"'Take five,' I told him.

"'I shall charge five thousand.'

"'Make it ten,' said I.

"'I shall paint your ears.'

"'And the nose too.'

"Well, he sent it to me inside of a year with his compliments. The fancy
struck him, he wrote. It was easy to do; I was a good type and all that.
Well, there it is."

He turned on an additional bunch of electric lights before the picture.

"Good, isn't it?" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed behind Sommers.

"Too good," he muttered. "I shouldn't have dared to hang it."

The girl's smooth brow contracted.

"Don't you think it was fine, though, his making up his mind out there in
Sioux Falls that what he wanted was pictures, and the best pictures, and
that he'd have Sargent do his portrait?"

"No more than it's fine for all the rest of these well-dressed men and
women to make up their minds that they want to be rich and luxurious and
important and all that."

Her face became still more puzzled.

"But it is fine! And the successful people are the interesting people."

"That has nothing to do with the matter," he returned dogmatically.

"Don't you think so?" she replied distantly, with a note of reproof in her
voice. He was too young, too unimportant to cast such aspersion upon this
comfortable, good-natured world where there was so much fun to be had. She
could not see the possessing image in his mind, the picture of the
afternoon--the unsuccessful woman.

"There is nothing honorable in wealth," he added, as she turned to examine
a delicate landscape. Her eyes flashed defiantly.

"It means--"

"All this," he moved his hand contemptuously. "Ah, yes, and a lot more," he
added, as her lip trembled. "It shows power and ability and thrift and
purpose and provides means for generosity and philanthropy. But it rots."

"What do you mean?"

"Because it turns the people who have it into a class that come to feel
themselves divinely appointed. Whereas it is all a gamble, a lucky gamble!"

"Not all wealth is a lucky gamble!" she retorted hotly.

Sommers paused, discomfited at the personal turn to the thought.

"I think the most successful would be the first to admit it," he answered
thoughtfully.

"I don't understand you," the girl replied more calmly. "I suppose you are
a socialist, or something of that sort. I can't understand such matters
well enough to argue with you. And I hoped to find you in another mood when
I came back; but we fall out always, it seems, over the most trivial
matters."

"I am afraid I am very blunt," he said contritely. "I came here to find
_you_; what do you want me to talk about,--Stewart's engagement to
Miss Polot? It was given the chief place in the newspaper this morning."

"Sh, sh!" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed cautiously. Little groups were moving in
and out of the rooms, and at that moment a pale-faced, slight young man
came up to Miss Hitchcock.

"May I offer my congratulations?" she said, turning to him with the smile
that Sommers's remark had caused still on her lips. The young man simpered,
uttered the requisite platitude, and moved away.

"Did you congratulate him on the Polot connection or on the girl?" the
young doctor asked.

"You don't know Estelle Polot! She is _impossible_. But Burton Stewart
has got _just_ what he wanted. No one thought that he would do as well
as that. You know they are _fearfully_ rich--she can't escape having a
number of millions. Don't you think a man of forty is to be congratulated
on having what he has been looking for for twenty years?"

Miss Hitchcock's neat, nonchalant enunciation gave the picture additional
relief.

"I don't see how he has the face to show himself. All these people are
laughing about it."

"It _is_ a bad case, but don't you believe that they are not envying
him and praising him. He is a clever man, and he won't let the Polot money
go to waste. He has taken the largest purse--the rest were too light."

Miss Hitchcock seemed to find infinite resources of mirth in the affair.
Other people drifted by them. Several of the younger women stopped and
exchanged amused glances with Miss Hitchcock.

"He's been attentive to all these," Miss Hitchcock explained to Sommers.

"The Polot money is very bad, isn't it?"

Miss Hitchcock shrugged her shoulders.

"It is current coin."

"The system is worse than the _dot_ and _mariage de convenance_.
There is no pretension of sentiment in that, at least. See him hanging over
the girl--faugh!"

"You _are_ crude," Miss Hitchcock admitted, candidly. "Let us move out
of this crowd. Some one will overhear you."

They sauntered into the dimly lighted hall, where there were fewer people,
and he continued truculently:

"I remember that side by side with the report of Miss Polot's engagement
was a short account of the starvation at Pullman, and another column was
headed, 'Nothing to arbitrate: Pullman says he has nothing to arbitrate.'
Did you see that the reporters carefully estimated just how much Miss
Polot's share of the plunder would be?"

"What you need is golf. I have been teaching papa at the Springs. It is a
great resource, and it increases your sense of humor."

"It doesn't seem to have rested you," Sommers answered. "You are tired or
worried."

"Worse yet!" she laughed nervously. "Clearly, you won't do. You must go
back to Marion."

She looked up at him from her low seat with brilliant, mocking eyes.
"I have thought of that. It would not be the worst thing that could happen.
Would _you_ think it possible--Marion?" he asked clumsily.

Her eyes did not fall, but rested steadily on his face. Under this clear
gaze his remark appeared to him preposterous. She seemed to show him how
precipitate, unformed,--crude, as she said,--all his acts were. Instead of
answering his question, she said gently:

"Yes, you are right. I _am_ worried, and I came here tonight to escape
it. But one doesn't escape worries with you. One increases them. You make
me feel guilty, uncomfortable. Now get me something thoroughly cold, and
perhaps we can have that long-promised talk."

When Sommers returned with a glass of champagne, a number of men had
gathered about Miss Hitchcock, and she left him on the outside,
intentionally it seemed, while she chatted with them, bandying allusions
that meant nothing to him. Sommers saw that he had been a bore. He slipped
out of the group and wandered into the large library, where the guests were
eating and drinking. A heavy, serious man, whom he had seen at various
places, spoke to him. He said something about the lecture, then something
about Miss Polot's engagement. "They'll go to New York," he ventured.
"Stewart has some position there, some family." He talked about the
Stewarts and the Polots, and finally he went to the dressing room to smoke.

