He sat with his eyes fixed on the bottom of the boat.
An elderly couple were standing among the rashes. They regarded him with a friendly and companionable smile. They seemed to offer him the "middling lot" that the sage and poet have called the best and safest. "No hazardous and complicated relationships," they seemed to say; "no struggle over dead men's dollars, no swamping of self-respect in ill-got gains; only our daughter—"
George pressed his forehead confusedly and raised his eyes to get his bearings; the late afternoon sun dazzled him with its level beams. He saw a house set high among the trees; and on its porch, amidst a tangle of bittersweet, a girl was standing. He shaded his eyes; it was as if she waved a handkerchief at him. Presently she strolled to the brow of the bank.
"Glad to see you," she called; "we have just driven over."
It was Jessie Bradley.
Cornelia McNabb became Mrs. Barton Brainard during the first week in August. Neither of the pair was inclined to wait, and neither had such a circle of friends as to make a midsummer wedding less preferable than a later one.
The wedding took place in church—as Cornelia had intimated to Ogden. She was not disposed to let false delicacy clog the heels of success, and she had her way. They were married in the daytime, as a partial concession to the social inexperience of one father and the social indifference of the other. The young men of the bank were drawn on freely; Ogden served as an usher—as Cornelia had requested. Adrian Valentine supported Burt at the chancel-rail, and gave some friendly counsel as to details at both church and house.
Cornelia's circle of girl-friends yielded nothing suitable in the way of bridesmaids; but there was the groom's sister—and one maiden attendant was enough. Abbie therefore took this part—for the first time. She walked up the long aisle with a bashful modesty. She had a dozen opportunities to meet Ogden's eye, but her embarrassed shyness prevented her from once looking into his face.
Mary Brainard was still in exile, and her mother was confined to her room by one of her nervous attacks; but in one of the back pews, in the twilight under the gallery, a dark, meagre, and dissolute-looking young man had taken his post. And as Burt, with a proud and prosperous smile, led Cornelia down the aisle, tears of indignant rage started from the eyes of his banned and mistreated brother.
The Brainard marriage was celebrated in print, just as the Brainard divorce had been. Some of the cuts that had illustrated the one were also used to illustrate the other.
Mr. and Mrs. Burton Brainard went to California and were absent a month. On their return they took up their quarters in the Brainard house, while Burt considered the question of building. Cornelia had made up her own mind where this building should be done.
They returned to town in accordance with the mandate conveyed by certain cards that had been sent out, directed by the serviceable Abbie, during their absence. These cards announced that "Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tillinghast Brainard" would be "at home" on the "Thursdays in September."
Cornelia had gloated over these cards on their arrival from the stationer's.
"Mrs. Burton Tillinghast Brainard," she read, with a vigorous hitch of her shoulder. "H'm! now we're ready to knock out your Smiths and your Joneses." She tossed her head. "And then bring on your Floyds and your Ingleses!"
Before going away she had wrung Ogden's hand, and had committed her parents to him during the concluding days of their stay. Especially was he enjoined to take them up to the top of the Clifton on the very first clear day. A clear day came; he conducted them up to the roof-observatory and showed them the city, and they numbered the towers thereof.
The old people tiptoed gingerly around the parapet, while Ogden waved his hand over the prospect—the mouth of the river with its elevators and its sprawling miles of railway track; the weakish blue of the lake, with the coming and going of schooners and propellers, and the "cribs" that stood on the faint horizon—"that's where our water comes from," George explained; the tower of the water-works itself and the dull and distant green of Lincoln Park; the towering bulk of other great sky-scrapers and the grimy spindling of a thousand surrounding chimneys; the lumber-laden brigs that were tugged slowly through the drawbridges, while long strings of drays and buggies and street-cars accumulated during the wait. "My! don't they look little!" cried Mrs. McNabb.
George smiled with all the gratified vanity of a native.
"And that," he said, pointing southward down the street, "is the Board of Trade."
"Where we was the other day," the old man reminded his wife. "And that gilt thing on the top of it is a ship, I swan. And wasn't they noisy, though. Well, now, Josephine, ain't it handsome?"
A simple soul found to admire the tower of the Board of Trade—let it be put on record.
George and McNabb had got on very well. The old countryman had felt rather frost-bitten on seeing George in full social regalia, but seeming to find him more human and approachable in a simple business suit, he had thawed out again. Mrs. McNabb had taken to him kindly from the start. Most women did, though he appeared never to have observed it. She joined with her husband in wreathing him in an atmosphere of simple friendliness.
The other father concerned in the festivities had also thawed towards George, though it would be a mistake to attribute simplicity to any friendliness shown by the head of the Underground. At one stage of the proceedings Erastus M. Brainard had laid his hand on Ogden's shoulder, and the young man had asked himself with distressful circumspection what it meant. It might have been to his advantage if he had found an answer.
George's engagement to Jessie Bradley was now an accomplished fact; the nail was driven—only a formal announcement was required to clinch it. He had preferred to withhold this until his affairs with McDowell were more accurately adjusted. Freeze & Freeze had put on a pretty positive pressure, and an arrangement had been contrived that had some of the externals, at least, of an adjustment.
McDowell's affairs had not been taking a very favorable turn; some of his ventures had been too rank for even gullibility itself, and his hope of relations with Ingles was now completely at an end. Ingles, in fact, had signified to him that an accounting for of the St. Asaph funds was desired by himself and the other contributing members of the former committee, that a remittance in accordance therewith was looked for, and that his resignation of the financial guidance of the choir would receive prompt consideration.
