"'I shall marry Russell,' she declared."
"I shall marry Russell," she declared, "in spite of you and in spite of everything. You may say that he has no money, and that you don't know his family; and Burt may forbid him the house and go prying into his private affairs; and you may say that he has no friends and no abilities, and as much more as you please. I don't care; I shall be his wife. I won't believe any of these things, and nobody shall separate us."
She rose, flushed and frowning, and walked out firmly. Fairchild opened the opposite door and moved off quietly to his own place. Brainard brushed aside a pile of abstracts and mortgages that encumbered his desk, found an opening big enough for his elbow, and leaned over his blotting-pad with an air of utter dejection and defeat.
On the twelfth floor of the Clifton—at the far end of a long corridor—is the office of Eugene H. McDowell, real estate.
Ogden, at the beginning of one of his brief noonings, took the elevator up to the quarters of his coming brother-in-law.
He found McDowell stretching himself violently in his swivel chair, which was tilted as far back as its mechanism would permit; his head was thrown back, too, as far as anatomical considerations would allow. His eyes would have seen the ceiling if they had not been so tight shut; his Adam's apple appeared prominently between the turned-down points of his collar. His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.
"Waugh—oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"
He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to another several years his junior—of a man in business for himself to a man in business for some one else—of a man who was presently to undertake the protection and support of the other's sister.
"Sit down." He motioned Ogden to a chair which stood close to the window—a window that looked out on the court and that commanded the multifarious panorama of daily business going on behind the ranks and rows of great glass sheets which formed the other three sides of the enclosure—the ends of over-crowded desks, the digital dumb-show of stenographers, the careful handling by shirt-sleeved clerks of the damp yellow sheets in copying-books, the shaking fingers and nodding heads that accompanied the persuasion and expostulation of personal interviews.
McDowell presented a physiognomy that seemed to have been stripped of all superfluities. He contrived to avoid the effect of absolute leanness, yet he was without a spare ounce of flesh. His cheek-bones did not obtrude themselves, nor were his finger-joints unduly prominent; yet his trousers seemed more satisfactory as trousers than his legs as legs, and his feet were in long, narrow, thin-soled shoes, through whose flexible leather one almost divined the articulations of his toes. His hair had shrunk back from his forehead and temples, but his moustache sprang out as boldly and decidedly as if constructed of steel wires. His nose was sharp; his eyes were like two gimlets. The effect of his presence was nervous, excitant, dry to aridity. He had a flattish chest and bony shoulders; his was an earthly tabernacle that gave its tailor considerable cause for study.
"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him. "We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that cousin of theirs live with them?"
"Cousin? Isn't she their sister—sister-in-law?"
"I mean the other one; Miss—Bradley, isn't it?"
"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then. But her people live in Hinsdale."
"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down—like around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."
He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them into the waste-basket.
"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of herself yet.
"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on. "What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems, resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street—she lugged in mediaeval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her Boston literary business?"
He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one of his ears.
"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy. She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing—that's the amount of it."
"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how about that other affair—have you made any report to father?"
"Yes. That's as good as settled. The deeds are all made out; they've only got to be signed." He reached into one of his pigeon-holes and brought out a bulk of bluish paper whose fractious folds were held in some shape by a wide rubber strap. "Here's one of the abstracts—just come in. The other is a good deal longer and the copy isn't finished. I suppose they'll put that one on a board."
He snapped the band once or twice and put the abstract back again.
"I'm glad," he said, "that your father has finally decided to pull up altogether and to transfer everything to the West. That old block of his was wanting repairs all the time; I don't believe it paid him four per cent. It takes more than soldiers' monuments and musical festivals to make a town move."
George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so left-behind.
"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the North west and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking—"
"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"
"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's New York?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the wash-stand stood. "It ain't a city at all; it's like London—it's a province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny, you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have a bite myself."
"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were over at Brainard's house last night—he's a fine bird. And his son is like him. He's got another, hasn't he—a younger one? In the bank, isn't he? Used to be. Well, he might be without your knowing it. Queer genius—his father don't know what to do with him. He's kind of in the background, as it were. How did you happen to go over there?"
"Papers to sign. Mr. Brainard was at home, sick. It was something that they could hardly give to any of the boys to manage. I met his other daughter."
"Other? Didn't know he had any. Got two, has he? And two sons. Well, he's a great old father, from all I hear, and I shouldn't—D—ow—n!"
But the elevator was too far past them to return.
"Here's another coming," said George, to whom the indicator showed that a cab had left the top story and was half way down to their level.
