CHAPTER IV
When Charlotte was thirty Carrie—twenty—married. After all, the innocent little indiscretion which had so thoroughly poisoned Charlotte's life was not to corrupt Carrie's matrimonial future, in spite of Mrs. Thrift's mournful prediction. Carrie, whose philosophy of life was based on that same finding's-keeping plan with which she had filched the bit of orange silk from her sister so many years before, married Samuel Payson, junior member of the firm of Thrift and Payson, Real Estate, Bonds and Mortgages. Charlotte, it may be remembered, had disdained to pick up the scrap of orange silk on which Carrie had swooped. Just so with Samuel Payson.
Samuel Payson was destined to be a junior partner. Everything about him was deferential, subservient. The very folds of his clothes slanted away from you. He was as oblique and evasive as Isaac Thrift was upright and forthright. In conversation with you he pronounced your name at frequent intervals. Charlotte came to dread it: "Yes, Miss Charlotte.... Do you think so, Miss Charlotte?... Sit here, Miss Charlotte...." It was like a too-intimate hand on your shrinking arm.
The fashion for men of parting the hair in the middle had just come in. Samuel Payson parted his from forehead to nape of neck. In some mysterious way it gave to the back of his head an alert facial expression very annoying to the beholder. He reminded Charlotte of someone she had recently met and whom she despised; but for a long time she could not think who this could be. She found herself staring at him, fascinated, trying to trace the resemblance. Samuel Payson misinterpreted her gaze.
Isaac and Hetty Thrift had too late relaxed their vigilant watch over Charlotte. It had taken them all these years to realize that they were guarding a prisoner who hugged her chains. Wretched as she was (in a quiet and unobtrusive way) there is the possibility that she would have been equally wretched married to a Hardscrabble Dick. Charlotte's submission was all the more touching because she had nothing against which to rebel. Once, in the very beginning, Mrs. Thrift, haunted by something in Charlotte's eyes, had said in a burst of mingled spleen and self-defense:
"And why do you look at me like that, I should like to know! I'm sure I didn't kill your young man at Donelson. You're only moping like that to aggravate me; for something that never could have been, anyway—thank goodness!"
"He wouldn't have been killed," Charlotte said, unreasonably, and with conviction.
Had they been as wise and understanding as they were well-meaning, these two calvinistic parents might have cured Charlotte by one visit to the Dicks' Hardscrabble kitchen, with a mangy cur nosing her skirts; a red-faced hostess at the washtub; and a ruined, battered travesty of the slim young rhyme-making Jesse Dick there in the person of old Pete Dick squatting, sodden, in the doorway.
As the years went on they had, tardily, a vague and sneaking hope that something might happen among the G.A.R. widowers of Chicago's better families. During the reunions of Company I and Company E Charlotte generally assisted with the dinner or the musical program. She had a sweet, if small, contralto with notes in it that matched the fine dark eyebrows. She sang a group of old-fashioned songs: When You and I Were Young, Maggie; The Belle of Mohawk Vale; and Sleeping I Dream, Love. Charlotte never suspected her parents' careful scheming behind these public appearances of hers. Her deft capable hands at the G.A.R. dinners, her voice lifted in song, were her offerings to Jesse Dick's memory. Him she served. To him she sang. And gradually even Isaac and Hetty Thrift realized that the G.A.R. widowers were looking for younger game; and that Charlotte, surrounded by blue-uniformed figures, still was gazing through them, past them, into space. Her last public appearance was when she played the organ and acted as director forQueen Esther, a cantata, which marked rather an epoch in the amateur musical history of the town. After that she began to devote herself to her sister's family and to her mother.
But all this was later. Charlotte, at thirty, still had a look of vigor, and of fragrant (if slightly faded) bloom, together with a little atmosphere of mystery of which she was entirely unconscious; born, doubtless, of years of living with a ghost. Attractive qualities, all three; and all three quite lacking in her tart-tongued and acidulous younger sister, despite that miss's ten-year advantage. Carrie was plain, spare, and sallow. Her mind marched with her father's. The two would discuss real estate and holdings like two men. Hers was the mathematical and legal-thinking type of brain rarely found in a woman. She rather despised her mother. Samuel Payson used to listen to her with an air of respectful admiration and attention. But it was her older sister to whom he turned at last with, "I thought perhaps you might enjoy a drive to Cleaversville, since the evening's so fine, Miss Charlotte. What do you say, Miss Charlotte?"
