As events soon proved, Mrs. Ridge's croaking was not without justification. The crash in Milly's affairs came, not until the autumn, a few weeks before the day set for the wedding, and it came on the line of cleavage already described, although quite unexpectedly and over a trivial matter, as such things usually happen.
After the closing of the fairy city gloom had settled down over Chicago. People were exhausted socially from their hectic summer and Panic stalked forth from behind the festival trappings where it had lain hidden. Times were frightfully bad, every one said,—never so bad before in the experience of the country. There were strikes, a hundred thousand idle men walking the cold streets, empty rows of buildings, shops and factories closed—and a hard winter coming on. All this did not mean much to Milly, busy with her own concerns and plans for the wedding, except for the fact that few people entertained and everybody seemed relaxed and depressed. Clarence Albert, like a prudent mariner of the puritan type, dwelt upon the signs of dire storm, and counselled their not building for the present, although he let her understand that his own ventures were well under cover. Milly was less disappointed over not building the house because she still had her mind on that vacant lot on the Drive. Perhaps in the depression Clarence would be able to get it at a bargain....
Then the quarrel came over nothing at all. They were to go to the theatre or opera—later she forgot which—by themselves one evening. Her fiancé came to dinner, and he and Horatio talked dolefully of the business outlook. When they started out, there was no cab before the door. Milly, regarding her light raiment, demurred and telephoned for one herself. When they reached the theatre and she proceeded to sail down the centre aisle, she found that their seats were in the balcony. Clarence, who never dealt with ticket brokers on principle, had not been able to get good floor seats and thought the first row of the balcony would answer, as the theatre was a small one. Where he had been brought up, the balcony seats were considered "just as good," and better if they could be had more cheaply. He did not understand the awfulness of metropolitan standards to which Chicago was aspiring.
Milly, a cloud upon her pretty face, drew her wrap close about her and sat dumb through the first act. Her mortification was increased by discovering Sally Norton in a box below with Ted Leffingwell and some gay folk. Sally's roaming eyes also discovered Milly and her young man before the act was finished; she signalled markedly and communicated the news to her party, who all looked at the glum pair, laughed and smiled among themselves.
Milly's burning ears could hear Sally's jeers. At the close of the act she got up and marched out without a word, followed by the bewildered Clarence.
"What's the matter Milly? Where are you going?"
"Home."
At the entrance there were no cabs in sight at this hour, and they walked to the end of the block where the cars passed. When a car came, Milly got as far as the platform, pronounced it a "filthy box," which it probably was, and made the conductor let her off. Then she marched haughtily northwards, trailed by Clarence Albert, in whose white face a dangerous pink was rising. Fortunately it was a still clear, night, and they covered the mile to Acacia Street without misadventure and without words. When they had reached the small front room and Milly had thrown off her wrap, her eyes still flashing angrily, Parker said in a carefully controlled voice:—
"I'm sorry, Milly, to have given you so much annoyance."
"As if a girl with a decent gown on could ride in a street-car!"
"I'm sorry—"
"If you can't afford—"
"I didn't know you were so dependent on carriages—"
It was a pardonable human revenge, but it was the straw. In a flash Milly stripped the big diamond from her finger and dramatically held it forth to him.
"Here's your ring," she said.
"Milly!..."
It isn't wise to follow such a scene any further. I do not know that Milly finally flung the ring at her lover, though she was capable of doing it like an angry child. At any rate the symbolic circle of harmonious union lay on the floor between them when Grandma Ridge arrived, stealthily coming from behind the portières, her little gray shawl hugged tight about her narrow shoulders.
"Why, Milly—what is this? Clarence!"
"It means that I'm not going to marry a man who cares more for his money than for me," Milly said bluntly, picking up her wraps and stalking out of the room. She paused in the hall, however, long enough to hear her former lover say dolefully,—
"She don't love me, Mrs. Ridge. That's the trouble—Milly don't really love me."
And she added from the hall:—
"Clarence is quite right, grandma. I don't love him—and what's more, I'm never going to marry a man I can't love for all the money in the world!"
With this defiant proclamation of principle Milly ascended to her room.
What passed between Mrs. Ridge and the discarded Clarence, it is needless to relate. Even Mrs. Ridge became convinced after a time that the rupture was both inevitable and irrevocable. Parker at last left the house, and it must be added took with him the ring which had been recovered from the floor.
After he had gone Mrs. Ridge knocked at Milly's door. But an obstinate silence prevailed, and so she went away. Milly was sitting on her bed, tears dropping from her eyes, tears of rage and mortification and disappointment. She realized that she had failed, after all, in doing what she had set out to do, and angry as she still was, disgusted with Clarence's thin and parsimonious nature, she was beginning, nevertheless, to be conscious of her own folly.
"I never liked him," she said to herself over and over, in justification for her rash act. "I couldn't bear him near me. I only did it for Dad's sake. And I could not, that's all there is to it—I just couldn't.... We should have fought all the time—cold, mean little thing."
After a time she undressed and went to bed, calmer and more at peace with herself than for some time. The inevitable does that for us. "I can't live with a man I don't love—it isn't right," she thought, and gradually a glow of self-appreciation for her courage in refusing, even at the ninth hour, to make the woman's terrible sacrifice of her sacred self came to her rescue. Her sentimental education, with its woman's creed of the omnipotence of love, had reasserted itself.
"I tried," she said in her heart, "but I couldn't—it wasn't the real, right thing."
Of course she had known this all along, but she treated it now as a new discovery. And she went to sleep, sooner than one might expect under the circumstances.
But the next day, as the French say, it was to pay. When Milly kissed her father at the breakfast table, his mournful eyes and drooping mouth showed plainly that he knew the disaster.
"I couldn't, father," she murmured weepily.
"It's all right, daughter," the little man responded bravely, fumbling with his fork and knife.
But her grandmother did not mince matters. It was all well enough for a girl to have her own way as Milly had had hers, but now she had made a nice mess of things,—put them all in a ridiculous position. Who was she to be so particular, to consider herself such a queen? etc., etc. Milly took it all in silence. She knew that she deserved it in part.