Ogden had now gone through a novitiate of five or six weeks. After his first wrench—from the East to the West—his second one—from the West Side to the North—seemed an unimportant matter. He had learned his new neighborhood, had made a few acquaintances there, had become familiar with his work at the bank; and the early coming of his own family, who had elected to swell the great westward movement by the contribution of themselves and all their worldly goods, helped him to the feeling of being tolerably well at home. From the vantage-ground of a secure present and a promising future he became an interested observer of the life that swept and swirled about him. He found that there might be an inner quiet under all this vast and apparently unregulated din: he recalled how, in a cotton factory or a copper foundry, the hands talked among themselves in tones lower than the average, rather than higher. The rumble of drays and the clang of street-car gongs became less disconcerting; the town's swarming hordes presently appeared less slovenly in their dress and less offensive in their manners than his startled sensibilities had found them at first; even their varied physiognomies began to take on a cast less comprehensively cosmopolitan. His walks through the streets and his journeyings in the public conveyances showed him a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience; yet it soon came to seem possible that all these different elements might be scheduled, classified, brought into a sort ofcatalogue raisonnéwhich should give every feature its proper place—skulls, foreheads, gaits, odors, facial angles; ears, with their different shapes and sets; eyes, with their varying shapes and colors; hair, with its divergent shades and textures; noses, with their multiplied turns and outlines; dialects, brogues, patois, accents in all their palatal and labial varieties and according to all the differentiations in pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis.
He disposed as readily of the Germans, Irish, and Swedes as of the negroes and the Chinese. But how to tell the Poles from the Bohemians? How to distinguish the Sicilians from the Greeks? How to catalogue the various grades of Jews? How to tabulate the Medes, and the Elamites, and the Cappadocians, and the dwellers from Mesopotamia?
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise—the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.
The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality—no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items.
In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. It had pleased him, therefore, to find that Brainard's house was in the neighborhood of Union Park and in the immediate vicinity of his own first lodgings: and when he went over there with his documents in his pocket he appreciated the privilege of ringing the bell of a door behind which were one or two faces that he might recognize.
The Brainards lived on a corner, and the house was so set as to allow a narrow strip of yard along the side street. It was built in the yellow limestone which used to come from quarries at Joliet, and the architect had shown his preference for the exaggerated keystones that had so great a vogue in the late sixties. The house had a basement, and above the elaborate wooden cornice there was a mansard with several windows that were set in a frame-work of clumsy and pretentious carpentry. Behind the house was a brick stable; it had been built of cheap material and covered with a cheaper red wash. The dampness of the lower walls had caused this wash to discolor and then to fall off altogether. Around the premises there ran an old-fashioned iron fence; it stood on a stone coping that was covered with perpendicular streaks of yellow rust. In the yard a meandering asphalt walk led past a few lilacs and syringas, which were looked down upon by a painful side porch that nobody ever used. The walk in front of the house was of stone; that at the side was of plank and showed three long lines of nail-heads.
The interior, so far as it came under Ogden's notice, was furnished with a horrible yet consistent simplicity. The large rooms were set sparely with chairs, tables, and sofas that represented the spoil of Centralia, and there were few modern additions to introduce discords. An ideal sculptured head, placed on a marble pedestal swathed in a fringed scarf of saffron silk and set between the lace curtains so as to show from the street, would have ruined the effect both within and without. Perhaps the same might be said of any other house.
Brainard himself was not visible; he was only audible. His deep voice came in a sort of deadened growl through the closed door of a small side room; and mingled with it were the querulous tones of a woman's voice—an elderly woman, a woman in poor health, a woman whom some sudden and distressful stroke had brought to the verge of tears.
The house had been built in the primitive days when local architecture was still in such exact accord with local society that anything like graded receptions was undreamed of. Everybody who seemed too good to be kept waiting in the hall was shown into the front parlor. This room had a carpet whose design was in large baskets of bright flowers, and a ceiling that was frescoed in a manner derived from a former style of railroad decoration. This scheme of decoration centred around a massive and contorted chandelier with eight globes. Nobody had ever seen the whole eight "going" at one time. Lincoln and his family were on one side of the marble mantel-piece; Grant and his family on the other.
It was in this room that Ogden was received by the elder daughter of the house. She seemed a quiet, self-poised girl, four or five years the senior of her sister. She amply filled her gown of gray woollen; her hair was drawn back from her forehead and made a knot just above the nape of her neck. She had a pair of cool, steady gray eyes. She appeared wholesome, stable, capable of keeping herself well in hand.
"My father isn't able to see you," she said; "but if you will give me what you have brought I will take it to him."
