PART IICHAPTER I
Chicagois an instance of a successful, contemptuous disregard of nature by man. Other great cities have been called gradually into existence about some fine opportunity suggested by nature, at the junction of fertile valleys, or on a loving bend of a broad river, or in the inner recesses of a sea-harbour, where nature has pointed out, as it were, a spot favourable for life and growth. In the case of Chicago, man has decided to make for himself a city for his artificial necessities in defiance of every indifference displayed by nature. Along the level floor of sand and gravel cast up by the mighty lake, the city has swelled and pushed, like a pool of quicksilver, which, poured out on a flat plate, is ever undulating and altering its borders, as it eats its way further into the desert expanse. Railroad lines, like strands of a huge spider’s web, run across the continent in all directions, wilfully, strenuously centring in this waste spot, the swampy corner of a great lake. Through these manifold strands, the city touches the world.
The soil, where it emerges from the swamp, will grow nothing but spindling, scrubby trees and weeds. Man must make all,—must prepare special foundations forhis great buildings; must superimpose good streets of asphalt or brick upon the treacherous bottom; must make green things live, with the cares of a hot-house, to delight his eye, for left to herself nature merely hides the plain with a kind of brown scab. Upon this desolate waste first necessities have been provided for by miles and miles of nondescript buildings, enclosures for business and the requirements of naked existence; and then, these last years, time has come for ornamentation and individual care,—for the private house, the boulevard, the park. This last development, however, is sporadic; hence as a whole the first impression Chicago gives is that of a huge garment made of heterogeneous materials,—here a square of faded cotton, next door a patch let in of fine silk. For the order of life is first existence, then comfort, then luxury, and last—when the human mind begins to suffer ennui—a little beauty for a plaything.
The complex quality of this wonderful city is best seen as the stranger shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after layer of the folds. First in the great distance, rises a pall of dull smoke, shifting lethargically up and down the scene, as the lake wind or the land wind pulls and tugs at its mephitic dead body. Then the railroad, describing irregular curves, crosses lines of streets built up on embankments with oily ditches below, and intersected by cross streets that disappear into the marsh. In the chinks of the broken, ambitious plank walks grow brown weeds and grass. At regular intervals lamp posts set high up on mounds indicate where the city will placesome day a solid level for actual, busy life. Here and there rows of frame boxes, or cheaply ornamented cottages crop up, or a stone-front apartment building stands stranded, above the swamp, its foundation stones on a level with the lamp posts or the broken plank walk that gives access to its desolate self. Sometimes these tentative buildings lie closely together, and there are stores and saloons, and the streets are penetrated by electric wires. This is the Chicago of the future,—perhaps of the morrow, whenever the advancing lines of blocks shall have bounded that way.
Then come the solid outworks of the great city, which are marked roughly by the parks flanking the three landward sides. These parks are a noble patronage of nature, an indulgence to the carnal appetites of men, which are given to green things, as trees and flowering bushes and soft sod. They are great slices of man’s territory handed over to the landscape gardener to be made into nature by atour de force. Here begin the broad boulevards where live the men of the city who lead the toil and fight in the furnace, and have emerged to build great comfortable new houses surrounded by broad edgings of cool-looking grass. If one has succeeded fairly, there beyond, under the pall of black smoke, one comes out here to rest and enjoy and possess.
Still there is left the city, becoming hotter and fiercer mile by mile. Life spins there; man there is handling existence as you knead bread in a pan. The city is made of man; that is the last word to say of it. Brazen, unequal, like all man’s works, it stands a stupendouspiece of blasphemy against nature. Once within its circle, the heart must forget that the earth is beautiful. “Go to,” man boasts, “our fathers lived in the fear of nature;wewill build a city where men and women in their passions shall be the beginning and end. Man is enough for man.”