At last Horatio intervened. He didn't want his daughter to feel forced to marry a man she couldn't be happy with, not for all Danner's millions. Business was bad, to be sure, but he was a man yet and could find something to do to support his daughter.
"I hope it ends all this society business for good," Mrs. Ridge put in with a hard little laugh. "If you don't want to marry, you can go to work."
"I will," said Milly, humbly.
"Don't be hard on her, mother," Horatio whispered into the old lady's ear. "It don't do no good now."
But after he had left, Mrs. Ridge turned on Milly again.
"I don't suppose you know the trouble your father is in."
"We're always hard up.... Anything new?"
She had been so fully preoccupied with her own affairs these past months she had not realized that the tea and coffee business was getting into worse straits than ever. Everything, she had optimistically reckoned, would be smoothed out by her marriage.
"Bankruptcy—that's what's coming," her grandmother informed her, with an acid satisfaction in being able to record the fulfilment of her prophecies. "That comes of your father's trying a new business at his age—and Hoppers' was so sure. He'd have been a department head by now, if he had stayed."
"I thought the fair concession made a lot of money."
Mrs. Ridge gave her the facts. It seemed that Horatio, always optimistic and trusting, had put this new venture in the hands of a man who had talked well, but had cheated him outrageously, and finally absconded after the close of the Fair, leaving behind debts contracted in the firm's name. The losses had wiped out all the profits of the concession and more, and this, added to the general business depression, was bad enough. But there was worse. Snowden had suddenly demanded his money. Using the defalcation as an excuse he alleged Horatio's bad management, and wanted an immediate settlement of the firm's affairs. That meant the end—bankruptcy, as Mrs. Ridge said. Awful word!
"But it's outrageous of Mr. Snowden!" Milly cried.
"It seems he's that kind. He got ahead of your father in the partnership agreement, and now the lawyer says he can do anything he likes—sell out the business if he wants to.... And we've got this house on our hands for another year," she added sourly, bringing home to Milly her share in the general misfortune.
Then the little old lady gathered up the breakfast dishes, while Milly sat and looked at the dreary wall of the next house. It was pretty bad. Still she could not feel sorry for what she had done....
"I'll see Mr. Snowden myself," she announced at last.
Her grandmother looked at her curiously.
"What good will that do?"
Milly, recollecting the old offence, blushed. Latterly as the prospective wife of a rich man she had assumed certain airs of her putative social position, and thought she could "manage" easily a common sort of person like this Snowden man. Now she realized with a sudden sinking of spirits it was all different. She possessed no longer any authority other than that of an attractive, but poor, young woman with "a good manner."
During the next few days she was destined to feel this change in her position repeatedly. If the news of her engagement to an "eligible" man had spread rapidly, the announcement of the disaster to her engagement seemed miraculously immediate. She had just begun with her grandmother's help to prepare to return her engagement gifts, as her grandmother insisted was the proper thing to do, when in rushed the Norton girls, quite breathless. Sally greeted her with a jovial laugh.
"So you've dropped him! I told Ted, Milly would never stand for those balcony seats!" She rippled with laughter at the humor of the situation. Milly, revived by her attitude, related the cab and car incidents. "He was—horrid."
"They're all like that, those New Englanders—afraid to spend their money," Sally commented lightly.
Vivie took the sentimental view.
"Your heart was never in it, dear," she said consolingly.
"Of course it wasn't—I never pretended it was!"
"That sort of thing can't last."
Milly, now quite reassured, gave a drole imitation of Clarence Albert's last remarks,—"She doesn't love me, Mrs. Ridge—Milly doesn't really love me!"
She trilled the words mischievously. Sally roared with pleasure. Vivie said, "Of course you couldn't marry him—not that!"
And Milly felt that she was right. No, she could not dothat: she had been true to herself, true to her feelings,—woman's first duty,—a little late, to be sure.
But a full realization of her situation did not come until she appeared in public. Then she began to understand what she had done in discarding her suitable fiancé. Nettie Gilbert hardly invited her to sit when she called. She said severely:—
"Yes, Clarence told me all about it. He feels very badly. It was very frivolous of you, Milly. I should not havethought it possible."
She treated Milly as the one soul saved who, after being redeemed, had fled the flock. Milly protested meekly, "But I didn't care for him, Nettie, not the least little bit."
Mrs. Gilbert, who remembered her Roy, replied severely, "At least you ought to have known your own mind before this."
"Heismean," Milly flared.
"And you are rather extravagant, I'm afraid, my dear!"
That relation ended there, at least its pleasant intimacy. And so it went from house to house, especially among the settled married folk, who regarded Milly as inconceivably foolish and silly. Who was she to be so scrupulous about her precious heart? Even the younger, unmarried sort had a knowing and disapproving look on their faces when she met them. As for the stream of invitations, there was a sudden drought, as of a parched desert, and the muteness of the telephone after its months of perpetual twinkle was simply ghastly.
So Milly was learning that there is one worse experience in life than not "making good," and that is, giving the appearance of it and then collapsing. This was the collapse. Sympathy was all with Clarence Albert, except among a few frivolous or sentimental souls, like Sally and Vivie. Young women having the means, who found themselves in Milly's situation,—with a broken engagement on their hands at the beginning of the season,—would at once have gone abroad or to California or the South, to distract themselves, rest their wounded hearts, and allow the world to forget their affairs, as it promptly would. At least they would have tried settlement work. But Milly had no money for such gentle treatment. She had to run the risk of bruising her sensibilities whenever she set foot out of doors, and she was too healthy-minded to sit long at home and mope. And home was not a pleasant place these days.
Still, she said to herself defiantly, she was not sorry for what she had done. A woman's first duty was to her heart, etc.
Eleanor Kemp, who had been ill and away from the city, sent for Milly on her return. She proved to be the most sympathetic of all her friends, and Milly decided that Eleanor was her best, as she was her oldest, friend. At the conclusion of Milly's tale, rendered partly in the comic vein, Mrs. Kemp sighed, "It's too bad, Milly." The sigh implied that Milly had damaged herself for the provincial marriage market, perhaps irretrievably. She might marry, of course, probably would, being sobered by this fiasco, but after such a failure, nothing "brilliant" might be expected.