There was a tremulousness in her voice, quite at variance with her manner and appearance. She put out her hand with a wavering motion; the flaring of the gas in her face seemed to strike her with a positive pain.
A door opened suddenly and her brother Burt came in. He was a stocky young man three or four years older than Ogden. He seemed stuffed with importance both present and future, both personal and parental—he was himself and his father rolled into one.
"Abbie," he said, in a sharp, curt way, "I wish you'd find father the copy of that report you made for him yesterday." He looked at Ogden in a fashion that changed the young man from a person to a thing. "We have been looking for you some time," he said. "I'll take those papers myself."
He spoke in a way that was abrupt and autocratic. Ogden recognized it as the utterance of a masterful nature, but he was unable to see that the masterful nature was moved by an emotion that must be controlled and concealed. His indignation made no allowance for this, and his subsequent ten minutes of solitary reflection left a bitterness that passed away but lingeringly. More and more, with every moment of this short wait, did he feel himself a gentleman turned into a lackey by his inferiors.
"A door opened suddenly, and her brother Burt came in."
There was no salve for his wounded sensibilities save, perhaps, in the look of dumb expostulation which the girl cast upon her brother and in the few commonplace words which she addressed to their caller before she went out.
"Kindly wait a few moments, and the papers will be ready to take back. Perhaps you will find this other chair more comfortable."
It was after this fashion that he first met Abbie Brainard; met her—as he reported it to McDowell—and hardly more.
He followed his brother-in-law into the elevator and they dropped swiftly to the ground floor. At this level is situated the Acme Lunch Room.
McDowell took a cup of tea and an expeditious doughnut standing, and hurried away. Ogden, who had not overcome his habit of leisurely eating, lingered behind.
The Acme occupies a square, low-ceiled room in the hindermost corner of the Clifton: perhaps, with a lower ceiling and a situation on a level lower still, it would have been called the Zenith. It is fitted up with three or four oval counters, and a very close calculation of space allows room for an infinitesimal cashier's desk as well. Each oval encloses a high rack that is heaped with rolls, buns, and cakes, and close to each rack stands a brace of big, cylindrical, nickel-plated tanks that yield coffee and tea. Each oval is fringed with a row of stools—hard-wood tops on a cast-iron base; and in warm weather a pair of fans, which are moved by power supplied from the engine-room, revolve aloft and agitate the stifling atmosphere.
Ogden had spent the past week in trying a succession of dairies, lunch-rooms, and restaurants, and had ended by returning to the Acme, which seemed as decent and convenient as any. He found a place in a quiet corner; ordered his coffee, wheat-muffins, and pie, which all came together; and fell to work with his eye soberly fixed on the shining expanse of the freshly-wiped counter. Was he consistent, he wondered, in claiming any great consideration until he could lunch at a higher figure than fifteen or twenty cents?
The girl who had waited on him turned away, but another one, who stood a little distance off, called her back.
"Here, Maggie, change that mince. This gentleman don't want a piece with a whole corner knocked off."
Ogden buttered his muffin without raising his eyes. The second girl herself placed the new cut of pie before him and stood looking down upon him. The hour was a little late, and but three or four customers held places around the counters. Presently she spoke.
"Well, Mister Ogden," she said, with a humorous tartness, "you don't seem to recognize your old friends."
Ogden threw up his head. "Why, Nealie, is this you!" he exclaimed. It was a girl who had helped wait on table at his West Side boardinghouse.
She wore a dark dress with a plain white collar. Her brows made two fine straight lines over the yellowish green of her eyes. She had a strong, decided face, yet there was a certain lurking delicacy in the outlines of nose and chin.
"That's what," she replied. "I've made a change, you see. Been here pretty near a week. Come in often?"
"I'm in the building. What was the matter with your other place?"
The girl hitched up her shoulders. "The fact of it is, I couldn't get used to it. Never tried anything like that before."
She looked about cautiously and then resumed in a confidential voice,
"To tell the truth, I was just forced into it. Pa and ma didn't want me to come to Chicago, but I couldn't make out that I was going to have any terrible great show there in Pewaukee. I didn't s'pose it was going to be so awful hard to find something to do in a big place like this. But I made up my mind, all the same, that I wasn't going to cave in and go back to Wisconsin—not straight off, anyway. Kept right on trotting about. Any port in a storm, says I. And when I met that good old soul in the intelligence office, that settled it. She only wanted a second girl; but I thought I could stand it."
"Couldn't you?"
He found a place in a quiet corner.
