These days there were many people on the streets, but few were busy. The large department stores were empty; at the doors stood idle floor-walkers and clerks. It was too warm for the rich to buy, and the poor had no money. The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World's Fair. In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength, and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed. There was gloom, not only in La Salle Street where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had exhausted the forces of all. The city's huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenantless buildings.
As the spring months moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and counter-meetings; agitators, panaceas, university lecturers, sociologizing preachers, philanthropists, politicians—discontent and discord. The laborer starved, and the employer sulked.
"The extravagant poor are unwilling to let the thrifty reap the rewards of their savings and abstinence," lectured the Political Economist of the standard school. "The law of wages and capital is immutable. More science is needed."
"The rich are vultures and sharks," shrieked the Labor Agitator.
"And will ye let your brother starve?" exhorted the Preacher.
"For it is as clear as the nose on your face that corporations corrupt legislatures, and buy judges, and oppress the poor," insinuated the Socialist.
"It's that wretched free trade," howled the hungry Politician, "andCleveland and all his evil deeds. See what we will do for you."
"Yes, it's free trade," bawled one newspaper.
"It's nefarious England," snarled another.
"It's the greed of Wall Street, the crime against silver, the burden of the mortgage," vociferated a third.
"It's 'hard times,'" the meek sighed, and furbished up last year's clothes, and cut the butcher's bill.
"Yes, it's 'hard times,' a time of psychological depression and distrust," softly said the rich man. "A good time to invest my savings profitably. Real estate is low; bonds and mortgages are as cheap as dirt. Some day people will be cheerful once more, and these good things will multiply and yield fourfold. Yea, I will not bury my talent in a napkin."
Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of the world.
The first sore to break, ironically enough, was in the "model industrial town" of Pullman. That dispute over the question of a living wage grew bitterer day by day. Well-to-do people praised the directors for their firm resolve to keep the company's enormous surplus quite intact. The men said the officers of the company lied: it was an affair of complicated bookkeeping. The brutal fact of it was that the company rested within its legal rights. The unreasonable people were dissatisfied with an eighth of a loaf, while their employers were content with a half. Then there was trouble among the mines, and the state troops were called out. Sores multiplied; men talked; but capital could not be coerced.
But while politicians squabbled and capitalists sulked and economists talked, a strong tide of fellowship in misery was rising from west to east. Unconsciously, far beneath the surface, the current was moving,—a current of common feeling, of solidarity among those who work by day for their daily bread. The country was growing richer, but they were poorer. There began to be talk of Debs, the leader of a great labor machine. The A. R. U. had fought one greedy corporation with success, and intimidated another. Sometime in June this Debs and his lieutenant, Howard, came to Chicago. The newspapers had little paragraphs of meagre information about the A. R. U. convention. One day there was a meeting in which a committee of the Pullman strikers set forth their case. At the close of that meeting the great boycott had been declared. "Mere bluff," said the newspapers. But the managers of the railroads "got together." Some of them had already cut the wage lists on their roads. They did not feel sure that it was all "bluff."
* * * * *
It was the first day of the A. R. U. boycott. Sommers left the Athenian Building at noon, for Dr. Lindsay's clients carried their infirmities out of town in hot weather. He took his way across the city toward the station of the Northwestern Railroad, wondering whether Debs's threats had been carried out, and if consequently he should be compelled to remain in town over Sunday. On the street corners and in front of the newspaper offices little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country of theirs had been exploited,—shamefully, rapaciously, swinishly,—and now that the first signs of exhaustion were showing themselves, the people's eyes were opening to the story of greed. Democracy! Say, rather, Plutocracy, the most unblushing the world had ever seen,—the aristocracy of THOSE WHO HAVE.
Thus meditating, he jostled against a group of men who were coming from a saloon. All but one wore the typical black clothes and derby hats of the workman's best attire; one had on a loose-fitting, English tweed suit. In this latter person Sommers was scarcely surprised to recognize Dresser. The big shoulders of the blond-haired fellow towered above the others; he was talking excitedly, and they were listening. When they started to cross the street, Sommers touched Dresser.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded abruptly.
"What areyoudoing? You had better get out of town along with your rich friends." He motioned sneeringly at the bag in Sommers's hand.
"I fancied you might be up to something of this kind," Sommers went on, unheeding his sneer.
"I had enough of that job of faking up text-books and jollying schoolteachers. So I chucked it."
"Why did you chuck me, too?"
"I thought you might be sick of having me hang about, and especially now that I am in with the other crowd."
"That's rot," Sommers laughed. "However, you needn't feel it necessary to apologize. What are you doing with 'the other crowd'?"
"I'm secretary of the central committee," Dresser replied, with some importance.
"Oh, that's it!" Sommers exclaimed."It's better than being a boot-licker to the rich."
"Like the doctors? Well, we won't quarrel. I suppose you mean to give 'us' a hard time of it? Come in when it is all settled, and we will talk it over. Meantime you've got enough mischief on your hands to last you for some months."
"I don't blame you," Dresser said benignantly, "for your position. Perhaps ifIhad had the opportunities—"
"That's just it. Your crowd are all alike, at least the leaders; they are hungry for the fleshpots. Iftheyhad the opportunities,weshould be served as they are now. That's the chief trouble,—nobody really cares to make the sacrifices. And that is why this row will be ended on the old terms: the rich will buy out the leaders. Better times will come, and we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old basis. Butyou," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow, "people like you are the real curse."
"Why?"
"Because you are insincere. All you want is the pie. You make me feel that the privileged classes are right in getting what they can out of fools and—knaves."