"I just couldn't sit opposite that cold, fishy creature all my life," Milly protested. "He got on my nerves—that was it."
"Yes, I understand—but—"
Milly suspected that banking and bankers might get on a woman's nerves, too, though Walter Kemp was a much more human man than Clarence Albert ever would be.
"And now what will you do?" her friend inquired. (Milly had confided to her Horatio's coming disaster.)
"I don't know—something quick!"
"You might help me with my mail and buying—I never seem to get through with everything—and this New Hospital committee."
"Could I, do you think?" Milly responded eagerly.
So it was arranged that Milly should become a sort of informal lady secretary and assistant to the banker's wife, with unstated hours, duties, and compensation,—one of those flexible, vague business and social arrangements that women were more likely to make with one another twenty years ago than now.
Milly's spirits revived quickly, and she left the Kemps buoyant. It seemed easier than she had expected to "get something to do." She kissed Eleanor Kemp with genuine gratitude.
"You've always been the kindest, dearest thing to me, Nelly."
"I'm very fond of you, dear, and always shall be."
"I know—and you were my first real friend."
Milly had a pleasant sense of returning to old ideals and ties in thus drawing near once more to the Kemps, whom latterly she had found a trifle dull.... Leaving the house, she bumped into old Mrs. Jonas Haggenash, one of the Kemps' neighbors. The Haggenashes had made their way in lumber and were among the most considered of the older, unfashionable people in the city. Mrs. H. had a reputation as a wit, of the kind that "has her say" under any and all circumstances. Latterly she had rather taken up Milly Ridge, who fished in many pools.
"So you and your young man had a falling out, Milly," Mrs. Haggenash rasped nasally.
"Our engagement has been broken," Milly acknowledged with dignity.
"That's a pity. It ain't every day a poor girl can marry a millionaire. They don't grow on every bush."
"When I marry, it will be some one I can respect and love too."
The old lady smiled dubiously at the pretty sentiment.
"Most women want to. But they've got to be fed and clothed first."
She looked at Milly's smart walking costume and smiled again. Milly always managed to have a becoming street dress and hat, even in her poorest days, and lately she had let herself out, as the pile of unopened bills on her dressing-table would show.
"I expect to eat and dress," Milly retorted, and trotted off with a curse near her lips for Mrs. Jonas Haggenash and all her tribe.
The way home took Milly near the office of the tea and coffee business, and she thought to surprise her father and give him the good news of Mrs. Kemp's offer. She would also get him to walk home with her. Horatio had been very doleful of late and she wished to cheer him up. She had not visited the office for many months, but its outward appearance was much the same as it had been that first time when she had visited it with her father. The sign had become dingy, was almost undecipherable, as if it had anticipated the end of its usefulness. The same dreary little cart for "city deliveries" stood before the door, but the thin horse drooped disconsolately between the shafts, as if he too knew that he was not there for long.
Horatio was not in the office. Snowden stood beside the bookkeeper, looking over a ledger. As Milly opened the door both he and the bookkeeper looked up. Milly recognized the hatchet-faced woman of uncertain age, with the forbidding stare through her large spectacles. This time when Milly came forward with a pleasant smile and "Miss Simpson, how are you?" the stony face did not relax a muscle. Miss Simpson looked her employer's daughter over as if she were about to accuse her of being the cause for the firm's disaster. "Mr. Snowden," Milly continued, ignoring the woman's hostility, "I came for my father.... How are you and Mrs. Snowden?"
"Your father's gone," the bookkeeper snapped with an unpleasant smile. She eyed Milly's fashionable attire unsympathetically. It was the second time that afternoon that Milly was made to feel apologetic for her good clothes.
"Oh," she said hesitantly.
"Anything I can do for you, Miss Ridge?" Snowden asked, glancing down at the ledger indifferently.
Milly had an inspiration.
"Why, yes, Mr. Snowden," she exclaimed pleasantly. "I should like to talk with you a few moments, if I am not interrupting your work," she added, for Snowden made no move.
"Well?" he said gruffly.
Milly turned towards the rear of the loft where there were a number of little tables dotted with unwashed china cups, and grains of tea and coffee. Snowden followed her slowly, and leaned against a table.
"What is it?"
"Mr. Snowden," Milly began gently, "you are my father's oldest friend in the city."
"Guess I know that."
"He's very unhappy."
"Has good reason to be."
She made the direct appeal.
"Why do you do this thing, Mr. Snowden? Why do you want to ruin my father—your old friend?"
"Guess you don't understand—he's pretty nearly ruinedme!" Snowden emitted with a snort.
"Yes, I understand," Milly replied glibly. "Business had been very bad. My friends tell me all business has been dreadful since the Fair—everybody feels poor. But why make things worse? A little time, and it will be different."
She smiled at him persuasively.
"I want to save my own skin, what there is left to save," he grumbled. "Your father's made a pretty bad mess of things, Milly."
"We won't discuss what my father has done," Milly retorted with dignity. "He's been deceived—he's too trusting with men. He trusted you!"
At this thrust Snowden laughed loudly.
"And you want me to trust him with my money some more? No, thank you."
His tone changed insensibly. No one could be rough with Milly for long. Snowden volunteered some explanations of the tea and coffee business not related by Mrs. Ridge. It seemed that Horatio had made rather a mess of things all around.
"So you see I must try and save what I can before it'sallgone.... I've got a family of my own, you know."
Milly knew that, and wished she had been nicer to Mrs. Snowden and the uninteresting daughter when she had had the chance. She had never had them to the Acacia Street house in all these years.
"Can't you wait a few months?... Please!..."
Entreaty was all the argument life had given Milly. There was a leap of something in the man's flushed face that caused the girl to retreat a step or two. She had not meant to rouse his graceless passion, but that was what she had almost succeeded in doing by her coaxing. As she drew back Snowden laughed.
"You see, Milly, peoplepayin this world for what they want—men and women too. They have topaysomehow!"