"I didn't tell ma, though, that I was living out. I wrote to her that I was clerking—ten dollars a week. Ten dollars!—I'm looking for the girl that gets more than six. I don't know what the folks would have thought if they'd known of me a-being ordered around by a lot of young fellers—run and fetch and carry for a parcel of strangers. It don't come natural to me to be bossed, I can tell you."
"But Mrs. Gore used you well?"
"She did, for a fact. But it wasn't the sort of thing I wanted at all. So I told her I guessed I'd go. 'Well,' says she, sort of resigned like, 'if you've made up your mind to, you must, I s'pose'; she was sorry to lose me, I know. She walked to the-basement door with me to say good-by—with her specs on top of her head. 'Be a good girl,' says she, 'and let us hear from you'—'most exactly what ma said when I came away. Gray hair, just like ma's, too. 'Yes, ma'am,' says I. I didn't say 'ma'am' because I thought I was a servant—I wasn't; but because she was older and because I had a respect for her. And so Ishalllet her hear from me; when I get along a little further I'm going to call on her. And I'm going to get along, let me tell you; I haven't jumped on to this hobby-horse of a town just to stay still."
She nodded her head with great decision.
"It broke her all up when you went away," she resumed. "She kept a-wondering for two or three days what the matter was. Poor soul, she's a good deal too tender for this town. Whatwasthe matter?"
"Nothing. I had friends in a different part of the city."
"In a different part of the city," she repeated. She spread her palms far apart on the inner edge of the counter and brought her face down almost to a level with his. "D'you know, I always liked the way you talked; it's real genteel. And you say 'cahn't,' too. And 'dinnuh' and 'suppuh.' Hardly anybody says 'cahn't' around here—except actors. Say, I went the other night. It cost fifty cents; but I was just wild to see a real out-and-out city show—couldn't hold in any longer. They all talked kind of artificial, except one man. He had a bad part—erring son, sort o'. He talked right out in plain, every-day style, and he was about the only one I really cared for. Of course, though, I don't like bad men better than good ones. But your way is nice, after all."
"Thanks."
"Well, I'm in a different par-r-t of the city myself." She gave a comprehensive glance over the sizzling coffee-urns. "Second in command." She tapped her breast-bone. "I don't think so everlasting much of Duggan here, but he recognizes talent. It didn't take him long to find out what I was and he raised me. I boss and help around when there's a rush, and now and then I take the cashier's place. It's all just like a store. Oh," she proceeded, after a shrewd look at him, "I know well enough what you've been thinking all this time. But here's your counter and there's your goods; and people just say what they want and get a check for it and pay at the door. No boarding-house in that, is there? They don't bulldozeusvery much."
The door opened and a belated clerk came in.
"Here, Gretchen," she called to one of her force, "see what this man wants." The newcomer dropped mechanically on to one of the stools and submissively took the damaged pie that had been taken away from Ogden. He had ordered apple.
"Most of 'em are tractable enough," she commented.
"I've got ten girls here," were her next words, "and they're quite a fair lot. But that mooneyed German girl over there—"
"Gretchen?"
"Icallher Gretchen; she don't look as if she knew beans, does she? Well, she don't. She was going on in the pantry yesterday about the rights of man. I knew she was due to break a saucer pretty soon. Well, she did. And we've got a Swede girl here who would be the best all around one of the lot if it wasn't for her temper. All of a sudden she gets mad and she stays mad, and you can't for the life of you find out what it was that made her mad. Those three Irish girls are pretty smart. H'm, yes; they were rigging up a strike Tuesday. They wanted fifty cents a week more. They found out their want at a quarter to twelve. 'All right, girls,' says I, 'you can go out if you want. Our regular people will kick and go somewhere else for a few days, perhaps; but the first rainy noon they'll all come in again, and they'll see that things are running all right with a new crew, and after that they'll stay.' Goodness me! I've heard more about rights and less about duties this last week than I ever did before in my life. My uncle says it's the same with him. He's the engineer here. He really got me this place. If you look down through that grating out there as you go along you may see him. It's talk and argue all the time—his men have more half-baked notions than you can think of, and he's kept on the k'jump all the time looking after things. DoIkick? Do I squeal? Not much. And if I had come in from outside with a different language, maybe, and a different training and a different set of notions, and if I had been a real, dyed-in-the-wool, down-trodden peasant and all my folks the same for nobody knows how far back, perhaps I'd find some reason there for not keeping abreast with the tolerably smart lot of people that had let me in."
She cast a lofty eye over her various underlings. "Kind of a plain lot, ain't we? You know there's one place like this in town where they won't take a girl unless she's pretty. Their cashier is a regular bute. But I wouldn't work in such a place; no, indeed."