Sommers had made up his mind to leave, and was looking for Mrs. Carson,
when he came across Miss Hitchcock again.

"The man you were talking with is quite a tragedy," she said unconcernedly,
picking up the conversation where she had dropped it. "I knew him when he
left college. He was an athletic fellow, a handsome man. His people were
nice, but not rich. He was planning to go to Montana to take a place in
some mines, but he got engaged to the daughter of a very wealthy man. He
didn't go. He married Miss Prudence Fisher, and he has simply grown fat.
It's an old story--"

"And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier
for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to
marry a rich man's daughter.'"

"It ought not to be so, if the man were a man."

She dwelt upon the last word until the young doctor's face flushed. Then
with the sudden transition of mood, which so often perplexed Sommers, she
said gently, confidently:

"You are quite right. My journey did me no good. There were worries, and we
can't go away this summer. The business situation will keep papa here, and
he is so lonely without me that I hadn't the heart to suggest leaving him.
So we have taken a house at Lake Forest. I shall teach you golf at the new
Country Club, if you will deign to waste your time on us. You will see more
of these good people."

"You must think me--" Sommers began penitently.

"Yes, _they_ would say 'raw' and 'green.' I don't know. I must go
now."

A few minutes later, Sommers met Colonel Hitchcock in the dressing room. As
he was leaving, the old merchant detained him.

"Are you going north? Perhaps you will wait for me and let me take you to
the city. Louise is going on to a dance."

Sommers waited outside the room. From the bedroom at the end of the hall
came a soft murmur of women's voices. He hoped that Miss Hitchcock would
appear before her father took him off. He should like to see her again--to
hear her voice. Every moment some one nodded to him, distracting his
attention, but his eyes reverted immediately to the end of the hall. Men
and women were passing out, down the broad staircase that ended in front of
the intelligent portrait. The women in rich opera cloaks, the men in black
capes carrying their crush hats under their arms, were all alike; they were
more like every other collection of the successful in the broad earth than
one might have expected.

Sommers caught bits of the conversation.

"Jim has taken the Paysons' place."

"Is that so? We are going to York."

"--Shall join them in Paris--dinner last Friday--did you see _The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray_--our horses are always ill--"

It sounded like the rustle of skirts, the stretching of kid. There was
dulness in the atmosphere. Yet if it was dull, Sommers realized that it was
his own fault--a conclusion he usually took away with him from the feasts
of the rich which he attended. He lacked the power to make the most of his
opportunities. The ability to cultivate acquaintances, to push his way into
a good place in this sleek company of the well-to-do,--an ability
characteristically American,--he was utterly without. It would be better
for him, he reflected with depression, to return to Marion, Ohio, or some
similar side-track of the world, or to reenter the hospital and bury
himself in a quite subordinate position.

There was still an eddy of guests about the host and his wife near the
great portrait. They were laughing loudly. Carson's thin face was beaming.
Even Mrs. Carson's face had lost some of its tension. Sommers could watch
her manner from his position in the upper hall. She was dismissing a minor
guest with a metallic smile. 'To aspire to this!' he murmured
unconsciously. 'This, the triumph of success!'

"Still waiting?"

Miss Hitchcock was passing, her long wrap trailing lightly behind. Her eyes
glowed underneath a white mantilla.

"I am ready to go now," Sommers replied. "You are too tired for the dance."

"I must go--I can't bear to miss anything. It is stupid--but it is exciting
at the same time. Good-by. Remember, Lake Forest in a fortnight. And learn
to take it easily!"

She smiled and disappeared in the wake of Mrs. Porter. How easily she
seemed to take it! The man she married would have to be of the world, as
large a world as she could contrive to get. She would always be "going on."
Imaginatively, with the ignorance of a young man, he attributed to her
appetites for luxury, for power, for success. _He_ was merely an
instance of her tolerance. Really he was a very little thing in her cosmos,
and if he wished to be more, he would have to take an interest in just
this.

Colonel Hitchcock came out at last, in close conversation with old
Blaisdell. They were talking business. Hitchcock's kindly face was furrowed
and aged, Sommers noticed. The old merchant put his arm through the young
doctor's, and with this support Sommers received the intimate farewell from
Mrs. Carson.

Colonel Hitchcock ordered the driver to take them to the Metropolitan Club.

"Our talk may take us some time," he explained. "I have been trying to find
you for several days. I have something to ask you to do for me. You may
think it strange that I should go to you instead of to one of my old
friends. But it is something Isaac would have done for me. It is for my
boy."

The weariness of years was in his voice. As briefly and as simply as he
could, he stated the matter. Parker had disappeared; he had gone to New
York and there drawn heavily on his father. The journey which Colonel
Hitchcock had made with his daughter had been largely for the purpose of
finding Parker, and had failed. The boy was ashamed to come back. Now there
was a clew, but it seemed unwise for the father to follow it up himself.

"I don't understand the boy," Colonel Hitchcock concluded. "I'm afraid
everything I do is wrong. I get angry. I have no patience with his polo,
his spending so much money uselessly--he spends ten times as much money as
any man among my friends did at his age."

"You have ten times as much as any one of their fathers had," Sommers
protested with a smile.

"Well, then, I guess I had better stop, if that's what it means. He may
find there isn't so much after all. This panic is pushing me. _I_
can't leave Chicago another day. He should be here fighting with me,
helping me--and he is sneaking in some hotel, with his tail between his
legs."