This communication might have been made by Ingles personally, or it might have been sent by his office-boy, or it might even (as a physical possibility) have been pushed in under the crack of the door between them. As a matter of fact, it came through the mail. So formal a transmission of so formidable a communication was conclusive; McDowell felt at once that all possibility of personal relations between himself and Ingles was at an end—that door in the wall between them was as good as bricked up.
"Burt led Cornelia down the aisle."
Kittie came around late one afternoon to see her mother. "Do you know, George," she said to her brother, "that Eugene is going to give up our pew at St. Asaph's? Can you imagine why?"
He had heard and read a good deal in his lifetime about the fine penetration of feminine intuition; he wondered why feminine intuition always failed when it came up for application to business matters. The pretty, high-held female heads that would droop in shame if they could come to learn the how and wherefore of their own costly bedeckings! Poor innocent Kittie—sitting there and twirling in unsuspecting surprise the sparkling novelties that encircled her fingers, and never caring or thinking about the means by which they had come to be there!
The principal instruments in McDowell's settlement with the Ogden estate were certain promissory notes and certain warranty deeds—warranty, after quit-claims had been refused; and Ogden found himself in possession of his brother-in-law's signature on several bits of paper which he hoped might realize their full value when the time came, and also of two or three largish tracts of suburban property in which the general public interest seemed rather diminishing than increasing. McDowell saved the best here, just as he had managed to secure the best of his father-in-law's estate for his wife. In the original division—fair, according to appraised values—his knowledge of tendencies of growth had put into his wife's third almost everything that was likely to show a quick increase in price. George took his notes and his lands, and the task of turning them into money; and he left to Kittie an unimpaired trust and confidence in her own husband.
The matter of a house shared his thoughts, along with the McDowell business—an October wedding, a week for a trip, and then the beginning of housekeeping on the first of November in a home of their own.
"You want to see Mrs. Cass," Floyd had told him; "she fixed us up when we first came out here."
"Who is she?"
"A clever little woman who makes a sort of specialty of North-side houses. She has got desk-room somewhere upstairs—sixteenth or seventeenth. She married badly—her husband doesn't do anything. She began by renting friends' houses to other friends, and has kept on until she has worked up quite a business. In such a big town as this has got to be you need to go to a specialist for almost everything. You might take in the whole lot of those big house-renting agencies and never get satisfied."
The office of the Massachusetts Brass Company was as much a social exchange as ever. Jessie frequently came down with Mrs. Floyd and Ann and Claudia, and George would sometimes step up to see her for a few minutes during his noonings. Mrs. Floyd looked upon the meetings indulgently enough, but Ann seemed to hold against Ogden a deeply-seated grudge.
She had been considerably embarrassed in the matter of her special assessments, and she had as much feeling against George as against McDowell himself. Her efforts to fortify and to recoup herself had led her into other fields of business, and she was now spending a good part of every forenoon in the neighborhood of the Board of Trade. Thus far she had not been so successful as to lessen the grudge.
The particular institution in which Ann was interested bore some external resemblance to its great prototype across the street. It was smaller and, if possible, uglier; but it, too, had its quadrangular arcade, its big square skylight, its ladies' gallery. In this gallery Ann sat daily for several hours, along with other women of a like turn of mind, and kept an eye on the proceedings generally. After a few sessions she became accustomed to the mere externals of the place—the endless shuffle of feet on the grimy floor, the sharp yawps of raw and eager voices, the flinging aloft of excited arms, the little tangles of noise and passion that were instantly woven around every new-comer with, an offer to buy or to sell. She looked over this choppy sea across to the promised land that was being portrayed on the opposite blackboard; the artist paced to and fro on a long, high, narrow platform, and worked in the uncertainty of a single drop-light. He frequently changed his mind, and his alterations usually had a deep and sometimes a discouraging effect upon Ann and her associates. Every now and then one would retire into the hallway and consult with her agent, and then there would be the rustle of greenbacks, and the agent would take the elevator down and presently be seen among the crowd of men on the floor. The agent was likely to be a gallant fellow, only too happy to be of service to a lady.
Ann was now a member of Floyd's household, in good and regular standing. She felt herself very much at home. What was her brother-in-law's was her sister's, and what was her sister's was hers. She was usually the first to unfold the morning paper; she pre-empted the bathroom with little regard to Walworth's established habits; and if the idea of some trifling delicacy occurred to her she would order it from the grocery, and after it had appeared on Walworth's table it appeared again in his bill. She did not stand on ceremony; she waived all stiff formality; cosily and frankly she was quite one of the family.
As such, she used Walworth's office quite freely, and in the same capacity she joined in the conferences which the Floyds were now beginning to hold with Atwater up under his great skylight in the roof. Atwater's little house for Claudia had given great satisfaction, and he was now about to do a larger one for Claudia's parents, who had begun to look upon their banishment to the West as a perpetual fact. Claudia's house had been delivered with its stairs, its windows, its red chimney, and its chandeliers—which last were composed by a pushing young draughtsman who was as anxious to make interest with Atwater as Atwater had perhaps been to make interest with Floyd.
Atwater was accustomed to people who didn't know their own minds, to people who knew their own minds too well, to people who had too many minds to really have any mind at all, and to people who had so much money that they didn't need to have any mind. He was impeccably suave and unruffled, but he had the immense advantage of being able to impress the unduly brusque and capricious and exasperating among his clients with the fact that they were dealing with a gentleman and an artist. He also put a good deal of "presence" into the rendering and the collecting of his accounts; there was no more disputing his charges than his taste.