"That's about enough. I suppose you are put out about the money—"
"Don't be an ass, Dresser. I don't need the hundred. And I don't want a quarrel. I think you are playing with dynamite, because you can't get the plunder others have got. Look out when the dynamite comes down."
"It makes no difference to me," Dresser protested sullenly.
"No! That's why you are dangerous. Well, good-by. Get your friends to leave the Northwestern open a day or two longer."
"There won't be a train running on the Northwestern to-morrow. I've seen the orders."
"Well, I shall foot it home, then."
They shook hands, and Dresser hurried on after his friends. Sommers retraced his steps toward the station. Dresser's vulgar and silly phrase, "boot-licker to the rich," turned up oddly in his memory. It annoyed him. Every man who sought to change his place, to get out of the ranks, was in a way a "boot-licker to the rich." He recalled that he was on his way to the rich now, with a subconscious purpose in his mind of joining them if he could. Miss Hitchcock's wealth would not be enormous, and it would be easy enough to show that he was not "boot-licker to the rich." But it was hard to escape caste prejudices, to live with those who prize ease and yet keep one's own ideals and opinions. If this woman had the courage to leave her people, to open a new life with him elsewhere—he smiled at the picture of Miss Hitchcock conjured up by the idea.
The streets were filthy as always, and the sultry west wind was sweeping the filth down the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant, their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along the river a strange stillness prevailed. "Nothing was doing," in the idiom of the street. Along the platforms of the railroad company's train house, however, a large crowd of idlers had assembled. They were watching to see whether the trainmen would make up the Overland Limited. Debs had said that this company would not move its through trains if it persisted in using the tabooed Pullmans. Stout chains had been attached to the sleepers to prevent any daring attempt to cut out the cars at the last moment. A number of officials from the general offices were hurrying to and fro apprehensively. There was some delay, but finally the heavy train began to move. It wound slowly out of the shed, in a sullen silence of the onlookers. In the yards it halted. There was a derisive cry, but in a few moments it started again and disappeared.
"I guess it's all bluff," a smartly dressed young man remarked to Sommers."There's the general manager getting into the Lake Forest two-ten, andSmith of the C., B. and Q., and Rollins of the Santa Fe, are with him. Thegeneral managers have been in session most of last night and this morning.They're going to fight it out, if it costs a hundred millions."
The young man's views seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike now," remarked a fat, perspiring stockbroker. "Roads aren't earning anything, anyhow."
The conductor who was taking the tickets smiled and kept his own counsel.
"Good time to buy rails, all the same," his companion answered.
"I guess this'll yank old Pullman back to town," another remarked, glancing up from his paper.
"You don't know him. It won't botherhim. He's keeping cool somewhere in the St. Lawrence. It's up to the railroads now."
"Let's see your clubs. Did you get 'em straight from Scotland? That's a pretty iron."
Older men were chatting confidentially and shaking their heads. But the atmosphere was not gloomy; an air of easy, assured optimism prevailed. "I guess it will all come out right, somehow, and the men will be glad to get back to work…. If Cleveland and his free trade were in hell!…" And the train sped on through the northern suburbs, coming every now and then within eyeshot of the sparkling lake. The holiday feeling gained as the train got farther away from the smoke and heat of the city. The young men belonged to the "nicer" people, who knew each other in a friendly, well-bred way. It was a comfortable, social kind of picnic of the better classes.
Most of the younger men, and Sommers with them, got into the omnibus waiting at the Lake Forest station, and proceeded at once to the club. There, in the sprawling, freshly painted club-house, set down on a sun-baked, treeless slope, people were already gathered. A polo match was in progress and also a golf tournament. The verandas were filled with ladies. One part of the verandas had been screened off, and there, in a kind of outdoor cafe, people were lunching or sipping cool drinks. At one of the tables Sommers found Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Porter, surrounded by a group of young men and women who were talking and laughing excitedly.
"Ah! you couldn't get the twelve-thirty," Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, as Sommers edged to her. "We waited luncheon for you until the train came; but you are in time for the polo. Caspar is playing—and Parker," she added in a lower tone. "Let us go down there and watch them."
Miss Hitchcock detached herself skilfully from the buzzing circle on the veranda, and the two stepped out on the springy turf. The undulating prairie was covered with a golden haze. Half a mile west a thin line of trees pencilled the horizon. The golf course lay up and down the gentle turfy swells between the club-house and the wind-break of trees. The polo grounds were off to the left, in a little hollow beside a copse of oak. There were not many trees over the sixty or more acres, and the roads on either side of the club grounds were marked by dense clouds of dust. Yet it was gay—open to the June heavens, with a sense of limitless breathing space. And it was also very decorous, well-bred, and conventional.
As they strolled leisurely over the lawns in front of the club-house, Miss Hitchcock stopped frequently to speak to some group of spectators, or to greet cheerfully a golfer as he started for the first tee. She seemed very animated and happy; the decorative scene fitted her admirably. Dr. Lindsay came up the slope, laboring toward the ninth hole with prodigious welter.
"That's the way he keeps young," Miss Hitchcock commented approvingly. "He's one of the best golfers in the club. I like to see the older men showing that they have powers of enjoyment left."
"I guess there's no doubt about Lindsay's powers of enjoyment," Sommers retorted idly.
They passed Mrs. Carson, "ingeniously and correctly associated," as MissHitchcock commented, and little Laura Lindsay flirting with young Polot.