And, this enigmatic taunt ringing in her ears, Milly departed with all the dignity that remained to her. She was conscious of the bookkeeping woman's hostile sneer upon her back as she disappeared. Her face burned with the man's coarse words: "In this world people have topayfor what they want."
That was too true! She had not been willing to pay, except with smiles and pretty speeches, the small change, and it seemed that was not enough. She had not been willing to pay the price of a good position in her world which she wanted, nor Snowden's price for mercy to her father. Of course not that! But now she must pay somehow for what she got: for her food and her clothes and her shelter first of all. It had come to that. Thus Milly had her first lesson in the manifold realities of life.
Soberly but bravely she faced the winter wind and made her way home to her father's house.
The next months were in some respects the dreariest that Milly was ever to know. It was not long before the illusion about her work for Eleanor Kemp wore thin. It was, in a word, one of those polite, parasitic occupations for women, provided by the rich for helpless friends, and it was satisfying to neither party. A good deal of time for both was wasted in "talking things over," with much discursive chatter on matters in general, and all sorts of consulting back and forth about the job to be done. There were letters to be carefully written, then rewritten after delicately guarded criticisms had been made; shopping to be done where it took hours to decide whether this "matched" or not and whether Danner's or Dround's was a better place for purchasing this or that. Milly still tried to keep up some social life, and so she usually came in at the Kemps rather late in the morning, and after lunching with her friend went back to the city on errands. She was a miracle of un-system, and frequently forgot. But she was so genuinely penitent and abased when her omissions were discovered that her friend had not the heart to be severe. Milly, on the other hand, began to think that the work took a great deal of time and that fifty dollars a month was small pay for her services, yet did not like even to hint that she wanted more.
Walter Kemp summed the matter up in the brutal fashion of man-financier, "Better give Milly her money and let me send you a trained woman from the bank to do your work, Nell."
But Eleanor Kemp was shocked at this evidence of male tactlessness.
"Milly would never take a gift like that!"
That was the trouble: Milly belonged to the class too proud to take charity and too incompetent to earn money. So Mrs. Kemp continued to do as much as she had done before and to pay Milly fifty dollars a month out of her private purse.
"Pity she didn't marry Parker," Kemp said brusquely. "He'll be a very rich man one of these days."
"You see she couldn't, Walter," his wife explained eagerly. "She didn't love him enough."
"Well," this raw male rejoined, "she'd better hurry up and find some one she does love who can support her."
"Yes," Mrs. Kemp admitted, "sheoughtto marry."
For in those days there didn't seem to be any other way of providing for the Milly Ridges.
Milly realized her inadequacy, but naturally did not ascribe it wholly to incompetency. She wanted to give up her irregular job: it could not be concealed from her friends, and it marked her as a dependent. But the stern fact remained that she needed the money, even the paltry fifty dollars a month, as she had never needed anything in life. If she refrained from spending a dollar for several years, she could hardly clear herself of the accumulated bills from her halcyon days of hope.
And the household needed money, too. After that regrettable interview with Snowden, the catastrophe in the tea and coffee business came with the swiftness of long-delayed fate. One morning Horatio did not rise from the breakfast table, as had been his wont for so many years, and throwing out his chest with the sensual satisfaction of the well-fed male shout boisterously:—
"Good-by, folks, I must be off to the office!"
For there was no longer any office to go to.
Instead, Horatio sat glumly at the table reading the want columns of the morning paper, down and up, and then as the morning wore on he silently departed for the city—"to look for something." Hopeless task, when the streets were filled with men out of work, and businesses everywhere were closing down and turning off old employees. Milly, watching Horatio reach gropingly for his hat and coat, like a stricken animal, realized that her father was no longer young and brave. He had passed fifty,—the terrible deadline in modern industry. "Nobody wants an old dog, any way," he said to his mother forlornly.
Then Milly was almost sorry for what she had done. But it was not really her fault, she still thought.
It was a mournful experience, this, of having a grown man—the one male of the family—sitting listlessly about the house of a morning and going forth aimlessly at irregular times, only to return before he should be expected. The habit of her life, as it had been the habit of Horatio's, was to have the male sally forth early from the domestic hearth and leave it free to the women of the family for the entire day.... Usually optimistic to a fault, with a profound conviction that things must come right of themselves somehow, Milly began to doubt and see dark visions of the family future. What if her father should be unable to find another place—any sort of work—and should come to hang about the house always, getting seedier and sadder, to be supported by her feeble efforts? Milly refused to contemplate the picture.
One day her grandmother asked money from Milly. The old lady was a grim little nemesis for the girl these days,—a living embodiment of "See what you have done," though never for a moment would Milly admit that she was responsible for the accumulation of disaster. It should be said in behalf of Grandma Ridge that now the blow of fate had fallen, which she had so persistently predicted for four long years, she set her lips in grim puritan silence and did that which must be done without reproach.
Somehow she found the money for the rent from month to month and gave Horatio his carfare and lunch money each morning. But she came to Milly for money to buy food, and Milly gave it generously although she owed all she earned and much more. But food came before bills. If it hadn't been for Eleanor Kemp's luxurious luncheons, the girl would often have gone hungry.... And through it all she never took refuge in tears. "What's the use?" she said.
It was during the darkest of these days that a new turn in Milly's fate came unexpectedly. She had been to a Sunday luncheon at the Nortons, and was walking back along the Drive, thinking a little sadly that even her old pals had invited her only at the last moment, "to fill in." She was no more any sort of social "card." She was revolving this and other dreary thoughts in her worried mind when she heard her name,—"Miss Ridge—I say, Miss Ridge!"
She turned to meet the beaming face of old Christian Becker, the editor-proprietor of theMorning Star, who was hurrying towards her as fast as his short, fat person would permit him. As he came along he raised his shiny silk hat above his bald head, and his broad face broke into a larger smile than was its wont. Becker was an amusing character, tempting to set before the reader, but as he has to do only incidentally with Milly Ridge it cannot be. Enough to say that after forty years of hard struggle in the land of his adoption, he had preserved the virtues of a simple countryman and the heart of a good-natured boy. Every one in the city knew Christian Becker; every one laughed and growled at his newspaper,—the God of his heart.
