At the gate of the cemetery he fled from the little company. Dr. Leonard wanted to return to the city with him, but he shook off the talkative dentist. He must escape all sense of participation in the affair. So he made the long journey in the cable train, thinking disconnectedly in unison with the banging, jolting, grinding of the car. The panorama of his one short year in Chicago rose bit by bit into his mind: the hospital, the rich, bizarre town, the society of thirsty, struggling souls, always rushing madly hither and thither, his love for the woman he had just left, and this final distracting event.
What if she had doubled the dose of the anodyne? Probably the fellow was abusive. It might have been some shameful extremity that had forced upon her this act in self-defence. But such a situation would have called for violence, some swift blow. The man had died in insidious calm. He had counselled it, believed in it. But not thatshe—the woman he loved—should be brave with that desperate courage. Yet it was over now, beyond sight and thought, and he loved her—yes, loved her more than if it had not been so.
Once in town, he felt intolerably lonely, as a busy man who has had his round of little duties in a busy world soon comes to feel when any jar has put him out of his usual course. As he sauntered among the strange faces of the city streets, looking out for a familiar being, he began to realize how completely he had cut himself off from the ordinary routine of life. He was as much a stranger as if he had been dropped into the bustling crowd for the first time. He had sat in judgment, and the world would give a fig for his judgments. A week ago he might have taken refuge in a dozen houses. To-night he stood upon street corners and wistfully eyed the passing stream.
He walked to the river aimlessly, and then walked back, examining the blank faces of the people. He spied through the lowered window of a carriage Brome Porter and Carson, going in the direction of the Northwestern station. The carriage skirted the curb near him, but the occupants were looking the other way. He recalled that Carson had been induced to leave the famous portrait on exhibition at the Art Institute. Whenever in the future he might care to refresh his mind with the vision of this epitome of success, he had but to drop into the dusky building on the lake front and have it all—with the comment of the great artist.
As he moved on his restless course, he thought of Porter and Carson, of Polot, and then of many others, whose faces came out of the memories of the past year. How many of them were "good fellows," human and kind and strong! They fought the world's fight, and fought it fairly. Could more be expected of man? Could he be made to curb his passion for gain, to efface himself, to refuse to take what his strong right hand had the power to grasp? Perhaps the world was arranged merely to get the best out of strong animals.
He turned into a restaurant, where usually he could find a dozen people of his acquaintance in the prosperous world. The place was crowded, but he spied no one he had ever seen. Evidently the people who knew how to make themselves comfortable had contrived to get out of this besieged city. They were at the various country clubs, at Wheaton, Lake Forest, Lake Geneva, Oconomowoc, keeping cool, while the general managers, the strikers, and the troops fought out their differences. The menu was curtailed this evening.
"'Twon't be long, sir," the waiter explained, "'fore we'll have to kill them cab horses as they done in Paris. Game and fruit and milk can't be had."
But for the present the food was not of the famine order, and the noisy crowd eat joyously, as if sure of enough, somehow, as long as they needed it and had the money to pay. As Sommers was idling over his coffee, Swift, a young fellow whom he had seen at the University Club, a college man connected with one of the papers, sat down at his table, and chatted busily.
"They telephoned from the stock yards that there was a big mob down there," he told Sommers. "I thought I'd go over and see if I couldn't get an extra story out of it. Want to come along? It's about the last round of the fight. The managers have got five thousand new men here already or on the way. That will be the knock-out," he chatted briskly.
Sommers drifted along to the scene of the riot with the reporter, happier in finding himself with some one, no matter who he might be. Swift talked about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over the roadbed like insects. A sweltering, fetid air veiled the distances. Like a filthy kettle, the place stewed in its heat and dirt. Here lived the men who had engaged in the foolish fight!
At a cross street the officers dropped off the car, and Swift and Sommers followed them.
"Where's the fun?" the reporter asked the sergeant.
The officer pointed languidly toward a tangle of railroad tracks at one end of the vast enclosure of the stock yards. They trudged on among the lines of deserted cars in the fading glare of the July heat. The broad sides of the packing houses, the lofty chimneys surrounded by thin grayish clouds, the great warehouses of this slaughter yard of the world, drew nearer. All at once a roar burst on their ears, and they came out from behind a line of cars upon a stretch of track where a handful of soldiers were engaged in pressing back a rabble of boys, women, and men. The rabble were teasing the soldiers, as a mob of boys might tease a cat. Suddenly, as the officers and deputies appeared, some one hurled a stone. In a moment the air was thick with missiles, revolver shots followed, and then the handful of soldiers formed in line with fixed bayonets.
Sommers heard in the midst of all the roar the piteous bellowing of cattle, penned up in the cars. He saw a dark form stealing around the end of a car; in a moment a light spurted out as if a match had been touched to kerosene; there was a gleam of light, and the stock-car with its load of cattle was wrapped in flames. The dark figure disappeared among the cars; Sommers followed it. The chase was long and hot. From time to time the fleeing man dodged behind a car, applied his torch, and hurried on. At last Sommers overtook him, kneeling down beside a box car, and pouring oil upon a bunch of rags. Sommers kicked the can out of reach and seized the man by the collar. They struggled in the dark for a few moments. Then the man put his hand to his pocket, saying,—
"I suppose you're a damned, sneaking deputy."
"Hold on, you drunken fool!" Sommers exclaimed. "It's lucky for you I am not a deputy."
He could hear the mob as it came down the yards in the direction of the burning cars.
"If you don't want to be locked up, come on with me."
The fellow obeyed, and they walked down through the lane of cars until they reached a fence. Sommers forced his companion through a gap, and followed him. Then the man began to run, and at the corner ran into a file of soldiers, who were coming into the yards. Sommers turned up the street and walked rapidly in the direction of the city. The first drops of a thunder-shower that had been lowering over the city for hours were falling, and they brought a pleasant coolness into the sultry atmosphere. That was the end! The "riot" would be drowned out in half an hour.
The sense of overwhelming loneliness came back, and instinctively he turned south in the direction of the cottage. From the loneliness of life, the sultry squalor of the city, the abortive folly of the mob, he fled to the one place that was still sweet in all this wilderness of men.
* * * * *
The cottage windows were dark when he arrived an hour later, but Alves met him at the door.
"I have been waiting for you," she said calmly. "I knew you would come as soon as you could."
"Didn't Miss M'Gann stay?" he asked remorsefully.
"I sent her away with Dr. Leonard. And our old Ducharme has gone out to one of her doctor's services. She is getting queerer and queerer, but such a good soul! What should I have done without her! You sent her to me," she added tenderly.