Miss Hitchcock quickened her pace, for the polo had already begun. They saw Caspar Porter's little pony fidgeting under its heavy burden. It became unmanageable and careered wildly up and down the field, well out of range of the players. Indeed, most of the ponies seemed inclined to keep their shins out of the melee. Sommers laughed rather ill-naturedly, and Miss Hitchcock frowned. She disliked slovenly playing, and shoddy methods even in polo. When the umpire called time, Parker Hitchcock rode up to where they were standing and shook hands with the young doctor. As he trotted off, his sister said earnestly:
"You have done so much for him; we can never thank you."
"I don't believe I have done so very much," Sommers replied. He did not like to have her refer to his mission in New York, or to make, woman-wise, a sentimental story out of a nasty little scrape.
"I think polo will help him; papa agrees with me now."
"Indeed!" Sommers smiled,
"What is it that you don't say?" the girl flashed at him resentfully.
"Merely, that this is a nice green paddock for a young man to be turned out in—when he has barked his shins. Do you know what happens to the ordinary young man who is—a bit wild?"
"Well, let us not go into it. I am afraid of you to-day."
"Yes, I am in one of my crude moods to-day, I confess. I had no business to come."
"Not at all. This is just the place for you. Nice people, nice day, nice sporty feeling in the air. You need relaxation badly."
"I don't think I shall get it exactly here."
"Why not?"
The girl looked out over the shaven turf, dotted with the white figures of the golfers, at the careering ponies which had begun the new round in the match, up the slope where the club verandas were gay with familiar figures,—and it all seemed very good. The man at her side could see all that and more beyond. He had come within the hour from the din of the city, where the wealth that flowered here was made. And there was a primitive, eternal, unanswerable question harassing his soul.
"Shall we walk over to the lake," the girl suggested gently, as if anxious to humor some incomprehensible child. "There is a lovely ravine we can explore, all cool and shady, and this sun is growing oppressive."
Sommers accepted gratefully the concession she made to his unsocial mood. The ravine path revealed unexpected wildness and freshness. The peace of twilight had already descended there. Miss Hitchcock strolled on, apparently forgetful of fatigue, of the distance they were putting between them and the club-house. Sommers respected the charm of the occasion, and, content with evading the chattering crowd, refrained from all strenuous discussion. This happy, well-bred, contented woman, full of vitality and interest, soothed all asperities. She laid him in subtle subjection to her. So they chatted of the trivial things that must be crossed and explored before understanding can come. When they neared the lake, the sun had sunk so far that the beach was one long, dark strip of shade. The little waves lapped coolly along the breakwaters. They continued their stroll, walking easily on the hard sand, each unwilling to break the moment of perfect adjustment. Finally the girl confessed her fatigue, and sat down beside a breakwater, throwing off her hat, and pushing her hair away from her temples. She looked up at the man and smiled. 'You see,' she seemed to say, 'I can meet you on your own ground, and the world is very beautiful when one gets away, when one gets away!'
"Why did you refuse to go abroad with Uncle Brome?" she asked suddenly. She was looking out idly across the lake, but something in her voice puzzled Sommers.
"I didn't want to go."
"Chicago fascinates you already!"
"There were more reasons than one," he answered, after a moment's hesitation, as if he could trust himself no farther. The girl smiled a bit, quite to herself. Her throat palpitated a little, and then she turned her head.
"Tell me about the cases. Are they so interesting?"
"There is one curious case," the young doctor responded with masculine literalness. "It's hardly a case, but an affair I have mixed myself up with. Do you remember the night of the dinner at your house when Lindsay was there? The evening before I had been at the Paysons' dance, and when I returned there was an emergency case just brought to the hospital. They had telephoned for me, but had missed me. Well, the fellow was a drunken brute that had been shot a number of times. His wife was with him."
Sommers paused, finding now that he had started on his tale that it was difficult to bring out his point, to make this girl understand the significance of it, and the reason why he told it to her. She was attentive, but he thought she was a trifle bored. Soon he began again and went over all the steps of the affair.
"You see," he concluded, "I was morally certain that, if the operation succeeded, the fellow would be worse than useless in this world. Now it's coming true. Of courseIhave no responsibility; I did what any other doctor should have done, I suppose; and, if it had been an ordinary hospital case, I don't suppose that I should have thought twice about it. But you see that I—this woman has got her load of misery saddled on her, perhaps for life, and partly through me."
"I think she did right," the girl responded quickly, looking at the case from an entirely different side.
"I am not sure of that," Sommers retorted brusquely.
"What kind of a woman is she?" the girl inquired with interest, ignoring his last remark.
"I don't think I could make you understand her. I don't myself now."
"Is she pretty?"
"I don't know. She makes you see her always."
The girl moved as if the evening wind had touched her, and put on her hat.
"She's a desperately literal woman, primitive, the kind you never meet—well, out here. She has a thirst for happiness, and doesn't get a drop."
"She must be common, or she wouldn't have married that man," Miss Hitchcock commented in a hard tone. She rose, and without discussion they took the path that led along the bluff to the cottages.
"I didn't think so," the doctor answered positively. "And if you knew her, you wouldn't think so."
After a moment he said tentatively, "I wish you could meet her."
"I should be glad to," Miss Hitchcock replied sweetly, but without interest.
Sommers realized the instant he had spoken that he had made a mistake, that his idea was a purely conventional one. The two women could have nothing but their sex in common, and that common possession was as likely to be a ground for difference as for agreement. It was always useless to bring two people of different classes together. Three generations back the families of these two women were probably on the same level of society. And, as woman to woman, the schoolteacher, who travelled the dreary path between the dingy cottage and the Everglade School, was as full of power and beauty as this velvety specimen of plutocracy. It was sentimental, however, to ignore the present facts. Evidently Miss Hitchcock had followed the same line of reasoning, for when she spoke again she referred distantly to Mrs. Preston.