"Oh, thank you—I'm not properly dressed for driving—perhaps Carrie——"
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Thrift would interpose tartly.
"But Miss Charlotte, you are quite perfectly dressed. If I may be so bold, that is a style which suits you to a marvel."
There he was right. It did. Hoops were history. The form-fitting basque, the flattering neck-frill, the hip sash, and the smart (though grotesque) bustle revealed, and even emphasized, lines of the feminine figure—the swell of the bust, the curve of the throat—that the crinoline had for years concealed. This romantic, if somewhat lumpy, costume well became Charlotte's slender figure and stern sad young face. In it Carrie, on the other hand, resembled a shingle in a flower's sheath.
This obstacle having been battered down, Charlotte raised another. "They say the Cleaversville road is a sea of mud and no bottom to it in places. The rains."
"Then," said Samuel Payson, agreeably, "we shall leave that for another time"—Charlotte brightened—"and go boating in the lagoon instead. Eh, Miss Charlotte?"
Charlotte, born fifty years later, would have looked her persistent and unwelcome suitor in the eye and said, "I don't want to go." Charlotte, with the parental eyes upon her, went dutifully upstairs for bonnet and mantle.
The lagoon of Samuel Payson's naming was a basin of water between the narrow strip of park on Michigan Avenue and the railway that ran along the lake. It was much used for boating of a polite and restricted nature.
It was a warm Sunday evening in the early summer. The better to get the breeze the family was sociably seated out on what was known as the platform. On fine evenings all Chicago sat out on its front steps—"the stoop" it was called. The platform was even more informal than the stoop. It was made of wooden planks built across the ditches that ran along each side of the street. Across it carriages drove up to the sidewalk when visitors contemplated alighting. All down Wabash Avenue you saw families comfortably seated in rockers on these platforms, enjoying the evening breeze and watching the world go by. Here the Thrifts—Isaac, Hetty, and their daughter Carrie—were seated when the triumphant Samuel left with the smoldering Charlotte. Here they were seated when the two returned.
The basin reached, they had hired a boat and Samuel had paddled about in a splashy and desultory way, not being in the least an oarsman. He talked, Miss-Charlotteing her so insistently that in ten minutes she felt thumbed all over. She looked out across the lake. He spoke of his loneliness, living at the Tremont House. Before being raised to junior partner he had been a clerk in Isaac Thrift's office. It was thus that Charlotte still regarded him—when she regarded him at all. She looked at him now, bent to the oars, his flat chest concave, his lean arms stringy; panting a little with the unaccustomed exercise.
"It must be lonely," murmured Charlotte, absentmindedly if sympathetically.
"Your father and mother have been very kind"—he bent a melting look on her—"far kinder than you have been, Miss Charlotte."
"It's chilly, now that the sun's gone," said Charlotte. "Shall we row in? This mantle is very light."
It cannot be said that he flushed then, but a little flood of dark color came into his pallid face. He rowed for the boat-house. He maneuvered the boat alongside the landing. Twilight had come on. The shed-like place was too dim for safety, lighted at the far end with one cobwebby lantern. He hallooed to the absent boatman, shipped his oars, and stepped out none too expertly. Charlotte stood up, smiling. She was glad to be in. Sitting opposite him thus, in the boat, it had been impossible to evade his red-rimmed eyes. Still smiling a little, with relief she took his proffered hand as he stood on the landing, stepped up, stumbled a little because he had pulled with unexpected (and unnecessary) strength, and was horrified suddenly to see him thrust his head forward like a particularly nasty species of bird, and press moist clammy lips to the hollow of her throat. Her reaction was as unfortunate as it was unstudied. "Uriah Heep!" she cried (at last! the resemblance that had been haunting her all these days), "Heep! Heep!" and pushed him violently from her. The sacred memories of the past twelve years, violated now, were behind that outraged push. It sent him reeling over the edge of the platform, clutching at a post that was not there, and into the shallow water on the other side. The boatmen, running tardily toward them, fished him out and restored him to a curiously unagitated young lady. He was wet but uninjured. Thus dripping he still insisted on accompanying her home. She had not murmured so much as, "I'm sorry." They walked home in hurried silence, his boots squashing at every step. The Thrifts—father, mother, and daughter—still were seated on the platform before the house, probably discussing real estate values—two of them, at least. Followed exclamations, explanations, sympathy, flurry.