She paused. Ogden made no response. She eyed him with a sharp impatience.
"Not but what I could, though, if I had a mind," she remarked, with a vindictive little explosion.
"No, I couldn't, either," she added suddenly; "they're all brunettes this year."
And she laughed forgivingly.
"And you don't see me a-wearing rings and chains," she pursued; "I guess not. And I sha'n't, either, until I finish my course."
"Course"? Was she hinting at the close of her earthly career?
"Yep. Shorthand. But don't hurry away." He had dropped his feet to the floor. "Duggan went right off after the rush, and I guess I've been hard pushed enough to enjoy a little restful conversation. Shorthand and typewriting—that's what I'm steering for. I'll stand this for a while—until I can do eighty words. I've begun at the Athenaeum already. I don't see why anybody should want to take 'lessons' in typewriting; it's practice you want. Same with the other. Well, I'm practising hard enough. I-shall-be ready for b-usiness in-three-months," she traced with her finger on the counter, giving considerable pressure to the "b" in "business." "I'm ahead of the class now.
"I'm educated, too," she continued. "I taught school one term up in Waukesha County. I know how to spell—you ought to see how some of those girls write out their notes. And I can punctuate—semicolons just as easy as anything else. Say, do you know Mrs. Granger S. Bates?"
"I've seen her name in the papers," said Ogden, emptying his glass and feeling in his pocket for his handkerchief.
"Sorry we don't give napkins. Well, she was a school-teacher, and look at her now. I went by her house on Calumet Avenue last Sunday. She's got about everything. She is one of the patronesses of the Charity Ball. Still, I suppose she must be getting along in years—her husband has come to be the Lord High Muck-a-muck of Most Everything; I've read about him for years. HopeIhaven't got to wait till I'm fifty to have a good time."
Ogden was shuffling his feet on the floor.
"Won't you have another piece of pie?No?Well, try a cream-puff, then; it'll be my treat. And do take time with it. Anything but fifty men eating away like a house afire."
Only one other customer remained. The Swede girl began to collect the cream-jugs.
"I don't care so extra much about Mrs. Bates, though. But there's Mrs. Arthur J. Ingles, three-hundred-and-something Ontario Street—do you knowher? Now there's a woman that interests me. She's in the papers every day; she goes everywhere. She's 'way up, I guess; I'd be wild if she wasn't. She was at a dance last Tuesday, and she gave a reception the day before, and her sister is going to be married nest month. It's easy to follow folks since the papers began to print their names all bunched up the way they do, and Mrs. Arthur J. is one that I've followed pretty close. She must be young—I never see his name except with hers. I guess he's just a society dude. Well, dudes are all right; you've got to have 'em in a big town. You wouldn't have the whole million and a half of us be grubbers?"
"I suppose not."
"She gave a dinner last week. Covers were laid for ten—what does that mean?"
"Probably that she and her husband had eight people."
"She wore heliotrope satin. Ornaments, diamonds. Great, wasn't it? One of our girls brought down a book this morning about lady Guinevere. Guinevere—your grandmother! What are we to Lady Guinevere, or what is Lady Guinevere to us? But when it comes to people living in your own town, why, that's getting down to business."
"Yes, let us talk about realities—Balzac."
"I should say so," she assented, missing the allusion. "Now then, why shouldn'tIbe wearing heliotrope satin to dinner sometime?—if not under the name of Cornelia McNabb, then under some other as good or better. Anyway, I'm going to keep my hands as nice as I can; a girl never knows what she may have a chance to become. I don't imagine it will disfigure me much to run a typewriter. Dear me," she sighed, "how much time I've lost! If I hadn't been such a darned goose, I might have begun Pitman at home a year ago."
She reached down under the counter and pulled a newspaper up out of a dark corner.
"Some lunch-rooms have papers around—as many as a dozen, sometimes; but Duggan says this place is too cramped for him to give people any inducement to dilly-dally. It's eat and run. So I have to buy my own. This is the first chance I've had to look at it. I wonder what she's been up to now."
She opened the paper and ran down its columns with an expert eye.
"Yes, here she is, first pop.Mr. and Mrs.—Cluett, Parker, Ingles. My sakes, how I envy that woman! Course I don't want that she should come down here and wash my dishes, but wouldn't I like to go up there and eat off of hers! What did she wear?—it don't tell. Where was it?—at Mrs. Walworth Floyd's—a small dinner. Don't know them. How about theMisses?—Jameson, Parker, Wentworth—she's a great goer, too. And here are a fewMessrs.—Johnson, J. L. Cluett, George Ogden—"
She stopped abruptly.