He breathed heavily at the bitterness of the thought. Everything in his
life had been honorable, open to all: he had fought fair and hard and
long--for this.

"If it weren't for Louise and his mother, I would let him starve until he
was ready to come home. But his mother is ill--she can't be troubled."

"And you can't let him disgrace himself publicly--do something that would
make it hard for him to come back at all," Sommers suggested.

"No, I suppose not," the older man admitted, with a grateful glance. "I
can't refuse to help him, poor boy; perhaps I have made him weak."

Sommers offered to do what he could,--to hunt Parker up, get him on his
feet, and bring him back to Chicago. He would leave that night. They had
stopped at the club to finish their talk, and while Colonel Hitchcock was
writing some letters, Sommers drove to his rooms for his bag. It was nearly
midnight before he returned. As they drove over to the station, Colonel
Hitchcock said:

"I have told him the whole thing: how hard pressed I am; how his mother is
worrying and ill--well, I don't feel it will make much difference. He could
_see_ all that."

"You must remember that he has always had every inducement to enjoy
himself," the young doctor ventured. "He doesn't understand _your_
life. You sent him to a very nice private school, and whenever he failed
got him tutors. You made him feel that he was a special case in the world.
And he has always been thrown with boys and young men who felt _they_
were special cases. At college he lived with the same set--"

"His mother and I wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a
gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and
self-indulgence."

Sommers nodded sympathetically. It was useless to discuss the matter. The
upright, courageous old merchant, whose pride was that he had never
committed one mean action in the accumulation of his fortune, could never
understand this common misfortune. He belonged to a different world from
that in which his son was to take his part. They turned to other
topics,--the business depression, the strike, the threatened interference
of the American Railway Union.

"Blaisdell, who is the general manager of the C. K. and G.," Colonel
Hitchcock remarked, "was saying tonight that he expected the Pullman people
would induce the A. R. U. to strike. If they stir up the unions all over
the country, business will get worse and worse. All we needed to make
things as bad as can be was a great railroad strike."

"I suppose so," Sommers responded. "Why won't the Pullman people consent to
arbitrate?"

The old merchant shook his head.

"They'd divide their twenty millions of surplus and go out of business
first. They say they're saving money on the strike. Did you ever know of
people with the whip-hand who had anything to arbitrate?"




CHAPTER XIII


Dr. Lindsay's offices were ingeniously arranged on three sides of the
Athenian Building. The patient entering from the hall, just beside the
elevators, passed by a long, narrow corridor to the waiting room, and
thence to one of the tiny offices of the attending physicians; or, if he
were fortunate enough, he was led at once to the private office of the
great Lindsay, at the end of the inner corridor. By a transverse passage he
was then shunted off to a door that opened into the public hall just
opposite the elevator well. The incoming patient was received by a woman
clerk, who took his name, and was dismissed by another woman clerk, who
collected fees and made appointments. If he came by special appointment,
several stages in his progress were omitted, and he passed at once to one
of the smaller offices, where he waited until the machine was ready to
proceed with his case. Thus in the office there was a perpetual stream of
the sick and suffering, in, around, out, crossed by the coming and going
through transverse passages of the "staff," the attendants, the clerks,
messengers, etc. Each atom in the stream was welling over with egotistic
woes, far too many for the brief moment in which he would be closeted with
the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this
mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued
place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric
annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in
the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from
the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made,
their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world
below, where they must carry on the burden of living.

The attending physicians arrived at nine. The "shop," as they called it,
opened at ten; Lindsay was due at eleven and departed at three. Thereafter
the hive gradually emptied, and by four the stenographers and clerks were
left alone to attend to purely business matters. Sommers came late the day
after his return from New York. The general door being opened to admit a
patient, he walked in and handed his coat and hat to the boy in buttons at
the door. The patient who had entered with him was being questioned by the
neat young woman whose business it was to stand guard at the outer door.

"What is your name, please?"

Her tones were finely adjusted to the caste of the patient. Judging from
the icy sharpness on this occasion, the patient was not high in the scale.

"Caroline Ducharme," the woman replied.

"Write it out, please."

The patient did so with some difficulty, scrawling half over the neat pad
the clerk pushed toward her.

"You wish to consult Dr. Lindsay?"

"The big doctor,--yes, mum."

"Did he make an appointment with you?"

"What's that?"

"Have you been here before?"

"No, mum."

"You will have to pay the fee in advance."

"What's that, please?"

"Ten dollars."

"Ten?"

The clerk tapped irritably on her desk with her pencil.

"Yes, _ten_ dollars for the first visit; five after that; operations
from fifty to five hundred."

The woman clutched tightly a small reticule. "I hain't the money!" she
exclaimed at last. "I thought it would be two dollars."

"You'll have to go to the hospital, then."

The clerk turned to a pile of letters.

"Don't he see nobody here without he pays ten?" the woman asked.

"No."

"Where is the hospital?"

"St. Isidore's--the clinic is every other Saturday at nine."

"But my head hurts awful bad. The doctor up our way don't know anything
about it."

The clerk no longer answered; she had turned half around in her
swivel-chair. Sommers leaned over her desk, and said,--

"Show her into my room, No. 3, Miss Clark."

"Dr. Lindsay is _very_ particular," the clerk protested.

"I will be responsible," Sommers answered sharply, in the tone he had
learned to use with hospital clerks when they opposed his will. He turned
to get his mail. The clerk shrugged her shoulders with a motion that said,
'Take her there yourself.' Sommers beckoned to the woman to follow him. He
took her to one of the little compartments on the inner corridor, which was
lined with strange devices: electrical machines, compressed air valves,
steam sprays--all the enginery of the latest invention.