"Those people—teachers—have their own clubs and society. Mrs. Bannerton was a teacher in the schools before she was married. Do you know Mrs. Bannerton?"
"I have met Mrs. Bannerton," Sommers answered indifferently.
He was annoyed at the trivial insertion of Mrs. Bannerton into the conversation. He had failed to make Mrs. Preston's story appear important, or even interesting, and the girl by his side had shown him delicately that he was a bore. They walked more rapidly in the gathering twilight. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the ravine below their path was gloomy. The mood of the day had changed, and he was sorry—for everything. It was a petty matter—it was always some petty thing—that came in between them. He longed to recall the moment on the beach when she had asked him, with a flicker of a smile upon her face, why he had decided to remain in Chicago. But they were strangers to each other now,—hopelessly strangers,—and the worst of it was that they both knew it.
* * * * *
There was a large house party at the Hitchcock cottage. The Porters and the Lindsays, with other guests, were there for the holidays of the Fourth, and some more people came in for dinner. The men who had arrived on the late trains brought more news of the strike: the Illinois Central was tied up, the Rock Island service was crippled, and there were reports that the Northwestern men were going outen masseon the morrow. The younger people took the matter gayly, as an opportune occasion for an extended lark. The older men discussed the strike from all sides, and looked grave. Over the cigars the general attitude toward the situation came out strongly: the strikers were rash fools; they'd find that out in a few weeks. They could do a great deal of harm under their dangerous leaders, but, if need be, the courts, the state, the federal government, would be invoked for aid. Law and order and private rights must be respected. The men said these things ponderously, with the conviction that they were reciting a holy creed of eternal right. They were men of experience, who had never questioned the worth of the society in which they were privileged to live. They knew each other, and they knew life, and at the bottom it was as useless to kick against the laws of society as to interfere with the laws of nature. Besides, it was all very good—a fair enough field for any one.
Sommers was excited by the reports. It made him restless to be lolling here outside of the storm when such a momentous affair was moving down the lake under the leaden pall of the city smoke. He asked questions eagerly, and finally got into discussion with old Boardman, one of the counsel for a large railroad.
"Who is that raw youth?" old Boardman asked Porter, when the younger men joined the ladies on the veranda.
"Some protege of Alec's," Brome Porter replied. "Son of an old friend—fresh chap."
"I am afraid our young friend is not going to turn out well," Dr. Lindsay, who had overheard the discussion, added in a distressed tone. "I have done what I can for him, but he is very opinionated and green—yes, very green. Pity—he is a clever fellow, one of the cleverest young surgeons in the city."
"He talks about what he doesn'tknow," Boardman pronounced sententiously. "When he's lived with decent folks a little longer, he'll get some sense knocked into his puppy head, maybe."
"Maybe," Brome Porter assented, dismissing this crude, raw, green, ignorant young man with a contemptuous grunt.
Outside on the brick terrace the younger people had gathered in a circle and were discussing the polo match. Miss Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came to his rescue.
"I say, Lou, it's absurd to compare us with the teams east. We haven't the stable. Who ever heard of playing with two ponies?"
He appealed to Sommers, who happened to be seated next him.
"Steve Bayliss buys ponies by the carload and takes his pick. You can't play polo without good ponies, can you?"
"I don't know," Sommers answered indifferently.
He was looking at the lights along the shore, and contriving some excuse to cut short his visit. It was clear that he was uncomfortably out of his element in the chattering circle. He was too dull to add joy to such a gathering, and he got little joy from it. And he was feverishly anxious to be doing something, to put his hand to some plough—to escape the perpetual irritation of talk.
The chatter went on from polo to golf and gossip until the group broke up into flirtation couples. As Sommers was about to stroll off to the beach, Lindsay came out of the dining room and sat down by him with the amiable purpose of giving his young colleague some good social doctrine. He talked admiringly of the manner in which the general managers had taken hold of the strike.
"Most of them are from the ranks, you know," he said, "fought their way up to the head, just as any one of those fellows could if he had the ability, and theyknowwhat they're doing."
"There is no one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the upper hand," Sommers commented philosophically.
"The son of a peasant?" Lindsay repeated, bewildered.
"Yes, that's what our money-makers are,—from the soil, from the masses. And when they feel their power, they use it worse than the most arrogant aristocrats. Of course the strikers are all wrong, poor fools!" he hastened to add. "But they are not as bad as the others, asthose who have. The men will be licked fast enough, and licked badly. They always will be. But it is a brutal game, a brutal game, this business success,—a good deal worse than war, where you line up in the open at least."
Sommers spoke nonchalantly, as if his views could not interest Dr. Lindsay, but were interesting to himself, nevertheless.
"That's pretty fierce!" Lindsay remarked, with a laugh. "I guess you haven't seen much of business. If you had been here during the anarchist riots—"
Sommers involuntarily shrugged his shoulders. The anarchist was the most terrifying bugaboo in Chicago, referred to as a kind of Asiatic plague that might break out at any time. Before Lindsay could get his argument launched, however, some of the guests drifted out to the terrace, and the two men separated.
Later in the evening Sommers found Miss Hitchcock alone, and explained to her that he should have to leave in the morning, as that would probably be the last chance to reach Chicago for some days. She did not urge him to stay, and expressed her regret at his departure in conventional phrases. They were standing by the edge of the terrace, which ran along the bluff above the lake. A faint murmur of little waves rose to them from the beach beneath.
