"You know that isn't true. If you will only meet this trouble honorably, like the man I loved and married, I will stay, and be with you always, no matter what comes. Will you?"
"So you want to make conditions?"
"Just one."
"You had better go, then."
She turned her face to her pillow and wept in the dreary realization that she could touch him in no way. The next day she telephoned her mother to come to her, and when Mrs. Spellman arrived, she said quietly:—
"Mother, I am going to Vermont, to the farm. It may be for a long time. Will you come with me and the boys?"
Mrs. Spellman, who was a wise woman, took her daughter's face between her hands and kissed her.
"Of course," she answered simply.
That day they made the necessary preparations for themselves and the children. When the architect returned from his office and saw what was going forward, he said to his wife:—
"So you are determined to leave me?"
"Yes, I must go unless—"
"I have seen Everett. They aren't going to do anything. I told you it was all bluff on Pemberton's part."
She hesitated, uncertain what to think, and then she asked searchingly:—
"Why aren't they going to do anything? What does it mean?"
"Oh, I guess the others have brought Pemberton to his senses," he replied evasively. "At any rate, it's blown over, as I told you it would."
"No, Francis! It isn't made right yet. You would be different if it were. Somehow, from the beginning, when first there was talk of this school, it has all been wrong. I hate it! I hate it! And the trouble goes back of that, too. It starts from the very beginning, when we were married, and began to live together. We have always done as the others do all around us, and it is all wrong. I see it now. We can never go on again in the same way—"
"What way? I don't understand you in the least," he interrupted.
"Why, just earning and spending money, trying to get more and more, trying to get things. It's spoiled your work; it's spoiled you; and I have been blind and weak to let us drift on like the others, getting and spending, struggling to get ahead, until it has come to this, to this,—something dreadful that you will not tell me,—something base that you have done to make money. Oh, how low and mean it is! How mean it makes men and women!"
"That's life," he retorted neatly.
"No, no, never! That wasn't what you and I thought before we married. I wish you were a clerk, a laborer, a farm-hand,—anything, so that we could be honest, and think of something besides making money. Let us begin again, from the very beginning, and live like the common people from day to day—live for your work, for the thing you do. Then we should be happy. Never this way, not if you make millions, millions!"
"Well, I can't see why you are set on going away," the architect answered, content to see her mind turn from the practical question.
"Tell me!" she exclaimed passionately. "Tell me! Is it all right with that building? With that contractor? Are you honest? Are you an honest man? Tell me, and I will believe you."
"I have said all that I am going to say about that matter," he answered stubbornly.
"Then, Francis, I go!"
The next afternoon the architect met his family at the train and saw them start, punctiliously doing all the little things that he could to make their journey comfortable. He referred to their going as a short vacation trip, and joked with the boys about the farm. Just before the train started, while Mrs. Spellman settled the children in their section, Helen walked up and down the platform with him. As the signal for starting was given she raised her veil, revealing the tears in her eyes, and leaning toward him kissed him. She put into his hands a little card, which she had been holding clasped in her palm. He raised his hat and stood on the platform until the long train had pulled out of the shed. Then he glanced at the card in his hand, which read:—
"I shall wait for you to come to me when you really want me. H."
He crushed the card in his fist and threw it into the roadbed.
As the architect had said to his wife, nothing of a serious nature was to happen. In the end Everett Wheeler settled the matter. After the first gust of passion it was clear enough that the trustees could not have a scandal about the building. If the contractor were prosecuted, the architect, the donor's nephew, would be involved; and, besides, it was plain that Wheeler could not continue as trustee and assist in ruining his cousin. When it came to this point, Pemberton, not wishing to embarrass his associates, resigned.
Hart was to continue nominally as the architect for the school, but Trimble was to have actual charge of the building henceforth, with orders to complete the work as soon as possible according to the original specifications. At first Graves had blustered and threatened to sue if certain vouchers issued by Hart were not paid, but Wheeler "read the riot act" to him, and he emerged from the lawyer's office a subdued and fearful man. The calm lawyer had a long arm, which reached far into the city, and he frightened the contractor so thoroughly that he was content to be allowed to complete the contract. Whatever parts of his work had been done crookedly, he was to rectify as far as was possible, and Trimble was to see that the construction which remained to be done came up to specification. As for the irrevocable, the bad work already accepted and paid for, the lawyer said nothing.
Thus the man of the world, the perfectly cynical lawyer, had his way, which was, on the whole, the least troublesome way for all concerned, and avoided scandal. He was the calm one of the men involved: it was his business to make arrangements with human weakness and frailty and "to avoid scandal." That at all costs!
He made his cousin no long reproaches.
"We've nipped your claws, young man," he admonished him.
He was disappointed in Jackson. Privately he considered him a dunderheaded ass, who had weakly given himself as a tool to the contractor. In his dealings with men, he had known many rascals, more than the public was aware were rascals, and he respected some of them. But they were the men, who, once having committed themselves to devious ways, used other men as their tools. For little, foolish rascals, who got befogged and "lost their nerve," he had only contempt.
"How's your wife?" he asked bruskly. "That was a dirty blow she got here the other day—straight between the eyes. I never thought she'd come in here that afternoon."
"Helen has gone East with the boys and her mother,—to that place in Vermont. She hasn't been feeling well lately, and she needs the rest."
"Oh, um, I see," the lawyer commented, comprehending quite well what this journey meant. He was a little surprised that Helen should desert her husband at this crisis. In his philosophy it was the part of a woman who had character to "back her husband," no matter what he might do, so long as he was faithful to his marriage oath. Jackson had been a fool, like so many men; there was trouble in the air, and she had run away. He would not have thought it of her.
Hart swallowed his humiliation before his cousin. He was much relieved at the outcome of the affair; it released him from further responsibility for the school, which had become hateful to him. He was chiefly concerned, now, lest the difficulty with the trustees should become known and hurt his reputation, especially lest the men in his office, to whom he was an autocrat and a genius, should suspect something. He began at once to push the work on the last details for the hotel, with the hope of forcing Graves to deliver another block of the "stock," which he argued was due him for his commission.
Now that the matter had been quietly adjusted without scandal, he was inclined to feel more aggrieved than ever over his wife's departure. "She might have waited to see how it turned out," he repeated to himself, obstinately refusing her the right to judge himself except where his acts affected her publicly. For some time he kept up with acquaintances the fiction of Helen's "visit in the East"; he even took a room at the Shoreham Club for the hunting season. But he soon fancied that the people at the club were cool to him; fewer engagements came his way; no one referred to the great building, which had given him so much reputation; the men he had known best seemed embarrassed when he joined them,—men, too, who would not have winked an eye at a "big coup." The women soon ceased to ask about Helen; it was getting abroad that there was "something wrong with the Jackson Harts." For it had leaked, more or less, as such matters always will leak. One man drops a word to his neighbor, and the neighbor's wife pieces that to something she has heard or surmised.