"Thought it must be you," he gasped. "Never forget how a pretty woman walks!" (Howdoesshe walk? Milly wondered.) "How are you, Miss Ridge? Haven't seen you for some time—not since that swell dinner at the Bowman place, d'ye remember?"
Milly remembered very well,—the apex moment of her career hitherto.
He smiled good naturedly, and Milly smiled, too. Then Becker added in a childlike burst of confidence:—
"Let me tell you, you did just right, my girl! Don't tie yourself up with any man you can't run with. It don't work. It saves tears and trouble to quit before you're hitched by the parson."
Milly flushed at the frank reference to her broken engagement, then laughed at the crude phrasing. But her heart warmed with the word of sympathy. Gradually she unburdened herself of all her troubles, and at the conclusion the kindly newspaper man said wisely:—
"Never you mind how folks behave, Miss Ridge. Keep a stiff upper lip—hold up your head—and you'll have all of 'em running after you like hens after corn 'fore you know it. That's what happened to me when I went broke that time."
"But I'm not fit to do anything," Milly confessed truthfully, "and I must support myself somehow."
"Why don't you try newspaper work? You are a clever girl and you know the world.... Come to my office to-morrow noon—no, I've got a Washington nob on my hands for lunch—" (Becker was vain of his political influence, which consisted for the most part of entertaining visiting politicians at luncheon.) "Come in 'bout four, and we'll see what we can do to help you out."
With a fatherly nod he hurried off down a side street, and Milly went home with a new fillip to her lively imagination.
As a matter of fact the proprietor of theStarwas not entirely disinterested in his kindness. He had been looking for some woman to take "Madame Alpha's" place and furnish the paper with that column of intimate social tittle-tattle about people the readers knew only by name, which every enterprising American newspaper considers a necessary ingredient of the "news." The estimable lady, who signed herself "Madame Alpha," had grown stale in the business, as such social chroniclers usually do. The widow of an esteemed citizen, with wide connections in the older society of the city, she had done very well at first. But she had "fallen down" lamentably, to use Becker's phrase, during the recent period of Chicago's social expansion. She neither knew the new gods and goddesses, nor did she know how to invent stories about their doings.
Becker, who had seen Milly, not merely at the Bowmans, but at many of the more brilliant functions of the Fair season, regarded her as "up-to-date," and further, thought her a nice, lively young woman, who would know the difference between Mrs. Patziki's card party on Garfield Boulevard and a dinner to the French ambassador at the Danner's. It made little difference whether she could write or not, so long as she had the "entry" as he called it. At any rate he would try her.
So Milly began her new career as journalist with much enthusiasm and a sense of self-importance that had been grievously lacking in her enterprises for some time. She thought she had the ability to write—what attractive young American woman doesn't? Her friends thought her clever, and laughed at her little "stories" about people. She set herself industriously to the composition of elaborate articles on "Our Social Leaders," consisting largely of a retrospect and review, for "our social leaders" kept very still during those terrible months of want and panic that followed the gay doings of the great show, or were out of the city. These articles appeared in the Sunday edition, over thenom de plumeof the "Débutante." Other women of the regular staff did the card-parties and club news and the West Side stuff.
There was a city editor, of course, and a ruthless blue pencil, but as Milly was recognized on the paper as "the old man's" present hobby, she was given a pretty free rein. She sailed into the dingyStaroffices dressed quite smartly, dropped her sprawling manuscript on the Sunday editor's table, and ambled into Mr. Becker's sanctum for a little social chat. In the office she was known as "the Real Thing," and liked as she was almost everywhere, though the youthful reporters laughed at her pompous diction.
TheStarpaid her the handsome sum of fifteen dollars a week.
It did not take Milly long to realize that the sort of newspaper writing she was doing was as parasitic in its nature as her first job, and even less permanent. Of course it quickly leaked out who theDébutantewas who wrote with such finality of "our social leaders," and though friends were kind and even helpful, assuring Milly "it made no difference," and they thought it "a good thing for her to do," she knew that in the end her work would kill whatever social position she had retained through her vicissitudes. The more "exclusive" women with social aspirations liked secretly to have their presences and their doings publicly chronicled, but they were fearful lest they should seem to encourage such publicity. Although they said, "We'd rather have one of us do it if it has to be done, you know," yet they preferred to have it thought that the information came from the butler and the housemaid. Milly soon perceived that a woman must cheapen herself at the job, and by cheapening herself lose her qualification. Nevertheless, she had to keep at it for the money.
That was the terrible fact about earning one's living, Milly learned: the jobs—at least those she was fitted for—were all parasitic and involved personal humiliations. From this arose Milly's growing conviction of the social injustice in the world to women, of which view later she became quite voluble....
Fortunately the summer came on, when "Society" moved away from the city altogether. Becker, who had been somewhat disappointed in Milly's indifferent success, now suggested that she do a series of articles on inland summer resorts. "Show 'em," said the newspaper man, "that we've got a society of our own out here in the middle west, as classy as any in America,—Newport, Bar Harbor, or Lenox." He advised Lake Como for a start, but Milly, for reasons of her own, preferred Mackinac, then a popular resort on the cold water of Lake Superior.
By mid-July she was established in the most fashionable of the barny, wooden hotels at the resort and prepared to put herself in touch with the summer society. One of the first persons she met was a Mrs. Thornton from St. Louis, a pleasant, ladylike young married woman, who had a cottage near by and took her meals at the hotel. She was a summer widow with three children,—a thoroughly well-bred woman of the sort Milly instinctively took to and attracted. They became friends rapidly through the children, whom Milly petted. She learned all about the Thorntons in a few days. They were very nice people. He was an architect, and she had been a Miss Duncan of Philadelphia,—also a very nice family of the Quaker order, Milly gathered. Mrs. Thornton talked a great deal of an older brother, who had gone to California for his health and had bought a fruit ranch there in the Ventura mountains somewhere south of Santa Barbara. This brother, Edgar Duncan, was expected to visit Mrs. Thornton during the summer, and in the course of time he arrived at Mackinac.
