The Athenian Building raises its knife-like facade in the centre of Chicago, thirteen stories in all; to the lake it presents a broad wall of steel and glass. It is a hive of doctors. Layer after layer, their offices rise, circling the gulf of the elevator-well. At the very crown of the building Dr. Frederick H. Lindsay and his numerous staff occupy almost the entire floor. In one corner, however, a small room embedded in the heavy cornice is rented by a dentist, Dr. Ephraim Leonard. The dentist's office is a snug little hole, scarcely large enough for a desk, a chair, a case of instruments, a "laboratory," and a network of electric appliances. From the one broad window the eye rests upon the blue shield of lake; nearer, almost at the foot of the building, run the ribboned tracks of the railroad yards. They disappear to the south in a smoky haze; to the north they end at the foot of a lofty grain elevator. Beyond, factories quietly belch sooty clouds.
Dr. Lindsay coveted this office, but Dr. Leonard clung tenaciously to his little strip, every inch that he could possibly pay rent for. He had been there since that story was finished. The broad view rested him. When he ceased to peer into a patient's mouth, he pushed up his spectacles and took a long look over the lake. Sometimes, if the patient was human and had enough temperament to appreciate his treasure, he would idle away a quarter of an hour chatting, enjoying the sun and the clear air of the lake. When the last patient had gone, he would take the chair and have the view to himself, as from a proscenium box.
The little office was a busy place: besides the patients there were coming and going a stream of people,—agents, canvassers, acquaintances, and promoters of schemes. A scheme was always brewing in the dentist's office. Now it was a plan to exploit a new suburb innumerable miles to the west. Again it was a patent contrivance in dentistry. Sometimes the scheme was nothing more than a risky venture in stocks. These affairs were conducted with an air of great secrecy in violent whisperings, emphasized by blows of the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh to the secret chamber of his soul. But his face was turned outward to receive the next scheme.
This time it happened to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little office clerk had left, the talk about the gas generator ceased, and the woman turned her wistful face to the old dentist. There was a sombre pause.
"Yes," the dentist muttered finally, "I saw it in the paper Tuesday, no,Monday—it was Monday, wasn't it? and I hoped you'd come in."
The woman moved her hands restlessly, as if to ask where else she could go.
"They most always do turn up," he continued bluntly; "them that no one wants, like your husband. What are you going to do?"
The woman turned her face back to the lake; it was evident that she had no plan.
"I thought," the dentist began, recalling her story, "I thought when you'd started in the schools—it was a mighty hard thing to do to get you in; it took all my pull on Mahoney."
The woman's face flushed. "I know," she murmured. "They don't want married women. But if it hadn't been for Mahoney—"
"Then," interrupted the dentist, "he'd been good enough to let you alone for most a year, and I thought you were out of your troubles."
"I knew he would come back," she interposed quietly.
"But now he comes back just as everything is nice, and worse, you come across him when he is nigh bein' shot to death. Then, worse yet, by what the papers said, you went to the hospital with him and gave the whole thing away. When I saw the name, Alves Preston, printed out, I swore."
Mrs. Preston smiled at his vehemence.
"Tell me, Alves," the old man asked in a rambling manner, "how did you ever come to marry him? I've wanted to ask you that from the first."
Mrs. Preston rose from the chair and pulled her cloak about her.
"I couldn't make you understand; I don't myselfnow."
"D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently.
"Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and he—"
But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture.
"It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance, no chance. I can't tell you now all the things."
"Well," the dentist said soothingly, "let's see just how bad it is. Has your boss, the superintendent, or the principal spoke to you, turned you out? I see the reporter went around to the school, nosing after something."
"They'd just transferred me—miles south," she answered indifferently. "I was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few months before they dismiss you."
"I didn't know any one was ever dismissed from a Chicago school," the dentist remarked.
"Oh, sometimes when the superintendents or the supervisors don't want you. There is a supervisor in the Everglade district—" she stopped a moment, and then continued tranquilly—"he was very intimate at first. I thought he wanted to help me to get on in the school. But he wanted—other things. Perhaps when he doesn't—succeed—that will be the end."
"It'll blow over," the dentist said encouragingly. "If the supervisor troubles you much, I'll see Mahoney. You've changed your boarding-place?"
"Yes—but," she admitted in a moment, "they know it at the hospital."
Dr. Leonard rubbed his bristly face irritably.
"I've been to see him—it seemed I ought to—I was the only one whoWOULD in the whole world—the only one to speak a word to him."
"That makes it worse," the dentist commented depressingly. "I don't know as you could get free now if you wanted to. You've put your hand to the plough again, my girl, and it's a long furrow."
"What do you mean?"
"The hospital folks know you're his wife, and they'll expect you to take him in when he gets better."
"I suppose so," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But I suppose, anyway, I should take care of him until he can go away."
Dr. Leonard threw up his hands in disgust.
"Alves, why don't you go straight off and get a divorce—for desertion?"
Mrs. Preston opened the heavy lids of her eyes; her face slowly flushed.
"That would be the end of it?" she asked, in a low voice.
"Of course! I'll give you the money, and testify for you. Go right ahead, now he is laid up, and have it all ready when he gets out."