"Now what is it?" he asked gruffly. He was vexed that the matter should
occur at this time, when he was on rather cool terms with Lindsay. The case
proved to be an interesting one, however. There were nervous complications;
it could not be diagnosed at a glance. After spending half an hour in
making a careful examination, he gave the woman a preliminary treatment,
and dismissed her with directions to call the next day.

"You will lose your eyesight, if you don't take care," he said. "We'll see
to-morrow."

"No," the woman shook her head. "I've had enough of her lip. You'se all
right; but I guess I'll have to go blind. I can't stand your prices. Here's
two dollars, all I got."

She held out a dirty bill.

"In the world?" Sommers added smilingly. It was a familiar formula.

"Just about," she admitted defiantly. "And if my eyes go back on me, I
guess 'twill be St. Isidore, or St. Somebody. You see I need my eyes pretty
bad just now for one thing."

"What's that?" the doctor asked good-naturedly, waving the money aside.

"To look for _him_. He's in Chicago somewheres, I know."

"Ducharme?" the doctor inquired carelessly.

The woman nodded, her not uncomely broad face assuming a strange expression
of determined fierceness. At that moment an assistant rapped at the door
with a summons from Dr. Lindsay.

"Turn up this evening, then, at the address on this card," Sommers said to
Mrs. Ducharme, handing her his card.

He would have preferred hearing that story about Ducharme to charging old
P. F. Wort with electricity. He went through the treatment with his
accustomed deftness, however. As he was leaving the room, Dr. Lindsay asked
him to wait.

"Mr. Porter is about to go abroad, to try the baths at Marienbad. I have
advised him to take one of our doctors with him to look after his diet and
comfort in travelling,--one that can continue our treatment and be
companionable. It will just take the dull season. I'd like to run over
myself, but my affairs--"

Lindsay completed the idea by sweeping his broad, fleshy hand over the
large office desk, which was loaded with letters, reports, and documents of
various kinds.

"What d'ye say, Sommers?"

"Do you think Porter would want me?" Sommers asked idly. He had seen in the
paper that morning that Porter was out of town, and was going to Europe for
his health. Porter had been out of town, persistently, ever since the
Pullman strike had grown ugly. The duties of the directors were performed,
to all intents and purposes, by an under-official, a third vice-president.
Those duties at present consisted chiefly in saying from day to day: "The
company has nothing to arbitrate. There is a strike; the men have a right
to strike. The company doesn't interfere with the men," etc. The third
vice-president could make these announcements as judiciously as the great
Porter.

"I have an idea," continued Sommers, "that Porter might not want me; he has
never been over-cordial."

"Nonsense!" replied the busy doctor. "Porter will take any one I advise him
to. All expenses and a thousand dollars--very good pay."

"Is Porter very ill?" Sommers asked. "I thought he was in fair health, the
last time I saw him."

Lindsay looked at the young doctor with a sharp, experienced glance. There
was a half smile on his face as he answered soberly:

"Porter has been living rather hard. He needs a rest--fatty degeneration
may set in."

"Brought on by the strike?"

Lindsay smiled broadly this time.

"Coincident with the strike, let us say."

"I don't believe I can leave Chicago just now," the young doctor replied
finally.

Lindsay stared at him as if he were demented.

"I've a case or two I am interested in," Sommers explained nonchalantly.
"Nothing much, but I don't care to leave. Besides, I don't think Porter
would be an agreeable companion."

"Very well," Lindsay replied indifferently. "French will go--a jolly,
companionable, chatty fellow."

The young doctor felt that Lindsay was enumerating pointedly the qualities
he lacked.

"Porter's connection will be worth thousands to the man he takes to. He's
in a dozen different corporations where they pay good salaries to
physicians. Of course, if you've started a practice already--"

"I don't suppose my cases are good for ten dollars."

Lindsay's handsome, gray-whiskered face expressed a polite disgust.

"There's another matter I'd like to speak about--"

"The patient Ducharme?" Sommers asked quickly.

"I don't know her name,--the woman Miss Clark says you admitted against my
rules. You know there are the free dispensaries for those who can't pay,
and, indeed, I give my own services. I cannot afford to maintain this plant
without fees. In short, I am surprised at such a breach of professional
etiquette."

Sommers got up from his seat nervously and then sat down again. Lindsay
undoubtedly had the right to do exactly what he pleased on his own
premises.

"Very well," he replied shortly. "It shan't occur again. I have told the
Ducharme woman to call at my rooms for treatment, and I will give Miss
Clark her ten dollars. She was an exceptionally interesting and instructive
case."

Lindsay elevated his eyebrows politely.

"Yes, yes, but you know we specialists are so liable to be imposed upon.
Every one tries to escape his fee; no one would employ Carson, for example,
unless he had the means to pay his fee, would he?"

"The cases are not exactly parallel."

"All cases of employment are parallel," Lindsay replied with emphasis.
"Every man is entitled to what he can get, from the roustabout on the wharf
to our friend Porter, and no more."

"I have often thought," Sommers protested rather vaguely, "that clergymen
and doctors should be employed by the state to do what they can; it isn't
much!"

"There are the hospitals." Lindsay got up from his chair at the sound of an
electric bell. "And our very best professional men practise there, give
their time and money and strength. You will have to excuse me, as Mr.
Carson has an appointment, and I have already kept him waiting. Will you
see Mrs. Winter and young Long at eleven thirty and eleven forty-five?"

As Sommers was leaving, Lindsay called out over his shoulder, "And can you
take the clinic, Saturday? I must go to St. Louis in consultation. General
R. P. Atkinson, president of the Omaha and Gulf, an old friend--"

"Shall be delighted," the young doctor replied with a smile.

