The two girls went out into the meadows and upon the hills almost daily. They sought wild strawberries in the sunny spots amid the hazel brush. They buried themselves in the hay in the field and climbed on the huge loads with John and rode to the barn. They drank water out of the spring lying flat on the ground; Rose showed how it was done. They went up on the hillsides under the edges of great ledges of water-washed sandstone where Rose had made her playhouse in her childhood, and she drew forth from the crevices in the rocks the queer little worn pieces of rock which she had called horses and cows and soldiers.
Rose had not been so girlish since her first vacation from school in Madison. She romped and laughed with the ever-joyous Josie, and together they grew brown and strong. But there came into the lusty splendid joy of these days hours of almost sombre silence and dreaming. It all ended in nothing, this attempt at amusement.
Here in the riant and overflowing opulence of July, time without love's companionship was time wasted. Of what avail these soft winds, the song of birds, the gleam and lift and shimmer of leaves, if love were not there to share it?
Josie frankly confessed the name of the one she wished to share it with, but Rose looked into the sky and remained silent. Her soul was still seeking, restless, avid, yet evermore discerning, evermore difficult to satisfy.
They fell into long talks on marriage, and Rose confided to her some of her deepest thoughts, though she felt each time that this little twittering sparrow was hardly capable of understanding her.
"I want to know the men who think the great thoughts of the world," she said once as they lay under the beeches on the hillside, far above the haying field. "I don't want to marry—I only want to know men who can lift me up by their great plans. I want to forget myself in work of some kind—I don't know what kind—any kind that will make me big and grand in my life. I can't stand these little petty things here in this valley; these women drive me crazy with their talk of butter and eggs and made-over bonnets."
"I think they're funny," said Josie. "They talk so loud and they get so interested in such queer things."
Rose fell silent again. She knew Josie was of this type, only her affairs happened to be of a different sort, not larger, only different, pettinesses of dress and teas.
"O, for a nice man!" sighed Josie. "Why didn't you tell me there weren't any nice men up here?"
Meanwhile the lack of men was not apparent. Hardly a day but some young fellow from Tyre or the Siding made bold to hitch his horses to the fence before Dutcher's place. Rose was annoyed and gave most of them scant courtesy. Josie, however, always saw them and managed to have great amusement out of their embarrassment.
Like summer girls in general she thought any man better than no man at all. Rose, however, could not endure a love-glance from any of them. She found her household duties pressing when they called, and Josie entertained them, and afterward entertained her by mimicking their looks and tones. It was very funny to see Josie screw her little face into shapes to represent her suitors' bashful grins and side-glances.
They were not always bashful, it must be said. Sometimes they were distressingly bold, and they came to the point of offensive warfare with a readiness and assurance which scared Josie. She had never seen anything like it.
Rose found Josie entertaining in any mood.
But the day came at last when Josie must say good-bye, and then Rose's essential loneliness swept back upon her in a bitter flood. That night she walked her room in her naked feet, with her handkerchief stifling her sobs, so that John might not hear. She fought it out there (she supposed) and ended at last by determining to sacrifice herself to her father.
He could not be deserted, he needed her so, now that he was growing old and a little weaker. She must put away her vague, ambitious dreams of success, and apply herself to making him happy.
And yet to what end was all her study, she thought, during these later years? Could it be applied to doing him good? Her indifferent talent as a musician seemed the only talent which gave him joy. He cared nothing—knew nothing, of the things she loved and thought about!
Was her life, like his, to come down to the raising of cattle and the breeding of sheep? Was not his office served in educating her? Should not the old be sacrificed to the young?
All these devilish questions came into her mind like flashes of lurid light, but they all paled and faded before this one unchangeable radiance; he was her father, tender, loving, simple, laborious and old.
She fell asleep after hours of writhing agony, worn out, yet triumphant—she imagined.
But she was not. Day followed day, each one seemingly more hopeless than the other. This consideration beat like a knell into her brain, love could never come to her. Marriage with these young men was no longer possible. Love was out there, somewhere in the great world, in the city among artists and music-lovers, and men of great thought and great deeds. Her powerful physical, mental and emotional womanhood rebelled at this thought of lovelessness; like the prisoner of old bound in a sunless cavern where the drip-drop of icy water fell upon his brain, she writhed and seemed like to go mad.
This was the age of cities. The world's thought went on in the great cities. The life in these valleys was mere stagnant water, the great stream of life swept by far out and down there, where men and women met in millions. To live here was to be a cow, a tad-pole! Grass grew here, yes—but she could not live on grass. The birds sang here, yes—but there were Patti, and Duse, and Bernhardt out there in the world.
Here you could arise at five o'clock to cook breakfast and wash dishes, and get dinner, and sweep and mend, and get supper, and so on, till you rotted, like a post stuck in the mud. Your soul would rot. She felt change going on all the time. She was slipping back into shiftlessness, into minute untidiness—into actual slovenliness. There was no stimulus in these surroundings, she told herself; everything was against her higher self.
Once she had read a sentence from Lowell which flamed upon her mind now each time she mused upon her lot.
"The wilderness is all right for a vacation, but all wrong for a life-time."
She considered the coulé a wilderness. It had nothing for her but nature, and nature palls upon a girl of twenty, with red blood in her veins, and splendid dreams in her heart.
Out there was her ideal. "Out there is the man who is to fill out my life," she uttered to herself softly, so that only her inner ear heard.
So she argued, fought, wept, surrendered, and went to battle again. While all about her, John and his sister, moved tranquilly to their daily duties, calm as the cattle in the meadows. To the discerning eye it was a wonderful sight to see that dark, gloomy, restless girl seated opposite those serene, almost stolid faces, to whom "the world" was a breeze blowing in the tree-tops. She had the bearing of a rebellious royal captive—a duchess in exile. Mrs. Diehl and the hired man were the peasants who waited upon her, but ate with her—and her father was the secure free-holder, to whom kings were obscure, world-distant diseases.
Then the equinoctial storms came on, and days of dull, cold, unremitting rain confined her to the house. The birds fell silent, the landscape, blurred with gray mist, looked grim and threatening, and there was prophecy of winter in the air. The season seemed to have rushed into darkness, cold and decay, in one enormous bound. The hills no longer lifted buoyant crests to heaven; they grew cheerless and dank as prison walls.
One night Rose spoke. She had always been chary of caresses; even when a child she sat erect upon her father's knee, with a sober little face, and when she grew sleepy she seldom put hands to his neck, but merely laid her head on his breast and went to sleep. John understood her in all this, for was he not of the same feeling? Love that babbled spent itself, his had no expression.
His heart was big with pride and affection when his splendid girl came over and put her arms about his neck, and put her forehead down on his shoulder.
"O pappa John, you're so good to me—I'm ashamed—I don't deserve this new house!"