"You?"
There was a world of reproach in her voice.
"Yes."
"And you sit there and never let on! You're as mean as you can be. What is she like? Tell me, do. Ain't she young, now? What did she wear?"
"I didn't go. I had a trip to the "West Side." "Your name's here."
"The reporters get the names in advance. Sometimes they copy them from cards or regrets."
"And you wasn't there?"
"Ho."
"Too bad! But you've seen her?"
"Never."
"How hateful! But you was really invited?"
"Yes."
"H'm!" she said, deliberately; "I see now why you moved. I don't blame you. I'm trying to get along, too. We're both in the same boat."
Ogden rose.
"What else is there?" she asked herself, looking over other columns. "Here's a marriage; it's in Milwaukee. Don't know whether it's a society item or not. Who are they?—J. Russell Vibert is the man, and Mary Adelaide Brainard is the woman. Both of Chicago—know 'em?" Ogden sat down suddenly.
She eyed him curiously.
"That's the first sign I've seen that you was willing to stay a single minute longer than you had to. You can go now, whenever you want. We've got to clean up. So long!"
Ogden had been balked in his first social advance by the inconsiderate and unwarranted demands of the Brainards. He failed on Proposition No. I., but its attendant corollary he disposed of after the proper interval. He had missed the dinner, but he accomplished the dinner call.
He was moving around his room in his shirtsleeves; he had the leisurely air of one whose social orbit was so small as to involve no relations with the courses of cabs and of street-cars. To set himself right with the Floyds he had but to step around the corner.
His room was rather small and cramped, but he had preferred indifferent accommodations in a good house to good accommodations in an indifferent house—just as he would have chosen an indifferent house in a good neighborhood to a better house in a poorer one. His quarters, however, were well enough for a single young man of moderate pretensions. He had space for a three-quarter bed, a bureau, a wash-stand which displayed a set of pink-flowered crockery and two towels, a cane-seated chair, and a pair of book-shelves on the wall. And by means of a good deal of dexterous manoeuvring he contrived to extract some comfort from an undersized rocker. His decorations were principally photographs, which showed to the extent common under the circumstances. Some of these were grouped in twos and threes, in frames faced with Chinese silk; they helped to achieve the disordered and over-crowded effect that the present taste in house-furnishing aims at, and can always accomplish in a back hall bedroom.
The photographs stood in the position in which he had first placed them a month and a half ago, although the recent arrival of several of the originals had given their shadows an altered importance. Everybody knows of the inertia that overtakes decorative detail, even when portable. There were the pictures of his father and his mother, arranged in a pair. His father offered a placid, gray-bearded face; it seemed rather forceless, though that effect may have been due to retouching; yet, independent of any practical processes, it was the face of a man who obviously could not have risen in advance to any adequate conception of the Western metropolis.
The face of his mother was serious, strenuous. She had in some degree the semi-countrified aspect of one who has run a quiet course in a quiet quarter of a minor town.
His sister's picture had been taken in the East just before her starting for her new home. It was now in the hands of Ogden's next-door neighbor, who had come in carrying a choice of white ties, and who now wove around it a contemplative cloud of tobacco-smoke from his briar-wood pipe. He was a young man with a high forehead and a pair of shrewd but kindly brown eyes.
"A mighty pretty girl," Brower said, heartily. "Get the right kind of a New England face, and you can't do much better. I must haul out my own photographs and fix them up some time."
Brower kept his collection in his trunk, along with his shirts and underwear generally. He used his bureau drawers for collars and cuffs, and for a growing accumulation of newspapers, magazines, and novels. He had been in the house two years, yet his trunk had never been unpacked and put away. He was an adjuster for an insurance company, and was subject to sudden calls to remote localities, in accordance with the doings of the busy monster that the press knows as the "fire fiend." If Isaac Sobrinski, off in Des Moines, had the misfortune to be burned out, at the close of a dull season or in the face of brisk and successful competition, then Des Moines was the place to which Brower immediately posted. He estimated the damage on the building, figured the salvage on socks and ulsters, and endeavored to decide, so far as lay in his powers, whether the catastrophe had been inflicted by Providence or had been precipitated by Sobrinski's own match-box. However, he never carried anything except his valise on such excursions; the general state of his trunk is to be accepted simply as the mental index of a constant and hurried traveller.
"Yes, she's a mighty pretty girl," he repeated, thoughtfully. "Where have they gone?"
"Oh, not far. There's been a good deal of travelling done already. They just went up to Milwaukee; Eugene had something to see about there. They'll be back to-morrow, I expect."