As he stepped into the corridor, one of the young women clerks was filling
in an appointment slip on the long roll that hung on a metal cylinder. This
was an improved device, something like a cash-register machine, that
printed off the name opposite a certain hour that was permanently printed
on the slip. The hours of the office day were divided into five-minute
periods, but, as two assisting physicians were constantly in attendance
beside Sommers, the allotted time for each patient was about fifteen
minutes.

"Mrs. Winter is in No. 3," the clerk told him. "Long in No. 1, and Mr.
Harrison and a Miss Frost in the reception room."

So the machine ground on. Even the prescriptions were formularized to such
an extent that most of them were stencilled and went by numbers. The clerk
at the end of the corridor handed the patient a little card, on which was
printed No. 3033, No. 3127, etc., as he circled by in the last turn of the
office. There was an apothecary store on the floor below, where the patient
could sit in an easy-chair and read the papers while the prescription
called for by his number was being fetched by an elegant young woman.

Sommers hurried through with Mrs. Winter, who was a fussy, nervous little
woman from the West Side; she resented having "a young feller" thrust on
her.

"I knew Dr. Lindsay when he was filling prescriptions on Madison Street,"
she said spitefully.

Sommers smiled. "That must have been a good while ago, before Chicago was a
big place."

"Before you was born, young man; before all the doctors who could came down
here in a bunch and set up offices and asked fees enough of a body to keep
'em going for a year!"

Then young Long; then one, two, three new patients, who had to have
physical examinations before being admitted to Lindsay. Once or twice
Lindsay sent for Sommers to assist him in a delicate matter, and Sommers
hurried off, leaving his half-dressed patient to cool his heels before a
radiator. After the examinations there was an odd patient or two that
Lindsay had left when he had gone out to lunch with some gentlemen at the
Metropolitan Club. By two o'clock Sommers got away to take a hasty luncheon
in a bakery, after which he returned to a new string of cases.

To-day "the rush," as the clerks called it, was greater than usual. The
attendants were nervous and irritable, answered sharply and saucily, until
Sommers felt that the place was intolerable. All this office practice got
on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter
thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved
at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was
giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and
mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,--they would do no
harm,--and they might do good, ought to do good,--if the cursed human
system would only come up to the standard.

At last he seized his coat and hat, and escaped. The noiseless cage dropped
down, down, past numerous suites of doctors' offices similar to Lindsay's,
with their ground-glass windows emblazoned by dozens of names. This
building was a kind of modern Chicago Lourdes. All but two or three of the
suites were rented to some form of the medical fraternity. Down, down: here
a druggist's clerk hailing the descending car; there an upward car stopping
to deliver its load of human freight bound for the rooms of another great
specialist,--Thornton, the skin doctor. At last he reached the ground floor
and the gusty street. Across the way stood a line of carriages waiting for
women who were shopping at the huge dry-goods emporium, and through the
barbaric displays of the great windows Sommers could see the clerks moving
hither and thither behind the counters. It did not differ materially from
his emporium: it was less select, larger, but not more profitable,
considering the amount of capital employed, than his shop. Marshall Field
decked out the body; Lindsay, Thornton, and Co. repaired the body as best
they could. It was all one trade.

On State Street the sandwich men were sauntering dejectedly through the
crowd of shoppers: "_Professor Herman Sorter, Chiropodist._" "_Go to
Manassas for Spectacles_";--it was the same thing. Across the street, on
the less reputable western side, flared the celluloid signs of the quacks:
"_The parlors of famous old Dr. Green_." "_The original and only Dr.
Potter. Visit Dr. Potter. No cure, no charge. Examination free._" The
same business! Lindsay would advertise as "old Dr. Lindsay," if it paid to
advertise,--paid socially and commercially. Dr. Lindsay's offices probably
"took in" more in a month than "old Dr. Green" made in a year, without the
expense of advertising. Lindsay would lose much more by adopting the
methods of quackery than he could ever make: he would lose hospital
connections, standing in the professional journals, and social prestige.
Lindsay was quite shrewd in sticking to the conventions of the profession.




CHAPTER XIV


When Sommers reached his rooms that evening, he found Mrs. Ducharme waiting
for him. She held in her hand his card.

"I thought you'd give me the go-by," she exclaimed, as he entered. "Your
kind is smooth enough, but they don't want to be bothered. But I came all
the same--on the chance."

"What have you been doing?" the doctor inquired, without noticing her
surliness. "Walking about in the streets all day and making your
inflammation worse?"

"Well, you see I must find _him_, and I don't know where to look for
him."

"Well, you won't find your husband walking about the streets, especially if
he's gone off with another woman; but you will get blind and have to go to
the hospital!"

"Well, I'll kill _her first_."

"You will do nothing of the sort," said the doctor, wearily. "You'll make a
fuss, and your husband will hit you again, and go away."

"He was all right, as nice a man as you could find before _she_ came
to Peory. You see she is married to another man, a baker, and they lived in
Decatur. Ducharme--he's a Frenchman--knew her in Decatur where he worked in
a restaurant, and he came to Peory to get rid of her. And he got a job and
was real steady and quiet. Then we got married, and Ducharme was as nice a
man as you ever knew. But we wasn't married a week--we had a kafe
together--before _she_ got wind o' his being married and come to town.
He told me she was trying to get him to go away, and he said how he didn't
want to; but she had influence with him and was worrying around. Well, the
third day he sent me a note by a little boy. 'Caroline,' it said, 'you'se a
good woman and an honest woman and we could get on first rate together;
but, Caroline, I don't love you when she is about. She calls me, and I
go.'"

"Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Sommers asked, half amused.
"You can't keep him away from the other woman. Now you are a sensible,
capable woman. Just give him up and find a place to work."