So before the season was over Hart gave up his room at the club, where his raw self-consciousness was too often bruised. Then, finding his empty house in the city insupportable, he went to live with his mother in his uncle's old home. There was a lull in building at this time, due to the high prices of materials, but fortunately he could keep himself busy with the hotel and a large country house in the centre of the state, which often made an excuse for him to get away from the city.
Helen wrote to him from time to time, filling her letters with details about the boys. She suggested that they should return to the city to visit their grandmother during the Christmas holidays. She never referred to the situation between them, apparently considering that he had it in his power to end it when he would. He was minded often when he received these letters to write her sternly in reply, setting forth the wrong which in her obstinacy she was doing to herself and their children. He went over these imaginary letters in his idle moments, working out their phrases with great care; they had a fine, dignified ring to them, the tolerant and condoning note. But when he tried to write he did not get very far with them. Sometimes he thought of writing simply, "I love you very much, Nell; I want you back; can you not forgive me?" But he knew well that he could not merely say, "I have done wrong, forgive me," if he would affect that new will in his wife, so gently stern. Even if he could bring himself to confess his dishonesty, that would not suffice. There was another and deeper gulf between them, one that he could not clearly fathom. "From the very beginning we have lived wrongly," she had cried that last time. "We can never go on again in the same way." ... No, he was not ready to accept her judgment of him.
Thus the winter wore away, forlornly, and early in April the first hint of spring came into the dirty city. On a Sunday afternoon the architect went to call on his old friend, Mrs. Phillips, who was one of the few persons who gave him any comfort these days. He found her cutting the leaves of an art journal.
"There's an article here about that German—the one we are all trying to help, you know," she said, giving him a hand. "Yes, I have taken to patronizing the arts; it's pleasanter than charities. I have graduated from philanthropy. And you have to do something nowadays, if you want to keep up."
She spoke with her usual bluntness, and then added a little cant in a conventional tone:—
"And I think those of us who have the time and the position should do something to help these poor artists who are struggling here in this commercial city. People won't buy their pictures.... But what is the matter with you? You look as if you had come to the end of everything. I suppose it's the old story. That cold Puritan wife of yours has gone for good. It's no use pretending to me; I knew from the start how it would be."
"But I don't know whether she has gone for good," he muttered.
"You might as well make up your mind to it. Two people like you two can't get along together."
"It isn't that," he protested. "We have been very happy until lately."
"Well, don't mope, whatever you do. Either go and eat your humble pie, or arrange for a divorce. You can't go on this way much longer. Oh, I know all your troubles, of course. Hasn't that pleasant brother-in-law of mine been in here rehearsing that story about the school,—well, what do you call it? And he seems to hold me responsible for the mess, because I liked you, and gave you your first chance. I didn't corrupt you, did I?"
The architect moved uneasily. The widow's levity displeased him, and roused his anger afresh against the trustees.
"I don't know what rot Judge Phillips has been telling you, but—"
"Come," she interrupted him in his defence, "sit down here by me and let me talk to you. You know me well enough to see that I don't care what the judge says. But I have something to say to you."
She made a place for him on the lounge, and tossed him a pillow to make him comfortable. Then, dropping her review on the floor, she locked her fingers behind her head and looked searchingly at the man.
"I don't know what you have been up to, and I don't care. Harrison always said I hadn't any moral sense, and I suppose I haven't of his sort. You should have had your uncle's money, or a good part at any rate, and it's natural that you should try to get all you can of it now, I say. But you must have been stupid to let that old square-toes Pemberton get in your way."
This cynical analysis of the situation was not precisely salve to the architect's wound. He was not ready to go as far as the woman lightly sketched. But he listened, for the sake of her sympathy, if for no other reason.
"Now, as I said, there's no use moping around here. Pick right up and get out for a few months. When you come back, people won't remember what was the matter. Or, if you still find it chilly, you can go to New York and start there. It's no use fighting things out and all that. Bury them."
She paused to give emphasis to her suggestion,
"Let your wife play by herself for a while; it will do her good. When she hears that you are in Europe, having a good time, she'll begin to see she's been silly.... I am going over, too. I've got to rent Forest Manor this summer. That Harris man went wrong the last time he advised me, and got me into all sorts of trouble,—industrials. Venetia pensions me! She won't go abroad, but she kindly gives me what she thinks I ought to spend for the summer and advises me to go over. I sail on theKronprinz, the 20th."
The invitation to him was implied in the pause that followed. The gleam in the man's eyes showed his interest in her suggestion, but he made no reply.
"There's nothing to do in your business just now, as you said, and you should give these talky people a chance to forget. We could have a good time over there. You might buy some things and sell them here, and make your expenses that way easily. You know all the nice little places, and if Maida and her husband come over, we could take an auto and do them. Think of Italy in May!"
She unclasped her hands and leaned forward, resting one arm on the cushioned back of the lounge, and thus revealing a very pretty forearm and wrist. Two little red spots of enthusiasm glowed in her cheeks. What life and vitality at forty-three! the man thought, smiling appreciatively into her face. For the first time she moved him emotionally. He was lonely, miserable, and thoroughly susceptible to such charm as she had.
"It would be awfully pleasant," he said at last, leaning toward her, "to get away from this place, with you!" ...
His hand slipped to her beautiful arm. At that moment Venetia came into the room, unnoticed by the two on the lounge. She stood for a little while watching them, and then, with a smile on her expressive lips, noiselessly withdrew.
"Well, wire for a passage to-morrow," Mrs. Phillips murmured....
There was nothing more, nothing that would have offended the most scrupulous; for the architect, at least, was essentially healthy-minded. In a lonely moment he might satisfy the male need for sympathy by philandering with a pretty woman, who soothed his bruised egotism. But he did not have that kind of weakness—the woman weakness. A few minutes later he was leaving the room, saying as he looked into Louise Phillips's brown eyes:—
"Yes, I think you are right. I need to get away from this town for a while and rest my nerves."
"When you come back people will be only too glad to see you. They don't remember their scruples long."
"There isn't anything for them to worry over."
"TheKronprinz, then."
In the hall he met Venetia, who was slowly coming down the stairs, wrapped in a long cloak. She hesitated a moment, then continued to descend.
"Hello, Venetia!" Hart called out.
She swept down the remaining steps without replying, her eyes shining hotly. As she passed him, she turned and shot one word full in his face,—"Cad!"
