CHAPTER IV
Thehearing before the governor at Springfield came off as Wilbur had predicted. The papers reported that Charles Bishop Wren, together with Israel Tracey and Wrightington, had gone on to the capital to plead for the bill. Also Thornton Jennings, chairman of a subcommittee of the Civic Association, appeared before his excellency, as the sole representative of the opposition. Public opinion was exhausted, or submissive: the matter seemed already arranged.
“You see,” Wilbur explained to his wife, “no one of any account has taken the pains to appear before the governor against the bill.”
“Perhaps they prefer to save their fares,” she retorted. He made no reply, and she was afraid to trust herself further. Yet she listened eagerly to Jennings, who happened in one afternoon, while he described his experiences at Springfield.
“The ‘hearing’ was a regular love-feast between old Wrightington and his excellency, the governor, who was moderately full. They sat on me every time I opened my mouth.” He laughed good-humouredly, stretching out his long figure. “At last the governor suggested that I should hand in a brief of my case. He had had enough of ‘chin.’ It was a delicious farce.”
“He signed, then?” Mrs. Wilbur asked nervously.
“Not yet. But of course it is all settled. I knew that when I went on.”
She looked at him admiringly. He continued idly. “I wanted to be in at the death. It was worth it too, as a comedy.” He laughed again contagiously. “I met old Parsons of our firm on the train. He gave me some fatherly advice about sticking to business, and keeping out of ‘politics.’ He cited a model—Jack Hendricks—you know him? The slim, white, perfectly clean young man who is trying to marry Remsen’s youngest. Honest-policy Jack we call him at the office. He is a nice young man.”
His mind ran on nervously, and when he spoke again he seemed to be looking into the future. “But the good people of Chicago are running things on a wrong basis, and some day they will wake up with forty-thousand Polacks and other impetuous citizens tearing down their houses.”
“I shouldn’t be altogether sorry!” Mrs. Wilbur flamed out.
“Well, if there were only Wrightingtons and Traceys and such like. But the others—you?After all there would be merely a row, some shooting, and back again to the old game of grab.”
She reflected after he had gone that Wren had called him a socialist, a meddler. “They think he should be a clergyman!” She was glad that he left before her husband should come in and find her with her “eastern puppy, the young agitator.” She did not wish to haveany extra prejudices to contend with. For her feeling was high:—she must express herself somehow, must struggle to draw herself and her husband out of this situation. Wilbur found her walking nervously back and forth, crushing in her hot hands the evening paper with its “story” of the hearing.
Mrs. Wilbur was too excited to use any finesse. She outlined her plan rapidly:—they must sell the investments made with her money, and use that for the new house. In this way she thought to induce her husband to drop the traction stocks. For, she concluded, “then our home won’t always be a sore between us.”
Wilbur looked at her disgustedly. “That’s the woman in business! I don’t care to let go my hold in the Alaska company, nor in the other things. As far as your conscience is concerned,—well, I have already made eighty thousand in this deal. What would you like me to do with that?”
He spoke coolly, almost good-naturedly, but with contempt. Mrs. Wilbur rose quickly and walked up and down the room, speaking passionately.
“Do! Let us get rid of it all and keep just what I had from my father and leave this place, this prison. We can go to Europe and live quietly and decently and think ofother things. If this goes on, we shall be like the others, like the Traceys, all of them, ploughing the mud for swill. This isn’t life,—this is—”
Pausing for the word, she caught herself, and grew calm again. Her fury, which had made her speak out for once, appeared childish, ineffective. Her desire wasthe old, womanish desire—to run away from the present, to elude the tangle.
Wilbur looked at her in astonishment. Then as if recollecting that allowances should be made for her, he spoke again calmly.
“Well, you wouldn’t like that kind of thing long. I shouldn’t, I can tell you. That isn’t life, doing nothing but just dawdling around and being respectable. You’re all twisted up and nervous, Ada, and the best thing is for us not to talk business until you are better. Then you’ll feel differently.”