They sat down by the open window within sound of the gentle, healing rain. Sommers noticed that Alves had changed her dress from the black gown she had worn in the afternoon to a colored summer dress. The room had been rearranged, and all signs of the afternoon scene removed. It was as if she willed to obliterate the past at once. How fast she lived!
Her manner was peaceful. She sat resting her head against a high-backed chair, and her arms, bare from the elbow, fell limply by her side. She seemed tired, merely, and content to rest in the sense of sweet relief.
"Alves," he cried, taking one of her hands and pressing the soft flesh in his grip, "I could not stay away. I meant to—I did not mean to meet you again here—but it was too lonely, too desolate everywhere."
"Why not here and at once?" she asked, with a shade of wonder in her voice. "Haven't we had all the sorrow here? And why should we put off our joy? It is so great to be happy to the full for once."
The very words seemed to have a savor for her.
"Are you happy?" he asked curiously.
"Why not! It's as if all that I could ever dream while I walked the hot streets had come to me. It has come so fast that I cannot quite feel it all. Some joy is standing outside, waiting its turn."
Smilingly she turned her face to his for response.
"What shall you do?" he asked.
"Do? I can't thinknow. There is so much time to think of that."
"But you can't stay here!" he exclaimed, with undue agitation.
"Not if you dislike it. But I feel differently. I found this refuge, and it served me well. I have no need to leave it."
Sommers let her hand fall from his clasp, and rose to his feet.
"You must! You cannot stay here after—"
"As you wish. We will go away."
"But until we are married?"
"Married?" she repeated questioningly. "I hadn't thought of that."
After a moment she said hesitatingly:
"Do we have to be married? I mean have the ceremony, the oath, the rest of it? I have been married. Now I want—love."
"Why, it is only natural—" the man protested.
"No, no, it is not natural. It may kill all this precious love. You may come to hate me as I hated him, and then, then? No," she continued passionately. "Let us not make a ceremony of this. It would be like the other, and I should feel it so always. We will have love, just love, and live so that it makes no difference. You cannot understand!"
Sommers knelt beside her chair.
"Love, love," he repeated. "You shall have it, Alves, as you will—the delirium of love!"
"That is right," she whispered, trembling at his touch. "Talk to me like that. Only more, more. Make my ears ring with it. Your words are so weak!"
"There are no words."
"No, there is not one perfect one in all the thousands!" she uttered, with a low cry. "And they are all alike—all used and common. But this,"—she kissed him, drawing him closer to her beating heart. "This is you and all!"
Thus she taught him the fire of love—so quickly, so surely! From the vague boyish beatitude had sprung this passion, like the opulent blossom out of the infolding bosom of the plant. Her kiss had dissipated his horrid suspicions. Her lips were bond and oath and sacrament.
That night they escaped the world with its fierce cross-purposes, its checker-board scheme. The brutality of human success, the anguish of strife,—what is it when man is shut within the chamber of his joy! Outside the peaceful rain fell ceaselessly, quenching the flame and the smoke and the passion of the city.
"Next week Monday is the tenth," Alves announced, glancing at the calendar that hung beside the writing-table.
"Well?" Sommers answered. He was preparing to make the daily trip to the post-office on the other side of Perota Lake.
"The Chicago schools open this year on the tenth," Alves continued slowly.
"What difference does that make?"
For reply Alves took from the drawer of the table the old leather purse that was their bank. The mute action made Sommers smile, but he opened the purse and counted the bills. Then he shoved them back into the purse, and replaced it in the drawer.
"I don't know why I haven't heard about my horse," he mused.
"That would only put the day off another month or two," Alves answered. "We have had our day of play—eight long good weeks. The golden-rod has been out for nearly a month, and the geese have started south. We saw a flock yesterday, you remember."
"But you aren't going back to the school!" Sommers protested. "Not to theEverglade School."
"I got the notices last week. They haven't discharged me! Why not?" she added sanely. "You know that it will be hard to build up a practice. And Miss M'Gann wrote me that we could get a good room at the Keystone. That won't be too far from the school."
"I had thought of returning to Marion, where my father practised," Sommers suggested. "If we could only stayhere, in this shanty three miles from a biscuit!"
Alves smiled, and did not argue the point. They went to the shore where their little flat-bottomed boat was drawn up. Perota Lake, on which the tiny frame cottage stood, was a shallow, reedy pond, connecting by sluggish brooks with a number of other lakes. The shore on this side of the lake was a tangled thicket; the opposite shore rose in a gentle slope to fields of sun-dried grain. The landscape was rich, peaceful, uneventful, with wide spaces of sun and cloud and large broad Wisconsin fields. The fierce west wind came cool and damp from the water. Sommers pulled out of the reedy shore and headed for a neighboring lake. After rowing in silence for some time, he rested on his oars.
"Why couldn't we stay here? That is what I want to do—to keep out of the city with its horrible clatter of ambitions, to return to the soil, and live like the primitive peasant without ambition."
The Wisconsin woman smiled sympathetically. She had grown strong and firm-fleshed these summer weeks, sucking vitality from the warm soil.
"The land is all owned around here!" she laughed. "And they use herb doctors or homeopaths. No, we should starve in the midst of harvests. There is only one thing to do, to go back where we can earn a bit of bread."
Sommers started to row, but put down the oars again.
"Doyouwant to go back?"
"I never think about it. It is so arranged," she answered simply. "Perhaps it will not be always so."
"Which means that we may be more fortunate than our neighbors?"
"I don't know—why think? We have until Monday," and she leaned forward to touch his hand.
Why think! That is what she had taught him. They had sloughed off Chicago at the first, and from the day they arrived at Perota they had sunk into a gentle, solitary routine. Sommers had been content to smoke his pipe, to ruminate on nothings, to be idle with no strenuous summoning of his will. There had been no perplexity, no revolt, no decision. Even the storm of their love subdued itself to a settled warmth, like that of the insistent summer sun. They had little enough to do with, but they were not aware of their poverty. Alves had had a long training in economy, and with the innate capability of the Wisconsin farmer's daughter, adjusted their little so neatly to their lives that they scarcely thought of unfulfilled wants.
Now why, the man mused, must they break this? Why must they be forced back into a world that they disliked, and that had no place for them? If he were as capable as she, there would be no need. But society has discovered a clever way of binding each man to his bench! While he brooded, Alves watched the gentle hills, straw-colored with grain, and her eyes grew moist at the pleasant sight. She glanced at him and smiled—the comprehending smile of the mothers of men.
"You would not want it always."