"I couldn't do that," Mrs. Preston answered, the color fading from her face, and the white lids closing over the eyes. "Besides, he may never recover fully. I don't think they expect him to at the hospital."
"All the more reason," protested the dentist. "It's mighty hard," he added sympathetically. "Women are mostly children, the better sort, and you feel bad, even when they're in trouble through their own foolishness."
"There is no release, no divorce," Mrs. Preston continued. "A thing is done, and it's done. There's no ending it in this life. You can run away, or close your eyes, but you don't escape. He has been—my husband."
"That's silly! Now let me tell you what I'll do." The dentist squared himself and raised the little lignum-vitae mallet, which he used to drive home his fillings.
"Don't you fool round any more. You can't love that fellow,—think you never did now,—and he's given you no reason to be very nice to him. You just drop him where you are, and start out alone and make the best of it. You can't do that in Chicago now. Get out of Chicago to-morrer. Go east. Take your maiden name; no one is goin' to be hurt by not knowin' you're married. I guess you ain't likely to try it again."
He paused for objections, and evidently found one himself.
"If you ain't got the money handy, I'll just fix you up. That gas generator I was talking to you about is going to make me mints of money. You can go right away to my sister-in-law in Worcester, Ohio. Guesshewon't trouble you much there. What do you say?"
She had nothing very cogent to say, but the dentist felt an impalpable obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination once enlisted for the plan, he held to it, arguing, counselling, bullying. "If it's the money," he ended, "you needn't bother. I'll just put it on the bill. When I am rich, it won't make no difference, nor when you are, either."
Mrs. Preston took one of his furry hands in hers, and pressed it. She knew that the ventures had not yet made him rich. Thirty years in Chicago had not filled his purse.
"I'd do it for you, same as for one of my daughters. It's just as easy as having a tooth out, and you start over as good as new."
"It isn't that," she smiled. "You can't start over as good as new if you are a woman. I couldn't run away. I've put myself into it a second time, without thinking. I chose then just as before, when I followed him to the hospital. When the doctor asked me if he should try to save his life, I wanted him to die—oh, how I longed that the doctor would refuse to try! Well, he's alive. It is for life."
She seemed to see before her a long, toilsome ascent, to which she had been driven to put her feet.
"Think it over," the dentist counselled at last, despondently. "Sleep on it. There's Worcester, Ohio, and my sister-in-law."
Mrs. Preston smiled, and put on her hat.
"I've taken a lot of your time."
"That's no account, but I can't see what you came for. You won't let a feller help you."
"There wasn't any good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things—horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,—because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for a long time."
"You make too much of it," the dentist protested. He busied himself in putting the little steel instruments into their purple plush beds and locking the drawers.
"Yes, I make too much of it," Mrs. Preston acknowledged quietly, as she opened the door. "Good night."
"I guess she loves him still and don't like to own it. Women are generally so," the dentist commented, when he was left alone. He picked up a sheaf of stock certificates and eyed them critically. "They're nicer than the Placer Mining ones. They just look fit to eat."
He locked the certificates of stock in the new company into a tiny safe, and prepared to pull down the shade. In the railroad yards below, the great eyes of the locomotives glared though the March dusk. As the suburban trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and steam were sucked together into the vortex of a cross street.
'I wished I hadn't let her go alone,' the dentist mused. 'Some day she'll just go over there into the lake.'
When Mrs. Preston shut the dentist's door behind her, an office door on the opposite side of the hall opened abruptly, and a young man strode into the hall. She recognized him as the young surgeon who had operated upon her husband at St. Isidore's. She stepped behind the iron grating of the elevator well and watched him as he waited for the steel car to bob up from the lower stories. She was ashamed to meet him, especially now that she felt committed to the sordid future.
The little car arrived; the doctor stepped in and disappeared. The door from which he came was covered with a long list of names. She read the name freshly painted in at the bottom,—Dr. Howard Sommers.
For Sommers had joined the staff of the great specialist, and resorted daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital practice he cared to take; and the new aspect of his profession—commercial medicine he dubbed it—was at least entertaining. If one wished to see the people of Chicago at near range,—those who had made the city what it is, and were making it what it will be,—this was pretty nearly the best chance in the world.
When he had mentioned Lindsay's offer to Dresser, who was rising at laborious hours and toiling in the McNamara and Hill's offices, he realized how unmentionable and trifling were his grounds for hesitation. Dresser's enthusiasm almost persuaded him that Lindsay had given him something valuable. And if he found it difficult to explain his distaste for the thing to Dresser, what would he have to say to other people—to the Hitchcocks? Yet he made his reservations to himself at least: he was not committed to his "career"; he should be merely a spectator, a free-lance, a critic, who keeps the precious treasure of his own independence. Almost at the start, however, he was made to realize that this nonchalance, which vindicated himself in his own eyes, could not be evident to others. As he was entering the Athenian hive one morning, he passed the Hitchcock brougham drawn up by the curb near a jeweller's shop. Miss Hitchcock, who was preparing to alight, gave him a cordial smile and an intelligent glance that was not without a trace of malice. When he crossed the pavement to speak to her, she fulfilled the malice of her glance:
"You find Dr. Lindsay isn't so bad, after all?" There was no time for explanation. She passed on into the jeweller's with another smile on her mobile face. He had to do his stammering to himself, annoyed at the quip of triumph, at the blithe sneer, over his young vaporings. This trivial annoyance was accentuated by the effusive cordiality of the great Lindsay, whom he met in the elevator. Sommers did not like thiscamaraderieof manner. He had seen Lindsay snub many a poor interne. In his mail, this same morning, came a note from Mrs. E. G. Carson, inviting him to dinner: a sign that something notable was expected of his career, for the Carsons were thrifty of their favors, and were in no position to make social experiments. Such was the merry way of the world, elsewhere as here, he reflected, as he turned to the routine of the day.