"O yes y' do, daughter." His voice when he said "daughter" always made her cry, it was deep and tender like the music of water. It stood for him in the place of "dear" and "darling," and he very, very seldom spoke it. All this made it harder for her to go on.
"No, I don't, father—O, father, I can't stay here—I can't bear to stay here now!"
"Why not, Rosie?"
"O because it's so lonesome for me. There is nobody for me to talk to" (she had to use phrases he could understand) "and I want to go on with my studies."
John considered a moment.
"But, Rosie, seems to me you've got enough; you're graduated."
Rose saw the hopelessness of making him understand that, so she went back.
"It's so lonesome for me here, pappa John!"
He considered again. "I 'spose it is. Well, you can go to the Siding every day if you want to. Hitch up old Doll every day—"
"I don't care for the Siding; it's just as lonesome there for me. I want to go to Chicago."
John grew rigid. "Chicago! What you want to do there?"
"I want to study, pappa. I want to go on with my work. I'll come home summers just the same. I'll come home Christmas if you want me to. It won't cost much, I'll live just as cheap as I can——"
"'Tain't that, 'tain't that, Rose," he said. Then he lifted his head and looked around.
She read his thought and the tears came to her eyes in blinding rush.
"I know, pappa. It's terrible to go now, when you've built this nice home for me, but what can I do? It's so lonesome here! I thought maybe I'd get used to it, but it gets worse. I can't stay here this winter. Youmustlet me go. I'll go crazy if I stay here all winter. I must go out into the world. I want to be an artist. I want to see great people. I can't stay here, pappa John!"
The terrible earnestness of every sentence stabbed John Dutcher's heart like a poniard thrust. He put her away and rose stiffly.
"Well, well, Rosie, if you want to go——"
He did not finish, but turned tremblingly and walked out. She remained on the floor near his chair and watched him go, her soul sick with wretchedness.
Why was the world so ordered? Why must she torture that beautiful, simple soul? Why was it that all her high thoughts, her dreams, her ambitions, her longings, seemed to carry her farther away from him?
She could have beaten her head against the wall in her suffering. She rose at last and crawled slowly to her room, and abandoned herself to black, rayless hopelessness.
John Dutcher went out to the hedgerow and sat down on a stool. Around him bees were humming in the wet clover. The calves thrust their inquiring noses through the fence and called to him. The rain-clouds were breaking up, and the sun was striking under the flying canopy at the West.
It was the bitterest moment of his life, since his wife's death. His eyes were opened to his fate; he saw what he had done; he had educated his daughter out of his world. Never again would she be content in the coolly beside him. He saw how foolish he had been all these years, to suppose he could educate and keep her. For a moment he flamed with resentment and said to himself:
"I wish she had never seen a book."
Then he grew tender. He saw her again in her little blue apron with its pockets full of wheat—he saw her blowing hair, her sunny face; he heard again the wind-tossed chatter of her cunning lips. He ran swiftly over her development—how tall she grew and how splendid she was now, the handsomest girl in the coolly, and he softened. She was right. Who was there of the young farmers or even in Tyre good enough for her?
So he rose to a conception which had never come to him before, and even now it was formlessly vast; he felt the power of the outside world, and reached to a divination of the fatality of it all. It had to be, for it was a part of progress. He was old and bent and dull. She was young, gloriously young. The old must give way to the young, while she was the one to be bowed down to. She was queen and he was subject.
With these conceptions in his mind he went back and looked for her. He called her softly, but she did not hear, she was sobbing deep into her pillow. He came up the stairs and saw her lying face downward on her bed. His heart rose in his throat, because it was a terrible thing to see his imperious girl weep.
"Rosie, old pappa John surrenders. You're right and he's an old dummy."
She turned her face upon him.
"No, you're right. We won't be separated."
"But we ain't going to be." He came over and sat down on the edge of the bed.
"You'll come home summers, and maybe I'll go to Chicago winters."
Her face flashed into a smile. She flung her arms about him again.
"O will you, pappa John?"
"Course I will. Wait till you see me in a spike-tail coat and a boiled shirt. I'll astonish the city dudes."
Rose laughed a little wildly, and tightened her clasp about his neck.
"You're my dear old pappa John."
She went at once to her desk and wrote a letter to Mary Compton, an old schoolmate who had gone to Chicago and whose guidance to bed and board now seemed valuable.
That night John Dutcher did not go to sleep at once, as he usually did on entering his room. He went to his bureau—the old bureau he had bought for his wife thirty years before. In it he kept his pictures. There were several tin-types of Rose, in awkward, scared poses, and there too was the last picture of his wife which had been taken with Rose as a babe in her arms.
Dutcher sat for a long time looking at it, and the tears ran down his face unheeded, pitiful to see.
When he got up at last he moved stiffly as if he had suddenly grown ten years older, and in his sleep his sister heard him groan and talk. In the morning he said he had a touch of rheumatism, but it would most probably pass off as the sun came out.
Almost 6 o'clock, and the train due in Chicago at 6:30! The city grew more formidable to Rose as she approached it. She wondered how it would first appear on the plain. There was little sign of it yet.
As she looked out of the car window she saw men stacking grain, and plowing. It was supper time at home, and John was just rising from the table. The calves were bleating for their pails of milk; the guinea-hens were clacking, and the little turkeys crying in the grass, the bees were homing, heavy with honey, and here she sat, rushing toward that appalling and unimaginable presence—Chicago.
Somewhere just ahead it sat, this mighty hive of a million and a half of people. The thought of it made her heart beat quick, and her throat filled. She was going there; the lake was there; art was there, and music and the drama—and love! Always under each emotion, always behind every success, was the understanding that love was to be the woman's reward and recompense. It was not articulate nor feverish, this thought; it was a deep, pure emotion, streaming always toward the unknown.
She dreamed as the train rumbled on. She would succeed, shemustsucceed. She gripped the seat-rail with her broad, strong hands, and braced herself like one entering a flood.
It was this wonderful thing again, a fresh, young and powerful soul rushing to a great city, a shining atom of steel obeying the magnet, a clear rivulet from the hills hurrying to the sea. On every train at that same hour, from every direction, others, like her, were entering on the same search to the same end.
"See that cloud?" some one said; "that's Chicago."
Rose looked—far to the south-east a gigantic smoke-cloud soared above the low horizon line, in shape like an eagle, whose hovering wings extended from south to east, trailing mysterious shadows upon the earth. The sun lighted its mighty crest with crimson light, and its gloom and glow became each moment more sharply contrasted. Towards this portentous presence the train rushed, uttering an occasional shrill neigh, like a stallion's defiance.
The brazen bell upon the engine began to clang and clang; small towns of scattered wooden houses came into view and were left behind. Huge, misshapen buildings appeared in flat spaces, amid hundreds of cars. Webs of railway tracks spread out dangerously in acres of marvelous intricacy, amid which men moved, sooty, grimy, sullen and sickly.