"It is so heavenly quiet!" the girl murmured, as if to reproach his dissatisfied, restless spirit. "So this is good-bye?" she added, at length.
Sommers knew that she meant this would be the end of their intimacy, of anything but the commonplace service of the world.
"I hope not," he answered regretfully.
"Why is it we differ?" she asked swiftly. "I am sorry we should disagree on such really unimportant matters."
"Don't say that," Sommers protested. "You know that it is just because you are intelligent and big enough to realize that theyareimportant that—"
"We strike them every time?" she inquired.
"Laura Lindsay and Caspar would think we were drivelling idiots."
"I am not so sure they wouldn't be right!" She laughed nervously, and locked her hands tightly together. He turned away in discomfort, and neither spoke for a long time. Finally he broke the silence,—
"At any rate, you can see that I am scarcely a fit guest!"
"So you are determined to go in this way—back to your—case?"
At the scorn of her last words Sommers threw up his head haughtily.
"Yes, back to my case."
Mrs. Ducharme opened the door of the cottage in response to Sommers's knock. Attired in a black house dress, with her dark hair smoothly brushed back from round, fat features, she was a peaceful figure. Sommers thought there was some truth in her contention that "Ducharme ought to get a decent-looking woman, anyway."
"How is Mr. Preston?" he asked.
Mrs. Ducharme shook her head mournfully.
"Bad, allus awful bad—andpitiful. Calling for stuff in a voice fit to break your heart."
"Mind you don't let him get any," the doctor counselled, preparing to go upstairs.
"Better not go up there jest yet," the woman whispered. "Hedidget away from us yesterdy and had a terrible time over there." She hitched her shoulders in the direction of Stoney Island Avenue. "We ain't found out till he'd been gone 'most two hours, and, my! such goings on; we had to git two perlicemen."
"I suppose you were out looking for Ducharme?" the doctor asked, in a severe tone.
"It was the last time," the woman pleaded, her eyes downcast. "Come in here. Miss Preston ain't got back from school,—she's late to-day."
Sommers walked into the bare sitting room and sat down, while Mrs. Ducharme leaned against the door-post, fingering her apron in an embarrassed manner.
"I've got cured," she blurted out at last. "My eye was awful bad, and it's been most a week since you sent me here."
"Did you follow my treatment?"
"No! I was out one afternoon—after Mrs. Preston came back from school—and I had walked miles and miles. Comin' home I passed a buildin' down here a ways on the avenue where there were picter papers pasted all over the windows; the picters were all about healin' folks, heaps and heaps in great theaters, a nice white-haired old preacher doin' the healin'. While I was lookin' at the picters, a door opened and a young feller came along and helped 'em carry in a cripple in his chair. He turns to me arter finishin' with the cripple and says, 'Come in, lady, and be healed in the blood of the lamb.' In I went, sure enough, and there was a kind of rough church fitted up with texts printed in great show-bills, and they was healin' folks. The little feller was helpin' em up the steps to the platform, and the old feller was prayin', and at last the young feller comes to me and says, 'Want ter be healed?' and I just got up, couldn't help it, and walked to the platform, and they prayed over me—you aren't mad, are you?" she asked suspiciously.
Sommers laughed.
"Mrs. Preston said you'd be very angry with such nonsense. But at any rate the old fellow—Dr.—Dr.—Po—"
"Dr. Potz," Sommers suggested.
"That's him. He cured me, and I went back again and told him about Ducharme. Andhesays that he's got a devil, and he will cast it out by prayin'. But he wants money."
"How much will it cost to cast out the devil?" the doctor inquired.
"The doctor says he must have ten dollars to loosen the bonds."
"Well," Sommers drew a bill from his pocket, "there's ten dollars on account of your wages. Now, don't you interfere with the doctor's work. You let him manage the devil his own way, and if you see Ducharme or the other woman, you run away as hard as you can. If you don't, you may bring the devil back again."
The woman took the money eagerly.
"You can go right off to find the doctor," Sommers continued. "I'll stay here until Mrs. Preston returns. But let me look at your eye, and see whether the doctor has cast that devil out for good and all."
He examined the eye as well as he could without appliances. Sure enough, so far as he could detect, the eye was normal, the peculiar paralysis had disappeared.
"You are quite right," he pronounced at last. "The doctor has handled this devil very ably. You can tell Mrs. Preston that I approve of your going to that doctor."
"I wonder where Mrs. Preston can be: she's most always here by half-past four, and it's after five. He," the woman pointed upstairs to Preston's rooms, "is sleeping off the effects of the dose Mrs. Preston gave him."
"The powders?" the doctor asked.
"Yes, sir. She had to give him two before he would sleep. Well, I'll be back by supper time. If he calls you, be careful about the bar on the door."
After Mrs. Ducharme had gone, the doctor examined every object in the little room. It was all so bare! Needlessly so, Sommers thought at first, contrasting the bleak room with the comfortable simplicity of his own rooms. The strip of coarse thin rug, the open Franklin stove, the pine kitchen table, the three straight chairs—it was as if the woman, crushed down from all aspirations, had defiantly willed to exist with as little of this world's furniture as might be. On the table were a few school books, a teacher's manual of drawing, a school mythology, and at one side two or three other volumes, which Sommers took up with more interest. One was a book on psychology—a large modern work on the subject. A second was an antiquated popular treatise on "Diseases of the Mind." Another volume was an even greater surprise—Balzac'sUne Passion dans la Desert, a well-dirtied copy from the public library. They were fierce condiments for a lonely mind!