"I fell in. A bad landing place. No light. A wretched hole."
Charlotte turned abruptly and walked up the front steps and into the house. "She's upset," said Mrs. Thrift, automatically voicing the proper thing, flustered though she was. "Usually it's Charlotte that falls into things. You must get that coat off at once. And the.... Isaac, your pepper-and-salt suit. A little large but.... Come in.... Dear, dear!... I'll have a hot toddy ready.... Carrie...."
It was soon after the second Chicago fire that Isaac Thrift and his son-in-law built the three-story-and-basement house on Prairie avenue, near 29th Street. The old man recalled the boast made almost forty years before, that some day he would build as far south as Thirtieth Street; though it was not, as he had then predicted, a country home.
"I was a little wrong there," he admitted, "but only because I was too conservative. They laughed at me. Well, you can't deny the truth of it now. It'll be as good a hundred years from now as it is to-day. Only the finest houses because of the cost of the ground. No chance of business ever coming up this way. From Sixteenth to Thirtieth it's a residential paradise. Yes sir! A res-i-den-tial paradise!"
A good thing that he did not live the twenty-five years, or less, that transformed the paradise into a smoke-blackened and disreputable inferno, with dusky faces, surmounted by chemically unkinked though woolly heads, peering from every decayed mansion and tumble-down rooming house. Sixteenth Street became a sore that would not heal—scrofulous, filthy. Thirty-first Street was the centre of the Black Belt. Of all that region Prairie Avenue alone resisted wave after wave of the black flood that engulfed the streets south, east, and west. There, in Isaac Thrift's day, lived much of Chicago's aristocracy; millionaire if mercantile; plutocratic though porcine. And there its great stone and brick mansions with their mushroom-topped conservatories, their porte-cochères, their high wrought-iron fences, and their careful lawns still defied the years, though ruin, dirt, and decay waited just outside to destroy them. The window-hangings of any street are its character index. The lace and silk draperies before the windows of these old mansions still were immaculate, though the Illinois Central trains, as they screeched derisively by, spat huge mouthsful of smoke and cinders into their very faces.
Isaac Thrift had fallen far behind his neighbours in the race for wealth. They had started as he had, with only courage, ambition, and foresight as capital. But they—merchants, pork-packers—had dealt in food and clothing on an increasingly greater scale, while Isaac Thrift had early given up his store to devote all his time to real estate. There had been his mistake. Bread and pork, hardware and clothing—these were fundamental needs, changing little with the years. Millions came to the man who, starting as a purveyor of these, stayed with them. At best, real estate was a gamble. And Isaac Thrift lost.
His own occasional short-sightedness was not to blame for his most devastating loss, however. This was dealt him, cruelly and criminally, by his business partner and son-in-law, the plausible Payson.
The two families dwelt comfortably enough together in the new house on Prairie. There was room and to spare, even after two children—Belle, and then Lottie—were born to the Paysons. The house was thought a grand affair, with its tin bathtub and boxed-in wash-bowl on the second floor, besides an extra washroom on the first, off the hall; a red and yellow stained-glass window in the dining room; a butler's pantry (understand, no butler; Chicago boasted no more than half a dozen of these); a fine furnace in the lower hall just under the stairway; oilcloth on the first flight of stairs; Brussels on the second; ingrain on the third; a liver-colored marble mantel in the front parlor, with anemic replicas in the back parlor and the more important bedrooms. It was an age when every possible article of household furniture was disguised to represent something it was not. A miniature Gothic cathedral was really a work-basket; a fauteuil was, like as not, a music box. The Thrifts' parlor carpet was green, woven to represent a river flowing along from the back parlor folding doors to the street windows, with a pattern of full-sailed ships on it, and, by way of variety, occasional bunches of flowers strewn carelessly here and there, between the ships. On rare and thrilling occasions, during their infancy, Belle and little Lottie were allowed to crawl down the carpet river and poke a fascinated finger into a ship's sail or a floral garland.