Terrors thickened. Smells assaulted her sensitive nostrils, incomprehensible and horrible odors. Everywhere men delved in dirt and murk, and all unloveliness. Streets began to stretch away on either side, interminable, squalid, filled with scowling, squaw-like women and elfish children. The darkness grew, making the tangle and tumult a deadly struggle.
Was this the city of her dreams? This the magnificent, the home of education and art.
The engine's bell seemed to call back "Good cheer! Good cheer!" The buildings grew mightier but not less gloomy; the freight cars grew fewer, and the coaches more numerous. It was an illimitable jungle filled with unrecognizable forms, over which night was falling.
The man with a hoop of clinking checks came through. He was a handsome, clean and manly fellow, and his calm, kindly voice helped Rose to choke down her dread.
"Baggage checked!—Baggage—Baggage checked to any part of the city—Baggage!"
In him she saw the native denizen to whom all these horrors were commonplace sensations, and it helped her. It couldn't be so bad as it looked to her.
"Chicago,She-caw-go!" called the brakeman, and her heart for a moment stood still, and a smothering sensation came upon her. She was at the gate of the city, and life with all its terrors and triumphs seemed just before her.
At that moment the most beautiful thing in the world was the smooth pasture by the spring, where the sheep were feeding in the fading light, and if she could, she would have turned back, but she was afloat, and retreat was impossible. She pressed on with the rest, wondering what she could do if Mary did not meet her.
Mary had hardly been more than an acquaintance at school, but now she seemed a staff to lean upon. Rose looked to her as a guide to a refuge, a hiding-place from all these terrors.
Out under the prodigious arching roof she stepped, into the tumult of clanging bells, of screeching, hissing steam and of grinding wheels. The shouts of men echoed here and there in the vaulted roof, mysteriously as in a cavern. Up the long walk, streams of people moved, each one laden, like herself, with a valise. Electric lamps sputtered overhead. She hurried on, with sensitive ears tortured by the appalling tumult, her eyes wide and apprehensive.
Her friend was not to be seen, and she moved on mechanically with the rest, keeping step beside an old man who seemed to be familiar with the station, and who kept off (without knowing it), the attentions of two human vultures, in wait for such as Rose.
They moved up the steps into the waitingroom before Rose gave up hope of her friend. So far she had gone securely, but could she find the house which was to be her home, alone?
She sat down for an instant on the long seat by the wall, and listened to the obscure thunder of the street outside. It was terrifying, confusing. Shrill screams and hoarse shouts rose above a hissing, scraping sound, the clang of gongs and the click of shoe-heels.
Every voice was pitched to an unnatural key, like that of men in a mill. The noise seemed hot, some way, like smitten iron and brass. No sound was familiar to her, nothing cool and reposeful. Her head throbbed and her tongue was dry. She had eaten little since early morning and she felt weak.
She looked far more composed and self-reliant than she was, and when her friend came swinging up to her she cried out: "O, Mary!" and her friend realized a little of her relief and gratitude.
"O, here you are! I got delayed—forgive me. I'm all out o' breath." (Here she kissed her.) "How well you look! Your complexion is magnificent. Give me your valise. We'll send for your trunk. Save twenty-five cents by having it done up town. This way—I'm glad to see you. How is Wisconsin?"
Mary Compton was tall, red-haired and strong. Her eyes were keen and laughing, and the tip of her chip hat and the swing of her skirts let everybody know how able she was to take care of herself—thank you! She had been the smart girl of a small town near Madison, and had come to the city, as her brother Dan had gone to Idaho, for the adventure of it. It was quite like hunting bears.
"Shall we take the grip?"
Rose didn't know what she meant, but she said:
"Just as you like."
"I like to take the grip; it gives a fellow a little fresh air, if there is any at all."
A train of cable-cars came nosing along like vicious boars, with snouts close to the ground. Mary helped Rose upon the open forward car, which had seats facing outward. A young man lifted his hat and made room for them.
"Hello, John!" said Mary, "aren't you a little early tonight? Rose, my friend Mr. Hardy. Mr. Hardy, Miss Dutcher."
The young fellow raised his hat again and bowed. He was a pleasant-faced young man in round straw hat and short coat. Mary paid no further attention to him.
"I've got you a room right next to mine," she said to Rose, who was holding to the seat with one hand and clinging to her hat with the other. The car stopped and started with vicious suddenness.
"You'd better hang on; the gripman is mad tonight," Mary explained. "We're most to our street, anyway."
To Rose it was all a wild ride. The noise, the leaping motion of the cars and the perilous passage of drays made it as pleasant to her as a ride behind a running team on a corduroy road.
They came at last to quieter spaces, and alighted finally at a cross street.
"I'm pretty far up," said Mary, "but I want it decently quiet where I live. I have noise enough at the office."
Rose thought it indecently noisy. Peddlers were crying out strange sing-song cries; children romped, screaming in high-pitched furious voices; laundry wagons and vegetable wagons clattered about. There was a curious pungent odor in the air.
On the steps of the houses groups of young people, like Mary and John, sat on strips of carpet, and laughed and commented on the passers-by. Mary turned upon one fool who called a smart word at her:
"Left your manners in Squashville, didn't you, little man?"
They came at last to an imposing block of houses, situated at the corner. They entered the door and climbed a gas-lit stairway, which went round and round a sort of square well. They came at last to a door which closed all passage, and Mary got out her key and opened it.
"Here we are!" she said cheerily.
The main hall was carpeted and ran past several doors, which were open. In one room a young man in his shirt sleeves was shaving before a glass. In another a girl was reading.
"Hello!" called Mary.
"Hello!" said the girl, without looking up.
"Here's my room, and this's yours." Mary pushed open a door at the end of the hall. It was a small room, papered in light buff and blue. It had an oak dresser and mirror, a couple of chairs and a mantel bed. It looked cheerful and clean, but very small. Mary put down her valise.
"I guess you'll find everything all right, water and towels. Wash up right off—dinner'll be ready soon."
Rose removed her hat and sat down, her head throbbing with the heat and noise. She heard the man at the glass whistling, and Mary was thumping about in her vigorous way.
The dash of cold water cleared her brain, but did not remove her headache. Her face was still flushed and her eyes expanded.
Mary coming back, looked at her a moment and then rushed upon her and hugged her.
"O what a beauty you are! I wish I had half what you've got."
Rose smiled faintly; she didn't care just that moment whether she looked well or ill.
"The boys will all be dead in love with you before dinner is over. Let me tell you about them." She softened her reed-like voice down and glanced at the transom furtively: "Never forget the transom when you're talking secrets," she explained.
"First, there's Mr. Taylor; he's from Colorado somewhere. He's a lawyer. He's a fine fellow too—you'll like him. Then there's Mr. Simons; he's a Jew, but he's nottoo muchof a Jew. There's Alice Fletcher; she's queer and grumpy, but she reads a lot and she can talk when she wants to, and there's you and myself."