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head sorrowfully.

"That won't do. I just think and think, and I can't work. He was such a
nice man, so gentlemanlike and quiet, so long as she stayed away. But I
didn't tell you: I found 'em in Peory in a place not fit for hogs to live
in, and I watched my chance and gave it to the woman. But Ducharme came in
and he pushed me out, and I fell, and guess I cracked my head. That's when
my eye began to hurt. The kafe business ran out, and I followed them to
Chicago. And here I been for three months, doing most anything, housework
generally. But I can't keep a place. Just so often I have to up and out on
the road and try to find him. I'll brain that woman yet!"

She uttered this last assertion tranquilly.

"She don't amount to much,--a measly, sandy-haired, cheap thing. _I_
come of respectable folks, who had a farm outer Gales City, and never
worked out 'fore this happened. But now I can't settle down to nothin';
it's always that Frenchman before my eyes, and _her_."

"Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers.

"Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He
doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him."

"Simply he wants to live with her and not with you."

The woman nodded her head sadly.

"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't
know that he didn't love me."

Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that
he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him
she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow
on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a
fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman
her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her
wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper
tragedies,--a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this
an idea seized the doctor; there was a way to distract her.

"The best thing for you to do," he said severely, "is to go to work."

"Can't get no place," she replied despondently. "Have no references and
can't keep a place. See a feller going up the street that looks like
Ducharme, and I must go after him."

"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look
like Ducharme!"

He explained to her the situation of the Ninety-first Street cottage, and
what Mrs. Preston needed.

"You take this note there to-morrow morning, and tell her that you are
willing to work for a home. Then I'll attend to the wages. If you do what I
want,--keep that fellow well locked up and relieve Mrs. Preston of
care,--I'll give you good wages. Not a word to her, mind, about that. And
when you want to hunt Ducharme, just notify Mrs. Preston and go ahead. Only
see that you hunt him in the daytime. Don't leave her alone nights. Now,
let's see your eye."

The woman took the brief note which he scribbled after examining her, and
said dejectedly:

"She won't want me long--no one does, least of all Ducharme."

Sommers laughed.

"Guess I better go straight down," she remarked more hopefully as she left.

He should have taken the woman to the cottage, he reflected after she had
gone, instead of sending her in this brusque manner. He had not seen Mrs.
Preston since his return, and he did not know what had happened to her in
the meantime. To-morrow he would find time to ride down there and see how
things were going with the sick man.

There was much mail lying on his table. Nothing had been forwarded by
Dresser, in accordance with the directions he had telegraphed him. And he
had seen nothing of Dresser yesterday or to-day. The rooms looked as if the
man had been gone some time. Dresser owed him money,--more than he could
spare conveniently,--but that troubled him less than the thought of
Dresser's folly. It was likely that he had thrown up his position--he had
chafed against it from the first--and had taken to the precarious career of
professional agitator. Dresser had been speaking at meetings in Pullman,
with apparent success, and his mind had been full of "the industrial war,"
as he called it. Sommers recalled that the man had been allowed to leave
Exonia College, where he had taught for a year on his return from Germany,
because (as he put it) "he held doctrines subversive of the holy state of
wealth and a high tariff." That he was of the stuff that martyrs of speech
are made, Sommers knew well enough, and such men return to their haven
sooner or later.

Sommers sorted his letters listlessly. The Ducharme affair troubled him. He
could see that a split with Lindsay was coming; but it must not be brought
about by any act of professional discourtesy on his part. Although he was
the most efficient surgeon Lindsay had, it would not take much to bring
about his discharge. Probably the suggestion about Porter was merely a
polite means of getting him out of the office. Lindsay had said some
pointed things about "the critical attitude." The "critical attitude" to
Lindsay's kind was the last crime.

Ordinarily he would not have cared. The sacrifice of the three thousand
dollars which Lindsay paid him would have its own consolation. He could get
back his freedom. But the matter was not so simple as it had been. It was
mixed now with another affair: if he should leave Lindsay, especially after
any disagreement with the popular specialist, he would put himself farther
from Miss Hitchcock than ever. As it was, he was quite penniless enough;
but thrown on his own resources--he remembered the heavy, sad young man at
the Carsons', and Miss Hitchcock's remark about him.

Yet this reflection that in some way it was complicated, that he could not
act impulsively and naturally, angered him. He was shrewd enough to know
that Lindsay's patronage was due, not to the fact that he was the cleverest
surgeon he had, but to the fact that, well--the daughter of Alexander
Hitchcock thought kindly of him. These rich and successful! They formed a
kind of secret society, pledged to advance any member, to keep the others
out by indifference. When the others managed to get in, for any reason,
they lent them aid to the exclusion of those left outside. So long as it
looked as if he were to have a berth in their cabin, they would be amiable,
but not otherwise.

Among the letters on the desk was one from Miss Hitchcock, asking him to
spend the coming Saturday and Sunday at Lake Forest. There was to be a
small house party, and the new club was to be open. Sommers prepared to
answer it at once--to regret. He had promised himself to see Mrs. Preston
instead. In writing the letter it seemed to him that he was taking a
position, was definitely deciding something, and at the close he tore it in
two and took a fresh sheet. Now was the time, if he cared for the girl, to
come nearer to her. He had told himself all the way back from New York that
he did care--too much. She was not like the rest. He laughed at himself. A
few years hence she would be like the rest and, what is more, he should not
find her so absorbing now, if she were not like the rest, essentially.

He wrote a conventional note of acceptance, and went out to mail it.
Possibly all these people were right in reading the world, and the aim of
life was to show one's power to get on. He was worried over that elementary
aspect of things rather late in life.