And out lakeward hangs the cool wind, ready now and then to rush into the thousands of streets and avenues that intersect the city like the pipes of a boiler, to clean out the stale air and the filth, willing thus to assist man in his slipshod management of his home. At other times it is busy with the lake—that marvellous lake!—spread out beyond the sandy shores, shifting, changing, gathering light to itself, playing out the panorama of nature close at hand for the unheeding benefit of this creature, man.
To John Wilbur, Chicago was like a congenial Alpine air, which stimulated his appetites. From the very first the strife for advancement summoned all his virility, and the sense of rapid success exhilarated him. His wife, on the other hand, remembered for many a day the sudden depression which the fierce city had given her spirits that first March morning of their arrival. It seemed to her imaginative mind the firstfactshe had ever known. But she learned to accept the conditions passably, and to do without many sensibilities; she learned how to make business—the mechanics of life—serve for all interests of mind. Nearly two years passed thus in a swift leap while Mrs. Wilbur was becoming a “worker,” before Molly Parker came to visit her. Mrs. Ormiston Dexter having died suddenly, Molly was preparingwonderingly to earn her bread, and for such vague purposes Chicago offered a good field.
The first morning after her arrival the two visited the Wilburs’ new house that was going up some miles to the south. They drove out by the arrow-like Michigan Boulevard, then turned back and forth, skilfully dodging bad streets where pools of slime lay in the broken wooden pavements, crossing the whirring cable-tracks, until they reached a broad avenue. Here the houses were separated by patches of lawn or vacant lots, and the expansive boulevard was divided in two by little artificial mounds of earth, with trees and shrubs, in which wound gravelled walks.
“We decided to build ’way south,” Mrs. Wilbur explained, “because it isn’t so dreadfully noisy and dusty out here. We can have plenty of room, and, just think! there are two or three fair-sized trees on our lot.”
Miss Parker was eagerly looking here and there. The morning breeze from the lake shot little spots of bright colour over her face.
“There!” Mrs. Wilbur pointed with the whip down the misty avenue. “You can just see it.”
“What? That enormous white building?” Molly exclaimed. Mrs. Wilbur touched the horse with her whip nervously.
“John felt that the house should be more than merely a home to live in: it is to be a good solid investment and a sort of advertisement of success. It helps him as a young capitalist to have it known that he is building a great house. Then the architect got us in formore than we expected. You see it is built all around with stone, very solid, and gives a more colossal appearance than its size really justifies.”
Miss Parker looked at the neighbouring houses that Mrs. Wilbur had pointed to for comparison. Most of them were only faced with stone. She had noticed, also, that in one case where a house was going up, the imposing front consisted merely of a thin veneer of stone placed over masonry.
“How do you like the architecture?” the mistress asked nervously.
“It is so imposing,” faltered Molly, “and what is the house in the rear?”
“Oh, that’s the stable. We had to finish that first, so that it could be used for the materials.”
“It looks like a mansion itself.”
Mrs. Wilbur led the way into the new “marble palace,” as it was locally described. She showed her friend about, with sudden alternations of enthusiasm and listlessness, explaining in detail the suites of rooms, the manifold conveniences suggested by the architect. Suddenly she exclaimed,—
“You have had enough of this! I am tired of it too. We come out here two or three times a week and every Sunday. I will drive you out to the parks, and we can have a good talk.”
Miss Parker remarked timidly, when they were once more in the trap, jogging southwards on the hard boulevard, “You must be so awfully rich!”
Her friend smiled. “Yes. John has done remarkablywell, and my money helped of course. But the house is really beyond us. That is the temptation out here, to discount the future, or at least to live up to the present to the last cent. And for the past six months the times have beensobad.” She looked grave.
“Don’t you find it all interesting and exciting, now you are married,—planning, and all that?”
“Oh, yes!” The married woman took the offered lead eagerly. “It has been such a full time. You see, I know almost all John’s business, and he has taken me with him on all his business trips, once to Alaska even, and I have felt like a real partner. I have managed some affairs here in the city all by myself.”