"I don't feel like meeting them tonight," Rose said; "if I had a cup of tea I'd stay in my room."
"All right! I'll bring it."
The bell rang and then the movement of feet and the banging of doors told of the rush to dinner.
Mary came back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and some pudding.
"Have more, if you wish," she said.
"This will do nicely. You're very kind, Mary Compton. I don't deserve it."
"You deserve the world," cried the adoring girl. "If I had your figure and complexion I'd make the universe wait on me."
In spite of all this fervor of praise Rose felt herself to be a very dejected and spiritless beauty. She was irritated and angry with the nagging of strange sights and sounds and smells. The air seemed laden with disease and filth. It was all so far from the coolly with its purple hills looming against the sapphire sunset sky.
But this she came for—to see the city; to plunge into its life. She roused herself therefore with a blush of shame at her weakness. She had appeared to be a child before this girl who had always been her inferior at school.
It was a very dignified young woman who arose to greet Mrs. Wilcox, the landlady, whom Mary brought back. This dignity was not needed. Mrs. Wilcox was a sweet-voiced, smiling woman of fifty—being of those toilers who smile when they are tired enough to drop. She was flushed with fatigue and moved languidly, but her kind, patient, pathetic smile touched Rose almost to tears.
"I'm glad to have you come here," the landlady said. "We're all nice people here, aren't we, Miss Compton?" Her eyes twinkled with humorous self-analysis.
"Every one of us," corroborated Mary.
"I hope you'll rest well. If there's anything we can do for you, my dear, let me know." Such was the spirit in which the over-worked woman served her boarders. They all called her "mother." She had no children of her own, and her husband was "not at all well," yet nothing could sour her sweet kindliness, which included all the world. She was a familiar type, and Rose loved her at once.
Miss Fletcher came in and was introduced. She was a teacher in a school near by.
"What anybody should come to this town for I can't understand. I stay here because I'm obliged to. I'm just back from the country to my work."
"The country is all right for a vacation," quoted Rose.
Mary broke in, "That's what I say. I lived on a farm and I lived in Castle Rock. When I lived on the farm I wanted to get to Castle Rock. When I got to Castle Rock I wanted to get to Madison. Madison made me hone for Chicago, and when I had a chance to come, I just dropped my work at the University and put for the city, and here I am and glad of it."
"I can't understand such folly," murmured Miss Fletcher.
"You could if you'd stayed on the farm the year round, with nobody to talk to and mighty little to read. It's all right for you to go up for a couple of months and lie about in a hammock, but you take a place like Castle Rock all the year round! It's worse than the farm. Gossip! They talk every rag of news to smithereens, don't they, Rose?"
Rose nodded.
"And then the people! They're the cullin's. All the bright boys and girls go to Madison and Chicago or Dakota, and then the rest marry and intermarry, and have idiot boys and freckle-faced girls!"
They all laughed. Mary was always extreme, no matter what her subject.
Miss Fletcher sighed resignedly.
"Well, it's fate. Here this big city sits and swallows you bright people like a great dragon, and the old folks are left alone in these dull places you talk about."
Rose felt her eyes filling with tears. The figure of her lonely old father came before her. She saw him sitting beside the kitchen table, his head on his palm, and all the new house empty and dark.
Mary jumped up. "Here now, stop that talk, we must leave Rose alone and let her go to sleep."
They left her alone, but sleep was impossible. The tramp of feet, the sound of pianos, the slam of doors, the singing, laughing of the other boarders made sleep impossible. The cars jangled by, the click-clack of horses' hoofs and the swift rattle of wagons kept up long after the house was silent. Between midnight and four o'clock she got a little sleep, out of which she awoke while a booming, clattering wagon thundered by. Other wagons clattered viciously along up the alleys, and then some early riser below began to sing, and Rose wearily dressed and sat down by the window to listen.
Far to the south a low, intermittent, yet ever deepening, crescendo bass note began to sound. It was Chicago waking from the three hours' doze, which is its only sleep. It grew to a raucous, hot roar; and then to the north she heard the clear musical cry of a fruit vendor,—then another: "Black-berries! Fine fresh black-berries!"
The cars thickened, the sun grew hot and lay in squares of blinding light across her carpet. That curious pungent smell came in with the wind. Newsboys cried their morning papers. Children fought and played in the street. Distant whistles began to sound, and her first morning in Chicago came to Rose, hot, brazen, unnatural, and found her blinded, bruised, discouraged, abased, homesick.
She was still sitting by the window wondering what to do next, when Mary tapped at her door.
"May I come in?"
She looked fresh and strong, and her cheery smile made her seem beautiful to Rose.
"How did you sleep?"
Rose shook her head. Mary laughed.
"I can tell by the looks of you. Look's if you'd been pulled through a knot-hole, as they say up in Molasses Gap. Heard everything that took place, didn't you? I did too. You'll get over that. I sleep like a top now."
"What is that smell? Pah!" shuddered Rose.
Mary elevated her freckled nose. "What smell? O, you mean that rotten, piney, turpentiney smell—that's the Chicago smell. It comes from the pavin' blocks, I guess. I never inquired. I'll ask Mr. Reed, he knows everything mean about Chicago. Well, you hadn't better go to breakfast looking like that. I want you to paralyze that Boston snipe. I'll bring in your breakfast."
Rose accepted this service passively; nothing else was to be done in Mary Compton's presence. She had the energy of a steam threshing machine, and affection to correspond.
Rose wondered again what she could do next. She was here to study art and literature—there was the library! She would read. And there were lectures perhaps; what she was to do would come to her after awhile.
Mary returned a little hot of color, bringing a tray.
"That Boston clothes-pin says you're a myth or a country gawk. You must lay him out cold as a handspike. I've been bragging about you and they were all on tip-toe to see you this morning. You sail in on 'em at dinner the way you used to do at our chapter-house spreads. Weren't they great! There now, I've got to vamoose. I'm not a lady of leisure. I'm a typewriter on trial and looks won't carrymethrough. I've got to rustle and walk chalk, as they say in Molasses Gap. So good-bye. Take it easy today. If you want to walk, go over to the lake front," and she banged out of the door and faced the city in her daily encounter.
Rose ate her breakfast and felt much better. Her trunk came and she got out her dresses and hung them up and made other preparations for staying, although it seemed impossible she should ever sleep another night in this terrible city.
She got out her portfolio and wrote a letter home and one also to Dr. Thatcher. Then she looked over the little bunch of letters of introduction she had. One was to Doctor Isabel Herrick, one to Professor H. Bevan Fowler at Evanston, and one was to Orrin Thatcher; that was the Doctor's cousin, a young lawyer in the Woman's building, whatever that was. With these and ten dollars a week she faced Chicago. The contest was unequal.
She felt this more keenly as she stood on the lake front a little later on in the day. She went there as the New Hampshire girl goes to the sea. This body of water, majestic in its immense shoreless spread, is wonderful to the young girl from Iowa or interior Wisconsin.