His examination over, he noiselessly stepped into the hall and went upstairs. After some fumbling he unbolted the door and tiptoed into the room, where Preston lay like a log. The fortnight had changed him markedly. There was no longer any prospect that he would sink under his disease, as Sommers had half expected. He had grown stouter, and his flesh had a healthy tint. "It will take it out of his mind," he muttered to himself, watching the hanging jaw that fell nervelessly away from the mouth, disclosing the teeth.
As he watched the man's form, so drearily promising of physical power, he heard a light footstep at the outer door, which he had left unbarred. On turning he caught the look of relief that passed over Mrs. Preston's face at the sight of the man lying quietly in his bed. What a state of fear she must live in!
Without a word the two descended, Sommers carefully barring and bolting the door. When they reached her room, her manner changed, and she spoke with a note of elation in her voice:
"I wassoafraid that you would not come again after sending me help."
"I shall come as often and as long as you need me," Sommers answered, taking her hand kindly. "He has had another attack," he continued. "Mrs. Ducharme told me—I sent her out—and I suppose he's sleeping off the opiate."
"Yes, it was dreadful, worse than anything yet." She uttered these words jerkily, walking up and down the room in excitement. "And I've just left the schoolhouse. The assistant superintendent was there to see me. He was kind enough, but he said it couldn't happen again. There was scandal about it now. And yesterday I heard a child, one of my pupils, say to his companion, 'She's the teacher who's got a drunken husband.'"
Her voice was dreary, not rebellious.
"I don't know what to do. I cannot move. It would be worse in any other neighborhood. I thought," she added in a low voice, "that he would go away, for a time at least, but his mind is so weak, and he has some trouble with walking. But he gets stronger, stronger, O God, every day! I have to see him grow stronger, and I grow weaker."
"It is simply preposterous," the doctor protested in matter-of-fact tones, "to kill yourself, to put yourself in such a position for a man, who is no longer a man. For a man you cannot love," he added.
"What would be the use of running away from the trouble? He has ruined my life. Alves Preston is a mere thing that eats and sleeps. She will be that kind of thing as long as she lives."
"That is romantic rot," the doctor observed coldly. "No life is ruined in that way. One life has been wrecked; but you,youare bigger than that life. You can recover—bury it away—and love and have children and find that it is a good thing to live. That is the beauty of human weakness—we forget ourselves of yesterday."
In answer to his words her face, which he had once thought too immobile and passive for beauty, flamed with color, the dark eyes flashing beneath the broad white brow.
"Am I just caught in a fog?" she murmured.
"You are living in a way that would make any woman mad. I might twist myself into as many knots as you have. I might say thatIhad caused this disaster; that March evening my hand was too true. For I knew then the man ought to die."
He blurted out his admission roughly.
"I knew you did," she said softly, "and that has made it easier."
His voice trembled when he spoke again. "But I live with facts, not fancies. And the facts are that that ruined thing should not clog you, ruinyou. Get rid of him in any way you will,—I advise the county asylum. Get rid of him, and do it quickly before he crazes you."
When he had finished, there was an oppressive stillness in the room, as if some sentence had been declared. Mrs. Preston got up and walked to and fro, evidently battling with herself. She stopped opposite him finally.
"The only thing that would justifythatwould be to know that you grasped it all—real happiness in that one bold stroke. Such conviction cannevercome."
"Happiness!" he exclaimed scornfully. "If you mean a good, comfortable time, you won't find any certainty aboutthat. But you can get freedom to live out your life—"
"You fail to understand. Thereishappiness. See,—come here."
She led him to the front window, which was open toward the peaceful little lawn. On the railroad track behind the copse of scrub oak an unskilful train crew was making up a long train of freight cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works. One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house and the avenue.
"You can hear it in the night air," she murmured; "the joy that comes rising up from the earth, the joy of living. Ah! that is why we are made—to have happiness and joy, to rejoice the heart of God, to make God live, forHemust be happiness itself; and when we are happy and feel joy in living, He must grow stronger. And when we are weak and bitter, when the world haunts us as I felt this afternoon on leaving the superintendent, when men strike and starve, and others are hard and grasping—then He must shrink and grow small and suffer. Thereishappiness," she ended, breathing her belief as a prayer into the solitude and night.
"What will you do to get it?" Sommers asked, shortly.
"Do to get it?" She drew back from the window, her figure tense. "When it comes within my grasp, I will do everything, everything, and nothing shall hinder me."
"Meantime?" the doctor questioned significantly.
"Don't ask me!" She sank into a chair and covered her eyes with her hand.And neither spoke until the sound of footsteps was heard on the walk.
"There is Mrs. Ducharme coming home from the charmer of devils. It is time for me to go," Sommers said.
The room was so dark that he could not see her face, as he extended his hand; but he could feel the repressed breathing, the passionate air about her person.
"Remember," he said slowly, "whenever you need me—want me for anything—send a message, and I shall come at once. We will settle this thing together."
There was a sharp pressure on his hand, her thin fingers drawing him toward her involuntarily. Then his hand dropped, and he groped his way to the door.
The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of light. A gentle wind drew in shore from the lake, stirring the tall rushes in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still; the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand to move the perishing freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a grass-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on, unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious dream.
The little space of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss Hitchcock in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her. Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night. That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded away, and in her place was this passionate, large-hearted woman, who had spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to some subtle opiate.
Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,—all, all that made the waking world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy colors of the essential fire. The fire,—that was the one great thing,—the fire was life itself.
As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the noble human figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of man's corrupted carcass; the world that has, with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had found it.
Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends—for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house.
He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this God-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, fromher. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in his life he was content to feel.
All emotion over life must come to be transmuted to this—an elemental state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and multitudes of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire—to love and have peace.
The Fourth, of July had never before been kept in the like manner in Chicago. There was a row or two at Grand Crossing between the strikers and the railroad officials, several derailed cars and spiked switches, a row at Blue Island, and a bonfire in the stock yards. People were not travelling on this holiday, and the main streets were strangely silent and dull.
Sommers had found no one at the office in the Athenian Building. Lindsay had not been in since the strike began. Probably he would not appear until the disorderly city had settled down. Sommers had taken the clinic yesterday; to-day there was nothing for him to do except exercise his horse by a long ride in the blazing sunshine. Before he left the office a telegram came from Lake Forest, announcing that a postponed meeting of the board of managers of the summer sanitarium for poor babies would be put off indefinitely. Sommers knew what that meant—no appropriation for carrying on the work. At the last meeting the board of managers, who were women for the most part, had disagreed about the advisability of undertaking the work this season, when every one was feeling poor. Some women had been especially violent against supporting the charity in those districts where the strikers lived.
Miss Hitchcock, who was the secretary, and Sommers had got the heated members of the board to suppress their prejudices for the present, and vote a temporary subsidy. The telegram meant that under the present circumstances it would be hopeless to try to extract money from the usual sources. The sanitarium and creche would have to close within a week, and Sommers was left to arrange matters. After he had taken the necessary measures, he started on his ride. He had in mind to ride out of the city along the lines of railroad to the southwest to see whether the newspaper reports of the strike were justified or, as he suspected, grossly exaggerated. The newspapers, at first inclined to side with the Pullman men in their demand for arbitration, had suddenly turned about and were denouncing the strikers as anarchists. They were spreading broadcast throughout the country violent reports of incendiarism and riot.
Outside of the stations and the adjacent yards Sommers found little to see. A great stagnation had settled over the city this hot July day. Somewhat disappointed in his search for excitement he came back at nightfall to the cool stretches of the South Parks. He turned into the desolate Midway, where the unsightly wheel hung an inert, abortive mass in the violet dusk. His way home lay in the other direction, and his horse trotted languidly. He had determined to turn back, when suddenly a tongue of flame shot up a mile away toward the lake. This first long tongue ran out, followed by another and another, and yet others that raced north and south and up into the night.
"The Fair Buildings!" a man on a bicycle shouted, and sped away.
The broad flames now illuminated the dome of the Administration Building and the facades of the Court of Honor. Sommers spurred his horse, while the loungers suddenly, with one cry, poured from the park along the rough paths of the Midway, streaming out across the prairie toward the fire. He plunged into the cool gulf under the Illinois Central tracks, then out into a glare of full day, before the wild, licking flames. The Court of Honor with its empty lagoon and broken bridges was more beautiful in the savage glow of the ravaging fire than ever on the gala nights of the exposition. The fantastic fury of the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the mass. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle—that noble fantasy plucked from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the lustrous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters of the lake caught the reflection and sombrely relighted the scene.
Sommers almost knocked over a woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery of the fierce fire.
"It is grand, beautiful," she murmured to Sommers, who had dismounted. Her large frame trembled with suppressed excitement, and her face glowed.
"Beauty eating beauty," Sommers replied sadly.
"They ought to go, just like this—shoot up into the sky in flame and die, expire in the last beauty."
The excitement of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, noble emptiness between the fire-eaten pillars of the Peristyle.
"That is better than the Fair itself. It is fiercer—not mere play."
"Nature has taken a hand," Sommers said grimly, "and knocks about man's toys. Look!"
He pointed to the fairylike brightness of the island in the lagoon. The green leafage of the shrubbery was suffused in tender light; the waters reflected calmly all their drapery, but none of the savage desolation of the pyre in the Court of Honor. Beyond where the gracious pile of the Art Building stretched across the horizon the light clouds of smoke floated, a gray wreath in the night. The seething mass of flame began to abate, to lessen almost imperceptibly, exhausting itself slowly with deep groans like the dying of a master passion.
Sommers suggested that they should circle the fire to the south, where they could see to better advantage the Peristyle now burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women—mere mites—were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping out of the gloom of dusk in a mountain valley. Helpless shapes doomed to wander on the sandy strand of the earth!
The two found a place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,—the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,—solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal figure of triumph the noble horseman still reined in his frightened chargers. The velvet shadows of the night were falling once more over the distant Art Building, creeping over the little island, leaving the lagoons in murky silence. The throngs of curious people that had clustered about the western end of the fire were thinning out rapidly. A light night breeze from the empty spaces of prairie wafted the smoke wreaths northward toward the city of men whose plaything had been taken. At their feet a white column of staff plunged into the water, hissed and was silent. The passion was well-nigh spent.
Mrs. Preston sighed, like a child waking from a long revery, a journey into another land.
"I never felt that the fierce things, the passions of life, could bring their happiness too. It seemed that happiness was something peaceful, like the fields at night or this lake when it is still. But that is butonekind. There are many others."
Her low voice, powerful in its restraint, took up the mood of the place.
"It dies," Sommers replied. "Burnt out!"
"No," she protested eagerly; "it remains in the heart, warming it in dull, cold times, and its great work comes after. It is not well to live without fierceness and passion."