CHAPTER XV


These days there were many people on the streets, but few were busy. The
large department stores were empty; at the doors stood idle floor-walkers
and clerks. It was too warm for the rich to buy, and the poor had no money.
The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed
the World's Fair. In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put
forth her utmost strength, and, having shown the world the supreme flower
of her energy, had collapsed. There was gloom, not only in La Salle Street
where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had
exhausted the forces of all. The city's huge garment was too large for it;
miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state.
Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal
wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its
tenantless buildings.

As the spring months moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores
of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen
mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival
of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and
counter-meetings; agitators, panaceas, university lecturers, sociologizing
preachers, philanthropists, politicians--discontent and discord. The
laborer starved, and the employer sulked.

"The extravagant poor are unwilling to let the thrifty reap the rewards of
their savings and abstinence," lectured the Political Economist of the
standard school. "The law of wages and capital is immutable. More science
is needed."

"The rich are vultures and sharks," shrieked the Labor Agitator.

"And will ye let your brother starve?" exhorted the Preacher.

"For it is as clear as the nose on your face that corporations corrupt
legislatures, and buy judges, and oppress the poor," insinuated the
Socialist.

"It's that wretched free trade," howled the hungry Politician, "and
Cleveland and all his evil deeds. See what we will do for you."

"Yes, it's free trade," bawled one newspaper.

"It's nefarious England," snarled another.

"It's the greed of Wall Street, the crime against silver, the burden of the
mortgage," vociferated a third.

"It's 'hard times,'" the meek sighed, and furbished up last year's clothes,
and cut the butcher's bill.

"Yes, it's 'hard times,' a time of psychological depression and distrust,"
softly said the rich man. "A good time to invest my savings profitably.
Real estate is low; bonds and mortgages are as cheap as dirt. Some day
people will be cheerful once more, and these good things will multiply and
yield fourfold. Yea, I will not bury my talent in a napkin."

Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and
there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the
insufferable cant of the world.

The first sore to break, ironically enough, was in the "model industrial
town" of Pullman. That dispute over the question of a living wage grew
bitterer day by day. Well-to-do people praised the directors for their firm
resolve to keep the company's enormous surplus quite intact. The men said
the officers of the company lied: it was an affair of complicated
bookkeeping. The brutal fact of it was that the company rested within its
legal rights. The unreasonable people were dissatisfied with an eighth of a
loaf, while their employers were content with a half. Then there was
trouble among the mines, and the state troops were called out. Sores
multiplied; men talked; but capital could not be coerced.

But while politicians squabbled and capitalists sulked and economists
talked, a strong tide of fellowship in misery was rising from west to east.
Unconsciously, far beneath the surface, the current was moving,--a current
of common feeling, of solidarity among those who work by day for their
daily bread. The country was growing richer, but they were poorer. There
began to be talk of Debs, the leader of a great labor machine. The A. R. U.
had fought one greedy corporation with success, and intimidated another.
Sometime in June this Debs and his lieutenant, Howard, came to Chicago. The
newspapers had little paragraphs of meagre information about the A. R. U.
convention. One day there was a meeting in which a committee of the Pullman
strikers set forth their case. At the close of that meeting the great
boycott had been declared. "Mere bluff," said the newspapers. But the
managers of the railroads "got together." Some of them had already cut the
wage lists on their roads. They did not feel sure that it was all "bluff."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the first day of the A. R. U. boycott. Sommers left the Athenian
Building at noon, for Dr. Lindsay's clients carried their infirmities out
of town in hot weather. He took his way across the city toward the station
of the Northwestern Railroad, wondering whether Debs's threats had been
carried out, and if consequently he should be compelled to remain in town
over Sunday. On the street corners and in front of the newspaper offices
little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes,
were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this
preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the
streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the
A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers
followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless
discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal
country of theirs had been exploited,--shamefully, rapaciously,
swinishly,--and now that the first signs of exhaustion were showing
themselves, the people's eyes were opening to the story of greed.
Democracy! Say, rather, Plutocracy, the most unblushing the world had ever
seen,--the aristocracy of THOSE WHO HAVE.

Thus meditating, he jostled against a group of men who were coming from a
saloon. All but one wore the typical black clothes and derby hats of the
workman's best attire; one had on a loose-fitting, English tweed suit. In
this latter person Sommers was scarcely surprised to recognize Dresser. The
big shoulders of the blond-haired fellow towered above the others; he was
talking excitedly, and they were listening. When they started to cross the
street, Sommers touched Dresser.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded abruptly.

"What are _you_ doing? You had better get out of town along with your
rich friends." He motioned sneeringly at the bag in Sommers's hand.

"I fancied you might be up to something of this kind," Sommers went on,
unheeding his sneer.

"I had enough of that job of faking up text-books and jollying
schoolteachers. So I chucked it."

"Why did you chuck me, too?"

"I thought you might be sick of having me hang about, and especially now
that I am in with the other crowd."

"That's rot," Sommers laughed. "However, you needn't feel it necessary to
apologize. What are you doing with 'the other crowd'?"

"I'm secretary of the central committee," Dresser replied, with some
importance.

"Oh, that's it!" Sommers exclaimed.
"It's better than being a boot-licker to the rich."

"Like the doctors? Well, we won't quarrel. I suppose you mean to give 'us'
a hard time of it? Come in when it is all settled, and we will talk it
over. Meantime you've got enough mischief on your hands to last you for
some months."

"I don't blame you," Dresser said benignantly, "for your position. Perhaps
if _I_ had had the opportunities--"

"That's just it. Your crowd are all alike, at least the leaders; they are
hungry for the fleshpots. If _they_ had the opportunities, _we_
should be served as they are now. That's the chief trouble,--nobody really
cares to make the sacrifices. And that is why this row will be ended on the
old terms: the rich will buy out the leaders. Better times will come, and
we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old
basis. But _you_," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow,
"people like you are the real curse."