They landed at the end of the lake; from there it was a short walk over the dusty country road to the village. The cross-roads hamlet with its saloons and post-office was still sleeping in midday lethargy. Alves pointed to the unpainted, stuffy-looking houses.
"You would not like this."
At the post-office they met a young fellow wearing a cassock, a strangely incongruous figure in the Wisconsin village. "Are you coming to vespers?" the young priest asked. His brown, heavy face did not accord with the clerical habit or with the thin clerical voice.
"I think so—for the last time," Alves answered.
"Guy Jones will be there. You remember Guy, Alves? He used to be quite sweet on you in the old days when your brother was at the seminary."
"Yes, I remember Guy," Alves answered hurriedly. She seemed conscious of Sommers's bored gaze. The young priest accompanied them along the dusty road.
"Guy'll be glad to see you again. He's become quite a man out in PaintedPost, Nebraska—owns pretty much the whole place—"
"We shall be at vespers," Alves repeated, interrupting the talkative young man.
When his cassock had disappeared up the dusty road between the fields of corn, she added,
"And that, too, you would not like, nor Guy Jones."
After beaching the boat in front of the cottage they walked to the seminary chapel by a little path through the meadows along the lake, then across a wooded hill where the birds were singing multitudinously. The buildings of the Perota Episcopal Seminary occupied the level plateau of a hill that lay between two lakes. A broad avenue of elms and maples led to the rude stone cloisters, one end of which was closed by the chapel. To Sommers the cheap factory finish of the chapel and the ostentatious display of ritualism were alike distasteful. The crude fervors of the boy priests were strangely out of harmony with the environment. But Alves, to whom the place was full of associations, liked the services. As they entered the cloisters, a tiny bell was jangling, and the students were hurrying into the chapel, their long cassocks lending a foreign air to the Wisconsin fields. Only one other person was seated on the benches beneath the choir, a broad-faced young American, whose keen black eyes rested upon Alves. She was absorbed in the service, which was loudly intoned by the young priest. The candles, the incense, the intoned familiar words, animated her. Sommers had often wondered at the powerful influence this service exerted over her. To the training received here as a child was due, perhaps, that blind wilfulness of self-sacrifice which had first brought her to his notice.
"The remission and absolution of sins—" Alves was breathing heavily, her lips murmuring the mighty words after the priest. Was there a sore hidden in her soul? Did she crave some supernatural pardon for a desperate deed? The memory of miserable suspicions flashed over him, and gravely, sadly, he watched the quivering face by his side. If she sought relief now in the exercise of her old faith, what would come as the years passed and heaped up the burden of remorse!
* * * * *
The service ended, and the three lay participants sauntered into the graveyard outside the west door. The setting sun flooded the aisle of the little chapel, even to the cross on the altar. The tones of the organ rolled out into the warm afternoon. The young man approached Alves with extended hand.
"The boys told me I could find you here. It's real good to see you again. Yes, I'm back to have a look at the old place. Wouldn't return tostayfor worlds. It's a great place out there, where a man counts for what he is. Won't you make me acquainted with your husband?"
Sommers felt instinctively the hesitation in Alves's manner. She turned to him, however.
"Howard, this is my brother's old friend, Mr. Jones,—Dr. Sommers."
The young man shook hands with great warmth, and joined them in their walk home, talking rapidly all the way. When he left the cottage, he extended a cordial invitation to Sommers to establish himself in Painted Post. "We want a good, live, hustling doctor, one that is up in all the modern school theories," he explained.
After he had gone, they sat in silence, watching the deepening twilight in the cool woods. The day, the season, the fair passion of life, seemed to wane. Like the intimations of autumn that come in unknown ways, even in August, surely in September, this accidental visitor brought the atmosphere of change.
"The struggle begins, then, next Monday," Sommers remarked at last.
She kissed him for reply.
To love, to forget unpleasant thoughts, to love again, to refrain from an ignoble strife—alas! that it could not be thus for a lifetime.
The Keystone Hotel was in full blast when the doctor and Alves returned from Wisconsin. Miss M'Gann met them and introduced them to the large, parlor-floor room she had engaged for them. The newcomers joined the household that was taking the air on the stone steps of the hotel. The step below Miss M'Gann's was held by a young man who seemed to share with Miss M'Gann the social leadership of the Keystone. He was with the Baking Powder Trust, he told Sommers. He was tall and fair, with reddish hair that massed itself above his forehead in a shiny curl, and was supplemented by a waving auburn mustache. His scrupulous dress, in the fashion of the foppish clerk, gave an air of distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,—a few young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed, middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle with maids-of-all-work. One of these latter,—father, mother, and daughter—had seats at table with Sommers and Alves. The father, a little, bald-headed man with the air of a furtive mouse, had nothing to say; the mother was a faded blond woman, who shopped every day with the daughter; the daughter, who was sixteen, had the figure of a woman of twenty, and the assurance born in hotels and boarding-houses. Her puffy rounded face, set in a thick roll of blond hair, had the expression of a precocious doll. When she had sounded Alves on the subject of silk waists, she relapsed into silence and stared amiably at the doctor.
Sommers arranged to hang his little celluloid sign,Howard Sommers, M. D., Physician and Surgeon, beneath his window. The proprietor of the Keystone thought it gave a desirable, professional air to the house. But Webber, the young man in the Baking Powder Trust, was sceptical of its commercial value to the doctor. Certainly the results from its appearance were not ascertainable. Sommers had no patients. The region about the Keystone was a part of the World's Fair territory, and had been greatly overbuilt. It had shrunk in these stagnant months to one-tenth of its possible population. There was, besides, an army of doctors, at least one for every five families Sommers judged from the signs. They were for the most part graduates of little, unknown medical schools or of drug stores. Lindsay had once said that this quarter of the city was a nest of charlatans. The two or three physicians of the regular school had private hospitals, sanitariums, or other means of improving their business. Many of the doctors used the drug stores as offices and places of rendezvous. Their signs hung, one below another, from a long crane at the entrances of the stores. It was an impartial, hospitable method of advertising one's services. There was one such bulletin at the shop on the corner of the neighboring avenue; the names were unfamiliar and foreign,—Jelly, Zarnshi, Pasko, Lemenueville. Sommers suspected that their owners had taken to themselvesnoms de guerre.