He took equally, with his urbane imperturbability, the anxious carpings of Mrs. Floyd and the easy joking of her husband. Ann he quietly ignored, and Walworth thanked him; for his sister-in-law's interest in the new house was becoming oppressively personal. As for Claudia, he always saw that she had, out of his sample cabinet, all the bits of tiling and scraps of marqueterie that she needed; and if she fancied a promenade among the boards and trestles of his drawing-room, her whim was gratified. Ogden and Jessie, who sometimes came too, he welcomed pleasantly—the guests of the present were the clients of the future. Ogden admired his beautiful manners and his whitened hair; one day he amusedly recalled Jessie's determination to make her husband's hair like it.
He looked at Atwater, who was explaining his preliminary sketches to the Floyds and was trying to fix the general bearings of hall, stairway, and closets; his hair looked whiter still under the diffused glare from the skylight.
George turned to Jessie, with his hand on his own head, so smooth and shining brown.
"This is the hair you are to whiten," he said, and he lifted his eyebrows in a smile.
"I never saw such a boy!" she murmured in a repressed ecstasy. "Do you remembereverythingI have said?" No one was looking, and she placed her own hand on his other temple.
"Wouldn't powder do?" he asked lightly.
"Only for girls."
"Couldn't it be bleached?"
"Not and get that color."
"Must I suffer, then?"—with his hand still on his brow.
"I'm afraid that's the only way." She lowered his hand in her own, and gave it a tender pressure on its descent.
"Must it be lingering, or something sharp and sudden?"
She pressed his hand again, and looked affectionately into his eyes. "Both, perhaps."
"Will it be fear or anxiety or shame?"
"Wait and see."
Atwater rolled up his sketches and threw them into a drawer. Then he went to his cabinet and took out a few small strips and squares of encaustic tiling in yellow and gray.
"And now I wonder if our little Colleen wouldn't like to take some of these home to play with." He turned courteously to Mrs. Floyd, while his hand reached out for a sheet of brown paper.
"They're not too—too heavy?" she asked, cautiously. "Nor too easily broken?"
The child opened wide her brown eyes, in one of her sober little ecstasies. "Oh, plaze, mamma! Oh, lave me have them—do!"
Ogden turned to Jessie, mutely asking her to share his appreciation of this. But she did not seem, especially amused. He remembered, then, that to himself he had frequently called her treatment of Claudia "uneven." Sometimes the child entertained her, sometimes she annoyed her. Jessie seemed to regard her—and he felt now and then that she so regarded children generally—as a doll to be played with until weariness came, and then to be carelessly thrust away.
"Oh, let her have 'em," said Ann, with an air of authority.
"Very goodof you, I'm sure," said Floyd to Atwater.
"Not at all; I'm sampled to death. There, my child." He gave her a neat little package. "I'm sure they'll understand you when you get to Paris!"
George Ogden and Jessie Bradley were married during the third week in October. The wedding took place at St. Asaph's, with the participation of a small section of the choir, and the Floyds opened their house for the reception that followed. Walworth even gave George a small lunch at his club.
For some weeks previous Ogden had watched for the right opportunity to make a formal announcement of his plans to the head of the bank and to ask for a week's leave. For nearly a month, now, Brainard had not looked at him, had not spoken to him; and when he entered the old man's office to make his request Brainard still refrained from looking at him, and in speaking to him was as curt as possible.
"We need all our men right here; you must give up any idea of going off."
"Blow hot, blow cold," thought George, and asked Jessie what she preferred to do under the circumstances.
She had planned a long and rapid and lavish tour, and the tears of disappointment started to her eyes.
"Go anyway," she cried.
"Go? Do you know what he is?" And "Do you know what business is?" he almost added.
She lapsed into a sullen silence.
"We could arrange the wedding for a Saturday," he suggested, "and spend Sunday in Wisconsin."
This proposition stuck in her throat, but presently she gulped it down. "Only don't call it a wedding-trip," she said tartly. "Well," she went on, "we'll settle that. We must, because the cards have got to be started out pretty soon—all those people who have entertained me have got to be remembered. There's some in Providence, and in Detroit, and in St. Paul. And don't let me forget those Louisville people that took me to Old Point."
They spent their Sunday in Oconomowoc, along with the Seven Bridegrooms. The day was wet and gloomy, and most of the time they sat in-doors over a grate-fire. Mists dulled the blazing red of the maples, and a thick fall of leaves was churned into the mud before the house by the wheels of farm wagons returning home from church. Only at sunset did the clouds clear away, and the full moon rose over one lake while the sun sank below the other.
George recalled this many times in afteryears.
They had taken a house in Walton Place for the year and a half from November first. The house had been vacant some little time, and the landlord made no account of an introductory fortnight.
Mrs. Bradley had come in from Hinsdale and had superintended most of the furnishing and fitting up. She saw the window-shades put into place and told the men where to set the refrigerator, and Jessie had looked on with the gay irresponsibility of a child who watches puppets being strung.
On their return from Wisconsin they found the house decorated almost throughout with chrysanthemums. The new green-house at Hinsdale had devoted the whole autumn to this specialty.
Jessie sank down into one of her big new easy-chairs. "Nothing to do but to be happy," she sighed, with a long and delicious expiration.
She had her days, but those dates were of course overridden by her intimates.
Among the first to call were the Floyds. Walworth came over with a pocketful of cigars—to christen the new wall-paper, he said.
"Have you got any closets?" was one of his questions.
"Plenty," replied George.
"Then I don't see but what you're all right—just as well off in a house that you rent as we are going to be in a house made to order. If ever I turn architect"—with a glance towards his wife—"I shall begin every house with a dozen closets and then pour in the various rooms around them. Four drawers in every one, and two rows of hooks. How stuff does accumulate!"