The girl's word was like a blow in the face. It toppled over any self-complacency that had survived these last disintegrating months. Was he as mean a thing as that? So little that a girl whom he had always treated with jovial condescension might insult him, unprovoked? Probably others, all those people whose acquaintance he valued, had a like contempt for him, which they refrained, conventionally, from expressing. At first he did not resent their judgment; he was too much dazed.
In this plight he walked south on the avenue, without minding where he was going, and then turned west, automatically, at Twenty-second Street, walking until he came to the region of dance halls and flashy saloons. In this unfamiliar neighborhood there was a glare of light from the great electric signs which decorated the various places of resort, and the street was crowded with men and women, who loitered about the saloons and dance halls, enjoying the fitful mildness of the April evening. At this early hour there were more women than men on the street, and their dresses of garish spring colors, their loud, careless voices, and air of reckless ease, reminded the architect faintly, very faintly, of the boulevards he had loved in his happy student years. In this spot of the broad American city coarse license flourished, and the one necessity for him who sought forgetfulness was the price of pleasure. The scene distracted his mind for the moment from the sting of the girl's contempt.
He entered one of the larger saloons on the corner of an avenue, and sat down at a small table. When the waiter darted to him, and, impudently leering across the table into his face, asked, "What's yours, gent?" he answered quickly: "Champagne! Bring me a bottle and ice." His heavy spirit craved the amber wine, which, in association at least, heartens man. At the tables all about him sat the women of the neighborhood, large-boned and heavy creatures, drinking beer by themselves, or taking champagne with stupid-looking rough men, probably buyers and sellers of stock at the Yards, which were not far away. The women had the blanched faces of country girls over whom the city has passed like the plates of a mighty roller. The men had the tan of the distant prairies, from which they had come with their stock. Their business over, the season's profit obtained, they had set themselves to deliberate debauch that should last for days,—as long as the "wad" held out and the brute lust in their bodies remained unquenched.
Presently the waiter returned with the heavy bottle and slopped some of the wine into a glass. The architect raised it and drank. It was execrable, sweetened stuff, but he drank the glass at a draught, and poured another and drank it. The girl's inexplicable insult swept over him afresh in a wave of anger. He should find a way somehow to call her to account....
"Say, mister, you don't want to drink all that wine by yourself, do you?"
A woman at the next table, who was sitting alone before an empty beer glass and smoking a cigarette, had spoken to him in a furtive voice.
"Come over, then," he answered, roughly pushing a chair to the table. "Here, waiter, bring another glass."
The woman slid, rather than walked, to the chair by his side, and drank the champagne like a parched animal. He ordered another bottle.
"Enjoying yourself?" she inquired politely, having satisfied her first thirst. "Been in the city long? I ain't seen you here at Dove's before."
He looked at her with languid curiosity. She recalled to him the memory of her Paris sisters, with whom he had shared many aconsommationin those blessed days that he had almost forgotten. But she had none of the sparkle, the human charm, of her Latin sisters. She was a coarse vessel, and he wondered at the men who sought joy in her.
"Where do you come from?" he demanded.
"Out on the coast. San Diego's my home. But I was in Philadelphia last winter. I guess I shall go back to the East pretty soon. I don't like Chicago much—it's too rough out here to suit me."
She found Chicago inferior! He laughed with the humor of the idea. It was a joke he should like to share with his respectable friends. They drank and talked while the evening sped, and he plied her with many questions in idle curiosity, touched with that interest in women of her class which most men have somewhere in the dregs of their natures. She chatted volubly, willing enough to pay for her entertainment.
As he listened to her, this creature of the swift instants, whose only perception was the moment's sensation, he grew philosophical. The other world, his proper world of care and painful forethought, faded from his vision. Here in Dove's place he was a thousand miles from the respectabilities in which he had his being. Here alone in the city one might forget them, and nothing mattered,—his troubles, his wife's judgment of him, the girl's contempt.
At last he had loosened that troublesome coil of things, which lately had weighed him down, and it seemed easy enough to cut himself free from it for good and walk the earth once more unhampered, like these, the flotsam of the city.
"Come! Let's go over to Grinsky's hall," the woman suggested, noticing the architect's silence, and seeing no immediate prospect of another bottle of wine. "We'll find something doing over there, sure."
But he was already tired of the woman; she offended his cultivated sensibilities. So he shook his head, paid for the wine, said good evening to her, and started to leave the place. She followed him, talking volubly, and when they reached the street she took his arm, clinging to him with all the weight of her dragging will.
"You don't want to go home yet," she coaxed. "You're a nice gentleman. Come in here to Grinsky's and give me a dance."
Her entreaties disgusted him. People on the street looked and smiled. At the bottom he was a thoroughly clean-minded American; he could not even coquette with debauch without shame and timidity. She and her class were nauseating to him, like evil-smelling rooms and foul sights. That was not his vice.
He paid for her admission to the dance-hall, dropped a dollar in her hand, and left her. Then where to go? How to pass the hours? He was at an utter loss what to do with himself, like all properly married, respectable men, when the domestic pattern of their lives is disturbed for any reason. So, vaguely, without purpose, he began to stroll east in the direction of the lake, taking off his hat to let the night wind cool his head. He found walking pleasant in the mild spring air, and when he came to the end of the street he turned south into a deserted avenue that was starred in the dark night by a line of arc lamps. It was a dull, respectable, middle-class district, quite unfamiliar to him, and he stared inquiringly at the monotonous blocks of brick houses and cheap apartment buildings. Here was the ugly, comfortable housing of the modern city, where lived a mass of good citizens,—clerks and small business men with their wives and children. He wondered vaguely if this was what his wife would have him come to, this dreary monotony of small homes, each one like its neighbor, where the two main facts of existence were shelter and food.
A wave of self-pity swept over him, and his thoughts returned to his old grievance: if Helen had stayed by him all would have been well. He wanted his children; he wanted his home, his wife, his neighbors, his little accustomed world of human relationships,—all as it had been before. And he blamed her for destroying his happiness, shutting his mind obstinately to any other consideration, unwilling to admit even to his secret self that his greed, his thirst for luxury, had aught to do with the case. He had striven with all his might, even as the bread winners in these houses strove daily, to get a point of vantage in the universal struggle. Doubtless these humble citizens had their modicum of content. But why should he, with his larger appetite, be condemned to their level? The idea was utterly repugnant to him, and gradually that heavy weight of depression, which the wine had temporarily lifted, pressed on his spirits.