At first Sommers avoided these places, and got the few drugs he needed at a well-known pharmacy in the city. He had an idea that matters would improve when people returned from the country or the seashore. But these people did not take long vacations. He had had but one case, the wife of a Swedish janitor in a flat-building, and he had reason to believe that his services had not pleased. Every morning, as Alves hurried to reach the Everglade School, his self-reproach increased. He hated to think that she was in the same treadmill in which he had found her. His failure was a matter of pride, also; he began to suspect that the people in the house talked about it. When Webber spoke to him of Dr. Jelly's success, he felt that the Keystone people had been making comparisons. They were walking to the railroad station after breakfast—the clerk on his way south to the baking powder works; he, for a daily paper. The young clerk nodded to a black-whiskered, sallow man, and said:
"He's Doc. Jelly, and has the biggest practice around here. He's thick with the drug-store people,—has an interest in it, I have heard. I haven't seen your sign over there. Why don't you hang it out?"
Sommers did not like to say that it was in bad professional form. After he had left the friendly clerk, however, he walked over to the drug store and made some inquiries in a general way. The place was a shameful pretence of a prescription pharmacy. Cigars, toilet articles, and an immense soda-water fountain took up three-fourths of the floor space. A few dusty bottles were ranged on some varnished oak shelves; there was also a little closet at one side, where the blotchy-faced young clerk retired to compound prescriptions. The clerk hailed him affably, calling him by his name. He seemed to know that Sommers used up-town pharmacies and had no practice; and he, too, good-naturedly offered his advice.
"Goin' to settle in the neighborhood? Shall be glad to have your slab to add to the collection." He pointed jocularly to the filigree-work of signs that were pendent above the door.
"Well, I am not settled yet," Sommers replied, as easily as he could.
"Mostly homeopaths hereabouts," the clerk went on, rolling out a handful of cigars for a purchaser to make his selection. "Makes no difference, I say; any one with a diploma is welcome to hang out and try his chances with the rest. But all these"—he waved the hand which held the cigars at the signs—"are fine men. They do a rushin' business."
Sommers left the shop; he was not quite ready to do a "rushin' business" and to advertise for it from the corner drug store. As he retreated the clerk looked at him with a cynical smile. In the clerk's vernacular, he wasn't "in the push," not "the popular choice."
These days Sommers had so little to do that he could meet Alves at the close of the afternoon session. At first he had gone to the Everglade School and waited while the pupils bustled out. He disliked seeing her in the performance of her petty duties, giving commands and reproofs. The principal and the teachers stared at them when they walked away from the school, and he gathered that his appearance there was embarrassing to Alves. So they came to have a rendezvous at the rear of a vacant lot not far from the deserted cottage, which lifted its ill-favored roof above the scrub oaks. Then they would traverse the familiar walks in and out of the deserted streets.
When he told her of his conversation with Webber and the drug clerk's remarks, she counselled unexpectedly:
"Why don't you do it? Miss M'Gann says they all do it in Chicago,—that is, the doctors who aren't swells."
He smiled sadly at the idea that his holding aloof from this advertising custom might be set down to his ambition of being a "swell doctor." The method, however, seemed entirely proper to Alves, who hadn't the professional prejudices, and whose experience with the world had taught her to make the fight in any possible way, in any vulgar way that custom had pointed out.
"Well, if you want me to," he conceded drearily.
"It isn't a great matter," she replied. "I don'twantyou to do anything that you don't feel like doing. Only," she sighed, "there's so much opposition to married women's teaching, and we must live somehow."
"I'll do it to-morrow," Sommers replied quickly, stung by the unintentional implication of the speech.
They walked to their favorite haunt on the lake shore, beneath the crumbling walls of the little convent. During these hot September days this spot had become the brightest place in their lives. They had come there to find themselves, to avoid the world. They had talked and planned, had been silent, had loved, and had rested. Today they watched the fiery sun sinking in its bed of shining dust, and did not speak. Alves was unusually weary, and he was sad over the decision he had just made, weakly, it seemed to him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of opportunities. If he could manage to wait, even six months, some hospital place might turn up. His old associates at Philadelphia would have him in mind. He did not dare to write them of his necessity; even his friends would be suspicious of his failure to gain a foothold in this hospitable, liberal metropolis.
He rose at last to escape these gloomy thoughts. Alves followed him without a word. He did not offer her his arm, as he was wont to do when they walked out here beyond the paths where people came. She respected his mood, and falling a step behind, followed the winding road that led around the ruined Court of Honor to the esplanade. As they gained the road by a little footpath in the sandy bank, a victoria approached them. The young woman who occupied it glanced hastily at Sommers and half bowed, but he had turned back to give Alves his hand. The carriage drove on past them, then stopped.
"That lady wishes to speak to you," Alves said.
"I think not," Sommers replied quickly, turning in the opposite direction. As they walked away the carriage started, and when Alves looked around it had already passed over the rough wooden bridge that crossed the lagoon.
"Was it some one you knew?" she asked indifferently.
"It was Miss Hitchcock," Sommers replied shortly. He told her something about the Hitchcocks. "She was the first woman I knew in Chicago," he concluded musingly. Alves looked at him with troubled eyes, and then was silent. Territories unknown in her experience were beginning to reveal themselves in the world of this man.
The next day Sommers applied at the drug store for permission to hang his sign beneath the others. The question was referred to Jelly, who seemed to be the silent partner in the business, and in a few days consent was given. The little iron sign with gilt letters shone with startling freshness beneath the larger ones above. But no immediate results were visible. Sommers dropped into the store as nonchalantly as he could almost daily, but there were no calls for him. He met Jelly, who looked him over coldly, while he lopped over the glass show-case and smoked a bad cigar. Sommers thought he detected a malicious grin on the clerk's face when Jelly questioned him one day about his practice. The successful physician seemed to sum him up in a final speech.
"What people want hereabouts is a practical, smart man. They don't take much stock in schools or training; it's themanthey want."
Leaving the clear impression that the young doctor was not the man for their money, he grasped his black bag and lounged out of the door, puffing at his cigar and spitting as he went. The Keystone, also, did not find Sommers the man they could rely upon. When the overfed daughter of the family at his table was taken ill with a gastric fever, the anxious mamma sent for Jelly. Webber took this occasion to give him advice. Apparently his case was exciting sympathy in the hotel,—at least Miss M'Gann and the clerk had consulted about it.
"You don't get acquainted with the folks," Webber explained. "You go and shut yourself up in your room after every meal, instead of talking to people and being sociable like the rest of us. And you haven't formed any church connection. That helps a man, especially in your profession. You ought to get connected with a good church, and go to the meetings and church sociables. Join the young people's clubs and make yourself agreeable. It don't make any difference how much you know in this world. What people want is a good, open-hearted fellow, who meets 'em easily and keeps in sight."
'In different circles, different customs,' thought Sommers. 'Lindsay frequents dinners, and I must attend church sociables!'