"Yes, the inside is rather nice," Jessie acknowledged; "but the outside might be improved. I have my own notion about the porch and the front door."
George turned to her, as if to ask what that notion might be.
Other friends followed—Brower among them.
He went about rather shyly, looking at the draperies andgrillesand mirrors. In the semi-gloom of the dining-room he threw his arm over Ogden's shoulder and looked into his eye with a friendly and affectionate smile.
"I never expected you to do it," he said. "You have left me as lonesome as the deuce."
"Ho it? Why not?"
"Because you're so careful; you always think things out—regular old Puritan sage."
"Oh, well," began George, with the air proper to a launching out into a broad and easy generalization, "aren't we New England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race? And why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself?"
"Oh, I know," said Brower, discontentedly; "that's all right, up to a certain point."
Others came, among them the Valentines.
"And how do you like your new house?" asked Mrs. Valentine, effusively. She addressed Jessie exclusively; with her everything went in the female line. "We are new converts too, you know—just over from the West Side. We are very much pleased, aren't we, Adrian?"
Her husband gave his corroborative little bow. "We were being left rather aside, over there," he admitted. "And take the South Side, for that matter. Business is walking right over them, and the whole section is in a state of mild panic from the Courts to Oakwood Boulevard. Yes, we're safe and quiet, and settled to stay." Still others came, among them Cornelia Tillinghast Brainard. She called frequently, she usually brought her husband with her, and she never failed to walk him all around the Ogdens' neighborhood. Her favorite time was Sunday afternoon; then she took him along the Lake Shore Drive and through all the adjacent streets, with the full benefit of daylight.
Cornelia now had command over a good seven hundred thousand dollars, and she was arming for the social fray. She meant to bang her shield against the shields of other amazons. The gladiator must come to the arena, and the centre of the arena seemed to be somewhere near the water-works tower. If Burton was going to put seventy or eighty thousand dollars into a house, the site of it must not be too far away from this point.
"I expect I shall cut a pretty wide swath," Cornelia acknowledged to herself.
Jessie had her receptions through November; her intimates appeared at these as well, and so did many of her more formal acquaintances.
On one of these occasions George, having left the bank early, after a light day, hurried home, dressed himself, and hastened down to the parlor. Its contracted space was beflowered and belighted, and quite a little throng of ladies were circulating and chatting there. Mrs. Floyd and Miss Wilde were among them; so were Mrs. Ogden and Kittie; so were Mrs. Valentine and Mrs. Atwater.
His wife hurried up to him; her cheeks were flushed and her large eyes burned brightly.
"If you had only been three minutes sooner! She has just gone. She was telling me why she hadn't been able to come to the wedding. I wanted you to meet her so much."
"Who is this?"
"Cecilia Ingles."
"There is such a person, then?"
"Why, George, what do you mean? Of course there is, and she was just as nice to me as she could be."
"'How well it's done!' she said to him."
"Why shouldn't she have been? I see you call her Cecilia. Are you as intimate as that?"
"Everybody calls her Cecilia. See, Mrs. Atwater is trying to catch your eye."
A tall and rather stately woman of thirty-five was standing in the doorway; she seemed finished—in profile, figure, and carriage. "How well it's done," she said to him; "who is the presiding genius?"
"My wife's mother, I fancy." He turned and drew her attention to the rustling of Mrs. Bradley's black silk.
"Ah!" she said indifferently, and turned away.
He had been unable to apprehend the simple costliness of his questioner's dress, and he only half wondered how, in a dozen quiet words, she had conveyed the impression of an expert addressing a beginner; but he could not refrain from asking himself if there was a slight here on Mrs. Bradley. He looked at the old lady again. She was moving about with the greatest show of confidence and good-will. No thought of anything called "differences" had entered her head. She did not believe that anybody would want to slight her or that anybody could. She had come on the ground in the early days of simple friendliness, and perhaps she was too old to apprehend that anything different had developed in the meanwhile. She certainly seemed to need no defence, and George was assuredly in no position to offer any.
"Cecilia has gone off and left me," Mrs. Atwater resumed; "careless girl!" They were half-sisters, and Mrs. Atwater was several years the elder. The Atwaters and the Ingleses ran as a kind of four-in-hand. The rich sister had married a poor man, and the poor sister had married a rich man, and they all went along at the same pace. It was a somewhat rapid pace. "I'm going to see what Mrs. Floyd can do for me; I dare say she has a spare seat."
His wife caught at Mrs. Atwater and bade her adieu with effusion. Did Jessie regard it as a feat and a triumph to have secured her presence? So it seemed to Jessie's husband.
The last of these little receptions was disposed of, and the honeymoon drew to its close. Quiet succeeded this introductory flurry to married life, and George now took occasion to lay a steady hand upon the throbbings of the "pocket-nerve."
His apprehension of any suffering in this part of his financial anatomy was, indeed, largely anticipatory; it was not that the nerve had been roughly touched, but that it soon might be. He had no tendency towards a retrospective study of the journal-and-ledger aspects of his courtship. He had been spared the expense of the wedding-journey that Jessie had planned by the unaccountable countable veto of Brainard. And the remuneration of St. Asaph's choir and kindred matters had fallen to his wife's father to arrange. But, all the same, many small indications arose to make it worth while for him to remember that he was a young man on a moderate salary and that most of his available means were badly tied up.