The office was in full blast: the telephones rang sharply every few minutes, telling in their irritable little clang of some prosperous patient who desired a panacea for human ailments; the reception-room was already crowded with waiting patients of the second class, those who could not command appointments by telephone. Whenever the door into this room opened, these expectant ones moved nervously, each one hoping to be called. Then, as the door into the private offices closed, the ones left behind fell back with sighs to the magazines and illustrated papers with which they sought to distract their fears or their ennui.
The thin, tall building shivered slightly at the blows of the fresh April wind. The big windows of the reception-room admitted broad bands of sunlight. The lake dazzled beneath in gorgeous green and blue shades. Spring had bustled into town from the prairies, insinuating itself into the dirty, cavernous streets, sailing in boisterously over the gleaming lake, eddying in steam wreaths about the lofty buildings. The subtle monitions of the air permeated the atmosphere of antiseptics in the office, and whipped the turbulent spirits of Sommers until, at the lunch hour, he deserted the Athenian Building and telephoned for his horse.
This saddle horse was one of the compensations for conformity. He had been too busy lately, however, to enjoy it. From the bellow of the city he cantered down the boulevards toward the great parks. As he passed the Hitchcock house he was minded to see if Miss Hitchcock would join him. In the autumn she had ridden with him occasionally, waiving conventionalities, but lately she had made excuses. He divined that Parker Hitchcock had sneered at such countrified behavior. She was to go away in a few days for a round of visits in the South, and he wanted to see her; but a carriage drew up before the house, and his horse carried him briskly past down the avenue. From one boulevard to another he passed, keeping his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the sight of the comfortable, ugly houses, anxious to escape them and their associations, pressing on for a beyond, for something other than this vast, roaring, complacent city. The great park itself was filled with people, carriages, bicycles. A stream of carts and horse-back riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway, where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward the crumbling Spanish convent. In this place there was a fine sense of repose, of vast quiet. Everything was dead; the soft spring air gave no life. Even in the geniality of the April day, with the brilliant, theatrical waters of the lake in the distance, the scene was gaunt, savage. To the north, a broad dark shadow that stretched out into the lake defined the city. Nearer, the ample wings of the white Art Building seemed to stand guard against the improprieties of civilization. To the far south, a line of thin trees marked the outer desert of the prairie. Behind, in the west, were straggling flat-buildings, mammoth deserted hotels, one of which was crowned with a spidery steel tower. Nearer, a frivolous Grecian temple had been wheeled to the confines of the park, and dumped by the roadside to serve as a saloon.
Sommers rose in his stirrups and gazed about him over the rotting buildings of the play-city, the scrawny acres that ended in the hard black line of the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, tawdry sweep of defaced earth.
The horse started: a human figure, a woman's dress, disturbing here in the desert expanse, had moved in front of him. Sommers hit the horse with his crop and was about to gallop on, when something in the way the woman held herself caught his attention. She was leaning against the wind, her skirt streaming behind her, her face thrust into the air. Sommers reined in his horse and jumped down.
"How is your husband?" he asked brusquely.
Mrs. Preston looked up with a smile of glad recognition, but she did not answer immediately.
"You remember, don't you?" the doctor said kindly. "You are Mrs. Preston, aren't you? I am the doctor who operated on your husband a few weeks ago at the hospital."
"Yes, I remember," she replied, almost sullenly.
"How is he? I left St. Isidore's the next day. Is he still in the hospital?"
"They discharged him last Monday," Mrs. Preston answered, in the same dull tone.
"Ah!" The doctor jerked the bridle which he held in his left hand and prepared to mount. "So he made a quick recovery."
"No, no! I didn't say that," she replied passionately. "You knew, you knewthatcouldn't be. He has—he is—I don't know how to say it."
Sommers slipped the bridle-rein over the horse's head and walked on by her side. She looked down at the roadway, as if to hide her burning face.
"Where is he now?" the doctor asked, finally, more gently.
"With me, down there." Mrs. Preston waved her hand vaguely toward the southern prairie. They began to walk more briskly, with a tacit purpose in their motion. When the wagon road forked, Mrs. Preston took the branch that led south out of the park. It opened into a high-banked macadamized avenue bordered by broken wooden sidewalks. The vast flat land began to design itself, as the sun faded out behind the irregular lines of buildings two miles to the west. A block south, a huge red chimney was pouring tranquilly its volume of dank smoke into the air. On the southern horizon a sooty cloud hovered above the mills of South Chicago. But, except for the monster chimney, the country ahead of the two was bare, vacant, deserted. The avenue traversed empty lots, mere squares of sand and marsh, cut up in regular patches for future house-builders. Here and there an advertising landowner had cemented a few rods of walk and planted a few trees to trap the possible purchaser into thinking the place "improved." But the cement walks were crumbling, the trees had died, and rank thorny weeds choked about their roots. The cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either side of an embankment.