He must have walked many blocks on this avenue between the monotonous small houses. In the distance beyond him, to the south, he saw a fiery glow on the soft heavens, which he took to be the nightly reflection from the great blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago. Presently as he emerged upon a populous cross street, the light seemed suddenly much nearer, and, unlike the soft effulgence from the blast furnaces, the red sky was streaked with black. On the corners of the street there was an unwonted excitement,—men gaping upward at the fiery cloud, then running eastward, in the direction of the lake. From the west there sounded the harsh gong of a fire-engine, which was pounding rapidly down the car tracks. It came, rocking in a whirlwind of galloping horses and swaying men. The crowd on the street broke into a run, streaming along the sidewalks in the wake of the engine.
The architect woke from his dead thoughts and ran with the crowd. Two, three, four blocks, they sped toward the lake, which curves eastward at this point, and as he ran the street became strangely familiar to him. The crowd turned south along a broad avenue that led to the park. Some one cried: "There it is! It's the hotel!" A moment more, and the architect found himself at the corner of the park opposite the lofty building, out of whose upper stories broad billows of smoke, broken by tongues of flame, were pouring.
There, in the corner made by the boulevard and the park, where formerly was the weedy ruin, rose the great building, which Graves had finished late in the winter, and had turned over to the hotel company. Its eight stories towered loftily above the other houses and apartment buildings in the neighborhood. The countless windows along the broad front gleamed portentously with the reflection from the flames above. At the west corner, overlooking the park, above a steep ascent of jutting bay windows, there floated a light blue pennon, bearing a name in black letters,—THE GLENMORE.
At first the architect scarcely realized that this building which was burning was Graves's hotel, his hotel. The excitement of the scene stupefied him. Already the police had roped off the streets beneath the fire, in which the crowd was thickening rapidly. From many points in the adjoining blocks came the shrill whistles of the throbbing engines, answering one another. The fire burned quietly aloft in the sky, while below there rose the clamor of excited men and screeching engines. The crowd grew denser every moment, and surged again and again nearer the building, packing solidly about the fire lines. Hart was borne along in the current.
"They've pulled the third alarm," one man said in his ear, chewing excitedly on a piece of gum. "There's more'n fifty in there yet!"
"They say the elevators are going still!" another one exclaimed.
"Where's the fire-escapes?"
"Must be on the rear or over by the alley. There ain't none this side, sure enough."
"Yes, they're in back," the architect said authoritatively.
He tried to think just where they were and where they opened in the building, but could not remember. A voice wailed dismally through a megaphone:—
"Look out, boys! Back!"
On the edge of the cornice appeared three little figures with a line of hose. At that height they looked like willing gnomes on the crust of a flaming world.
"Gee! Look at that roof! Look at it!"
The cry from the megaphone had come too late. Suddenly, without warning, the top of the hotel rose straight into the air, and from the sky above there sounded a great report, like the detonation of a cannon at close range. The roof had blown up. For an instant darkness followed, as if the flame had been smothered, snuffed out. Then with a mighty roar the pent-up gases that had caused the explosion ignited and burst forth in a broad sheet of beautiful blue flame, covering the doomed building with a crown of fire.
Hart looked for the men with the hose. One had caught on the sloping roof of a line of bay windows, and clung there desperately seven stories above the ground.
"He's a goner!" some one near him groaned.
Large strips of burning tar paper began to float above the heads of the crowd, causing a stampede. In the rush, Hart got nearer the fire lines, more immediately in front of the hotel, which irresistibly drew him closer. Now he could hear the roar of the flame as it swept through the upper stories and streamed out into the dark night. The fierce light illumined the silk streamer, which still waved from the pole at the corner of the building, untouched by the explosion. Across the east wall, under the cornice, was painted the sign: THE GLENMORE FAMILY HOTEL; and beneath, in letters of boastful size, FIREPROOF BUILDING. Tongues of flame danced over the words.
The policeman at the line pointed derisively to the legend with his billy.
"Now ain't that fireproof!"
"Burns like rotten timber!" a man answered.
It was going frightfully fast! The flames were now galloping through the upper stories, sweeping the lofty structure from end to end, and smoke had begun to pour from many points in the lower stories, showing that the fount of flame had its roots far down in the heart of the building. Vague reports circulated through the crowd: A hundred people or more were still in the hotel. All were out. Thirty were penned in the rear rooms of the sixth floor. One elevator was still running. It had been caught at the time of the explosion, etc.... For the moment the firemen were making their fight in the rear, and the north front was left in a splendid peace of silent flame and smoke—a spectacle for the crowd in the street.
Within the lofty structure, the architect realized vaguely, there was being enacted one of those modern tragedies which mock the pride and vanity of man. In that furnace human beings were fighting for their lives, or, penned in, cut off by the swift flames, were waiting in delirious fear for aid that was beyond the power of men to give them. A terrible horror clutched him. It was his building which was being eaten up like grass before the flame. He dodged beneath the fire line and began to run toward the east end, driven by a wild impulse that he could not control. He must do something,—must help! It was his building; he knew it from cornice to foundation; he might know how to get at those within! A policeman seized him roughly and thrust him back behind the line. He fought his way to the front again, while the dense crowd elbowed and cursed him. He lost his hat; his coat was half torn from his shoulders. But he struggled frantically forward.
"You here, Hart! What are you after?"
Some one stretched out a detaining hand and drew him out of the press. It was Cook, his draughtsman. Cook was chewing gum, his jaws working nervously, grinding and biting viciously in his excitement. The fierce glare revealed the deep lines of the man's face.
"You can't get out that way. The street's packed solid!" Cook bellowed into his ear. "God alive, how fast it's going! That's your steel frame, tile partition, fireproof construction, is it? To hell with it!"
Suddenly he clutched the architect's arm again and shouted:—
"Where are the east-side fire-escapes? I can't see nothing up that wall, can you?"
The architect peered through the wreaths of smoke. There should have been an iron ladder between every two tiers of bay windows on this side of the building.
"They are all in back," he answered, remembering now that the contractor had cut out those on the east wall as a "disfigurement." "Let's get around to the rear," he shouted to the draughtsman, his anxiety whipping him once more.
After a time they managed to reach an alley at the southwest angle of the hotel, where two engines were pumping from a hydrant. Here they could see the reach of the south wall, up which stretched the spidery lines of a single fire-escape. Cook pointed to it in mute wonder and disgust.
"It's just a question if the beams will hold into the walls until they can get all the folks out," he shouted. "I heard that one elevator boy was still running his machine and taking 'em down. As long as the floors hold together, he can run his elevator. But don't talk to me about your fireproof hotels! Why, the bloody thing ain't been burning twenty minutes, and look at it!"