He noticed that his wife was developing a disdain of the public conveyances; a carriage was sometimes required of afternoons, and invariably of evenings when dances or theatre-going might be the matter in hand. She was also cultivating her taste for flowers; she had employed them rather lavishly at her receptions (in conjunction with her mandolin-players), and her appreciation of them kept equal pace with the advancing coldness of the weather and their own advancing cost. She also betrayed a ravenous taste for the exasperating superfluities of house-furnishing, and his bills for things needful were attended by a train of little accounts for things quite worse than useless.
"Oh, well, we shall be fitted out pretty soon," he sighed; and he saw his studious face reflected from among the clutteredbibelotsof his mantelpiece.
The point of completion as regarded the interior was finally reached, and his wife's intentions as to the exterior presently developed. She accompanied him out into the vestibule one morning, and stood at the head of the steps to bid him good-by.
"These doors are awfully shabby and old-fashioned," she declared. "Don't you suppose the landlord would put in new ones?"
"I'm quite sure he wouldn't. I wouldn't in his place."
"Well, we have taken this house for a year and a half, and are likely to take it again for a year or two longer. Why couldn't we fix things up ourselves? The entrance counts more, really, than anything else."
"That might be thought about."
"Yes, indeed. If Mary Munson is coming to see me, I want things as nice as they have everything."
Mary Munson was of the Louisville family that had entertained Jessie Bradley at Old Point Comfort. It presently transpired that she was under like obligations to many other acquaintances of her girlhood.
"I must pay them up," she explained. "Besides, I need company—all alone here during the day, and mamma away off there in the country."
The succession of Mary Munsons lasted, indeed, through into spring. Blowers, carriages, and matinee-tickets doubled up finely, and the hideous mien of the caterer was seen in connection with frequent lunches.
"I spoke to Mr. Atwater to-day about the front of the house," she said to him one evening towards the close of dinner. "Maggie didn't quite get around to pudding to-day," she went on, as the dessert came in, "so I sent out for this ice-cream. Take some of these lady-fingers with it."
"To Atwater?"
"Yes. Frances wanted me to go up with her and see the drawings for the front of their house. It's going to be lovely. He had some special little drawings for the outside doors, and things like that. He's got beautiful taste."
"I know he has."
"I asked him to design some doors for us."
"You did?"
"Yes. He said he had a new idea that he'd like to try."
"You must get your landlord to pass on that. He might not like the new idea."
"Think not?"
"He might object. It would all come on his hands in the end."
"We'd better go on with it, don't you think?"
"But don't let it be anything too unusual or too elaborate." Architects, he understood, generally charged a commission on the cost of the work; so much per cent.—five, he had heard. "We don't want to go in too deep."
They left the table and sauntered slowly into the parlor—the drawing-room, Jessie called it. The standing lamp sent out a broad glare from under its shade of crinkled yellow paper, and the floor of the room burned with a dull and unaccustomed red—the red of a handsome Turkish rug.
"Ah, what's this?" exclaimed George.
"I picked it up to-day," she said; "it was so pretty and just the thing for this room. Cecilia called it a great bargain—she knows all about rugs."
"Then you have been shopping with Mrs. Ingles?"
"Well, she was getting a few things. She said that sixty dollars was little enough for it."
"Sixty dollars! Did you pay for it?"
"I had it charged."
"Charged?"
"Yes; wasn't that right? Why, George, even poor mamma, away out there in Hinsdale, has her account at Field's."
The drawings for the embellishment of the house on Walton Place were undertaken by Atwater, and their scope broadened under the artist's hands. George, at his wife's request, took the elevator one noon and went up to the roof to see them.
In Atwater's absence he was received by the head draughtsman. The scheme had widened, as such schemes will; there were suggestions for the porch and for new hand—rails. There was also a drawing for a cornice in harmony.
"Urn," said George, thoughtfully. "This is all very handsome."
At about the same time that work on the Ogden house began, the work on the plans for the Floyd house received a check. This check was due to the first Western trip of Winthrop C. Floyd, treasurer of the Massachusetts Brass Company. He came on a general visit of inspection.
The morning after his arrival he sat in the office of the Chicago branch; he had come down with Mrs. Floyd and Claudia. His keen and quiet eye ran over the furnishings of the place. He was a bachelor of forty; he was dressed simply but elegantly—he was completelycomme il faut, except for his muddy shoes, which seemed to trouble him.
"Well, Walworth," he said, with the manner of an elder brother and of an official whose dictum had weight, "you are pretty well fixed up out here—better than the home office, in fact."
"Have to be," returned the other. "Down East everybody knows the company; you could do business in a coal-shed if you wanted to. Here it's different. People don't know us from a hole in the ground; they go by what they see."
"Do you use all these calls and things?"
The wall was set with electrical devices for calling boys from everywhere for everything.
"Sometimes. Anyway it looks as if we did, and that helps business."
Little Claudia came creeping up to his desk.
"When are you going to begin, papa? I've come down to see you do it."
"Do what, my dear?"
"Make money. You said you did it here. When are you going to begin?"
Winthrop swung his chair towards the window and looked out at the driving rain and at the crowds of vehicles and passengers in the filthy streets below.
"Yes," he said, under his breath; "when are you going to begin?" Then aloud, "What a beastly hole! Is there no government here?"
"Precious little for a million and a half of people, and precious bad what there is."
"A million and a half? Nonsense!"
"Why nonsense? There's the census, and there's the regular annual increase."