"You and Mrs. Sommers hold yourselves apart," Webber went on with friendly warmth, "as if you were too good for ordinary company. Now I know you don't really think so at all. As soon as you break the ice, you will be all right. There was Lemenueville. He started in here the right way, took to the Presbyterian church, the fashionable one on Parkside Avenue, and made himself agreeable. He's built up a splendid practice, right there in that congregation!"
"Are there any good churches left?" Sommers inquired.
"Well, I shouldn't be bashful about cutting into the Presbyterian. You're as good as Lemenueville."
Decidedly, Sommers thought, this simple society had its own social habits. If he did not take this well-meant advice, he must justify himself by his own method. He made up his mind to go to the next meeting of the medical society. His clothes were a trifle shabby, but as the meeting was in the evening, he could go in his evening dress—drop in casually, as it were, from an evening entertainment. That silly bit of pride, however, angered him with himself. He went in his shabby everyday suit. The experience was the most uncomfortable one he had had. The little groups of young doctors did not open to him. They had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same reason, and had sunk, had run away with the woman, and had come back to Chicago penniless. The woman was supporting him, some one said. Enough of this pretty tale could be read in the bearing of the men to make Sommers sorry that he had come, and sorrier that he had come in the hope of bettering his condition. He slipped out unobserved and walked the six miles back to the Keystone.
The fight was on; he was placed, as he had wished, without handicap; he closed his jaws and summoned all his will to take the consequences. The pity was that he had brought himself to make any concessions to the obsequiousness of the world. As he passed down Michigan Avenue he overtook a shabby laboring man, who begged of him. Sommers found out that he was a striker, a fireman on the Illinois Central, who had lost his job by being blacklisted after the strike. He had walked the streets since the middle of July.
"You were a fool," Sommers remarked calmly, "to think that you and yours could make any impression on the General Managers' Association. You have had your lesson, and the next time you find yourself hanging on to the world, no matter how, don't kick over the traces. There's a quarter. It's more than I can afford to give, and I think you're a fool."
The man hesitated.
"I don't want none of your money," he growled at last. "If you had to work for a living, you silk stocking—"
"Come, don't call me names. I am a fool, too. I am in the same boat. I'd give a good deal for a job, any job to earn my living. I didn't say it wasn't natural what you did, but it's against the facts, against the facts."
The man stared, took the quarter, and dived into a cross street.
"I have lost twenty cents by walking home," Sommers reported to Alves, "butI have realized—a few facts."
The following day, as Sommers was passing the drug store, the clerk beckoned to him. A messenger had just come, asking for immediate help. A woman was very ill—third house north on Parkside Avenue.
"There's your chance," the clerk grinned. "They're rich and Jelly's people. He won't be back before two. Just show Dr. Sommers the way," he added, to the servant who had brought the message.
Sommers had his doubts about going, for Jelly was an "eclectic" and probably would refuse to consult with him. The matter seemed urgent, however, and he followed the servant. The case, he found on examination, was serious and at a critical stage. It was an affair of mismanaged confinement. Jelly, Sommers could see, was brutally ignorant. The woman, if she survived, would probably be an invalid for life. He did what he could and remained in the house, waiting for Jelly, who would be sure to come. About three the black-whiskered doctor arrived and hurried upstairs, his sallow face scowling. Sommers explained what he had done, and suggested that a certain operation was necessary at once to save matters at all. Jelly interrupted him.
"See here, young feller, this is my case, and you're not wanted, nor your advice. You can send your bill to me."
Sommers knew that he should bow and withdraw. Jelly was within his professional rights, but the man's brutal ignorance maddened him, and he spoke recklessly.
"A first-year interne could tell you the same thing. The woman has been nearly killed, if you want to know the truth. And I don't know that I shall leave you to complete the job."
"What are you going to do about it?" Jelly asked insolently.
Sommers paused. He was clearly in the wrong, professionally. There was not a well-trained doctor in Chicago who would abet him in his act. But it mattered little; his own desperate situation gave him a kind of freedom.
"I shall present the facts to her husband." He found the husband in the room below and stated the case.
"What I am doing," he concluded, "is entirely unprofessional, but it's the thing I should want any man to do for me. You needn't take my word, but call up either Dr. Fitz or Dr. Sloper by telephone, and ask one of them to come out at once. They are the best surgeons in the city. As to Dr. Jelly, I prefer not to say anything, and I don't expect you to take my advice."
The husband was anxious and worried. All doctors seemed to him a game of chance.
"She's always hankered after the Science people; but she kind of took to Jelly, and our friends think an awful sight of him," he remarked doubtfully.
"You are taking tremendous risks," Sommers urged.
"Well, I'll see Jelly."
Sommers waited until the man returned.
"Well, I guess it isn't so bad as you think. We'll wait a day or two, I guess. I am obliged to you for your kindness."
Sommers made no reply and left the house. The only result of this affair was that he found it disagreeable to call at the drug store. Besides, it was useless; no practice had come from his assiduous attendance. Finally, he saw one morning that his modest sign no longer waved from the pendent ladder. He did not take the trouble to inquire why it had been removed.
* * * * *
The winter was wearing on,—the slow, penurious winter of exhaustion after the acute fury of the spring and summer. These were hard times in earnest, not with the excitement of failures and bankruptcies, but with the steady grind of low wages, no employment, and general depression. The papers said things would be better in the fall, when the republican candidates would be elected. But it was a long time to wait for activity. Meanwhile the streets down town were filled with hungry forms, the remnant of the World's Fair mob swelled by the unemployed strikers. The city was poor, too. The school funds were inadequate. The usual increase in salary could not be paid. Instead, the board resolved to reduce the pay of the grade teachers, who had the lowest wages. Alves received but forty dollars a month now, and had been refused a night school for which she had applied.
When Alves timidly suggested that it would be cheaper for them to rent one of the many empty cottages in the vast region south of the parks, he put her off. That would be too much like the experience in the Ninety-first Street cottage, and he fought against the idea. There were a few dollars still left from the sale of his horse, his microscope, and other possessions. A few dollars each week came in from some work he had found in preparing plates for a professor of anatomy in the new university. Some weeks he could almost pay his board without drawing from his capital. They would hang on in this way.
Not that the Keystone Hotel was in itself very attractive. In spite of Webber's advice, he and Alves found it hard to mix with the other "guests." After they had been in the house several months, he fancied that the people avoided them. The harmless trio left their table, and in place of them came a succession of transient boarders. For a time he thought he was oversensitive, inclined to suspect his neighbors of avoiding him. But one evening Alves came into their room, where he was working at the anatomy plates, her face flushed with an unusual distress.