Carrie's two children were born in this house. Isaac and Hetty Thrift died in it. And in it Carrie was left worse than widowed.
Samuel Payson must have been about forty-six when, having gathered together in the office of Thrift & Payson all the uninvested moneys—together with negotiable bonds, stocks, and securities—on which he could lay hands, he decamped and was never seen again. He must have been planning it for years. It was all quite simple. He had had active charge of the business. Again and again Isaac Thrift had turned over to Payson money entrusted him for investment by widows of lifelong friends; by the sons and daughters of old Chicago settlers; by lifelong friends themselves. This money Payson had taken, ostensibly for investment. He had carefully discussed its investment with his father-in-law, had reported such investments made. In reality he had invested not a penny. On it had been paid one supposed dividend, or possibly two. The bulk of it remained untouched. When his time came Samuel Payson gathered together the practically virgin sums and vanished to live some strange life of his own of which he had been dreaming behind that truckling manner and the Heepish face, with its red-rimmed eyes.
He had been a model husband, father, and son-in-law. Chess with old Isaac, evenings; wool-windings for Mrs. Thrift; games with the two little girls; church on Sundays with Carrie. Between him and Charlotte little talk was wasted, and no pretense.
A thousand times, in those years of their dwelling together, Mrs. Thrift's eyes had seemed to say to Charlotte, "You see! This is what a husband should be. This is a son-in-law. No Dick disgracing us here."
The blow stunned the two old people almost beyond realising its enormity. The loss was, altogether, about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Isaac Thrift set about repaying it. Real estate on Indiana, Wabash, Michigan, Prairie was sold and the money distributed to make good the default. They kept the house on Prairie; clung to it. Anything but that. After it was all over Isaac Thrift was an old man with palsied hands. Hair and beard whose color had defied the years were suddenly white. Hetty Thrift's tongue lost its venomous bite. After Isaac Thrift's death she turned to Charlotte. Charlotte alone could quell her querulousness. Carrie acted as an irritant, naturally. They were so much alike. It was Charlotte who made broths and jellies, milk-toast and gruel with which to tempt the mother's appetite. Carrie, the mathematical, was a notoriously poor cook. Her mind was orderly and painstaking enough when it came to figuring on a piece of property, or a depreciated bond. But it lacked that peculiar patience necessary to the watching of a boiling pot or a simmering pan.
"Oh, it's done by now," she would cry, and dump a pan's contents into a dish. Oftener than not it was half-cooked or burned.
Charlotte announced, rather timidly, that she would give music lessons; sewing lessons; do fine embroidery. But her tinkling tunes were ghostly echoes of a bygone day. People were even beginning to say that perhaps, after all, this madman Wagner could be played so that one might endure listening. Hand embroidery was little appreciated at a time when imitations were the craze.
Carrie it was who became head of that manless household. It was well she had wasted her time in doing sums instead of being more elegantly occupied while at Miss Tait's Finishing School, in the old Wabash Avenue days. She now juggled interest, simple and compound, with ease; took charge of the few remaining bits of scattered property saved from the ruins; talked glibly of lots, quarter-sections, sub-divisions. All through their childhood Belle and Lottie heard reiterated: "Run away. Can't you see mother's busy! Ask Aunt Charlotte." So then, it was Aunt Charlotte who gave them their bread-and-butter with sugar on top. Gradually the whole household revolved about Carrie, though it was Charlotte who kept it in motion. When Carrie went to bed the household went to bed. She must have her rest. Meals were timed to suit Carrie's needs. She became a business woman in a day when business women were practically unheard of. She actually opened an office in one of the new big Clark Street office buildings, near Washington, and had a sign printed on the door:
MRS. CARRIE PAYSONReal EstateBondsMortgagesSuccessor to late Isaac Thrift
Later she changed this to "Carrie Thrift Payson." Change came easily to Carrie. Adaptability was one of her gifts. In 1893 (World's Fair year) she was one of the first to wear the new Eton jacket and separate skirt of blue serge (it became almost a uniform with women); and the shirtwaist, a garment that marked an innovation in women's clothes. She worked like a man, ruled the roost, was as ruthless as a man. She was neither a good housekeeper nor marketer, but something perverse in her made her insist on keeping a hand on the reins of household as well as business. It was, perhaps, due to a colossal egotism and a petty love of power. Charlotte could have marketed expertly and thriftily but Carrie liked to do it on her way downtown in the morning, stopping at grocer's and butcher's on Thirty-first Street and prefacing her order always with, "I'm in a hurry." The meat, vegetables, and fruit she selected were never strictly first-grade. A bargain delighted her. If an orange was a little soft in one spot she reckoned that the spot could be cut away. Such was her system of false economy.