"Why?"

"Because you are insincere. All you want is the pie. You make me feel that
the privileged classes are right in getting what they can out of fools
and--knaves."

"That's about enough. I suppose you are put out about the money--"

"Don't be an ass, Dresser. I don't need the hundred. And I don't want a
quarrel. I think you are playing with dynamite, because you can't get the
plunder others have got. Look out when the dynamite comes down."

"It makes no difference to me," Dresser protested sullenly.

"No! That's why you are dangerous. Well, good-by. Get your friends to leave
the Northwestern open a day or two longer."

"There won't be a train running on the Northwestern to-morrow. I've seen
the orders."

"Well, I shall foot it home, then."

They shook hands, and Dresser hurried on after his friends. Sommers
retraced his steps toward the station. Dresser's vulgar and silly phrase,
"boot-licker to the rich," turned up oddly in his memory. It annoyed him.
Every man who sought to change his place, to get out of the ranks, was in a
way a "boot-licker to the rich." He recalled that he was on his way to the
rich now, with a subconscious purpose in his mind of joining them if he
could. Miss Hitchcock's wealth would not be enormous, and it would be easy
enough to show that he was not "boot-licker to the rich." But it was hard
to escape caste prejudices, to live with those who prize ease and yet keep
one's own ideals and opinions. If this woman had the courage to leave her
people, to open a new life with him elsewhere--he smiled at the picture of
Miss Hitchcock conjured up by the idea.

The streets were filthy as always, and the sultry west wind was sweeping
the filth down the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale
business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant,
their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along
the river a strange stillness prevailed. "Nothing was doing," in the idiom
of the street. Along the platforms of the railroad company's train house,
however, a large crowd of idlers had assembled. They were watching to see
whether the trainmen would make up the Overland Limited. Debs had said that
this company would not move its through trains if it persisted in using the
tabooed Pullmans. Stout chains had been attached to the sleepers to prevent
any daring attempt to cut out the cars at the last moment. A number of
officials from the general offices were hurrying to and fro apprehensively.
There was some delay, but finally the heavy train began to move. It wound
slowly out of the shed, in a sullen silence of the onlookers. In the yards
it halted. There was a derisive cry, but in a few moments it started again
and disappeared.

"I guess it's all bluff," a smartly dressed young man remarked to Sommers.
"There's the general manager getting into the Lake Forest two-ten, and
Smith of the C., B. and Q., and Rollins of the Santa Fe, are with him. The
general managers have been in session most of last night and this morning.
They're going to fight it out, if it costs a hundred millions."

The young man's views seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest
train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their
holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this
time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf.
There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the
yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind.
"Blamed fools to strike now," remarked a fat, perspiring stockbroker.
"Roads aren't earning anything, anyhow."

The conductor who was taking the tickets smiled and kept his own counsel.

"Good time to buy rails, all the same," his companion answered.

"I guess this'll yank old Pullman back to town," another remarked, glancing
up from his paper.

"You don't know him. It won't bother _him_. He's keeping cool
somewhere in the St. Lawrence. It's up to the railroads now."

"Let's see your clubs. Did you get 'em straight from Scotland? That's a
pretty iron."

Older men were chatting confidentially and shaking their heads. But the
atmosphere was not gloomy; an air of easy, assured optimism prevailed. "I
guess it will all come out right, somehow, and the men will be glad to get
back to work.... If Cleveland and his free trade were in hell!..." And the
train sped on through the northern suburbs, coming every now and then
within eyeshot of the sparkling lake. The holiday feeling gained as the
train got farther away from the smoke and heat of the city. The young men
belonged to the "nicer" people, who knew each other in a friendly,
well-bred way. It was a comfortable, social kind of picnic of the better
classes.

Most of the younger men, and Sommers with them, got into the omnibus
waiting at the Lake Forest station, and proceeded at once to the club.
There, in the sprawling, freshly painted club-house, set down on a
sun-baked, treeless slope, people were already gathered. A polo match was
in progress and also a golf tournament. The verandas were filled with
ladies. One part of the verandas had been screened off, and there, in a
kind of outdoor cafe, people were lunching or sipping cool drinks. At one
of the tables Sommers found Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Porter, surrounded by a
group of young men and women who were talking and laughing excitedly.

"Ah! you couldn't get the twelve-thirty," Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, as
Sommers edged to her. "We waited luncheon for you until the train came; but
you are in time for the polo. Caspar is playing--and Parker," she added in
a lower tone. "Let us go down there and watch them."

Miss Hitchcock detached herself skilfully from the buzzing circle on the
veranda, and the two stepped out on the springy turf. The undulating
prairie was covered with a golden haze. Half a mile west a thin line of
trees pencilled the horizon. The golf course lay up and down the gentle
turfy swells between the club-house and the wind-break of trees. The polo
grounds were off to the left, in a little hollow beside a copse of oak.
There were not many trees over the sixty or more acres, and the roads on
either side of the club grounds were marked by dense clouds of dust. Yet it
was gay--open to the June heavens, with a sense of limitless breathing
space. And it was also very decorous, well-bred, and conventional.

As they strolled leisurely over the lawns in front of the club-house, Miss
Hitchcock stopped frequently to speak to some group of spectators, or to
greet cheerfully a golfer as he started for the first tee. She seemed very
animated and happy; the decorative scene fitted her admirably. Dr. Lindsay
came up the slope, laboring toward the ninth hole with prodigious welter.

"That's the way he keeps young," Miss Hitchcock commented approvi

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7828