Winthrop favored his brother with a stare of frank curiosity. Walworth had spoken with some warmth; he seemed disposed to throw an undue ardor into his defence of his adopted home—a city where quality seemed to count for less than quantity, and where the "prominent" citizen made the "eminent" citizen a superfluity. Then, too, Winthrop coupled with the earnest lines in his brother's forehead a slightly dingy necktie under his brother's chin. He observed, moreover, in the polishing of the shoe which Walworth, for greater emphasis, was beating on the carpet, a neglect of the heel in favor of the toe. And there were several other indications of a growing carelessness in dress.
"Well, Walworth," he remarked, "you are getting acclimated, I guess."
"Not to this sort of thing. Yes, there's a million and a half of us here, and this little quarter of a square mile is probably the most crowded and the most active of any on the globe, and yet it isn't found worth while to keep it clean, or even decent, small as it is. On days like this you feel as if you just wanted to remove the inhabitants and annex the whole place to the Stock-yards."
Mrs. Floyd paused in the adjustment of her bedraggled skirts and looked up fiercely.
"Why remove the inhabitants?" she inquired.
"Frances!" called her husband.
"Why, indeed?" asked Winthrop. "I never saw such a beastly rabble in my life."
"Nor I," she cried. All her smouldering resentment against the town broke out with the appearance of a new Eastern ally.
"Except in Madrid or Naples." Winthrop had travelled in his younger days; he never made these European comparisons except under extreme provocation.
"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd, plaintively.
"Because there's no standard of manners—no resident country gentry to provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What little culture we have in the country generally we find principally in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."
He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he admitted further, "to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to live it in such a place as this!"
But pity was not an important factor in Winthrop's Western mission. The Chicago office was costing too much and earning too little. There was to be a general reduction and scaling-down; the most important part of Winthrop's baggage was the pruning-knife.
He remained a week. He used the knife pretty thoroughly. He snipped Atwater's plans for Walworth's house into very small pieces. He left Walworth in a great state of depression—a depression deeper than any he had felt since his failure in coffee and spices.
His last evening in Chicago he spent in Walworth's library. It was a sober little room, and Walworth was the soberest man in it. His wife made only an occasional emergence from her unquiet silence; she no longer looked on Winthrop as an ally. The Fairchilds were there, and the Ogdens dropped in during the course of the evening. Fairchild and Winthrop did most of the talking.
Winthrop's sensibilities had now lost their keenest edge; the weather had improved, and the general aspect of things was a little less disgusting. He listened to Fairchild with the cautious reserve of a maturity that was accustomed to meet elderly strangers. He acknowledged, too, that the city was a big fact, and perhaps a more complicated fact than, he had imagined.
"You have seen the foundations," Fairchild said to him. The old gentleman lay back in his chair and spoke in a quiet and dispassionate tone. "It has taken fifty years to put them in, but the work is finally done and well done. And now we are beginning to build on these foundations. We might have put up our building first and then put in the underpinning afterwards. That is a common way, but ours will be found to have its advantages."
"I dare say," admitted Winthrop; "but you have made an awful muss doing it."
"Well," rejoined Fairchild, "you may look at the external aspect of things, which is distressing enough, I acknowledge, or you may consider the people themselves, who are perhaps the real essential."
"Winthrop finds them rather distressing too." It was Walworth who spoke; his voice came in a muffled tone from the darkest comer of the room.
"What have we done to him?" demanded Jessie Ogden, quickly. "Haven't we received him well?"
Winthrop had no ground for individual complaint, and he hastened to make this clear. Personally, he had been made a great deal of. He was rather a large figure at home, and he naturally grew larger still the farther he travelled West.
"I don't think it can be denied," pursued Fairchild, tranquilly, "that new-comers are pretty well received here, whether they come to stay or to pass on or to go back. All that a man has to do, in order to insure good treatment, is to put a certain valuation on himself. That done, the more he claims, the more he receives; we take him at his own figure. The more I think of it, the more I am astonished at so much humility among people who have accomplished such great results. Commercially, we feel our own footing; socially, we are rather abashed by the pretensions that any new arrival chooses to make. We are a little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of each other."
"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that. Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."
"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of watching and waiting for cues—people of plain origin who are beginning to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke like a princess of the blood-royal.
"That is the point," said Fairchild. "Individually, we may be of a rather humble grade of atoms, but we are crystallizing into a compound that is going to exercise a tremendous force. To him that hath eyes this crystallization, this organization, is the great thing to note just now."
"I acknowledge to have seen the ferment of activity, as they call it," said Winthrop.
"You may have seen the boiling of the kettle," returned Fairchild, "but you have hardly seen the force that feeds the flame. The big buildings are all well enough, and the big crowds in the streets, and the reports of the banks and railways and the Board of Trade. But there is something, now, beyond and behind all that."
"Let me tell Winthrop," broke in Mrs. Floyd. "Since I can't take him to our club, I must bring the club to him. At our last meeting"—there was a sub-acid relish in all this—"it developed that the present intellectual situation in Chicago is precisely that of Florence in the days of the-the—"
"Medici," suggested Ogden.
"Yes, the Medici," said Ann Wilde, loudly. She looked at him with a sharp aversion; he seemed to be taking part in her sister's joke. "That's just exactly what my paper said; the Florence of the Medici after the dispersal of the Greek scholars from Constantinople by the Turks."
"Oh, murder!" said Walworth to himself; "what will Ann rig up next?"
"The Florentines of that day," pursued his sister-in-law, "didn't know so very much, perhaps, but they were bound to learn, and that was the main thing. And it's just so here."
"Quite right," said Fairchild; "we know what there is to learn, and we are determined to master it. Our Constantinoples are Berlin and London and the rest—yes, Boston, too; and all their learned exiles are flocking here to instruct us."