With the World's Fair came a boom in real estate and Carrie Payson rode on the crest of it. There still were heart-breaking debts to pay and she paid them honestly. She was too much a Thrift to do otherwise. She never became rich, but she did manage a decent livelihood. Fortunately for all of them, old Isaac Thrift had bought some low swampy land far out in what was considered the wilderness, near the lake, even beyond the section known as Cottage Grove. With the Fair this land became suddenly valuable.
There's no denying that Carrie lacked a certain feminine quality. If one of the children chanced to fall ill, their mother, bustling home from the office, had no knack of smoothing a pillow or cooling a hot little body or easing a pain. "Please, mother, would you mind not doing that? It makes my headache worse." Her fingers were heavy, clumsy, almost rough, like a man's. Her maternal guidance of her two daughters took the form of absent-minded and rather nagging admonitions:
"Belle, you're reading against the light."
"Lottie, did you change your dress when you came home from school?"
"Don't bite that thread with your teeth!" Or, as it became later, merely, "Your teeth!"
Slowly, but inevitably, the Paysons dropped out of the circle made up of Chicago's rich old families—old, that is, in a city that reckoned a twenty-year building a landmark. The dollar sign was beginning to be the open sesame and this symbol had long been violently erased from the Thrift-Payson escutcheon. To the ladies in landaus with the little screw-jointed sun parasols held stiffly before them, Carrie Payson and Charlotte Thrift still were "Carrie" and "Charlotte dear." They—and later Belle and Lottie—were asked to the big, inclusive crushes pretty regularly once a year. But the small smart dinners that were just coming in; the intimate social gayeties; the clubby affairs, knew them not. "One of the Thrift girls" might mean anyone in the Prairie Avenue household, but it was never anything but a term of respect and meant much to anyone who was native to Chicago. Other Prairie Avenue mansions sent their daughters to local private schools, or to the Eastern finishing schools. Belle and Lottie attended the public grammar school and later Armour Institute for the high school course only. Middle-aged folk said to Lottie, "My, how much like your Aunt Charlotte you do look, child!" They never exclaimed in Belle's presence at the likeness they found in her face. Belle's family resemblance could be plainly traced to one of whom friends did not speak in public. Belle was six years her sister's senior, but Lottie, with her serious brow and her clear, steady eyes, looked almost Belle's age. Though Belle was known as the flighty one there was more real fun in Lottie. In Lottie's bedroom there still hangs a picture of the two of them, framed in passepartout. It was taken—arm in arm—when Lottie was finishing high school and Belle was about to marry Henry Kemp; high pompadours over enormous "rats," the whole edifice surmounted by a life-sizechouof ribbon; shirtwaists with broad Gibson tucks that gave them shoulders of a coal-heaver; plaid circular skirts fitting snugly about the hips and flaring out in great bell-shaped width at the hem; and trailing.
"What in the world do you keep that comic valentine hanging up for!" Belle always exclaimed when she chanced into Lottie's room in later years.
Often and often, during these years, you might have heard Carrie Payson say, with bitterness, "I don't want my girls to have the life I've had. I'll see to it that they don't."
"How are you going to do it?" Charlotte would ask, with a curious smile.
"I'll stay young with them. And I'll watch for mistakes. I know the world. I ought to. For that matter, I'd as soon they never married."
Charlotte would flare into sudden and inexplicable protest. "You let them live their own lives, the way they want to, good or bad. How do you know the way it'll turn out! Nobody knows. Let them live their own lives."
"Nonsense," from Carrie, crisply. "A mother knows. One uses a little common sense in these things, that's all. Don't you think a mother knows?" a rhetorical question, plainly, but:
"No," said Charlotte.