As he spoke there was a shrill whistle from the fire marshal, and then a wrenching, crashing, plunging noise, like the sound of an avalanche. The upper part of the east wall had gone, toppling outward into the alley like the side of a fragile box. In another moment followed a lesser crash. The upper floors had collapsed, slipping down into the inner gulf of the building. There was a time of silence and awful quiet; but almost immediately the blue flames, shot with orange, leaped upward once more. From the precipitous wall above, along the line of the fire-escape, came horrid human cries, and in the blinding smoke and flame appeared a dozen figures clinging here and there to the window frames like insects, as if the heat had driven them outward.
Cook swayed against the architect like a man with nausea.
"They're done for now, sure, all that ain't out. And I guess there ain't many out. It just slumped, just slumped," he repeated with a nervous quiver of the mouth. Suddenly he turned his pale face to the architect and glared into his eyes.
"Damn you, you son of a bitch! Damn you—you—" he stammered, shaking his fist at him. "There wasn't any steel in the bloody box! It was rotten cheese. That's you, you, you!" He turned and ran toward the burning mass, distracted, shouting as he ran: "Rotten cheese! Just rotten cheese!"
But the architect still stood there in the alley, rooted in horror, stupefied. High above him, in a window of the south wall, which was still untouched by the fire, he saw a woman crouching on the narrow ledge of the brick sill. She clung with one hand to an awning rope and put the other before her eyes. He shouted something to her, but he could not hear the sound of his own voice. She swayed back and forth, and then as a swirl of flame shot up in the room behind her, she fell forward into the abyss of the night.... A boy's face appeared at one of the lower windows. He was trying to break the pane of heavy glass. Finally he smashed a hole with his fist and stood there, dazed, staring down into the alley; then he dropped backward into the room, and a jet of smoke poured from the vent he had made.
In front of the hotel there were fresh shouts; they were using the nets, now. The architect covered his face with his hands, and moaning to himself began to run, to flee from the horrible spot. But a cry arrested him, a wail of multitudinous voices, which rose above the throb of the engines, the crackle of the fire, all the tumult of the catastrophe. He looked up once more to the fire-eaten ruin. The lofty south wall, hitherto intact, had begun to waver along the east edge. It tottered, hung, then slid backward, shaking off the figures on the fire-escape as if they had been frozen flies.... He put his hands to his eyes and ran. He could hear the crowd in the street groaning with rage and pity. As he ran he saw beside the park a line of ambulances and patrol wagons ready for their burdens.
How long he ran, or in what direction, he never knew. He had a dim memory of himself, sitting in some place with a bottle of whiskey before him. The liquor seemed to make no impression on his brain; his hand still shook with the paralysis of fear. He remembered his efforts to pour whiskey into the glass without spilling it. After a time a face, vaguely familiar, entered his nightmare, and the man, who carried a little black bag such as doctors use, sat down beside him and shouted at him:—
"What are you doing here? What do you want with that whiskey? Give it to me. You have had all the booze that's good for you, I guess."
And in his stupor he said to the man tearfully:—
"Don't take it away, doctor. For heaven's sake don't take the whiskey away! I tell you, I have killed people to-night. Eight, ten, forty—no, I killed eight people. Yes, eight men and women. I see 'em dying now. Give me the whiskey!"
"You're off your nut, man," the doctor replied impatiently. "You haven't killed any one. You have been boozing, and you'll kill yourself if you don't quit. Here, give me that!"
He remembered rising to his feet obediently and saying very solemnly:—
"Very well, my friend, I won't drink any more if you say so. But listen to me. I killed a lot of people, eight of 'em, and I don't know how many more besides—over there in a great fire. I saw 'em dying, like flies, like flies! Now give me one more drink."
"All right, you killed 'em, if you say so."
"Don't leave me, doctor! It's a terrible thing to kill so many people, all at once, like flies, like flies!"
And he burst into tears, sobbing and shaking with the awful visions of his brain, his head buried in his arms.
The next morning Hart found himself on a sofa in a bare, dusky room that looked as if it was a doctor's office. He sat up and tried to think what had happened to him overnight. Suddenly the picture of the burning hotel swept across his memory, and he groaned with a fresh sense of sharp pain. Some one was whistling in the next room, and presently the door opened, and Dr. Coburn appeared in trousers and undershirt, mopping his face with a towel. The architect recognized him now, and knew that he was the one who had struggled with him in his dreams.
"Hello, Jack Hart!" the doctor called out boisterously. "How are you feeling? Kind of dopey? My, but you were full of booze last night! I had to jam a hypodermic into you to keep you quiet, when I got you over here. Do you get that way often?"
"Was I drunk?" the architect asked dully.
"Well, I rather think. Don't you feel it this morning?"
He grinned at the dishevelled figure on the sofa and continued to mop his face.
"You were talking dotty, too, about killing folks. I thought maybe you might have a gun on you. But I couldn't find anything. What have you been doing?"
"It was the fire," Hart answered slowly, "a terrible fire. People were killed—I saw them. My God! it was awful!"
He buried his face in his hands and shuddered.
"Shook you up considerable, did it? Your nerves are off. Here, wait a minute! I'll fix you something."
The doctor went back into the inner room and returned presently with a small glass.
"Drink this. It will give you some nerve."
The architect took the stimulant and then lay down once more with his face to the wall. Before long he pulled himself together and drank a cup of coffee, which the doctor had prepared. Then he took himself off, saying that he must get to his office at once. He went away in a daze, barely thanking the doctor for his kindness. When he had left, Coburn began to whistle again, thinking, "There's something more'n drink or that fire the matter withhim!"
Hart bought a newspaper at the first stand. It was swelled with pages of coarse cuts and "stories" of the "Glenmore Hotel Tragedy." On the elevated train, which he took to reach the city, all the passengers were buried in the voluminous sheets of their newspapers, avidly sucking in the details of the disaster. For a time he stared at the great cut on the first page of his paper, which purported to represent the scene at the fire when the south wall fell. But in its place he saw the sheer stretch of pitiless wall, the miserable figures on the iron ladder being swept into the flames. Then he read the headlines of the account of the fire. Seventeen persons known to have been in the hotel were missing; the bodies of ten had been found. Had it not been for the heroism of a colored elevator boy, Morris by name, who ran his car up and down seven times through the burning shaft, the death list would have been far longer. On the second trip, so the account ran, the elevator had been caught by a broken gate on the third floor. Morris had coolly run his car back to the top, then opened the lever to full speed, and crashed his way triumphantly through the obstacle. It was one of those acts of unexpected intelligence, daring, and devotion to duty which bring tears to the eyes of thousands all over the land. The brave fellow had been caught in the collapse of the upper floors, and his body had not yet been found. It was buried under tons of brick and iron in the wrecked building.