She talked rapidly, describing a few energetic and capable women in Chicago who managed large businesses. “It is so good to feel that you have a hand on the reins; aren’t merely driven along in a brougham, while you read a novel.”
“You must like it.” Miss Parker warmed sympathetically on finding a spot of enthusiasm. “Chicago and business must be so much more real than all that stuff in Paris.”
“Ihaveliked it,” Mrs. Wilbur’s face sobered again, “while it was venture and struggle, and I had a hand in it. But, I shouldhateanything that came in between me and my husband, and just this active, free life.” Some passionate chord had been stirred.
“A woman loves and marries and has a large scheme to carry out. She plans living with her husband as an equal, and then—” She touched the horse quickly.
“What?” the girl asked curiously.
“Then she finds that their roadsmustdivide. She must ‘make the home,’ cultivate persons whom it is well to know; even entertain horrid, stupid people because her husband’s interests are involved.”
“But if they areyourinterests too?”
“A woman wouldn’t sacrifice herself to get her ends in that way. Now we have this house, I must try to be something of a ‘leader,’ so John thinks, and go in for reading papers, or at least for music and art, because the others do. I must entertain, become a ‘patroness’ if I can, and all the rest of it.”
“I should think it great fun to have a swell house and loads of people about, and put my name down for all the nice charities. I’d have a beautiful time and fill that big temple of yours full of interesting people.”
Mrs. Wilbur smiled indulgently. “Interesting people—I mean people interesting for more than a few minutes to any one but themselves—aren’t so easy to find, my dear, anywhere in this wide world.”
Molly Parker did not answer. That had not been her experience. Every object that she could remember from the puppy dogs and the babies in the streets to the self-conscious New England professors at Aunt Dexter’s, had always amused her.
“Then there are other facts a woman doesn’t reckon with before she is married,—her children,” Mrs. Wilbur continued abruptly. “Molly, do you think a woman is horrid because she doesn’t want children?”
“Yes,” the younger woman answered promptly. “Perhapsnot at first while she is kind of honeymooning it, but afterwards—why, of course.”
“I suppose that is the proper way to look at it,” Mrs. Wilbur assented regretfully. “If a woman doesn’t love her husband, children are interests, and if she does love him, she wants his children. But it isn’t true necessarily. Like so many other proper conceptions, it may be a commonplace lie.”
Miss Parker opened her eyes in consternation, wider and wider. “Well, your husband wants children; every man who is good and nice does.”
“I don’t,” Mrs. Wilbur answered passionately.
“Don’t say that, dear.” Molly Parker gave a little shiver of superstitious horror.
“It is what two women out of every three say or think, if they have any spirit in them,” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed excitedly.
“John has been in the Dakotas two weeks to-day, and I haven’t been with him because—in a few months I shall be a mother. Next week he will be here again for a little while and then off for another week in Boston and New York. And it would make no difference, if he were here all the time, like most business men, I should be put aside,—hors de combat. It will be a whole year, perhaps two, before I can be his companion again, before I can have any life of my own. I am tied to a circumstance that may be misery, that means two years gone, out of the twenty good ones of life. Not to speak of theothersthat may come!”
“Why did you marry, then?”
“What has that to do with it?” she said impatiently, “a woman doesn’t marry for children; a young woman doesn’t think much about it beforehand. When she does think, she supposes what the world says is true; it all arranges itself, and is a blessing, and a great happiness. The world has been dealing in sentimental lies so long that its axioms are apt to be foolish. No! there is no freedom for women: they are marked incapable from their birth and are supported by men for some obvious and necessary services. Between times they have a few indifferent joys dealt out to them.”
They had driven slowly around the great oval of sward in the green park, and crossing eastward towards the lake were passing the grey walls of the new university, which rose boldly against the steel-blue sky.
“You must sympathize withthem.” Miss Parker pointed dubiously to a group of women students who were crossing the campus.