A fresh, keen east wind had arisen, pure and exhilarating, and the smooth expanse of glittering green-and-blue water stretched out under a vivid blue sky, in which great clouds floated like snow mountains, trailing great shadows like robes of state upon the lake.
The curving lake-wall was wet and glistening with the up-flung spray. The slender elms were fronded at the top like palms, and the vivid green grass set opposite the pink-gray wall, and the brilliant many-colored lake in magnificent, harmonious contrast. The girl felt her soul grow larger as she faced this scene, so strange, so oriental, and she looked and looked, until it became a part of her.
It was all so remote and so splendid. There the great violet-shadowed sails of ships stood, as she had seen them in pictures of the sea. There a gleaming steamer ran, trailing great banners of smoke. There glittered the white bodies and slant wings of gulls, dipping, upshooting and whirling. To her eyes this was infinity, and the purple mist in which the ships drave was ultimate mystery.
At last she turned to look behind her. There on the left stood rows of immense houses, barred and grated like jails or fortresses; palaces where lived the mighty ones of Chicago commerce. Before their doors carriages stood, with attendants in livery, such as she had read about and had never seen. Up and down the curving ribbon of lavender sand other carriages were driving, with jingle of silver chains and soft roll of wheels. The horses flung foam from their bits; they were magnificent horses (she knew horses as well as any coachman), and their brass-trimmed harnesses glittered in the sun like burnished gold.
There was no noise here beyond the tread of these stately horses, the babble of a few soft-voiced children on the grass and the crackling, infrequent splash of the leaping breakers. It was a wide contrast to the Chicago of her first glimpses the day before. That side of the city terrified her, this oppressed and awed her. The social splendor of this life appealed to her perception as it would not to any man. Her quick imagination peopled these mansions with beautiful women and lordly men, and she felt herself rightful claimant of a place among them.
She turned and faced them with set teeth and a singular look in her half-closed eyes, and in her heart she said: "Before I die I'll go where I please in this city. I'll be counted as good as any of you—poor as I am."
To the onlooker—to Mrs. Oliver Frost, she was a girl in a picturesque attitude; to the coachmen on the carriages she was a possible nurse-girl; to the policeman she was a speck on the lake-front lawn.
Something of this mood was with her still when she went in to dinner with Mary. Mary ushered the way, beaming with joy. Rose never looked more beautiful nor more imperious. The Boston man was properly astonished; the Jew salesman smiled till his chubby face seemed not able to contain his gladness. Mr. Taylor, a gaunt young man, alone seemed unmoved; the morose teacher gave a sigh of sad envy.
Rose said little during the meal. She cordially hated Mr. Reed at once. His Boston accent annoyed her, and his brutal sarcasm upon the West aroused a new anger in her. She had never listened to such talk before. It didn't seem possible anybody could disparage the West.
"Civilization stops," he said during the meal, "after you leave the Hudson riveh."
"Some folks' manners stop after they leave the Hudson river, if they ever had any," Mary replied, and the Jew cackled joyously.
He defended Chicago. "It is the greatest place to do business in the world. I'm a New Yorker by birth, but Chicago suits me. I like its hustle."
"That's the point. It thinks of nothing but hustle," said the Boston man. "I was speaking of higher things. It lacks the art atmosphere of Boston and Cambridge."
"It has all the atmosphere I need," said the Jew.
To Rose all this was new. It had not occurred to her to differentiate the cities sharply from one another. Chicago, to her, was a great city, a splendid example of enterprise, and it was to be her city, the pride of the West. To the country mind a city is a great city when it acquires a million people. Like the young Jew, Rose had not missed any atmosphere. The tall young man voiced her opinion when he said:
"This finicky criticism don't count. You might just as well talk about the lack of gondolas and old palaces in Boston. Conditions here are unexampled. It's a new town and I think a splendid place to live. Of course you can find fault anywhere."
Rose looked at him with interest. Such precision and unhesitancy of speech she had not heard since leaving college.
Mary glowed with gratified admiration. The Jew was delighted, although he did not quite follow the implied rebuke. Miss Fletcher merely said:
"If Mr. Reed don't like Chicago he is privileged to go back to Boston. I don't think Chicago would experience any shock if he did."
Mr. Reed wilted a little, but he was not crushed.
"The trouble with you people is you don't know anything about any other city. You come in here from Oshkosh and Kalamazoo, and Okookono—"
"Hit him on the back!" called Mary, "he's choking."
"O-con-o-mo-woc," calmly interpreted Miss Fletcher.
Reed recovered—"And a lot more outlandish places—"
"How about Squantum and Skowhegan and Passamaquoddy," laughed Mary.
Reed collapsed—"O well, those are old, familiar—"
The others shouted with laughter.
"O yes! Everything old and New England goes. You are too provincial, old boy. You want to broaden out. I've seen a lot of fellows like you come here, snapping and snarling at Chicago, and end up by being wild promoters." The Jew was at the bat, and the table applauded every hit.
Rose did not share in the talk—she had so little knowledge of cities—but it served to make Mr. Taylor a strong figure in her eyes. He was tall and big-boned and unsmiling. He studied her with absent-minded interest, and she felt no irritation or embarrassment, for his eyes were clean and thoughtful. He looked at her as if she called up memories of some one he had loved in another world, and she somehow grew a little sad under his gaze.
As they sat in her room after dinner, Mary asked:
"How do you like our crowd?"
"I can't tell yet. I don't like that Boston man. I never could bear the sound of 'ah'."
"He's a chump; but they ain't all like that. I have met two or three decent Boston fellows down in the office. Don't think they are all muffs."
"Of course not."
"Now take my 'boss' for example. He's fine. He's big enough so you don't mind his airs, but what do you think of Mr. Taylor?"
Rose looked thoughtful, and Mary hastened to say.
"Ain't he fine?" She hoped to forestall criticism.
"Yes, I think he's fine. He makes me think of Professor Jenks."
"A-hugh! so he does me. Say Rose, I'm going to tell you something, don't you ever tell, will you?"
"Why no—of course not."
"Hope to die?"
"Hope to die, hands crossed."
"Well!"
"Well?"
"I came here to board becausehewas here."
"Why, Mary Compton!"
"Ain't it awful? Of course, no one knows it but you. I'd just die if he knew it. I used to be afraid that he'd find out, but he can't, because you see, he never saw me till I came here, and he thinks it is just accident. He's so simple about such things anyway, and he's always dreaming of something away off. O he's wonderful! He's been all over the mountains. He adores John Muir—you know that man Professor Ellis told us about? Well, he's lived just that way weeks and weeks in the wildest mountains, and it's just glorious to hear him tell about it."
Rose was astonished at Mary, generally so self-contained. She talked as if she had volumes to tell and but short minutes to tell them in. Her cheeks glowed and her eyes grew deep and dark.