The newspaper account wandered on, column after column, repeating itself again and again, confused, endlessly prolix, but in the waste of irrelevancy a few facts slowly emerged. The Glenmore, fortunately, had not been half full. It had been opened only six weeks before as a family hotel,—one of those shoddy places where flock young married people with the intention of avoiding the cares of children and the trials of housekeeping in modest homes; where there is music twice a week and dancing on Saturday evenings; where the lower windows are curtained by cheap lace bearing large monograms, and electric candles and carnations are provided for each table in the dining-room. Another year from this time there would have been three or four hundred people in the burning tinder box.
The fire had started somewhere in the rear of the second floor, from defective electric wiring, it was supposed, and had shot up the rear elevator shaft, which had no pretence of fireproof protection. The east wall had bulged almost at once, pulling out the supports for the upper three floors. It was to be doubted whether the beams, bearing-walls, and main partitions were of fireproof materials. The charred remains of Georgia pine and northern spruce seemed to indicate that they were not. At any rate, the incredible rapidity with which the fire had spread and the dense smoke showed that the "fireproofing" was of the flimsiest description. And, to cap all, there was but one small fire-escape on the rear wall, difficult of access! "The Glenmore," so the ChicagoThundererpronounced, "was nothing but an ornamental coffin."
Editorially, theThundererhad already begun its denunciation of the building department for permitting a contractor to erect such an obvious "fire-trap," and for granting the lessees a license to open it as a hotel. There had been too many similar horrors of late,—the lodging-house on West Polk Street, where five persons had lost their lives, the private hospital on the North Side, where fourteen men and women had been burned, etc. In all these cases it was known that the building ordinances had been most flagrantly violated. There was the usual clamor for "investigation," for "locating the blame," and "bringing the real culprits before the Grand Jury." It should be said that theThundererwas opposed politically to the City Hall.
In the architect's office there was an air of subdued excitement. No work was in progress when Hart let himself into his private room from the hall. Instead, the men were poring over the broad sheets of the newspapers spread out on the tables. When he stepped into the draughting-room, they began awkwardly to fold up the papers and start their work. Cook, Hart noticed, was not there. The stenographer came in from the outer office and announced curtly:—
"The 'phone's been ringing every minute, Mr. Hart." She looked at the architect with mingled aloofness and curiosity. "They were mostly calls from the papers, and some of the reporters are in there now, waiting. What shall I say to 'em?"
"Say I am out of town," Hart ordered, giving the usual formula when reporters called at the office. Then he went back to his private room and shut the door. He dropped the bulky newspaper on the floor and tried to think what he should do. There were some memoranda on the desk of alterations which he was to make in a country house, and these he took up to examine. Soon his desk telephone rang, and when he put the receiver to his ear, Graves's familiar tones came whispering over the line. The contractor talked through the telephone in a subdued voice, as if he thought to escape eavesdropping at the central office by whispering.
"Is that you, Hart? Where have you been? I've been trying to get you all the morning. Say, can't you come over here quick?"
"What do you want?" the architect demanded sharply. The sound of the man's voice irritated him.
"Well, I want a good many things," Graves replied coldly. "I guess we had better get together on this business pretty soon."
"You can find me over here the rest of the morning," Hart answered curtly.
There was a pause of several seconds, and then the contractor telephoned cautiously:—
"Say, I can't leave just now. That Dutchman's in here pretty drunk, and I don't want him to get loose. Come over, quick!"
"All right," the architect muttered dully, hanging up his telephone. He was minded to refuse, but he realized that it would be best to see what was the matter. Some plan of action must be decided upon. Meyer was one of the officers and directors of the Glenmore Hotel Corporation. The architect and a couple of clerks in the contractor's office were the other dummies in this corporation, which had been organized solely to create bonds and stock and to escape personal liability.
Hart gathered up the memoranda on his desk, and telling the stenographer that he was going out to Eversley to see the Dixon house, he left the office. As he stepped into the hall, he met Cook, who had just come from the elevator. He nodded to the draughtsman and hailed a descending car.
"Say, Hart," Cook said in a quiet voice, "can I have a word with you?"
Hart stepped back into the hall and waited to hear what the draughtsman had to say.
"I must have been pretty near crazed last night, I guess," Cook began, turning his face away from the architect, "and I said things I had no call to say."
"Come in," Hart murmured, unlocking the door to his private office.
"Of course, it wasn't my business, anyway," Cook continued, "to accuse you, no matter what happened. But I saw a friend of mine this morning, a man on theThunderer, and he had just come from the city hall, where he'd been to examine the Glenmore plans. He says they're all right. Same as ours in the office. I can't understand what happened to the old thing unless Graves— Well, that's not our business."
There was a pause, while the two men stood and looked at each other. Finally Cook added:—
"So I wanted to tell you I was wrong,—I had no call to talk that way."
"That's all right, Cook," the architect replied slowly. Somehow the man's apology hurt him more than his curses. They still stood waiting. Suddenly Hart exclaimed:—
"You needn't apologize, man! The plans are all right. But that doesn't let me out. I knew what Graves was going to do with 'em. I knew it from the start."
"What do you say?" the draughtsman demanded, bewildered.
"The hotel was a job from the start," Hart repeated.
There was another pause, which was broken by Cook.
"Well, I suppose after this you won't want me any more?"
"I suppose not," the architect answered in a colorless tone.
"All right; I'll go to-day if you say so."
"As you please."
And they parted. Cook was an honest, whole-souled man. It was best that he should leave the office, Hart reflected, as he went down in the elevator—best for Cook and for him too. The draughtsman's admiration for him had been his daily incense, and it would be intolerable to see him daily with this matter between them, even if Cook would stay.
Hart found Graves in his inner office, while a clerk held at bay a roomful of men who wanted to get at the contractor. Graves looked serious, but undisturbed, manifesting no more outward emotion than if he had come from the funeral of a distant relative.
"It's a pretty bad mess, ain't it?" he said to the architect, offering him a cigar. "I guess you were right. Those first story walls weren't solid. They must have bulged and pulled the whole business down.... Of course the papers are hot. They always yap considerable when anything happens. They'll spit fire a week or so, and then forget all about it. Everything is straight over at the city hall so far. There'll be the coroner's inquest, of course. But he won't find much. The only danger is this cuss Meyer. He's been on a spree and is pretty well shook up. If they get hold of him, and ask him questions at the inquest, he's liable to tell all he knows, and more too. What I want you to do is to take care of the Dutchman."