"My God, what a place!" the young doctor exclaimed. "The refuse acres of the earth."
The woman smiled bitterly, tranquilly, while her glance roamed over the familiar landscape.
"Yet it is better than the rest, back there," she protested, in a low voice. "At least, there is something open, and a little green in spring, and the nights are calm. It seems the least little bit like what it used to be in Wisconsin on the lake. But there we had such lovely woodsy hills, and great meadows, and fields with cattle, and God's real peace, not this vacuum." Her voice grew faint.
"You liked it there?" the doctor asked musingly.
"It's all that I have ever known that was—as it should be. My father had a farm," she explained more easily, "and until he died and I was sent to Rockminster College to school, my life was there, by the lake, on the farm, at the seminary on the hill, where my brother was studying—"
The visions of the past developed with endless clews, which she could not follow aloud. After waiting for her to resume, Sommers asked tentatively:
"Why don't you go back, then?"
She flashed a rapid, indignant glance at him.
"Now! Go back to what?—Withhim!"
Her lips set tight. He had been stupid, had hit at random.
"No, no," she continued, answering her own heart; "they would never understand. There is never any going back—and, sometimes, not much going ahead," she ended, with an effort to laugh.
They stopped while the horse nibbled at a tall weed in the roadway. They had got fairly into the prairie, and now at some distance on left and right gawky Queen Anne houses appeared. But along their path the waste was unbroken. The swamp on either side of the road was filled with birds, who flew in and out and perched on the dry planks in the walks. An abandoned electric-car track, raised aloft on a high embankment, crossed the avenue. Here and there a useless hydrant thrust its head far above the muddy soil, sometimes out of the swamp itself. They had left the lake behind them, but the freshening evening breeze brought its damp breath across their faces.
"How came you to get into this spot?" the doctor asked, after his searching eyes had roamed over the misty landscape, half swamp, half city suburb.
"I was transferred—about the time of the operation. My school is over there," she pointed vaguely toward the southwest. "I could not afford to live any distance from the school," she added bluntly. "Besides, I wanted to be alone."
So she taught, Sommers reflected, yet she had none of the professional air, the faded niceness of face and manner which he associated with the city school-teacher.
"I haven't taught long," she volunteered, "only about a year. First I was over by Lincoln Park, near where I had been living."
"Do you like the teaching?" Sommers asked.
"I hate it," she remarked calmly, without any show of passion. "It takes a little of one's life every day, and leaves you a little more dead."
They walked in silence for a few minutes, and then Mrs. Preston suddenly stopped.
"Why do you come?" she exclaimed. "Why do you want to know? It can do no good,—I know it can do no good, and it is worse to have any one—you—know the hateful thing. I want to crush it in myself, never to tell, no,—no one," she stopped incoherently.
"I shall go," the doctor replied calmly, compassionately. "And it is best to tell."
Her rebellious face came back to its wonted repose.
"Yes, I suppose I make it worse. It is best to tell—sometime."
As they proceeded, more briskly now, she talked of her life in the Chicago schools. She had taken the work when nothing else offered in the day of her calamity. She described the struggle for appointment. If it had not been for her father's old friend, a dentist, she would never have succeeded in entering the system. A woman, she explained, must be a Roman Catholic, or have some influence with the Board, to get an appointment. Qualifications? She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required, but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have passed the necessary examinations.
In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the principals—petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed gossip, scandal, intrigue. There were the "soft places"; the deceitful, the easy, the harsh principals; the teachers' institutes to which the poor teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules, counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger. The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work," "discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about the human atom.
Her manner of telling it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special story of the special case.
"The first weeks I was nearly lost; the drawing teacher didn't like me, and reported my room for disorder; the 'cat'—that is what they call the principal—kept running in and watching, and the pupils—there were seventy-five—I could barely keep them quiet. There was no teaching. How could one teach all those? Most of our time, even in 'good' rooms, is taken up in keeping order. I was afraid each day would be my last, when Miss M'Gann, who was the most friendly one of the teachers, told me what to do. 'Give the drawing teacher something nice from your lunch, and ask her in to eat with you. She is an ignorant old fool, but her brother is high up in a German ward. And give the cat taffy. Ask him how he works out the arithmetic lessons, and about his sassing the assistant superintendent, and make yourself agreeable.'
"I did as I was told," she ended with a smile, "and things went better for a time. But there was always the married teachers' scare. Every month or so some one starts the rumor that the Board is going to remove all married teachers; there are complaints that the married women crowd out the girls—those who have to support themselves."
They both laughed at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain farcical incidents.