"He's here reading law, but he don't need to work. He's got a share in a big mine out there somewhere, which he discovered himself. He just thought he'd try civilization awhile, he said, and so he came to Chicago. He kind o' pokes around the law school (it's in our building—that's where I saw him first, in the elevator), just as an excuse. He hates the law; he told me so. He comes in to see me sometimes. Of course I leave the door open." She smiled. "But it don't make any difference to him. He's just the same here as he is anywhere—I mean he knows how to treat a woman. The school-ma'am said she thought it was terrible to have a man come into your room—the same room you sleep in—but I told her it depended on the man. That settled her, for Owen—I mean Mr. Taylor—don't like her."
Rose listened in silence to this torrent of words from Mary. Her mind was naturally fictive, and she divined the immense world suggested by the girl's incoherent sentences. The mysterious had come to her friend—the "one man of all the world," apparently—a striking personality, quite suited to Mary, with her practical ways and love of fun. It confirmed her in her conviction that a girl must adventure into the city to win a place and a husband.
She rose and put her arms about her friend's neck:
"I'm so glad, Mary."
"O goodness! don't congratulate me. He's never said a word—and maybe he won't. I can't understand him—anyway it's great fun."
A slow step crossed the hall, and a rap at the door nearly took away Mary's breath; for a moment she could not reply, then Mr. Taylor's voice was heard.
"I beg your pardon." He was turning away when Mary sprang up and opened the door.
"O Mr. Taylor, is it you?"
"Yes—I didn't know but you and your friend would like to go out somewhere?"
"Would you, Rose?"
"Not tonight, thank you. But you go. Don't keep in on my account."
Mary struggled a moment, then she smiled with tender archness.
"Very well, thank you, Mr. Taylor. I'll be ready soon." After he had gone she said:
"Perhaps he'll propose!"
Rose glowed sympathetically. "I hope he will."
The next day Rose went down town alone. The wind had veered to the south, the dust blew, and the whole terrifying panorama of life in the streets seemed some way blurred together, and forms of men and animals were like figures in tapestry. The grind and clang and clatter and hiss and howl of the traffic was all about her.
She came upon the river just as the bridge was being opened. Down toward the lake, which had to her all the wonder and expanse of the sea, boats lay thickly, steamers from deep water, long, narrow and black. Excursion boats, gleaming white, and trimmed with shining brass, lay beside the wharves, and low-lying tugs, sturdy, rowdyish little things, passed by, floating like ducks and pulling like bull-dogs, guiding great two-masted sailing boats and long, low, grimy steamers, with high decks at the ends. The river ran below, gray-green, covered with floating refuse. Mountainous buildings stood on either side of the waterway.
The draw, as it began to move, made a noise precisely like an old fashioned threshing machine—a rising howl, which went to her heart like a familiar voice. Her eyes for a moment released hold upon the scene before her, and took a slant far over the town to the coulé farm, and the days when the threshing machine howled and rattled in the yard came back, and she was rushing to get dinner ready for the crew.
When the bridge returned to its place she walked slowly across, studying each vista. To the west, other bridges, swarming with people, arched the stream—on each side was equal mystery. These wonderful great boats and their grim brave sailors she had read about, but had never seen. They came from far up the great tumultuous lake, and they were going to anchor somewhere in that wild tangle of masts and chimneys and towering big buildings to the west. They looked as if they might go to the ends of the earth. At the stern of an outgoing boat four sailors were pulling at a rope, the leader singing a wild, thrilling song in time to the action.
So it was—the wonderful and the terrifying appealed to her mind first. In all the city she saw the huge and the fierce. She perceived only contrasts. She saw the ragged newsboy and the towering policeman. She saw the rag-pickers, the street vermin, with a shudder of pity and horror, and she saw also the gorgeous show windows of the great stores. She saw the beautiful new gowns and hats, and she saw also the curious dress of swart Italian girls scavenging with baskets on their arms. Their faces were old and grimy, their voices sounded like the chattered colloquies of monkeys in the circus.
It all seemed a battlefield. There was no hint of repose or home in it all. People were just staying here like herself, trying to get work, trying to make a living, trying to make a name. They had left their homes as she had, and though she conceived of them as having a foot-hold she could not imagine them having reached security. The home-life of the city had not revealed itself to her.
She made her way about the first few blocks below Water street, looking for Dr. Herrick's address. It was ten o'clock, and the streets were in a frenzy of exchange. The sidewalks were brooks, the streets rivers of life which curled into doors and swirled around mountainous buildings.
It was almost pathetic to see how helpless she seemed in the midst of these alien sounds. It took away from her the calm, almost scornful, self-reliance which characterized her in familiar surroundings. Her senses were as acute as a hare's and sluiced in upon her a bewildering flood of sights and sounds. She did not appear childish, but she seemed slow and stupid, which of course she was not. She thought and thought till she grew sick with thought. She struggled to digest all that came to her, but it was like trampling sand; she apparently gained nothing by her toil.
The streets led away into thunderous tunnels, beyond which some other strange hell of sound and stir imaginatively lay. The brutal voices of drivers of cabs and drays assaulted her. The clang of gongs drew her attention, now here, now there, and her anxiety to understand each sound and to appear calm added to her confusion.
She heard crashes and yells that were of murder and sudden death. It was the crash of a falling bundle of sheet iron, but she knew not that. She looked around thinking to see some savage battle scene.
She saw women with painted faces and bleached hair whom she took to be those mysterious and appalling women who sell themselves to men. They were in fact simple-minded shop girls or vulgar little housewives with sad lack of taste.
Every street she crossed, she studied, looking both up and down it, in the effort to see some end of its mystery. They all vanished in lurid, desolate distance, save toward the lake. Out there she knew, the water lay serene and blue.
This walk was to her like entrance into war. It thrilled and engaged her at every turn. She was in the center of human life. To win here was to win all she cared to have.
It was a relief to pass into the rotunda of the splendid building in which Dr. Herrick's office was. Outside the war sounded, and around her men hastened. She entered the elevator as one in a dream. The man hustled her through the door without ceremony and clanged the door as if it were a prison gate. They soared to the ninth floor like a balloon suddenly liberated, and the attendant fairly pushed her out.
"Here's your floor—Herrick, to the left."
Rose was humiliated and indignant, but submitted. The hallway along which she moved was marble and specklessly clean. On each side doors of glass with letters in black told of the occupations of the tenants.
She came at length to the half-open door of Dr. Herrick's office and timidly entered. A young girl came forward courteously.
"Would you like to see the Doctor?" she asked in a soft voice.
"Yes, please. I have a letter to her from Dr. Thatcher of Madison."
"O! well, I will take it right in. Be seated, please."
This seemed good treatment, and the soft voice of the girl was very grateful after the hoarse war-cries of the street. Rose looked around the little room with growing composure and delight. It was such a dainty little waiting room, and argued something attractive in Dr. Herrick.