"What do you mean to do about the inquest?" Hart asked abruptly.
"Do? Well, the best thing for all of us who have been concerned with the Glenmore is to be called out of the city for two or three weeks or so. I have got to go to Philadelphia to-night or to-morrow, if I can get away. Gotz will be here to go on the stand if they want to get after the hotel corporation. They won't make much out of him. Now, if you can take care of the Dutchman—"
"What do you mean?"
Graves looked at the architect critically before answering.
"Don't lose your nerve, Hart. It'll come out all right. I've seen my lawyer this morning, and I know just what they can do with us, and it ain't much. They can get after the building department, but they're used to that. And they can bring a civil suit against the corporation, which will do no harm. You keep out of the way for a while, and you won't get hurt a particle. Take the Dutchman up to Milwaukee and drown him. Keep him drunk—he's two-thirds full now. Lucky he came here instead of blabbing to one of those newspaper fellers! Keep him drunk, and ship him up north on the lakes. By the time he finds his way back, his story won't be worth telling."
Hart looked at the big mass of a man before him, and loathed him with all his being. He wanted to take him by one of his furry ears and shake the flesh from his bones. The same impulse that had prompted him to admit his guilt to Cook, the impulse to free his mind from the intolerable coil of fraud, cost what it might, was stirring again within him.
"Well?" Graves inquired.
"I am going to quit," the architect said, almost involuntarily. "I'm sick of the business, and I shan't run away. You can look after Meyer yourself—"
"Perhaps you're looking for some money, too?" the contractor sneered.
"No more of yours, I know that!" Hart answered, rising from his chair and taking his hat. "I'm sick of the whole dirty job, and if they want me to, I'll talk, too, I suppose."
"You damned, white-livered sneak! Ain't you got enough gut in you to sit tight? You—"
But the contractor was swearing at the blank wall of his office.
When the architect reached the street he hesitated. Instead of taking the train for Eversley, as he had intended to do, he got on an electric car that ran far out into the northern suburbs. He kept saying to himself that he wanted time to think, that he must think it all out before he returned to his office. For he was not yet sure that it would be best to stay and bear the brunt of the coming investigation, as he had said to the contractor. He was not clear whether that would do any good.
But he did not think. Instead, he brooded over the visions of the past night, which beset him. When the car stopped he got out and walked north along the lake shore, vaguely intending to reach Eversley in that way. He was still trying to think, but he saw nothing clearly—nothing but that terrible picture of the burning hotel, the dying men and women. Thus he walked on and on, still trying to think, to find himself....
... He had been lying there long hours close to the warm earth that was preparing for a new life. The thin branches of the trees rose bare and severe between him and the blue sky, mementos of the silent winter. The ground about their trunks was matted with dead leaves, through which nothing green had yet pushed its way. Nevertheless, the earth seemed yeasty with promise. The intense, unwonted heat of the April days had broken the crust of soil and set the sap of life in motion once more. The air was heavy with earthy odors,—a fragrant forecast of Nature's regeneration. Deep down in the little ravines, and among the pools of the meadowland beyond, frogs were croaking harshly, filling the solitude of the still slumbering woods with the clamor of awakening life. And through the brown tree trunks, above the tracery of the topmost branches, over the flat fields, there swam the haze of earliest spring—a vague atmosphere of renascence, the warm breath of mother earth.
The man lay there, empty of thought, feeling remotely the mighty movement of things around him—an inert mass in a vital world. The odors of the earth stirred in him faintly old sensations of vivid springtimes in his youth, when the ecstasy of the great world of sun and sky and cloud, of distant fields and mounting uplands, had thrilled his heart. He saw again the morning mist swimming above the little Wisconsin lakes where he used to hunt, and felt the throb of joy for the on-coming spring. And he remembered how this outer world had spoken to him one day while he was sitting at his work in Paris. Something imperceptible had crept into the room over the endless roofs, and called to him in a low, persistent voice. Then he had listened, joyously putting aside his task, and obeyed the invitation, wandering idly forth into the germinating fields, which in some mysterious way had purified his soul of all petty things. In his youth that experience had come to him again and again, an impulse from beyond his world, which had led him forth from himself, from the soil of living, to fresh vigor and purity. Latterly there had come to him no call like this; he had known no abandonment of self in the enveloping force of Nature, no purification of spirit. The trees and the grass, the earth and the sky, all the multitudinous voices of unconscious life, had not spoken to him. Shut within himself, driven by the bitter furies of his own little being, he had worked from season to season, forgetting the face of Nature. True, he had lived the outdoor life of the world, passed through the beautiful fields each season, just as he had gone to the theatre or the opera. But the earth had not spoken to him, alone, personally, out of her abundant wisdom, garnered through the limitless years. For all the period of his maturity he had forgotten the great mother of life.
Now, wrecked and bruised, he lay there on her breast, as a sick man might lie in the silent room of a hospital and listen to the large commotion of life without. He was content to rest there on the warm earth, waiting and listening for the voice which should come from beyond, content to forget himself,—a creature that had been industriously shaped for eight busy years, a creature of the city and of men, with a self that was his in part only, and was mixed with all those others whom he had touched. That figure of deformity, made in the strife of the city, he no longer recognized to be his. The richer heart of youth, with its pictured hopes, the beauty of early days, came back to him and blessed him.... The sun sank into the deepening blue haze of the heavens; the thin shadows of the trees faded from the brown earth; the south wind from the prairies began to rise, blowing strongly, scented by the breeding land over which it had come. And as the day drew to its close, the murmuring voices of re-created life ascended from all parts of the earth with a strengthened note. The tree-toads were chorusing in the damp hollows, and the spice of roots and mould sucked out by the hot sun was descending once more in damp fragrance to the earth. The moist, crumbling soil beneath the man's body was opening itself—stirring, awakening, preparing, for the gigantic tasks of renewal, of re-creation, of conception and birth. An immense, powerful, impersonal life, the greatest Life of all, was going forward all about him. In the midst of this large mystery he felt that he was but an atom—an accident which counted for nothing.