"Once I saw a principal hurl a book at a sleepy teacher, who was nodding in his lecture at the Institute. Poor woman! she is so nearly deaf that she can hear nothing, and they say she can never remember where the lessons are: the pupils conduct the recitations. But she has taught in that school for twenty-three years, and she is a political influence in the ward. Imagine it!"
They laughed again, and the world seemed lighter. Sommers looked at his companion more closely and appreciatively. Her tone of irony, of amused and impartial spectatorship, entertained him. Would he, caught like this, wedged into an iron system, take it so lightly, accept it so humanly? It was the best the world held out for her: to be permitted to remain in the system, to serve out her twenty or thirty years, drying up in the thin, hot air of the schoolroom; then, ultimately, when released, to have the means to subsist in some third-rate boarding-house until the end. Or marry again? But the dark lines under the eyes, the curve of experience at the mouth, did not warrant that supposition. She had had her trial of that alternative.
She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most casual—too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there is slight probability of a common future.
At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a tiny hub,This is Ninety-first Street; and at right angles on another spoke,This is Washington Avenue. He remembered vaguely having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,—to the Gulf for all he knew.
Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck farm bordered one side; a line of tall willows suggested faintly the country. Just beyond the tracks of a railroad the ground rose almost imperceptibly, and a grove of stunted oaks covered the miniature hill. The bronzed leaves still hanging from the trees made something like shade beside the road.
"That is better," Sommers exclaimed, relieved to find a little oasis in the desert of sand and weeds.
The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes, mostly,—operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of English,—and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I am left alone to reign among my young barbarians."
When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages with Chicago.
An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines.
Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car, passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open lot—a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote.
The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant.
"Shall we go in?" the doctor asked at last.
Mrs. Preston started, and her hand closed instinctively upon the gate, as if to bar further entrance to her privacy. Then without reply she opened the gate, led the way across the tiny lawn, and unlocked the cottage door. They entered a large room, from which some narrow stairs led to the chambers above. Floor and walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of two wooden chairs, a small coal-stove, and a pine table of considerable size. This was covered with books, school exercises, and a few dishes. Mrs. Preston brusquely flung off her cape and hat, and faced the doctor.
"I might as well tell you the main thing before you see him. He—"
"That is scarcely necessary," Sommers replied gently. "I probably know what you are thinking of."
A flush, caused by the revealed shame, crept over her face, lighting it to the extreme corners under the temples and ears. As she stood there, humiliated, yet defiant of him and of the world, Sommers remembered the first time he had seen her that night at the hospital. He read her, somehow, extraordinarily well; he knew the misery, the longing, the anger, the hate, the stubborn power to fight. Her deep eyes glanced at him frankly, willing to be read by this stranger out of the multitude of men. They had no more need of words now than at that first moment in the operating room at St. Isidore's. They were man and woman, in the presence of a fate that could not be softened by words.
"You are right," she said softly. "Yet sometime I want to tell you things—not now. I will go and see how he is."
When she had left the room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable, imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing with a human soul nakedly.
"Will you come now?"
Mrs. Preston had returned and held the stair-door open for him. Sommers looked at her searchingly, curious to find where this power lay. Her face had grown white and set. The features and the figure were those of a large woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above the large brow and features made her seem older than she was. The deep-set eyes, the quivering lips, and the thin nostrils gave life to the passive, restrained face. The passions of her life lay just beneath the surface of flesh.
"He is very talkative, and wanders—"
The doctor nodded and followed her up the steep stairs, which were closed at the head by a stout door. The upper story was divided about equally into two rooms. The east room, to which Mrs. Preston opened the door, was plainly furnished, yet in comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge lay the patient.
Preston's personal appearance had not improved during his illness: his face, over the lower half of which a black beard had grown rankly, was puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch were white and flabby. As he half rose and extended his hand to the doctor, he betrayed, indefinably, remote traces of superior breeding.
"Excuse me, doctor," he said apologetically. "Mrs. Preston keeps me a close prisoner. But she won't have the whip-hand very long."
He laughed boisterously, as Sommers shook hands and sat down.
"Women know they've got you while you are sick. They like to keep an eye on a man, eh?"
He laughed again, confidentially, as if the doctor, being a man, would appreciate the point. Then he continued, nervously, without pause:
"But I have some business to attend to. I must get out of this as soon as you can patch me up so I can walk straight. I ought to have been in Denver a month ago. There's a man out there, who comes in from his ranch two hundred miles to see me. He is a fine fellow, strapping, big six-footer.Heknows how to put in his time day and night, when he gets to town. I remember one time we were in Frisco together—ever been in Frisco? It's a great place for a good dinner, and all you want to drink. Drink—my! I've seen the time—"
He rambled on, now and then pausing to laugh boisterously at some recollection. As his whirligig tale touched upon indecent episodes, his voice lowered and he sought for convenient euphemisms, helped out by sympathetic nods. Mrs. Preston made several attempts to interrupt his aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the presence of the doctor. His mind was like a bag of loosely associated ideas. Any jar seemed to set loose a long line of reminiscences, very vaguely connected. The doctor encouraged him to talk, to develop himself, to reveal the story of his roadside debaucheries. He listened attentively, evincing an interest in the incoherent tale. Mrs. Preston watched the doctor's face with restless eyes.