"And the books that are coming in!" cried Jessie Ogden. She was no great reader, and she spoke less as a student than as a Chicagoan—that is, she spoke more ardently than any student could have spoken. "Does the enemy know that four of the biggest buildings in this big city are built of books?"
"The new libraries," her husband explained—"the ones that are going to make us the literary centre."
"Dear me," said Winthrop, "are you expecting that?"
"And we expect to be the financial centre, and presently the political centre, too—Chicago, plus New York and Washington."
"And where is Boston?"
"A little behind," said Fairchild. "New York is the main-mast yet; Chicago ranks as foremast—at present; while Boston is—"
"The mizzen-mast," completed Ogden.
"And we Chicago folks stand at the bow," chimed in his wife, "and sniff the first freshness of the breeze."
"Yes," said Winthrop, in satirical assent; "the 'Windy City.'"
"Don't abuse our wind," cried Mrs. Floyd; "we should all die like flies without it."
"That's so," assented her husband. "The wind is our only scavenger."
"I see," said Winthrop. "If you can only be big you don't mind being dirty."
Then, half in amusement, half in amaze, he concentrated his attention on the banker. "Can it be that there are really any such expectations here as these?" He addressed Fairchild exclusively—the oldest and most sedate of the circle.
"Why not?" returned Fairchild. "Does it seem unreasonable that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis?"
"And you personally—is this your own belief?"
Fairchild leaned back his fine old head on the padded top of his chair and looked at his questioner with the kind of pity that has a faint tinge of weariness. His wife sat beside him silent, but with her hand on his, and when he answered she pressed it meaningly; for to the Chicagoan—even the middle-aged female Chicagoan—the name of the town, in its formal, ceremonial use, has a power that no other word in the language quite possesses. It is a shibboleth, as regards its pronunciation; it is a trumpet-call, as regards its effect. It has all the electrifying and unifying power of a college yell.
"Chicago is Chicago," he said. "It is the belief of all of us. It is inevitable; nothing can stop us now."
But Winthrop Floyd was glad to withdraw himself on the morrow from his temporary enlistment—or drafting—under the vociferous banner of the Western capital. He did all in his power, as well, to oppose its manifest destiny by transmitting to Walworth, immediately after his return to Boston, a full corporate confirmation of his own anathema against Walworth's office and house. The Chicago representative of the Massachusetts Brass Company was recommended to secure less expensive quarters at the earliest opportunity, and was directed to drop his architectural scheme forthwith.
Walworth at once adjusted matters with Atwater. The architect received his "reconsideration" with composure, but he was doubtless nettled to be balked in a work in which he had taken unusual personal interest, and he was also disappointed merely to be paid for his plans when he had looked for the fees that follow construction. These considerations may have had their influence on the account which he rendered a month later to the Ogdens—friends and relatives of the Floyds, and introduced, too, by them. This account was handed in much more promptly than is generally the case with an accredited client in other professions—the legal or the medical, let us say—and its final footing caused Ogden considerable consternation.
The account was mailed to the house instead of to the bank, and the stationery employed was such as to suggest a personal matter between gentlemen rather than a purely business matter between architect and client; and Ogden opened it under his wife's eyes to learn that design had cost him more than construction.
"Your drawings are more of an item than your porch itself," he said, rather faintly. "I shall have to step up there and see about it."
Late one afternoon Ogden drew down his desk-top, put on his street-coat, felt in his pocket to be sure that Atwater's tasteful memorandum was still there, and took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor. He had been as conscious of that memorandum all through the day as he would have been of a mustard-plaster. On taking it out and recreasing its immaculate folds he almost felt as if he were about to dispute a debt of honor.
Atwater was in, but he was completely taken up in radiating his careful affability upon some promising clients who wanted not only doors but the house that went with them. Ogden got no closer to him than to secure the attention of the clerk whose duty it was to mediate between the contractors and the plans they were to follow.
He was an alert, nervous young man, with a big shock of unruly hair and a pair of large, luminous eyes behind his hooked and shimmering spectacles. He ran his long, lean, inky fingers through his hair, and transferred his wide eyes from the memorandum to the man who had brought it in.
"No," he said presently; "it's all right—there's no mistake. Mr. Atwater took a good deal of interest in this work. He sketched out some of the drawings himself, to start with, and he even touched up a few of them to finish with."
"Touched up a few of them to finish with?" George repeated, inquiringly.
"Yes; he don't do that often. When he does, it makes a difference; it ought to."
The whole matter was coming to assume the aspect of a personal favor; it was a debt of honor, after all. The grocer, the upholsterer, and the rest of them might wait; it would give them time to learn the value of an elegant "presence" and the compelling force of personal acquaintance.
The doors, hung and paid for, swung open many times during the following winter and spring, to admit people whom, as his wife assured him, it was an advantage to know. He became conscious that she was actuated by motives quite different from his, and that she had a standard quite at variance from any that he himself would have set up. She strained for people that he would not have turned his hand for. Most of these had familiar names, and it sometimes seemed to him as if many of them had had their place in the social yearnings of Cornelia McNabb. Certainly, his wife's attitude was quite different from that of the Floyds, who had been disposed to pooh-pooh quietly almost everybody, and also from that of her own parents, who simply accepted the circle that chance and association had formed for them, and met everybody on the same dead level of good-will.
During Lent his wife arranged a small musicale; another Mary Munson had arrived—this time from Cincinnati. The names of the performers included only those of amateurs of the better sort—since she knew that good professional services were quite beyond her reach; yet chairs, awning, and refreshments called for the expense of outside supervision. The morning before it she put a slip of paper into his hands.