"Come right in," the girl said on returning. "The Doctor is attending to her mail, but she will see you for a few moments."
Rose entered the second and larger room, and faced a small graceful woman, of keen, alert gaze. She appeared to be about thirty-five years of age. She shook hands briskly, but not warmly.
Her hand was small and firm and her tone quick and decisive. "How-d'-you-do! Sit down! I had a note from Dr. Thatcher the other day saying I might expect you."
Rose took a chair while the Doctor studied her, sitting meanwhile with small graceful head leaning on one palm, her elbow on the corner of her desk. No woman's eyes ever searched Rose like those of this little woman, and she rebelled against it inwardly, as Dr. Herrick curtly asked:
"Well, now, what can I do for you? Dr. Thatcher thought I could do something for you."
Rose was too dazed to reply. This small, resolute, brusque woman was a world's wonder to her. She looked down and stammered.
"I don't know—I—thought maybe you could help me to find out what I could do."
The Doctor studied her for an instant longer. She saw a large, apparently inexperienced girl, a little sullen and a little embarrassed—probably stupid.
"Don't you know what you want to do?"
"No—that is, I want to write," confessed Rose.
"Write! My dear girl, every addlepate wants to write. Have you friends in the city?"
"One; a classmate."
"Man?"
"No, a girl."
"Why did you leave home?"
Rose began to grow angry. "Because I couldn't live the life of a cow or a cabbage. I wanted to see the city."
The Doctor arose. "Come here a moment." Rose obeyed and stood beside her at the window, and they looked out across a stretch of roofs, heaped and humped into mountainous masses, blurred and blent and made appalling by smoke and plumes of steam. A scene as desolate as a burnt-out volcano—a jumble of hot bricks, jagged eave-spouts, gas-vomiting chimneys, spiked railings, glass skylights and lofty spires, a hideous and horrible stretch of stone and mortar, cracked and seamed into streets. It had no limits and it palpitated under the hot September sun, boundless and savage. At the bottom of the crevasses men and women speckled the pavement like minute larvæ.
"Isthatwhat you came here to see?" asked the Doctor.
Rose drew a deep breath and faced her.
"Yes, and I'm not afraid of it. It's mighty! It is grander than I expected it to be—grand and terrible, but it's where things are done."
Isabel Herrick studied her a little closer.
"You'd leave your country home for this?"
Rose turned upon her and towered above her. Her eyes flashed and her abundant eye-brows drew down in a dark scowl.
"Would you be content to spend your life, day and night, summer and winter, in Dutcher's Coolly?"
"Pardon me," said Dr. Herrick cuttingly, "the problem is not the same. I have not the same——I——the question——"
"Yes,youwho are born in the city and who come up to see us on the farms for a couple of weeks in June—youtake it on yourselves to advise us to stay there!Youwho succeed are always ready to discourage us when we come to tryourfortunes. I can succeed just as well as you, and I'll make you bow your head to me before five years are gone."
Rose was magnificent, masterful. She was flaming hot with wrath. This little woman had gone too far.
Dr. Herrick turned abruptly.
"I guess I've made a mistake; sit down again," she said, in softer tones.
Rose was not yet done. She kept her lofty pose.
"Yes, you certainly have. I am not afraid of this city; I can take care of myself. I wouldn't be under obligations to you now for the world. I want you to know I'm not a beggar asking a dollar from you; I'm not a school-girl, either. I know what I can do and you don't. I wouldn't have troubled you, only for Dr. Thatcher." She moved toward the door, gloriously angry, too angry to say good-day.
The Doctor's cold little face lighted up. She smiled the most radiant smile, and it made her look all at once like a girl.
"My dear—I am crushed. I am an ant at your feet. Come here now, you great splendid creature, and let me hug you this minute."
Rose kept on to the door, where she turned:
"I don't think I ought to trouble you further," she said coldly.
The Doctor advanced. "Come now, I beg your pardon. I'm knocked out. I took you for one of those romantic country girls, who come to the city—helpless as babes. Come back."
Rose came near going on. If she had, it would have lost her a good friend. She felt that and so, when the Doctor put an arm around her to lead her back to the desk, she yielded, but she was still palpitating with the heat of her wrath.
"My dear, you fairly scared me. I never was so taken by surprise in my life; tell me all about yourself; tell me how you came to come, where you are—and all about it."
Rose told her—not all, of course—she told her of her college work, of her father, of the coulé, of her parting from her father.
"O yes," the Doctor interrupted, "that's the way we go on—we new men and women. The ways of our fathers are not ours; it's tragedy either way you put it. Go on!"
At last she had the story, told with marvelous unconscious power, direct, personal, full of appeal. She looked at Rose with reflective eyes for a little space.
"Well, now we'll take time to consider. Meanwhile bring me something of yours; I'll show it to a friend of mine, an editor here, and if it pleases him we'll know what to do. Meanwhile, come and see me, and I'll introduce you to some nice people. Chicago is full of nice people if you only come at them. Come and see me tomorrow, can't you? O you great, splendid creature! I wish I had your inches." She glowed with admiration.
"Come Sunday at six and dine with me," yielding to a sudden impulse. "Come early and let me talk to you."
Rose promised and then went out into the waiting room.
"Etta, dear, this is Miss Dutcher; this is my sister. I want you to know each other." The little girl tip-toed up and took Rose's hand with a little inarticulate murmur.
There was a patient waiting, but Dr. Herrick ignored her and conducted Rose to the door.
"Good-bye, dear, I'm glad you came. You've given me a good shaking up. Remember, six, sharp!"
She looked after Rose with a wonderful glow in her heart.
"The girl is a genius—a jewel in the rough," she thought. "She must be guided. Heavens! How she towered."
When she stepped into the street Rose felt taller and stronger, and the street was less appalling. She raised her eyes to the faces of the men she met. Her eyes had begun their new search. The men streamed by in hundreds; impressive in mass, but comparatively uninteresting singly.
It was a sad comment upon her changing conceptions of life that she did not look at the poorly dressed men, the workmen. She put them aside as out of the question; not consciously, for the search at this stage was still unconscious, involuntary, like that of a bird seeking a mate, moved by a law which knows neither individuals nor time.
She saw also the splendor of the shop windows. She had a distinct love for beautiful fabrics as works of art, but she cared less for dress than one would suppose to see her pass lingeringly before great luminous cataracts of drapery. She was quietly dressed, and gracefully dressed, beyond this she had never cared to go, but she constructed wonderful homes and owners out of the glimpses of these windows, and from the passing of graceful young girls, clothed like duchesses, and painted (some of them) like women of the under world.
It all grew oppressive and disheartening to her at last, and she boarded a State street car (the only car she knew) and took her way up home. All the people in the car looked at her as if she had intruded into a private drawing room.