"Milwaukee, eh? That's come to be quite the fashion, hasn't it? Some folks go there after they're married, and some of them tobemarried. We had one in our office a week or two ago; Vibert—have you met him?"
"It's in your office he is, then, is it? No, I've never met him. I've seen him and heard about him. Is he much thought of?"
"Well, the office doesn't have a great deal to say to a man as long as he keeps hours and attends to his work—when the position isn't responsible, I mean. What are you looking for—whisk-broom? Here; I'm sitting on it, I guess."
"I suppose he does attend to his work?"
"Oh, so-so; but a little break like that doesn't help a man any. He struck high, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"Wonder what he's got to keep her on. Great question—all that; ain't it? She's a rich girl, I hear. Subject for debate: is it safer to marry a rich girl or a poor girl—for a young man in moderate circumstances, I mean?"
"Oh, dear," said Ogden, sitting down on the edge of the bed, helplessly; "if you're going back tothatchestnut!"
"Well, it's timely," rejoined Brower, knocking the ashes of his pipe into the cover of the soap-dish; "and always will be. Pro: if the girl's rich, she'll have had things, and got used to them, and perhaps tired of them. If the girl's poor, she'll be ravenous after her long starve-out, and will expect her husband to feed her with everything."
"Lay on."
"Con: if the girl's rich, she'll expect all the comforts and luxuries she has been used to at home. If she's poor, she'll have had some sense ground into her; she'll know how to manage and contrive. So there it is. What's your idea?" "No general rule. Depends on circumstances." "What does?"
"The girl. To begin with."
"The girl depends on circumstances. And after?"
"After? Oh, then circumstances depend on the girl."
"H'm! Can't lay down any general law—same as with little Johnny. Pshaw! You go to the foot."
But they both agreed on one point, as young men always do when they discuss this standard subject: they stood together on the assumption that such a venture concerned only the two people primarily involved.
Brower preceded Ogden into the hallway; he stood with the toe of one slipper on the heel of the other. "Well, remember me to the swells."
"Oh, shucks!" said George, turning back and laughing.
He walked down and out rather sedately, and picked his way over the muddy sidewalks with his thoughts fixed on the two recent marriages. That in his own family had just occurred under such disadvantages as must prevail in a disorganized household, and with the infliction of such discomforts as will sometimes be undergone by people who, while not in society, still feel impelled to have such a function proceed after the fashion that society prescribes. Kittie Ogden was duly married, then, with a certain regard to cards, carriages, caterers, and the rest; and the feast was graced by a number of McDowell's family and friends—people of a fairish sort, who called for little comment in either way. At least, little comment was bestowed by Ogden, whose principal thought was that his sister was now the wife of a fellow of some means and ability, and who felt that it would not come amiss to have a good business man in the family.
At the Floyds' he found the other wedding the subject of much comment, more or less discreet. On the other hand, the affair in his own family received but a mere civil mention; the Ogdens, he felt, must be only an insignificant little group, after all. Must they—must he—always remain so?
The Floyds occupied a snug little house which filled a chink between two bigger and finer ones, and commanded a view of the back yard of a third, which was bigger and finer still. Mrs. Floyd had lately begun to fill a chink in the social world as well, by having an "evening." She had approached the idea with a good deal of deliberation, and she had achieved something very small and quiet. She overcame her husband's weakness for knowing people and inviting them to the house; she was not after a deluge, but a drop; and if her tardy distillation did not equal the perfumes of the fragrant East, still it was the best result to be arrived at under the circumstances.
He found the Fairchilds there, and he came upon Fairchild and Floyd smoking,sub rosa,in a secluded corner of the library, which was furnished in a sombre and solid fashion. In the Floyd family the household divinity was the lace-curtain, whose susceptibility to offence from the fumes of tobacco is well known; her high-priestess was Mrs. Floyd, and her chief victim was Walworth. Associated with the two smokers was young Freddy Pratt, whose solicitude regarding Brainard's mental state on the occasion of his daughter's call at the bank has been already touched upon, and who was now puffing a cigarette with a learned and expert air. This attitude was displeasing to Ogden, who was perhaps over-disposed to feel official differences on social occasions; but no oppressive sense of his own subordinate rank troubled Freddy Pratt, who had but a feeble and intermittent realization of the orders of the business hierarchy, or indeed of anything else.
"It was a matter that concerned just her and him," Fairchild was saying as Ogden entered, with a contemplative regard fastened on the lengthening ash of his cigar. "It was nobody else's business."
He stopped. He had spoken in a low, quiet voice, but he had conveyed unmistakably the presence of quotation-marks.