"What reason have they?" Sommers asked, going directly to the heart of the matter.
"None—unless Miss M'Gann has been talking carelessly. And she knows nothing—"
"No, she knows nothing," the doctor replied, looking at Alves intently."And there is nothing to be known."
"We think not!" she exclaimed. "I am not so sure that an unpleasant story couldn't be made."
"What do you mean?" he asked sharply.
"Why, the—my husband's condition—the death, our going away so quickly afterward. There are elements there of a good-sized boarding-house scandal."
"Yes, there are elements!" Sommers admitted, putting away his work. "We may as well leave as soon as we can. You are right; we had better fight it out alone."
"Yes,alone," she responded, with a glad note in her voice.
The next afternoon they looked at the cheap, flimsy cottages they passed in their walk with more interest than ever. The only places they could afford were far removed from the populous districts where patients live. They would have to pay for heat, too, and though they could starve the body, they could not freeze. So the matter was put off for the present, and they drew into themselves more and more, leaving the Keystone people to chatter as they willed.
The great strike was fast being forgotten, as a cause argued and lost or won as you looked at it. A commission was holding many meetings these months, and going over the debris, taking voluminous testimony. It was said to be prejudiced in favor of the strikers, but the victors cared little. Its findings in the shape of a report would lie on the table in the halls of Congress, neither house being so constituted that it could make any political capital by taking the matter up. The Association of General Managers had lapsed. It had been the banded association of power against the banded association of labor. It had fought successfully. The issue was proved: the strike was crushed, with the help of marshals, city police, and troops. And with it the victors prophesied was crushed the sympathetic strike forever. It had cost, to be sure, many millions in all, but it paid. It was such a tremendous example!
The statistical side of passion was interesting and ironical. It gave the matter the air of a family row: the next day the heads of the factions were sitting down to make the inventory of broken glass, ruined furniture and provisions. A principle had been preserved, people said, talking largely and superficially, but the principle seemed elusive. The laborers, too, had lost, more heavily in proportion to their ability to bear—millions in wages, not to reckon the loss of manhood to those who were blacklisted for participation in the fracas.
The Commission went into the Pullman affair, quite unwarrantedly, according to the corporation, which was comfortably out of the mess. And there were minor disputes over the injunctions against Debs, and a languid stirring of dead bones in the newspapers. Every one was tired of the affair and willing to let it drop, with its lesson for this party or that. Sommers, having nothing more urgent to do, attended the meetings of the Commission and listened eagerly to get some final truth about the matter. But it seemed to him that both sides merely scratched the surface of the argument, and were content with the superficial "lessons" thereby gained. What good could come of the hearings? The country would get out of its doldrums sooner or later; employment would be easy to find; wages would rise, a little; every one would have his bellyful; and then, some years later, another wave of depression would set in, the bitter strife would be repeated, both parties unlessoned by this or any other experience. The world, at least this civilization, belonged to the strong; the poor would remain weak and foolish and treacherous.
It was whispered about on the first days of the hearing that an official of the American Railway Union would take the stand and make disclosures. He would show how the strike was finally ended, not by the law and the sword, but by money. The official's name was Dresser, Sommers heard, and every day he looked for him to take the stand. But the rumor passed away, and no "revelations" by Dresser or any one else who knew the inner facts appeared. Sommers learned them unexpectedly after the Commission had taken itself to Washington to prepare its report.
It happened one evening at the Keystone Hotel. He had come in after dinner and found Miss M'Gann in his room, calling upon Alves. She had brought Dresser with her. He was well dressed, his hair was cut to a conventional length, and he carried a silk hat—altogether a different person from the slouchy, beery man who had grumbled at McNamara and Hills. Sommers's glance must have said something of this, for Dresser began to explain,
"I've given up agitating—doesn't go, what with the courts granting injunctions and the railroads throwing money about."
"Do you meanthatwas why the strike collapsed?" Sommers asked eagerly.
"Sure!" Dresser thundered heartily. "IKNOW IT. Do you know where the leaders are? Well, one of 'em has got the finest little ranch you ever saw out in Montana. And another," he winked slowly and put his hand to his pocket. "They were poor men when the strike began, and they aren't working now for any dollar and a half a day."
"I don't believe it," Sommers replied promptly. "The managers had the affair in hand, anyway."
Dresser protested loudly, and irritated by the doctor's scepticism began to leak, to tell things he had seen, to show a little of the inside of the labor counsels. He had evidently seen more than Sommers had believed possible, and his active, ferreting mind had imagined still more. The two women listened open-mouthed to his story of the strike, and feeling where the sympathy lay Dresser spoke largely to them.
"You seem to have found something to do?" Sommers remarked significantly at the close.
"I'm assistant editor of a paper," Dresser explained.
Sommers laughed. "Herr Most's old sheet?"
"The Investor's Monthly."
Sommers shrieked with laughter, and patted Dresser on the back. "Sammy, you're a great man! I have never done you justice."
"The management has been changed," Dresser said gruffly. "They wanted a man of education, not a mere reporter."
"Who owns it?"
"R. G. Carson has the controlling interest."
Sommers relapsed into laughter. "So this is your ranch in Montana?"
Dresser rose with an offended air.
"Oh! sit down, man. I am complimenting you. Haven't you a place as office boy, compositor, or something for a needy friend?"
"I don't see what you're so funny about, doctor," Miss M'Gann expostulated.
"Spoiling the Philistines, you see," Dresser added, making an effort to chime in with Sommers's irony.
They talked late. Webber, the stylish young clerk, dropped in, and the conversation roamed over the universal topics of the day,—the hard times, the position of the employee in a corporation, etc. The clerk in the Baking Powder Trust was inclined to philosophical acceptance of present conditions. Abstractly there might not be much justice for the poor, but here in the new part of the country every man had his chance to be on top, to become a capitalist. There was the manager of the B. P. T. He had begun on ten dollars a week, but he had bided his time, bought stock in the little mill where he started, and now that the consolidation was arranged, he was in a fair way to become a rich man. To be rich, to have put yourself outside the ranks of the precarious classes—that was the clerk's ambition. Dresser was doubtful whether the good, energetic young clerk could repeat in these days the experience of the manager of the B. P. T. The two women took part in the argument, and finally Alves summed the matter up:
"If we could, all of us would be rich, and then we should feel like the rich, and want to keep what we could. But as we have to labor hard for a little joy, it's best to get the joy, as much as you can, and not fret over the work."