She was evidently from the country, for, though it was in the day of quaintness, she wore her hair plain. It was also the middle period of the curious and inexplicable little swagger which all duly-informed girls assumed, but Rose walked on her strong elastic feet with a powerful swing which was worth going miles to see. It was due to her unconscious imitation of the proud carriage of William De Lisle. She loved that forward swing of the thigh, with the flex of the side which accompanied it. It was her ideal of motion, that free action of knee, waist and neck, which she felt rather than saw in the great athlete.
She made a goodly figure to look at, and it was no especial wonder that the people in the car faced her. Her forehead was prominent and her eyes were sombre. It was impossible for the casual observer to define why she made so marked an impression upon him. It was because she was so fresh and strong, and unaffected and unconscious.
Pure men did not smile at her as they might at a pretty girl. They looked at her with wide, quiet eyes, and she knew they meant to be perfectly respectful. There was one man looking at her like that when she looked up to pay the conductor. There was a deep sorrowful look in his eyes, and his face, too, was sad.
She did not understand his mood, but was moved by it. When she looked at him again he dropped his eyes to his paper. He was a large man of thirty or more, and had a rugged, serious face. She remembered it long afterwards.
At lunch she found no one but Mr. Taylor. He loomed up at the further end of the table, his gaunt, grave face and broad shoulders towering up like a farmer's. She studied him closely, now that she knew more about him. He had a big, wide, plain face, with gentle gray eyes. His beard was trimmed round and made him look older than he was. He was a man into whose eyes women could look unafraid and unabashed. He greeted Rose with a smile.
"I'm very glad you've come. I was afraid I should eat lunch alone. With your permission I'll move down to your end of the table."
Rose was very glad to have him take a seat near, and they were friends at once. They naturally fell upon Mary as a topic. Mr. Taylor spoke of her quietly:
"Mary's a fine girl," he said. "I don't like to see her work. I don't like to see any woman do work like that. I don't claim any right to say what women shall do or not do, but I imagine they wouldn't go into shops if they were not, in a way, forced into it."
Rose defended the right of a girl to earn her own living. He hastened to explain further:
"Of course a woman should be free and independent, but is she free when pressure forces her into typewriting or working in a sweat-shop?"
Rose turned his thoughts at last by asking about the West. He expanded like flame at the thought.
"Ah! the old equatorial wind is blowing today, and my hair crackles with electricity." He smiled as he ran his hands through his hair. "On such days I long for my pony again. Sometimes, when I can't stand it any longer, I take a train to some little station and go out and lie flat down on the grass on my back, so that I can't see anything but sky; then I can almost imagine myself back again where the lone old peaks bulge against the sky. Do you know John Muir and Joaquin Miller?"
Rose shook her head. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm.
"There are two men who know the wilderness. Your Thoreau I've read, but he don't interest me the way these Rocky Mountain fellows do. Your eastern fellows don't really know a wilderness—they're sort o' back pasture explorers. John isn't a bit theatrical, he's been there. He doesn't take a train of guides to explore a glacier, he sticks a crust of bread in his belt along with a tin cup, and goes alone. I've been with John in the Sierras, and once he came over into my range."
Rose defended Emerson and Thoreau as if she were the easterner this Colorado hunter considered her. As she talked he fixed great absent-minded eyes upon her, and absorbed every line of her face, every curve of her lips—every changing wave of color.
"I don't care for the wilderness as you do. What is a bird compared to a man, anyway? I like people. I want to be where dramas are being played. Men make the world, bears don't." She ended hotly.
He slowly withdrew his gaze.
"I guess you're right." He smiled a wise smile. "If the wilderness had been everything in the world, I wouldn't be here. A woman is more than a flower. A woman would make my mountains a paradise."
"You have no right to ask a woman to go there with you—not to stay," she added quickly.
His smile passed.
"You're right again. Unless I could find a woman who loves the wilderness as I do."
"That is out of the question," she replied. "No woman loves the wilderness—as a home. All women love cities and streets and children." She had a young person's readiness to generalize, and pitilessly flung these hopeless truisms at him. He arose, apparently made sadder by them. He sighed.
"But civilization carries such terrible suffering with it."
Rose went to her room and looked at her other letters of introduction. Should she present them? What would be the use. The scene with Dr. Herrick had not been pleasant; true, it had apparently brought her a friend, but it was a rigorous experience, and she hardly felt it worth while at the moment to go through another such scene to win another such friend.
She fell to looking over her manuscripts. They were on lined paper, stitched together at the top. They were imitative, of course, and leaned toward the Elizabethan drama, and toward Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, so far as verse-form went. There were also essays which she had written at college, which inquired mournfully, who will take the place of the fallen giants, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson? She had eloquent studies of Hugo and valiant defences of Dickens. She reflected in her writing (naturally) all the conventional positions in literature. She stood upon the graves of the dead as if she feared they might be desecrated.
She was a pupil, and as a pupil she had considered literature as something necessarily afar off, in England or France, in Boston and Cambridge, though she had come to think Chicago might be a place suitable for a humble beginning, but that it might be the subject of literature had not occurred to her. She had never known a person who had written a book. Professor Ellis and the President had written scientific treatises, but, not being a fool, she knew there was a difference between getting an article into a country weekly and getting into a big daily, to say nothing of the great magazines. She wished for advice. Being out in the world now, something must be done with her writings.
These essays were good and thoughtful, they represented study and toil, but they did not represent her real self, her real emotions, any more than her reading represented her real liking. Her emotions, big, vital, contemporaneous, had no part in this formal and colorless pedantry. Of this she was still ignorant, however.
She was sorting her poems over and dreaming about them when Mary came home.
"O, you dear! I've been thinking about you all day. Did you see your woman doctor?"
"Yes."
"Did you like her?"
"Well, I don't know—yes, I think I do. I didn't at first."
"Where else did you go?"
"Nowhere. I came home to lunch."
"Eat alone?" Mary was taking off her things and was more than usually fragmentary.
"No. Mr. Taylor was there." Mary faced her.
"Now see here, Rose Dutcher, do you want to break my heart into smithereens? If you do, you go on lunching with Owen Taylor."
Rose laughed at her tone of simulated sorrow and dismay.
"He moved down to my end of the table, too."
Mary plumped into a chair and stared.
"Well, that finishes me. I'm coming home to lunch after this. If you prove aterrater, I'll have your back hair, Rose Dutcher."
"I couldn't help it. He didn't want to shout at me across the table."
Mary's voice softened.
"What did you talk about?"
"He talked about you."
"Did he? What did he say?"
"He said you were a good girl, and you are."
"Is that all?"
"What more could you ask?"
"He might 'ave praised me beauty!" Then she laughed and rushed at Rose and hugged her for some reason not expressed.
"Isn't he just grand?"
"I'm going out to dinner Sunday night!"
"Where? Woman doctor's?"
"Yes. I met her sister, too."
"O, you'll soon be getting so swell you won't notice us. Well, anyhow, you'll leave me Owen?"