Finally Preston ended his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tellher, won't you?—to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell—his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan—well—we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some one grabbed me, and I was thrown into the street—"
Mrs. Preston exclaimed, "Do you want to hearmore?"
Sommers rose. "I'll come again to see you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave something that will help you. Good night."
"It was good of you to take this interest, doctor. I am glad to have met you, Doctor—?"
"Sommers," suggested the doctor, smiling at the evidences of forgotten breeding that cropped out of the general decay.
"Well, Dr. Sommers, I hope we shall meet again when I am more myself."
When they returned to the room below, Mrs. Preston lit a lamp. After some minutes Sommers asked, "How long has this been going on?"
"For years—before he left college; he was taken out of Yale because of it.All I know is what he tells when he is not—responsible."
"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.
"Inever knew," Mrs. Preston added quickly, "until we had been married a year. He was away so much of the time, and he was very different then—I mean he didn't ramble on as he does now. He was not flabby and childish, not before the operation."
The doctor turned his face away.
"About two years ago some of the men he was with brought him home, drunk. Afterward he didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time, travelling, going from place to place, always living in hotels, always drinking until some illness brought him back."
"And this time?" the doctor asked.
Mrs. Preston shut her lips, as if there were things she could not say yet.
"I was not living with him." In a few moments, she continued quietly: "I suppose I should have been but for one thing. He told me he was going to New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that. I had suspected for months that there were other women; but seeing it, knowing that he knew I had seen it! I nearly starved before I got work."
Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the facts undimmed by passionate speech.
"As I told you, an old friend of my father's helped me to get work. That kept me from ending it just there. As the months went on and he did not try to find me, I got used to the round, to the school, the living on, dead and alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have—I don't know. But accidentallyhewas brought back. I was going home from a teachers' meeting that night. I saw him lying on the pavement, thrown out of the saloon, as he told you. A crowd gathered. He was unconscious. I wanted to run away, to leave him, to escape. He groaned. I couldn't—I couldn't."
She sighed wearily at the memory of her illogical act. The doctor nodded sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point of decision in her life. He understood what it meant to her.
"There was no one else to take him—to be responsible. He had been mine. After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it never can. You have to take your failures; you have to endure."
"Has he any relatives?" Sommers asked.
"A few; they were done with him long ago. They had money, and they wanted to get rid of him. They put him into a business that would keep him away from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself—going about everywhere, always travelling, always with men who drink and live in hotels as he has. They shoved him into the world to let the world, or any one who would, take care of him."
It had been her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given up seeking for escape.
"He is helpless now," she added, as for excuse. "It would be cruel."
For a moment the doctor's face looked hard. Was it, he seemed to be turning over in his mind, that she loved him a little in the depths of her heart? That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent glance at her calm face rendered that supposition impossible. She was merely largely human, with a sense of remote claims.
"And now what will you do?" he asked.
Her eyes were brooding on that now. Finally she exclaimed with an impatient gesture:
"How can I tell! He may get strong enough to leave me—in peace. He may come back again to rest and get well. And that may go on and on until one of us dies, or I am discharged. As I told you, they are trying now to exclude married teachers from the schools. And I am married!"
Sommers saw that she had faced the sordid situation; that she expected no relief from the clouds. He got up and looked at his watch.
"I shall come again. We will see what can be done."
This was a convention of the profession. Nothing could be done for that man, and he knew it. She knew it also. She smiled mournfully as they shook hands. Yet as he moved toward the door she asked in a low tone:
"Won't you tell me what you call it? There is no use in not telling me."
"Paresis," Sommers replied shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated by the operation."
His glance met hers, and they both fell silent before the common thought. In the practice of his profession he had done this for her, in obedience to the cowardly rules of that profession. He had saved life—animation—to this mass of corruption. Except for his skill, this waste being would have gone its way quietly to death, thereby purifying all life by that little. He added at last in a mechanical tone:
"That results sometimes from such an operation. You can't tell how it will affect the brain, especially when the history of the case is a bad one. He will have to be sent away to an institution if—; but the only thing now is to wait to see what will happen. Good night. I shall see you in a few days," he concluded abruptly.
He was determined to speculate no more, to give her no hopes that might prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional to speculate in this loose fashion about the outcome of an operation.
Mrs. Preston watched him as he crossed the lawn and untied his horse. She had not thanked him for coming, for promising to come again, he reflected with relief. She was no weak, dependent fool. He rode down the sodded lane, and as his horse picked his way carefully toward the avenue where the electric cars were shooting back and forth like magnified fireflies, he turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding enough, isolated and withdrawn as the life of the woman within it. She was set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor, or restlessly babbling over his dirty tale. God knew why! Yet, physician and unsentimental thinker that he was, he felt to a certain degree the inevitableness of her fate. The common thing would be to shake the dirt from one's shoes, to turn one's back on the diseased and mistaken being, "to put it away where it would not trouble,"—but she did not seek to escape.
And he had been the instrument to execute for her this decree of fate, to bind it permanently, a lifetime curse.