That terrible vision of dying men and women no longer haunted the man's mind. The catastrophe which had shaken him to the roots of his being sank into its place behind the long procession of those acts, which had made him what he was. Now, at last, he began to think coherently, to see himself in the whole of his being, step by step, as he had come to be. The old man's death and funeral rose before him, and he remembered his restless preoccupation with the money so soon to be his, while others sorrowed and prayed. Then came the will, which he had resented, and the growing lust for the money that had slipped from his grasp. Born of that lust, bred in envy and hot desire, was the will to succeed. From the first day of his struggle for success there came before his eyes the man Graves. The contractor's fat, bearded face was the sordid image of his sin, familiar in its cupidinous look. It was the image of that greed to which he had submitted himself, with which he had consented to do evil. From the very hour when he had caught the contractor's eye in the Canostota, and the two had committed fraud over the weight of steel in an I-beam, there had set forth a long, long train of petty dishonesties, which had created in him the vitiating habit of insincerity. One by one he recalled the fraudulent works in which he had had a part,—the school from which he had tried to steal some of the money his uncle had denied him, and finally this hotel, which had crumbled at the touch of fire. That was the strange, dramatic climax of the story, fated so to be from the first petty lust for money, from the first fraud.
Greed, greed! The spirit of greed had eaten him through and through, the lust for money, the desire for the fat things of the world, the ambition to ride high among his fellows. In the world where he had lived this passion had a dignified name; it was called enterprise and ambition. But now he saw it for what it was,—greed and lust, nothing more. It was in the air of the city which he had breathed for eight years.... In his pride he had justified knavery by Success. He had judged himself mean and small merely because he had failed to cheat and steal and trick "in a large way." Only the little and the weak need be honest; to the strong all things were right—he had said glibly. Now, for the first day since the strength of his manhood, he saw acts, not blurred by his own passions, not shifting with the opinions of the day; but he saw them fixed and hard,—living, human acts, each one in its own integrity, with its own irrevocable fate; acts expressed in lowered eyelids of consent, in shrugs, in meaningful broken phrases; acts unprofessional, sharp, dishonest, criminal.
He lay in the gathering twilight, listened, and saw. And at last the soul of the man, which had been long in hiding, came back, and flowed into him once more. A deep, new longing filled his heart, a desire to be once again as he had been before, to rise from his debasement and become clean, to slough off this parasitic self into which he had grown all these years of his strife in the city, to be born anew like the springtime earth—such longings as come to men when they are sickened with the surfeit of their passions.
... He knew now why his wife had left him. She had felt the leper taint, which had been eating at his heart all the years of their marriage, and had repudiated it. She had cried out against the mere getting and spending of money, to which low ebb those lofty ambitions of his youth had descended before her eyes. She had loved him as the creator, the builder; and he had given her no visions, but only the sensualities of modern wealth. "Let us begin again and live the common life," she had cried out to him. "Let us live for work and not for money." He had put her aside with contempt, and refused to open the dark places of his life to her. Now he knew that she had done well to leave him to his own day of judgment. And the first impulse in the man's new soul was to go to her, humbly, and say to her: "You were right. I have sinned against myself, against you, against life, all along the way. Will you accept my repentance, and love me again from the beginning, knowing now the truth?" Ardently he desired to hear her answer; but his heart left him in doubt as to what that answer might be. For he understood at last that he had never known this woman, who had been his wife for eight years.
Nevertheless, despite this hunger of his heart for the woman he loved, there rose in him slowly a purging sense of relief from crime and sin committed. It had passed away, was put off from himself. Surely he was to come once more into peace! The upspringing life of the reincarnated earth chanted all about him but one song: "Here I leave my uncleanness. Life is strong and good. There is, for all, forgiveness and peace. Here I bury the filth of my deeds, and renew my hope." Thus man rises again and again from the depths of his abasement; thus springs in him a new hope, a vital, imperishable element, the soul of his being; and he is prepared afresh for the struggle. Deep within him there lies forever the unconquerable conviction of his power to rise, to renew himself.
So, after the tempest of debauch, little men wake from their carnal desires, and, leaving behind them the uncleanness of their flesh, go forth into the pure morning, subdued and ashamed, yet irresistibly sure that life is good and holds forgiveness and hope for them. With the new day they will become like their dreams, clean and pure. Thus, also, those larger men, not eaten by bodily lusts, those greater sinners who are caught on the whirling spikes of bolder passions, who are torn and twisted—these, also, return at certain hours to the soul within them, and renew there the pure fire of their natures, so that they may enter again the endless contest having hope and health. Thus, above all, the great heart of things, the abundant mother of life, the earth, renews herself eternally according to the laws of her being, and comes forth afresh and undiminished for the business of living.
The mere lump of man lying there inert upon the ground felt this great process of renewal all about him, and sucked in fresh life and health. In like manner, years before, in his youth, he had gone down to the sea, and there had known something of this mysterious sensation of renewal. His body plunged in cool, black sea-water, he had drawn through the pores of his flesh the elemental currents of life. He longed now to escape again from men, to go down to the sea and touch those waters washing in from their remote tidal courses up and down the earth. By such means Nature cleanses and teaches man. Heedless of man, unconcerned with his follies and vices, impersonal, irresistible, majestic, she receives his head upon her breast, and renews within him his spirit,—the power to battle, the power to live.
The fruitful earth holds in her bosom death and life, both together, and out of her comes health. In like manner there lie in the heart of man diverse instincts,—seeds of good and evil, ready to germinate. For long seasons seeds of one kind burst forth in the soil of a man's nature and thrive. Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat, their germinating impulse. And the world about them, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. But in their own time other seeds, perchance ripening late and slowly, come to their day of germination, seeds of unlike nature, with diverse fruit. Such sprout and send their life forth into the man, creating a new nature which the world will not recognize as his. Thus it was happening with this man: commingled in his heart and brain there had lain diverse seeds of many kinds,—seeds of decay and seeds of life. Impulses of creative purpose, of unselfish work—these had been long dormant; impulses of lust and greed and deceit—these had grown rankly in the feverish life of the city until they had flowered in crime. Now had come to him the time of fate; the first harvest of his acts was garnered; and the new seeds of his life were ready to wake from their sleep in the depths of his being, to put forth their energies, their demands. Some great shock—the agony of dying men and women—had quickened this new growth. So happened the miracle of rebirth, hidden far away from all human observation, first revealing itself in the consciousness of purification and renewed health.
The song of the springtime earth rose ever upward, calming and healing the man, who at last had caught its message. It said to him: "Another sun, a new day, an earth ever fresh from the hand of God! Eternal hope—the burial of the corrupt body with its misdeeds; health, and not decay; life, and not death. For life is good. There is forgiveness and renewal for all those who heed." ... Through the misty heavens above the trees the stars glimmered faintly. Over the prairie, fields, and woodland the night wind passed, soft, odorous, charged with the breath of the earth in the conceiving time of life....
Under the starlight of the spring night there might be seen the figure of a man walking southward toward the black horizon of the great city. He walked neither fast nor slow, but steadily, evenly, as if urged by one powerful purpose,—some magnetic end that set his nerves and his muscles to the rhythm of action.