* * * * *
Dresser found the Keystone so agreeable that he came there to live. The doctor and Alves and Miss M'Gann with Webber and Dresser had a table to themselves in the stuffy basement dining room. Miss M'Gann accepted impartially the advances of both young men, attending church with one and the theatre with the other. The five spent many evenings in Sommers's room, discussing aimlessly social questions, while the doctor worked at the anatomy slides. Dresser's debauch of revolt seemed to have sobered him. He bought himself many new clothes, and as time went on, picked up social relations in different parts of the city. He still talked sentimental socialism, chiefly for the benefit of Alves, who regarded him as an authority on economic questions, and whose instinctive sympathies were touched by his theories. As the clothes became more numerous and better in quality, he talked less about socialism and more about society.The Investor's Monthlyinterested him: he spoke of becoming its managing editor, hinting at his influence with Carson; and when the doctor jeered, Dresser offered him a position on the paper. Webber was openly envious of Dresser's prosperity, which he set down to the account of a superior education that had been denied him. When Dresser began to mention casually the names of people whom the Baking Powder clerk had read about in the newspapers, this envy increased. Dresser's evolution impressed Miss M'Gann also; Sommers noticed that she was readier to accept Dresser's condescending attentions than the devotion of the plodding clerk. Webber was simple and vulgar, but he was sincere and good-hearted. He was striving to get together a little money for a home. Sommers told Alves that she should influence Miss M'Gann to accept the clerk, instead of beguiling herself with the words of a talker.
"You are unfair to Sammy," Alves had replied, with some warmth. "She would do very well to marry him; he is her superior."
Sommers gave Alves a look that troubled her, and said:
"Because the fellow is settling into an amiable Philistine? He will never marry Jane M'Gann; it would hurt his prospects."
A few days later Dresser mentioned that he had met Miss Laura Lindsay, "the daughter of your former partner, I believe."
"My former boss," Sommers corrected, looking at Alves with an amused smile.He listened in ironical glee to Dresser's description of little LauraLindsay. Dresser thought her "a very advanced young woman, who had ideas, awide reader." She had asked him about Dr. Sommers and Alves.
"You had better not appear too intimate with us," Sommers advised. "Her papa doesn't exactly approve of me."
When he had left the room, Sommers added: "He will marry Laura Lindsay. An ideal match. He won't remain long in the Keystone, and I am glad of it. The converted Philistine is the worst type!"
Alves held her own opinion. She should be sorry to lose Dresser from their little circle. She permitted herself one remark,—"He is so much of a gentleman."
"A gentleman!" Sommers exclaimed scornfully. "Are any of us gentlemen in the American sense?"
It seemed probable, however, that Sommers and Alves would be the first to leave the Keystone. Although the sultry June weather made them think longingly of the idyllic days at Perota Lake, the journey to Wisconsin was out of the question. Struggle as he might, Sommers was being forced to realize that they must give up their modest position in the Keystone. And one day the proprietor hinted broadly that she had other uses for their room. They had been tolerated up to this point; but society, even the Keystone form of society, found them too irregular for permanent acceptance. And now it was impossible to move away from Chicago. They had no money for the venture.
A change, even so small a change as from one boarding-house to another, is caused by some definite force, some shock that overcomes the power of inertia. The eleventh of June Sommers had gone to meet Alves at their usual rendezvous in the thicket at the rear of Blue Grass Avenue. The sultry afternoon had made him drowse, and when he awoke Alves was standing over him, her hands tightening nervously.
"They have dropped you," he said, reading the news in her face.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, until they had plodded down the avenue for several blocks.
"Why did they do it!" she murmured rebelliously. "They gave me no reason. It isn't because I teach badly. It isn't because of the married teachers' talk: there are hundreds of married women in the schools who haven't been dismissed."
"Well," Sommers responded soothingly, "I shouldn't hunt for a rational reason for their act. They have merely hastened the step we were going to take some day."
"What shall we do!" she gasped, overpowered by the visions her practical mind conjured up. "We could just get along with my forty dollars, and now—Oh! I've been like a weight about your neck. I have cut you off from your world, the big world where successes are made!"
Her large eyes filled with pleading tears. She was generously minded to take the burden of their fate upon herself.
"You seem to have been making most of the success," he responded lightly. "The big world where Dresser is succeeding doesn't call me very hard. And it's a pretty bad thing if a sound-bodied, well-educated doctor can't support himself and a woman in this world," he added more gloomily. "Iwill, if I have to get a job over there."
He jerked his head in the direction of the South Chicago steel works. But the heavens seemed to repel his boast, for the usual cloud of smoke and flame that hung night and day above the blast furnaces was replaced by a brilliant, hard blue sky. The works were shut down. They had reached the end of Blue Grass Avenue at the south line of the park. It was a spot of semi-sylvan wildness that they were fond of. The carefully platted avenues and streets were mere lines in the rough turf. A little runnel of water, half ditch, half sewer, flowed beside the old plank walk.
They sat down to plan, to contrive in some way to get a shelter over their heads. From the plank walk where they sat nothing was visible for blocks around except a little stucco Grecian temple, one of those decorative contrivances that served as ticket booths or soda-water booths at the World's Fair. This one, larger and more pretentious than its fellows, had been bought by some speculator, wheeled outside the park, and dumped on a sandy knoll in this empty lot. It had an ambitious little portico with a cluster of columns. One of them was torn open, revealing the simple anatomy of its construction. The temple looked as if it might contain two rooms of generous size. Strange little product of some western architect's remembering pencil, it brought an air of distant shores and times, standing here in the waste of the prairie, above the bright blue waters of the lake!
"That's the place for us!" Sommers exclaimed, gazing intently at the time-stained temple. Alves looked at the building sceptically, for woman-wise she conceived of only conventional abiding-places. But she followed him submissively into the little stucco portico, and when he spoke buoyantly of the possibilities of the place, of the superb view of park and lake, her worn face gained color once more. The imitation bronze doors were ajar, and they made a thorough examination of the interior. With a few laths, some canvas, and a good cleaning, the place could be made possible—for the summer.
"That's four months," Sommers remarked. "And that is a long time for poor people to look ahead."
The same evening they hunted up the owner and made their terms, and the next day prepared to move from the Keystone. They had some regrets over leaving the Keystone Hotel. The last month Sommers had had one or two cases. The episode with Dr. Jelly had finally redounded to his credit, for the woman had died at Jelly's private hospital, and the nurse who had overheard the dispute between the two doctors had gossiped. The first swallow of success, however, was not enough to warrant any expenditure for office rent. He must make some arrangement with a drug store near the temple, where he could receive calls.
They invited Miss M'Gann, Webber, and Dresser to take supper with them their first Sunday in the temple. Alves had arranged a little kitchen in one corner of the smaller of the two rooms. This room received the pompous name of "the laboratory"; the other room—a kind of hall into which the portico opened—was bedroom and general living room.