Milly found him on the piazza of the Thornton cottage playing with the children. As he got up awkwardly from the floor and raised his straw hat, Milly remarked that his sandy hair was thin. He was slight, about middle-aged, and seemed quite timid. Not at all the large westerner with bronzed face and flapping cowboy hat she had vaguely pictured to herself. Nevertheless, she smiled at him cordially,—
"You are the brother I've heard so much about?" she said, proffering a hand.
"And you must be that new Aunt Milly the children are full of," he replied, coloring bashfully.
So it began. For the next month, until Milly, having exhausted the social possibilities of Mackinac, had to move on to another "resort" in Wisconsin, she saw a great deal of Edgar Duncan. They walked through the fir woods by moonlight, boated on the lake under the stars, and read Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and thoughtful for women, of a refined and high-minded race—the sort of man "any woman could be sure of."
Mrs. Thornton, with much sisterly affection and no vulgar ambition, encouraged unobtrusively the intimacy. "Edgar is so lonely out there on his ranch," she explained to Milly, "I want him to come back east. He might now, you know,—there's nothing really the matter with his health. But he's got used to the life and doesn't like our hurry and the scramble for money. Besides he's put all his money into those lemons and olives.... I think a woman might be very happy out of the world in a place like that, with a man who loved her a lot,—and children, of course, children,—don't you?"
Milly thought so, too. She was becoming very tired of newspaper work, and of her single woman's struggle to maintain herself in the roar of Chicago. The future looked rather gray even through her habitually rose-colored glasses. She was twenty-four. She knew the social game, and its risks, better than two years before.... So she was very kind to Duncan,—she really liked him extremely, rather for what he was without than for what he had,—and when she left it was understood between them that the Californian should return to his ranch by the way of Chicago and meet Milly there on a certain day,—Monday, the first of September. He was very particular, sentimentally so, about this date,—kept repeating it,—and they made little jokes of it until Milly even particularized the hour when she could be free to see him,—"Five o'clock, 31 East Acacia Street,—hadn't you better write it down?" But Duncan thought he could remember it very well. "We'll go somewhere for dinner," Milly promised.
That was all, but it was a good deal for the shy Edgar Duncan to have arrived at. Milly was content to leave it just that way,—vague and pleasant, with no explicit understanding of what was to come afterwards. She knew he would write—he was that kind; he would say more on paper than by word of mouth, much more. Then, when they met again, she would put her hand in his and without any talk it would have happened.... He came with the children to see her off at the station, and as the fir-covered northern landscape retreated from the moving train, Milly relaxed in her Pullman seat, holding his roses in her lap, and decided that Edgar Duncan was altogether the "best" man she had ever known well. She surrendered herself to a dream of a wonderful land where the yellow lemons gleamed among glossy green leaves, and the distant hills were powdered with the gray tint of olive trees, as Duncan had described the ranch, and also of a little low bungalow, a silent Jap in white clothes moving back and forth, and far below the distant murmur of the Pacific surges.... Her eyes became suffused: it wasn't the pinnacle of her girlish hope, but it was Peace. And just now Milly wanted peace more than anything else.
He wrote, as Milly knew he would, and though Milly found his letters lacking in that warmth and color and glow in which she had bathed the ranch, they were tender and true letters of a real lover, albeit a timid one. "All his life he had longed for a real companion, for a woman who could be a man's mate as his mother was to his father," and that sort of thing. He implied again and again that not until he had met Milly had he found such a creature, "but now," etc. Milly sighed. She was happy, but not thrilled. Perhaps, she thought, she was too old for thrills—twenty-four—and this was as near "the real right thing" as she was ever to come. At any rate she meant to take the chance.
Ocanseveroc did not prove attractive: it was a hot little hole by a steaming, smelly lake, like Como, only less select in its society and more populous. Milly quickly "did" the resort and fled back to Chicago for a breath of fresh air from the great cooling tub of Lake Michigan. That was the nineteenth of August. She had twelve days in which to get ready her articles before Duncan's arrival. On the hot train she planned a little article on the search for the ideal resort with the result of a hasty return to the city for comfort and coolness. She thought it might be made amusing and resolved to see the editor about it.
Matters at home had scarcely improved during the languid summer. Horatio sat on the stoop in his shirt-sleeves, unchided, or went for long hours to a beer-garden he had found near by. He made no pretence of looking for work. "What's the use—in the summer?" Milly stirred the stagnant domestic atmosphere with her recovered cheerfulness. She told them of her various adventures, especially of the Thorntons and of the new young man. Duncan had given her some kodaks of the fruit ranch in the Ventura mountains, which she displayed.HEwas coming to see her soon, and she laughed prettily. Grandma maintained her sour indifference to Milly's doings, but Horatio took a lively interest. He had always wanted to go "back to a farm" since he was a young man, he said. It was the only place for a poor man to live these days, and they said those California ranches were wonderful money-makers. A man at Hoppers' had gone out there, etc.
Father and daughter talked ranch far into the hot night.
The next afternoon Milly went to the newspaper office to report and to discuss with the editor her last inspiration for an article. It was the vacation season and a number of the desks in the editorial room were vacant. Mr. Becker's door was closed and shrouded with an "Out of Town" card. At the Sunday editor's table in the partitioned box reserved for this official was an unfamiliar figure. Milly stopped at the threshold and stared. A young man, fair-haired, in a fresh and fetching summer suit with a flowing gauzy tie, looked up from the table and smiled at Milly. He was distinctly not of theStartype.
"Come right in," he called out genially. "Anything I can do for you? No, I'm not the new Sunday editor—he's away cooling himself somewheres.... I just came in here to finish this sketch."
Milly noticed the drawing-paper and the India-ink bottle on the table.
"You're not Kim?" Milly stammered.
"The same."
("Kim" was the name signed to some clever cartoons that had been appearing all that winter in a rival paper, about which there had been more or less talk in the circles where Milly moved.)
"So you've come over to theStar?" she said with immediate interest.
"The silver-tongued Becker got me—for a price—a small one," he added with a laugh, as if nothing about him was of sufficient consequence to hide.
"I'msoglad. I like your pictures awfully well."
"Thanks!... And you, I take it, arela belle Débutante?"