The frogs were making merry in the marshy fields along the avenue. Their robust chorus mingled with the whir of the cars. Soft, dark clouds were driving lakeward. The blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago silently opened and belched flame, and silently closed again. A rosy vapor, as from some Tartarean breathing, hovered about the mouths of the furnaces. Moment by moment these mouths opened and belched and closed. It was the fiery respiration of a gigantic beast, of a long worm whose dark body enveloped the smoky city. The beast heaved and panted and rested, again and again—the beast that lay on its belly for many a mile, whose ample stomach was the city, there northward, hid in smoke.
Long after the horse's hoofs had ceased to beat in the still evening, Mrs. Preston sat by the open window in the bare cottage room, her head resting on her arms, her eyes peering into the soft darkness in the path of the shadowy figure that had passed down Stoney Island Avenue into the night beyond her ken. She had not asked him to return. But he had promised to. Indeed, he did not seem to be far away: she could feel his gentle eyes, his imperious face, his sympathetic voice. It was not much that she could make of him; but her imagination built gratefully on his few words and simple acts, until he became—as when he had spoken to her at the hospital—a masterful spirit, dominating that vague, warm land of dreams in which she took refuge during waking hours.
She should see him again—she must see him again, that was all. And yet what was the good of it? Only a new pain in thus revealing her sores—a pain mixed with a subtle anaesthetic, sweeter than anything she had known in this life. In the end she would have to do without this anodyne; would have to meet her hard and brutal world. Just now, while the yoke was hot to the neck, she might take this mercy to temper the anguish. On the long hill road before her it would be a grateful memory. It seemed now that she had put herself to the yoke, had taken the hill road very lightly. She had not thought of accepting the dentist's advice. With the fierce energy of her crushed, spoiled youth, she had taken her measures: had found this little cottage, hid in the oak copse; had prepared it with her own hands; had gone to the hospital to fetch her husband. That never ending journey from the hospital to the cottage! His ceaseless babble, the foul overflow from his feeble mind, had sapped her courage.
Her head dropped weakly upon her arms; useless tears started. Before that day she had had some joy in this cottage. There were glorious sunrises from the lake and sunsets over the desolate marshes. The rank swamp grasses were growing long, covering decently the unkempt soil. At night, alone, she had comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as they fled to and fro into the roaring cavern of the city, outward to the silent country, to the happier, freer regions of man. As they rushed, they bore her with them to those shadowy lands far away in the sweet stillness of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days were beset with visions like these—visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in the still afternoons as she wandered over this vast waste of houseless blocks. Up and down the endless checker-board of empty streets and avenues she had roamed, gleaning what joys were to be had in the metallic atmosphere, the stunted copses, the marshy pools spotted with the blue shields of fleur-de-lys. For even here, in the refuse corner of the great city, Nature doled out niggardly gifts of green growth—proofs of her unquenchable bounty.
This hunger for joy had included no desire for companionship. When her child died, the last person had slipped out of her world. To-night there was a strange, almost fearful sense that this vacant, tenantless life might change. Was there some one among these dull figures that would take life, speak, touchher?
There was a movement in the rooms above. She started. Had she locked the door securely? Preston had tried before to drag himself out of the cottage, across the intervening lot, to the saloon on Stoney Island Avenue, whose immense black and gold sign he could see from his chamber. That must not happen here, in the neighborhood of the Everglade School. She must keep him well concealed until he should be strong enough to go far away, on the old round of travel and debauch, from city to city, wearing out his brutishness and returning to her only when spent.
The movements above increased. He was pounding at the door.
"Are you going to let me starve? Where are you?" the sick man called out querulously.
She sprang up; she had forgotten to get supper. When she took the food upstairs, Preston was dragging himself about the room. He was excited, and anxious to talk.
"Did that doctor fix me up? I don't remember seeing him in the hospital."
"He operated when you were received. He left the next day," she answered.
"It must have been a neat job. I guess I was in a pretty tough state," he mused more quietly. "How did he happen to look me up?"
"I met him accidentally in the park," she explained briefly, anxious to have done with the subject. "He offered to come back with me to see you. Perhaps," she added more bitterly, "he wanted to see what he had done."
"I suppose he knows?"
She nodded.
"Well, I can't see why he bothers around. I don't want his attentions."
As she prepared to leave the room, after pulling down the shades and opening the bed, he said apologetically:
"It was pretty good of you to take me in after—I have treated you badly,Alves. But it's no use in going back over that. I guess I was made so.There are lots of men like that, or worse."
"I suppose so," she assented coldly.
"Why are you so stiff with me? You hardly look at me, and you touch me as if I were a piece of dirt. Supposing I take a brace and we start over, somewhere else? I am tired of knocking round. Come over and kiss me, won't you?"
Mrs. Preston paused in her work, the color mounting in her face. At first she made no reply, but as she crossed to the door, she said in a cool, distant tone:
"I don't think I shall ever kiss you again or let you touch me, if I can help it. Do you happen to remember where I saw you last—I mean before I found you in the street—six months ago?"
His face grew troubled, as if he were trying to recollect.
"Oh! that woman? Well, that's past."