"I called on 'em the other night," volunteered Freddy Pratt, unabashedly. His perky little nose was tipped in the air, and his eyes were closed to the two fine slits that denote the complete enjoyment of the smoker. "I wasn't going to stand off. They're at the Northumberland—big name, but not much else. Ragged matting in the halls, and the janitor didn't look very slick. I guess they've rented ready furnished. Mayme was real glad to see me. Buthewas rather grumpy, I thought."
"Everybody ought always to be glad to seeyou, Freddy," smiled Walworth, with a caressing irony.
"I suppose," resumed Fairchild, thoughtfully, "that the human family will always go on considering a wedding as a joyous occasion. It always has; it always must—hope springs eternal."
Ogden wondered what other view there might be to take. Everybody had seemed lively and happy enough when Kittie was married.
"But there's the other side—the side that turns to view with a consideration of the complicated relations of a good many new and diverse elements—new people coming in. We had a case in our own family some years ago, when my young cousin married. Poor Lizzie; she is dead now. Her father died six months before her and left a good deal to be divided up. Her husband was trustee for the boy after she herself went, and he made us a good deal of trouble. He had his eye on the estate from the start, and more than his share in the handling of it. There were a good many meetings in lawyers' offices—more trying than the courts themselves. There was a good deal of money lost, and there is a good deal of feeling that will never be got over. He traded on his wife's memory all through. Yet the family welcomed him very cordially and trustfully; we thought the poor girl was going to be so happy. She was; she never knew."
Ogden sighed; this was dismal matter.
"Oh, well," continued Fairchild, resuming his cigar, with an air of passing to lighter topics, "this can't apply here. All of us are happily married or are going to be—"
Freddy Pratt nonchalantly blew an ineffable smoke-ring across the room; Walworth slipped around the table to close the last inch of crack in the door.
"Oh, dear, yes!" he exclaimed.
"—and none of us are being troubled through relations by marriage."
The door was shut, but the penetrating voice of Ann Wilde came through it clearly, and Walworth winced.
"Oh, dear, no!" he protested.
"I should say not," chimed in Freddy Pratt, with his self-satisfied little ba-a.
The cigars were ending. "Come, let us go out to the others," said Floyd.
In the drawing-room Ogden presently encountered Jessie Bradley and her parents. The girl herself appeared as dressed as the occasion could warrant, but her father and mother wore the every-day habiliments in which he had first seen them, a fortnight before, on the occasion of a call at Hinsdale. They had an easy-going aspect, as if they hardly cared to put themselves out greatly. They were present in the triple capacity of relatives of the hostess, of suburbanites, and of body-guard to escort their daughter back home after another of her frequent visits in town, and their effect was quite provisional and transitory.
Mrs. Bradley was a pleasant woman whose face was full of the fine lines of experience and whose hair had thinned greatly without changing its dry, sandy brown. She wore an old-fashioned tortoise-shell comb. She met Ogden here precisely as she had met him in her own house. He noticed presently that she treated everybody else in exactly the same fashion, and he learned subsequently that she had, practically, one invariable manner for all times, places, and people. It was a manner that he found very quiet, simple, straightforward, and friendly. It showed that she valued herself, and was also disposed to accord a good value to anybody else. It seemed to say, as plainly as words: "The Lord is the maker of us all; so let's have no more fuss about it." It was the good American manner in full bloom.
Her husband had a jovial eye, a grizzled moustache, a rotund, polished forehead, and cheeks that hung downward fatly into his big, round, short neck. He appeared to have valued his peace of mind sufficiently to preserve it and to be satisfied with the moderate success that comes from moderate effort. He wore a short-waisted, double-breasted frock coat, and there were no wrinkles in it, either front or back: he would have found it impossible to thrust his plump hand in between any two of the buttons.
He was given in the directory as "Bradley, Danl. H., secty. and treas. Darrell & Bradley P't'g & Lith'g Co." He had been one of the organizers of the corporation, but had since yielded the lead to others of more push and means. He had a moderate salary and a small block of the stock. Since he was assisting the business as an officer, rather than directing it as an individual, he had little personal annoyance from typographical unions and from the paper manufacturers' trusts. As for "pi" and proof-readers' errors, matters which have a power to make some men agonize, he merely laughed at them. The concern, besides its central establishment, had a few retail branches placed here and there through the business district; one of them, on the ground floor of the Clifton, supplied the La Salle Street banks and insurance offices with ledgers, ink, and blotting-pads.
He had an acre of ground and a two-story frame house at Hinsdale, and Ogden remembered the small green-house where he fed his craze for chrysanthemums.