She looked over at him critically. He certainly would never “feel differently.” He stood alert, keenly alive, self-reliant, quite assured,—one who had fitted into fate admirably. Her passion for business, for the stir and contest of affairs, ended there, that night. The papers were torn, the partnership dissolved.
Her excessive feeling was unreasonable, she knew, yet this episode of the traction stocks had revealed to her all the ugliness of this game with money, which as a girl she had fancied to be fine and exciting. Others possibly might play it with ideal justice, but so few, so very few! And the worst of it was that your ideas of fair play became warped insensibly, that the best of men acquired a contempt for the “amateurishness” and “quixotry” of their youth. They became Jesuits with their souls. And the end of it all after you had got the success was one or all of three things: personal indulgence, charity, or a vague kind of comfort in the general development of mankind. Money made Chicago expanduntil men became dizzy contemplating where the end might be. But what use in all this multiplication, if it meant no gain in quality, no finer fibre, no higher life of the mind or of the soul? If the hard, honest Remsen were but to give place to the unctuous Wren? Why go on sowing a vast country, planting dollars and reaping millions; multiplying railroads and factories and mines,—when all that came of it was an immense commissariat business for the accumulating hordes of greedy, half-educated, wholly common people? One passionate, intolerant moment killed this woman’s love of business energy,—the mere exercise of getting wealth. It was a curious trade,—that was all.
Her imagination made her unfair, narrow. She could not see that in this wholesale indictment of an eager, fresh civilization, she was condemning the order of nature. She did not pause to consider the sturdy men who kept to their ideals, nor realize that the seething, hungry mass who fought for the only glory they knew were pitiable and blind. She would have none of it.
Six weeks later Mrs. Wilbur’s son came. When she had grown strong enough for her old life, she put all business aside methodically, turning away from the stock quotations in the newspapers in nervous dread, and skilfully avoiding any reference to their affairs whenever Wilbur showed himself inclined to talk business. There had been a time when she resented her child’s interference with her plans, his division between her and her husband. Now she welcomed it, trying to make up to the little Sebastian her disloyalty during themonths before his birth. Even Molly Parker, who presided over a small kindergarten in the neighbourhood, found her a sufficiently solicitous mother.
When Thornton Jennings wondered why Mrs. Wilbur had lost her interest in the Legal Aid Society and in the committees of the Civic Association, Miss Parker explained blithely, “She has other things to think of.”
“I don’t believe it is that, altogether. She was not the kind to lose all interest in this fashion.”
“Perhaps she is passing through a crisis. She is always having a crisis on hand.”
And Wilbur—who found nothing to complain of in his handsome, composed wife—also wondered about the crisis. He found himself left completely to his own devices. He did not bother himself long, for the business world was beginning to shake off the lethargy of the past two years, and he was busy with success. At odd moments, the husband and wife talked of the new house. It was nearly ready now for occupancy, and there was an undiscussed plan to move late in the summer.
Mrs. Anthon, who had come from St. Louis to assist in this operation, was anxious that the house should be properly dedicated by some important social event. Wilbur agreed with her, and the two discussed the matter for weeks. At last Mrs. Wilbur showed enough interest to suggest, languidly, giving a musicale. “Then,” she added, “we might have a series of lectures on art subjects by Mr. Erard. The Woman’s Amalgamated Institute have asked me to get him for the club, and I might offer the house.”
Mrs. Anthon sniffed dubiously. “I thought you had dropped that fellow by this time. What’s he doing over here?”
“Visiting and lecturing, I believe. He will be in Chicago by the end of October. I had thought of asking him to stay with us while he is here. What do you say, John, to having him?”
“I kind of think as your mother does. What’s the use of bothering with him any longer? He is either on his legs by this time or ought to be.”
He asked, as a second thought, “Have you been sending him money right along?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied in her usual calm tones. “But I won’t have him here if it troubles you. The lectures will be for women in the mornings, you know.”
“Oh! if he interests you,—I thought we had been travelling different roads these last years—”
“Yes.” Mrs. Wilbur’s tone was slightly ironical, “We have been going different ways, but I still find him—interesting; perhaps more than—well, most things.”