"Yes, that woman. I took you here," she continued, her full voice gathering passion, "because you are helpless and an outcast. And because I had taken you before, ignorantly, I feel bound to defend you as you never defendedme. But I am not bound to do more, and you have sense enough—"
"You were ready enough to bind yourself, if I remember."
She answered meekly:
"I can't think it was the same woman who did that—who was blind and cheap enough to do that. Something has shown me that I am other than the foolish creature you took so easily with a marriage ring, because you could not have her in an easier way! But the old, silly country girl has gone and left me this——Why did it have to be?" she exclaimed more incoherently. "Why did you not let me read what you are? I had only a few wretched weeks to learn you—and I was ignorant and foolish and young. You had me helpless at Barrington! Was it such a clever thing to cheat a girl from a Wisconsin village?"
Preston answered apologetically,—
"Well, I married you."
"Married me! You make a good deal of that! Perhaps it would have been better if you had not married me. My child and I could have died together then. But I wasmarried, and so I struggled. The child died, died, do you hear, because you had left me without money to get it what it needed. I sat and saw it die. You were—"
She closed her lips as if to repress further words. As she reached the door, she said in her usual neutral tones:
"So long as you are decent, keep from drinking, and don't get me into trouble at the school, you may stay and take what I can give you."
"'May stay!'" Preston roared, getting to his feet and making a step to intercept her before she closed the door. His legs trembled, and he fell. She knelt over him to see if he had injured himself, and then satisfied that he was not hurt, she left the room, barring the door from the outside. She was none too soon in taking this precaution, for as she swung the heavy oak bar into its socket,—a convenient device of the old German, who had the reputation of being a miser,—she could hear Preston dragging himself toward the door, cursing as he stumbled over the furniture. She crept wearily downstairs into the bare room. Some one was moving in the tiny kitchen beyond.
"Is that you, Anna?" Mrs. Preston called.
"Ye-es," a slow voice responded. Presently a young woman came forward. She was large and very fair, with the pale complexion and intense blue eyes of the Swede.
"I came in and found no one here, so I was cleaning up for you. I have time. John has gone to a meeting—there are many meetings now and not much work. You will eat something?"
She went back to the kitchen and returned with warm food.
"Yes, I am faint." Mrs. Preston's arms trembled. She laughed nervously as she spilled her tea.
"You are not well? You cannot live so—it's no use," the strong Swede continued monotonously. "The men are bad enough when they are good; but when they are bad, a woman can do nothing."
"Tell me about the strike."
Anna Svenson laughed contemptuously, as if such affairs were a part of men's foolishness.
"They're talking of going out, all the railroad men, if the roads use the Pullmans. That's what John has gone to see about. Work is hard to find, so they're going to make less of it."
She stood easily, her arms by her side, watching Mrs. Preston eat, and talking in an even, unexcited tone.
"Father likes the job I told you about—over at the lumber yards. He came in last Sunday. He says the folks out his way are near starving. Svenson thinks of quitting his job."
She laughed gently.
"Life is like that," Mrs. Preston assented. "You can't manage it."
"No, why should one?" Anna Svenson replied coolly. "Children come, they die, they grow up, they fight, they starve, and they have children. It was so over there; it is so here—only more pay and more drink some days; less pay, less drink other days. I shall wash the dishes. Sit still."
She came and went quickly, noiselessly. When everything had been done, she opened a window and leaned out, looking into the darkness. The fact of her presence seemed to bring peace to the room.
"It is a good night," she said, drawing her head in. "There, Svenson has lit the lamp. I must go."
"Good night, Anna." Mrs. Preston took her hand. It was large and cool.
"You shake hands?" Mrs. Svenson asked, with a smile. "When I was working out, people like you never shook hands."
"People like me! What have I that makes me different from you?"
"Oh, nothing; not much," she replied tranquilly.
With a sigh Mrs. Preston took up a bundle of grammar exercises and sorted them. She was too weary for this task: she could not go on just yet. She drew her chair over to the window and sat there long quarter hours, watching the electric cars. They announced themselves from a great distance by a low singing on the overhead wire; then with a rush and a rumble the big, lighted things dashed across the void, and rumbled on with a clatter of smashing iron as they took the switches recklessly. The noise soothed her; in the quiet intervals she was listening for sounds from upstairs. The night was still and languorous, one of the peaceful nights of large spaces when the heavens brood over the earth like a mother over a fretful child. At last no more cars came booming out of the distance. She shut the windows and bolted the door; then she prepared slowly to undress.
For the first time in months she looked at herself curiously, taking an impersonal, calm survey of this body. She sought for signs of slovenly decay,—thinning rusty hair, untidy nails, grimy hands, dried skin,—those marks which she had seen in so many teachers who had abandoned themselves without hope to the unmarried state and had grown careless of their bodies. As she wound her hair into heavy ropes and braided them, it gave her a sharp sense of joy, this body of hers, so firm and warm with blood, so unmarked by her sordid struggle. It was well to be one's self, to own the tenement of the soul; for a time it had not been hers—she reddened with the shame of the thought! But she had gained possession once more, never, never to lose it.
She listened carefully for noises from above; then flung herself on the couch, utterly wearied. In a moment she was asleep, having shed the years of pain, and a frank smile crept over the calm face.