"You are going right past theTribune.Won't you just leave this with them?"
It was an announcement of her musicale. It included a list of names—not those of the performers, but those of the listeners.
"All old friends—in print," her husband commented. "What do you care for these people? Why don't you ask the Fairchilds?—they're quiet, but they're nice; and they like music. Why don't you have your father and mother? I haven't seen either of them for a month."
His wife writhed delicately in protest. Her winter had increased her paleness. The blue veins were bluer in her temples; her large eyes looked larger yet, and there were faint circles under them.
"Well, Cecilia doesn't fancy Mrs. Fairchild very much, in the first place—"
George bit his lip. By the curious workings of chance he had never yet seen Cecilia Ingles, but he no longer joked about her non-actuality. She appeared to be looming up as the great power in his household.
"—and besides," she proceeded, "who would recognize their names if they saw them in print?"
George stood like a looker-on at a transformation-scene, before whose eyes the gauze veils are lifted one by one in slow succession.
"Oh, then," he said, and less in jest than in earnest, "there is no use in enjoying ourselves unless we put it in the papers, and no use of putting it in the papers unless we can give a list of names, and no—"
"Now, George!" She flushed with vexation.
"—and no use of putting in a list of names unless they are names that will be generally recognized. Well, thatdoescut out the Fairchilds, and your poor mother, too. And mine." He looked at her narrowly.
"Now, George," she cried again, "how can you be so disagreeable? You know papa and mamma wouldn't care anything for this; nor your mother, either. And it isn't the only thing I'm ever going to have. I can ask her yet, though, if you want me to."
"Oh, fiddlesticks! Only don't lose your head. Here; give me that precious notice. Perhaps, before long, people who are after names will be just as anxious to get yours."
"You silly boy!" she cried, striking him lightly across the shoulder. But she was pleased and gratified by this, and she was not able to conceal it.
Following Lent there was the usual social aftermath. For Mrs. George Milward Ogden the major stress of the season was over, but she gave a few luncheons, and she went to a good many others. These little functions sent dozens of ladies tripping through the raw winds and the slushy streets of spring. The lake, weltering under the gray skies of March, dashed its vicious sprays high over the sea-wall, and sent its cruel blasts gashingly through the streets that ended on its confines. And at such signals asthma and bronchitis and pneumonia dug their clutching fingers into the throats and lungs of thousands of tender sufferers.
Jessie's supplementary doings were of too informal a nature to demand the entrance of outside help, but at the same time they were of a kind to lay the maximum strain upon the small and simply organized household which was all that her husband was as yet able to maintain. About every so often the domestic tension overtook the breaking-point. An interregnum would follow, and then a change of dynasty. The blame for these economic hitches George was obliged to distribute with an even hand. He acknowledged frankly the mere muddishness of most of the peasant material that oozed in and out of his kitchen; but he was also obliged to recognize the utter tactlessness of his wife and the folly of her unguarded exhibitions of conscious superiority. She had never before been able to issue directions to two servants, and she had never acquired the practical experience necessary for the control of even one. She referred to her servants in their own hearingasservants; and this did not seem to her as inconsiderate from the point of humanity or unwise as a mere matter of policy.
The burden of this fell principally upon her husband. He was obliged now and then to temporize with an indignant cook to secure a dinner for the evening; on one occasion he employed all his finesse to effect without scandal the removal of a frantic chamber-maid; and he became more familiarly known to the intelligence offices than he had ever expected to be. His wife was manifestly incapable of keeping a house, and he was committed to housekeeping for a year to come.
March passed and April came. One evening they sat together in their little parlor. The weather outside was raw and rainy, and not all of its chill could be kept out by the grate-fire over which Jessie was cowering and shivering. She wore a fleecy wrap on which her thin fingers took a sinuous clutch, and she was nursing a cold whose sniffling discomfort seemed passing into an obstinate cough. She was running over the newspaper carelessly.
"I see Mayme Brainard's 'mother has just died," she said presently. "'On the eighth of April, at her residence'—and all that—'Abigail Brainard, aged fifty-six years.' Wasn't she any older than that? Well, I suppose not. No great change for her, is it?"
"What did she die of?"
"Oh, it was her lungs. It's a wonder that anybody lives through these springs. I can't think why we ever got so close to the lake as this. I don't feel sure of getting through another winter here myself."
She leaned forward to stir the fire, and then lay back, coughing.
"I suppose they'll let Mayme come home, now—for the funeral, anyway. I wonder if shell bring the baby; he swears he won't see it. Cornelia says it's a pretty little thing—Abbie was down there a month ago."
George stared at the fire thoughtfully, and reached mechanically for the poker.
"I don't know how they will feel, now, about staying in that house," she went on. "Cornelia wants to move the whole family over here, but Abbie won't listen to her. I don't know whether she likes her own part of town, but she seems to have taken a strong dislike to this. Anyway, she has never come nearme, for all you helped them at her brother's wedding. Cornelia appears to think everything of her, though, and I guess she likes Cornelia quite a little. Funny, isn't it, that those two—Goodness, George, don't knock the fire all to pieces. Here; let me have it."
She took the poker from him.
"Dear me, what a miserable flue!" She looked at him discontentedly, as she settled back wearily in her big chair. "And we've really got this house on our hands for a whole year more?" She seemed to feel in this one year the weight of eternity.
"That's what the lease says," he responded, soberly. "What do you say?" his eyes seemed to ask.
She spoke her thoughts presently and at some length. She proposed giving up the house on the first of May. Was it a passing caprice or a serious desire? he wondered.