"We will throw open the temple doors," she explained to Sommers, "and have supper on the portico between the pillars."
From that point the lake could be seen, a steely blue line on the horizon. But it rained on Sunday, and the visitors arrived so bedraggled by the storm that their feast seemed doomed. Sommers produced a bottle of Scotch whiskey, and they warmed and cheered themselves. The Baking Powder clerk grew loquacious first. The Baking Powder Trust was to be reorganized, he told them, as soon as good times came. There was to be a new trust, twice as big as the present one, capitalized for millions and millions. The chemist of the concern had told him that Carson was engineering the affair. The stock of the present company would be worth double, perhaps three times as much as at present. He confided the fact that he had put all his savings into the stock of the present company at its greatly depressed present value. The company was not paying dividends; he had bought at forty. His air of financial success, of shrewd speculative insight impressed them all. Miss M'Gann evidently knew all about this; she smiled as if the world were a pretty good place.
Dresser, too, had his boast. He had finally been given charge ofThe Investor's Monthly, which had absorbed theLa Salle Street Indicator. The policy of the papers was to be changed: they were to be conservative, but not critical, and conducted in the interests of capital which was building up the country after its financial panic.
"In the prospective return of good times many new interests will seek public patronage," he explained to the company. "A new era will dawn—the era of business combinations, of gigantic cooperative enterprises."
"Vulgarly known as trusts," Sommers interjected. "And your paper is going to boom Carson's companies. Well, well, that's pretty good for Debs's ex-secretary!"
"You must understand that people of education change their views," Dresser retorted uncomfortably. "I have had a long talk with Mr. Carson about the policy of the paper. He doesn't wish to interfere, not in the least, merely advises on a general line of policy agreeable to him and his associates, who, I may say, are very heavily engaged in Chicago enterprises. We are interested at present in the traction companies which are seeking extensions of their franchises."
"He's joined the silk-hat brigade," Webber scoffed. "The Keystone ain't good enough for him any longer. He's going north to be within call of his friends."
"How is Laura Lindsay?" Sommers asked.
"I saw her last night, and I met Mr. Brome Porter and young Polot, too."
"Did you tell 'em where you were going to-night?" Sommers asked, rather bitterly.
"Say, Howard," Dresser replied, pushing back his chair and resting one arm confidentially on the table, "you must have been a great chump. You had a soft thing of it at Lindsay's—"
"I suppose Miss Laura has discussed it with you. I didn't like the set quite as well as you seem to."
"Well, it's no use making enemies, when you can have 'em for friends just as easily as not," Dresser retorted, with an air of superior worldly wisdom.
* * * * *
Miss M'Gann had drawn Alves out of the talk among the men, and they sat by themselves on the lower step of the temple.
"I saw Dr. Leonard the other day at a meeting of the Cymbals Society," MissM'Gann told Alves. "He asked where you were."
"I hope he'll come to see us."
Miss M'Gann looked at the men and lowered her voice.
"I think he knows what was the reason for dismissing you. He wouldn't tell me; but if I see him again, I am going to get it out of him."
"Why, what did he say?" Alves asked.
"Nothing much. Only he asked very particularly about you and the doctor; about what kind of man the doctor was, and just when you were married and where."
Alves moved nervously.
"Where were you married, Alves?" Miss M'Gann pursued anxiously. "Here or inWisconsin? You were so dreadfully queer about it all."
"We were not married," Alves replied, in a quiet voice, "at least not in a church, with a ceremony and all that. I didn't want it, and we didn't think it necessary."
The younger woman gasped.
"Alves! I'd never think it of you—you two so quiet and so like ordinary folks!"
"We are like other people, only we aren't tied to each other by a halter. He can go when he likes," Alves retorted. "I want him to go," she added fiercely, "just as soon as he finds he doesn't love me enough."
"Um," Miss M'Gann answered. "Lucky you haven't any children. That's where the rub comes."
Alves straightened herself with a little haughtiness.
"It wouldn't make any difference tohim. He would do right by them if he had them."
"I don't see how he could, at present," Miss M'Gann proceeded, with severe logic. "It's all very well so long as things go easily.ButI had rather have the ring."
After a little silence, she continued: "It must have had something to do with that, I guess, your being dropped. Did any one know?"
"I never said anything about it," Alves replied coldly. She would have liked to add an entreaty, for his sake, that Miss M'Gann keep this secret. But her pride prevented her.
"That Ducharme woman must have been talking," Miss M'Gann proceeded acutely. "I saw her around last year, looking seedy, as if she drank."
"Possibly," Alves assented, "though she didn't know anything."
"Well, my advice to you is to make that right just as soon as ever you can.He's willing?"
"I should never let him," Alves exclaimed vehemently; "least of all now!"
"Well, I suppose folks must live their own way. But you don't catch me taking a man in that easy fashion, so that he can get out when he wants to."
Alves tried to change the subject, but her admission had so startled her friend that the usual gossip was impossible. When the visitors rose to go, Sommers proposed showing them the way back by a wagon road that led to the improved part of the park, across the deserted Court of Honor. He and Alves accompanied them as far as the northern limits of the park. The rain clouds were gone, and a cold, clear sky had taken their place. On their return along the esplanade beside the lake Sommers chatted in an easy frame of mind.
"I guess Webber will get Miss M'Gann, and I am glad of it. Dresser wouldn't do anything more than fool with her. He will get on now; those promoters and capitalists are finding him a clever tool. They will keep him steady. It isn't the fear of the Lord that will keep men like Dresser in line; it's the fear of their neighbors' opinions and of an empty stomach!"
"Don't you—wish you had a chance like his?" Alves asked timidly.
The young doctor laughed aloud.
"You don't know me yet. It isn't that I don't want to. It's because Ican't—no glory to me. But, Alves, we are all right. I can get enough in one way or another to keep the temple over our heads, and I can work now. I have something in view; it won't be just chasing about the streets."
This reference to his own work both pleased and saddened her. The biologist, who had befriended him before, had given him some work in his laboratory. The work was not well paid, but the association with the students, which aroused his intellectual appetites, had given him a new spur. What saddened her was that it was all entirely beyond her sphere of influence, of usefulness to him. Living, as they should, in an almost savage isolation, she dreaded his absorption in anything apart from her. There were other reliefs, consolations, and hopes than those she held. He was slipping away into a silent region—man's peculiar world—of thought and dream and speculation, an intangible, ideal, remote, unloving world. Some day she would knock at his heart and find it occupied.