"Yes!" Milly laughed. "How did you know?"
"Oh," he replied, and his tone said, "it's because you too are different from the rest here," which flattered Milly.
"Won't you come in and sit down?"
The young man emptied a chair by the simple process of tipping it and presented it to Milly with a gallant flourish. She sat on the edge and drew up her veil as far as the tip of her nose. The young man smiled. Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than either could ever understand the other members of theStarstaff. Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came from the same world,—that small "larger world," where they all use the same idiom.
"Been doing Mackinac and Ocara-se-er-oc?" the young man drawled with delightful irony. "Ye gods! What names!"
Both laughed with a pleasant sense of superiority over a primitive civilization, though Milly at least had hardly known any other.
"And they're just like their names," Milly asserted, "awful places!"
"I've not yet had the privilege of seeing our best people in their summer quarters," the young man continued, with his agreeable air of genial mockery.
"You won't see them in those places."
"Or anywhere else at present," the artist sighed, glancing at his unfinished sketch.
Milly asked to see the drawing, and another inspiration occurred to her. She told the young artist of her idea for a comic article on the hunt through the lake resorts for an ideal place of peace and coolness. He thought it a good topic and suggested graciously that he could do a few small pen-and-ink illustrations to elucidate the text.
"Oh, would you!" Milly exclaimed eagerly. It was what she had hoped he would say, and it revived her waning interest in journalism immensely, the prospect of collaboration with this attractive young artist. (She had already forgotten that she was to abandon journalism after the first Monday in September.)
Later they went out to tea together to discuss the article.
Jack Bragdon, who signed his pen-and-ink sketches with the name of "Kim," was one of that considerable army of young adventurers in the arts who pushed westward from the Atlantic seaboard at the time of the World's Fair in Chicago; also one of the large number who had been left stranded when the tidal wave of artistic effort had receded, exposing the dead flats of hard times. After graduation from an eastern college of the second class, where he had distinguished himself by composing the comic opera libretto for his club and drawing for the college annual, he had chosen for himself the career of art. With a year in a New York art school and another spent knocking about various European capitals in a somewhat aimless fashion, an amiable but financially restricted family had declined to embarrass itself further for the present with his career. Or, as his Big Brother in Big Business had put it, "the kid had better show what he can do for himself before we go any deeper." Jack had consequently taken an opportunity to see the Fair and remained to earn his living as best he could by contributing cartoons to the newspapers, writing paragraphs in a funny column, and occasional verse of the humorous order. And he designed covers for ephemeral magazines,—in a word, nimbly snatched the scanty dollars of Art.
All this he sketched lightly and entertainingly for Milly's benefit that first time.
Already he had achieved something of a vogue socially in pleasant circles, thanks to his vivacity and good breeding. Milly had heard of his charms about the time of her Crash, but had never happened to meet him. He had heard of Milly, of course,—many things which might well stir a young man's curiosity. So they smiled at each other across a little table in a deserted restaurant, and sat on into the August twilight, sipping cooling drinks. He smoked many cigarettes which he rolled with fascinating dexterity between his long white fingers, and talked gayly, while Milly listened with ears and eyes wide open to the engrossing story of Himself.
Jack Bragdon was a much rarer type in Chicago of the early nineties—or in any American city—than he would be to-day. Milly's experience of the world had never brought her into close touch with Art. And Art has a fatal fascination for most women. They buzz around its white arc-light, or tallow dip, like heedless moths bent on their own destruction. Art in the person of a handsome, sophisticated youth like Jack Bragdon, who had seen a little of drawing-rooms as well as the pavements of strange cities, was irresistible. (Milly too felt that she had in her something of the artistic temperament, which had never been properly developed.)
Thus far, even by his own account, Bragdon was not much of an artist. He was clever with his fingers,—pen or pencil,—but at twenty-six he might very truthfully state,—"I've been a rotten loafer always, you know. But I'm reformed. Chicago's reformed me. That's what Brother meant.... Now watch and see. I'm not going to draw ridiculous pot-bellied politicians for a newspaper—not after I have saved the fare to Europe and a few dollars over to keep me from starving while I learn to really paint."
"Of course you won't stay here!" Milly chimed sympathetically, with an unconscious sigh....
It is marvellous what a vast amount of mutual biography two young persons of the opposite sexes can exchange in a brief tête-à-tête. By the time Milly and the young artist were strolling slowly northward in the sombre city twilight, they had become old friends, and Milly was hearing about the girl in Rome, the fascination of artist life in Munich, the stunning things in the last Salon, and all the rest of it. They parted at Milly's doorstep without speaking of another meeting, for it never occurred to either that they should not meet—the next day.
The gardens of that California Hesperides were already getting dim in Milly's memory, blotted out by a more intoxicating vision.
The next meeting was not farther off than the next noon. They lunched together, to talk further of their collaboration, and from luncheon went to the Art Institute to see the pictures, most of which Bragdon disposed off condescendingly as "old-style stuff." Milly, who had been taught to reverence this selection of masterpieces, which were the local admiration, learned that there were realms beyond her ken.
The next day saw another meeting and the next yet another. Then there was an intermission—Bragdon had to finish some work—and Milly felt restless. But there ensued ten delicious days of music and beer-gardens and walks in the parks, luncheons and suppers,—one starry Sunday spent scrambling among the ravines on the north shore and picnicking on the sandy beach, listening to the sadly soothing sweetness of Omar—(yes, they read Omar in those days, the young did!)—with little opalescent waves twinkling at their feet. Milly never paused to think one moment of all those ten precious days. She was blissfully content with the world as it was, except when she was at home, and then she was plotting skilfully "another occasion." If she had stopped to think, she would have murmured to herself, "At last! This must be the real, right thing!"