The last lights from the fire flickered over her dark hair and sombre face. She was breathing heavily close by his side, throwing into the soft night a passionate warmth of feeling. It set his pulses beating in response.
"You are so insistent upon happiness," the man cried.
"Yes," she nodded. "To die out without this"—her hand pointed to the blackened Court of Honor—"is to have lived unfulfilled. That is what I felt as a child in the rich fields of Wisconsin, as a girl at the chapel of the seminary."
And she began, as if to explain herself, to tell the story of the Wisconsin farm, sleeping heavily in the warm sun among the little lakes; of the crude fervor that went on under the trees of the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human associations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,—the scents of field and of cattle, the fertile soil, and the broad-shouldered men, like Holstein cattle.
The excitement of the evening had set free the heart, and a torrent of feelings and memories surged up,—disordered, turbulent, yet strangely unified by the simple nature, the few aims of the being that held them. The waters of the past had been gathering these past weeks, and now she found peace in their release, in the abandonment of herself through speech. The night crept on, cooler now and clouded, the heavens covered with filaments of gray lace; the horse tied near by stamped and whinnied. But the two sitting on the shore of the silent lake felt neither the passing of time nor the increasing cold of the night.
At the end of her tale the dominant note sounded once more: "Eight or wrong, happiness! for if we make happiness in the world, we know God. God lives upon our happiness."
This belief, which seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure of joy.
"If you think that—if your whole story turns out that way—why did you—"But he paused, unwilling to force her by a brutal proof of illogicality.
"How ishe?" he asked at last, with effort.
Her head had drooped forward, but with this question she moved quickly, as if suddenly lashed.
"He is better, always better."
"My God!" the man groaned.
"But his mind is weaker—it wanders. Sometimes it is clear; then it is dreadful."
"You must not endure it!"
She laid her hand lightly upon his arm, warning him of the inutility of his protest.
"I think we must endure it now. If it had been done earlier, before—" she answered tranquilly; and added definitely, "it is too late now for any relief."
It was on his lips to cry out, "Why, why?" but as his eyes looked into her face and met her warm, wistful glance, he acquiesced in the fate she had ordained. He took her hand, the one that had touched him, and for the time he was content that things should be as they were. She was looking out into the ruined buildings, where embers hissed; at last she lowered her eyes, and whispered:
"It is very good even as it is, now."
But he rebelled, manlike, unwilling to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been!Ihave fastened this monstrous chain about you—aboutus."
"Let us not think of it——to-night," she murmured, her eyes burning into his face.
* * * * *
The first gray of the morning was revealing the outlines of the scrub oaks in the field as the two came back to the cottage. Sommers tied his horse to a fence-post at the end of the lane, and went in to warm himself from the chill of the night air. Mrs. Preston prepared some coffee, while he built a fire in the unused stove. Then she drew up her work-table before the fire and poured out the coffee into two thick cups. As there was no cream, she remarked with a little smile, "It is very late for after-dinner coffee!"
She moved and spoke with extreme caution, not to disturb Mrs. Ducharme and Preston, who became excitable when awakened suddenly. They drank their coffee in silence, and Sommers had stood up to leave.
"I shall come very soon," he was saying, and her face responded with a little smile that lit up its sober corners and hard lines. Suddenly it grew rigid and white, and her eyes stared beyond the doctor into the gloom of the room. Sommers turned to follow her gaze. The door moved a little. There was some one outside, peering in. Sommers strode across the floor and threw the door open. In the dim light of the dawn he could see Preston, half dressed. He had slunk back from the door.
"Come in," the doctor ordered sternly.
The man obeyed, shambling into the room with an air of bravado.
"Oh, it's you, is it, doctor?" he remarked quite naturally, with an air of self-possession. "Haven't seen you for a long time; you don't come this way often, at least to seeme," he added insinuatingly, looking at his wife. "I heard voices, and I thought I would come down to see what my wife was up to. Women always need a little watching, doctor, as you probably know."
He walked toward the table. As he stood there talking in a sneering voice, in full flesh, shaved and clean, he certainly did not look like a man stricken with paresis. Yet the doctor knew that this fitful mood of sanity was deceitful. The feeble brain had given a momentary spurt.
"Coffee?" Preston continued, as the others remained silent. "Haven't you got anything better than coffee? Where have you been, Mrs. Preston and Dr.—?"
Mrs. Preston tremblingly poured out some coffee and handed it to him. The act enraged the doctor. It seemed symbolical. Preston threw the cup to the floor.
"None of your rot," he shouted. "I betyouhave had something more than coffee, you—" he glared at his wife, his limbs trembling and twitching as the nervous irritation gained on him. Sommers sprang forward.
"Go upstairs," he commanded sternly. "You are not fit to be here."
"Who are you to give me orders in my own house beforemywife?" The man balanced himself against the table. "You get out of this and never come back. I am a gentleman, I want you to know, and I may be a drunkard and all that, but I am not going to have any man hanging—"
Sommers seized Preston by the collar of his shirt and dragged him to the stairs. The man fought and bit and cursed. A black slime of words fell from his lips, covering them all with its defilement. Finally the struggles subsided, and with one mighty effort the doctor threw him into the upper chamber and closed the door behind them. In a few moments he came downstairs, bolting the door carefully. When he entered the room, he saw Mrs. Preston staring at the door as if entranced, her face marble with horror.
"I gave him a hypodermic injection. He will sleep a few hours," Sommers muttered, throwing himself into a chair.
Mrs. Preston sat down at the table and folded her arms about her face. Her figure shook with her silent sobs.