He was so handsome, so full of strong male youth and joy, of large hopes and careless intentions, and he was also exotic to Milly,—a bit of that older, more complex civilization she had always longed for in her prairie limitations. His horizon had been broader than hers, she felt, though he was a mere boy in worldly knowledge. He even dressed differently from the men she knew, with a dash of daring color in waistcoat and ties that proclaimed the budding artist. And above all he embodied the Romance of Art,—that fatal lure for aspiring womankind. The sphere of creation is hermaphroditic: he too was fine and feminine, unlike the coarser types of men. He craved Reputation and would have it, Milly assured him confidently. She was immediately convinced of his high talent. Alas! She sighed when she said it, for she knew that his gifts would quickly waft him beyond her reach on his upward way. Chicago could not hold one like him long: he was for other, beautifuller ports of destiny!
At four forty-five on the afternoon of September first,—a Monday,—a tall, somewhat nervous man rang the bell of 31 East Acacia Street and inquired for Miss Ridge. He came in and waited when he learned from the little old lady who opened the door that Milly was not at home. He waited in the small front room, sombrely darkened, where the tragedy of Milly's first engagement ring had taken place,—waited until six forty-five, then at the signs of preparation for the evening meal slipped out. But he was back at seven forty-five and again came in. This time Mrs. Ridge introduced herself and invited him politely to await her granddaughter's return. "She's very uncertain in her hours," the old lady explained with a deprecatory little laugh, "since she has undertaken this newspaper work. It seems to keep her at the office a great deal of late...." We may leave Edgar Duncan there in the little front room, being entertained by Mrs. Ridge in her most gracious manner, while we go in search of the truant Milly.
She might have been found at an unpretentious German beer-garden far out on the North Side. Bragdon and Milly had discovered this particular retreat, which was small and secluded and usually rather empty. It seemed to Milly quite "Bohemian" to drop into the garden late in the afternoon and rouse the sleepy proprietor to fetch them cool stone mugs of foaming beer, which the artist drank and which she sipped at.
On this Monday afternoon they had installed themselves in the little arbor at the remote end of the tiny garden, where they were shielded by the dusty vines from any observation, and thus the quarter hours and the halves slipped by unheeded. The artist told her again of his aspirations to paint,—"the real thing," to "go in for the big stunts." Milly listened sympathetically. That was what he should do, of course,—have a career, a man's career,—even if it parted him from her for always. All her life she had wished to be an "inspiration" in some man's life-work. What greater thing than to inspire an Artist to his glorious fulfilment?...
Imperceptibly their words became more personal and more tender. He wanted to painthersome day, as she had lain on the beach, with her lovely bronze hair, her wide blue eyes, and the little waves curling up towards her feet.... Dusk fell, and they forgot to eat.... At the moment when Edgar Duncan was describing to Mrs. Ridge for the second time the exact location of Arivista Ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills, Milly's head was resting close to the artist's face and very real tears were in her eyes—tears of joy—as her heart beat wildly under her lover's kisses and her ears sang with his passionate words....
For the one thing that the young artist had sworn to himself should never happen toHIM,—at any rate not until he was old and successful,—the very thing that Milly had laughed at as preposterous—"me fall in love with a poor man!"—had come to pass. Both had done it.
"I shan't spoil all your future for you, shall I, dear?" she whispered, her mouth close to his. He gave her the only proper answer....
"It shan't make any difference," she said later, in a calmer moment. "You shall have your life, dear, and become a great painter."
"Of course!" Youth replied robustly. "And I'll do a great picture of you!"
How wonderful! How wonderful it all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificingTHIS—"the real, right thing"—for any bribe on earth?...
As they neared the little house, Milly perceived the light in the front room and with an intuition of something unpleasant to follow dismissed her lover peremptorily, with a last daring kiss beneath the street-light, and tripped into the house.
It all came over her as soon as the tall figure rose from the uncomfortable corner sofa: she knew what she had done and she was filled with real concern for the Other One.
"Edgar!" she cried. "Have you been waiting long?"
"Some time," Mrs. Ridge observed with reproof.
"Since four forty-five," Duncan admitted, and added with a touch of sentiment. "I came fifteen minutes before the time."
Milly cast a fleeting glance backward over what had happened to her since four forty-five!
"But it doesn't matter now," he said with intention, "all the waiting!"
Mrs. Ridge discreetly withdrew at this point.
"I'm so glad to see you," Milly began lamely. "Do sit down."
"I've been sitting a long time," Edgar Duncan remarked, patiently reseating himself on the stiff sofa.
"I'm so sorry!"
"Did you forget?"
"Yes, I forgot all about it," Milly admitted bluntly. "You see so much has happened since—"
"Then you didn't get my letters?" he pressed on eagerly, ignoring Milly's last words.
"Oh, yes, I got all your letters," she said hastily, remembering that she had not found time or heart to open the last bulky three, which lay upstairs on her dressing-table. "Beautiful letters they were," she added sentimentally and irrelevantly, thinking, "What letters Jack will write!"
It is useless to follow this painful scene in further detail. Timid as Edgar Duncan was by nature he was man enough to strike for what he wanted when he had his chance,—as he had struck manfully in those bulky letters. And he repeated their message now in simple words.
"Milly, will you go back with me?... I've waited for you all my life."
Touched by the pathos of this genuine feeling, Milly's eyes filled with tears and she stammered,—
"Oh, I can't—I really can't!"
"Why not?"
(She would have been quite willing to make the journey with him, if she might have flown straightway back to the arms of her artist lover!)
"You see—it's different—I can't—" Milly could not bring herself to deal the blow. It seemed too absurd to state baldly that in twelve days a man had come into her life, whom she had never set eyes on thirteen days before, but who nevertheless had made it impossible for her to do what before that time she had looked forward to with serene content. Such things happened in books, but were ridiculous to say!
"You care for some one else?"
Milly nodded, and her eyes dropped tears fast. It all seemed very sad, almost tragic. She was sorry for herself as well as for him....
If he felt it inexplicable that he had not been allowed to suspect this deep attachment before, he was too much of a man to mention it. He took his blow and did not argue about it.
"I'm so sorry!" Milly cried.
"It had to be," he said, hastily putting out a hand to her. "I shall love you always, Milly!" (It was the thing they said in books, but in this case it sounded forlornly true.) "I'm glad I've had the chance to love you," and he was gone.
Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman's heart seemed to her ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,—fate that Jack Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word, especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal responsibility.
So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right thing" was hers!