Mrs. Wilbur made no reply and they drove on silently towards the lake. “Oh! how good it is, that great lake,” Molly exclaimed as if eager to escape from some shocking ideas. “How I love it, the colour is so pure, and the little clouds out on the horizon are like little hopes of happiness.”
She jumped out of the carriage and stood looking into the lake, as if she would grasp it in her arms, her black dress swaying in the air, and her cheeks flushing with excitement. Mrs. Wilbur watched her a little enviously.
“Now let us talk about your plans,” Mrs. Wilbur beganwhen they had turned back towards the city. “You are not marrying, with all your proper views.”
“No! Twenty-four last March. Five proposals in full form, three half proposals,—kind of suggestions,—four other things that might have come to something, but didn’t. There is hope still. I am looking hard for him, and when the right young man comes along, I won’t hesitate. Have you any likely young men in view?”
Mrs. Wilbur shook her head. “That is one thing Chicago hasn’t produced,—ideal young men with good fortunes suitable for ideal young women without fortunes. There’s Thornton Jennings, but he hasn’t any money. He is quite the nicest young man I know.”
“Then I must do something right off quick,” Molly Parker sighed, disliking doing anything definite as much as a discreet cat.
“Whatwillyou do?” Mrs. Wilbur asked thoughtfully.
“Teach kindergarten, I guess. I get on best with the kids. But tell me something about Chicago and the people. How did you come to know them?”
That was a long theme which occupied the two friends for the rest of the drive. Mrs. Wilbur explained how much her uncle Sebastian Anthon had helped them to get a start socially through some old friends, who were warmly devoted to him. And in Chicago one got to know enough people very soon. There was a certain social openness, and a willingness to take people for their personal value. Then John had proved unusuallysympatico, had made friends easily.
She described the three sections of the city with their three distinctmilieus. When the city was young, people settled away from the lake out of a superstition that the water was unhealthy,—“some miles in the interior where it is very hot, and where it is awful every way. Some day I will take you over there and show you the miles of shabby homes, that bear all over them the marks of not being in it.” Then she related “the pilgrimage of the successful.” These good people of the West Side, prospered in business, and desiring something more than narrow, high-stooped brick houses with black-walnut decorations, moved down to the lake; most, the very rich, to the south where land was to be had in plenty. Occasionally a family who had acute social aspirations moved again to the north into the little segment of lake shore. This northern settlement held itself as conservative and distinctly fashionable. “But the money is where we are, on the South Side—for the most part.”
Mrs. Wilbur recounted ironically, yet with genuine interest, their own experiences in Chicago. They aspired to “the society of progressive people of weight and wealth, who patronize art and music and education.” They were members of the Art Association, of the Society for the Support of Classical Music, and a dozen minor enterprises of a public-spirited nature. Then Mrs. Wilbur described the Woman’s Amalgamated Institute and the Monday Club, to which she had been recently elected.
“You see,” she concluded with a laugh, “the women foster the arts and sciences. We are making it all:we order a stock of ideas as you would get flowers from a florist. Next Monday I am to read my first paper,—on Modern French Art. You must come and hear me get off what Erard told us over there.”
“And Erard?” Molly Parker put in curiously.
“He is bringing out a book, I believe. He sent me the proof, but John had no interest in it, and I was too tired after the day’s hurly-burly to do more than glance over it. The picture, they say, was a great success in the Champ de Mars and at Berlin. It’s on its way over now.”
“I think,” Miss Parker remarked irrelevantly, “that when we are landed in one place, the rest of the world should sink out of sight,—so there need be no pillars of salt along the road.”
“Chicago is just the place for you then,” Mrs. Wilbur answered wistfully, looking down the miles of Michigan Avenue. “When you are in it, you are cut off by a vacuum, as it were, from the surrounding world. You can’t see outside, and you hear the voices of the others only faintly.”
“That sounds too much like a prison to be true.”
Mrs. Wilbur’s face looked as if she were convinced that it was a prison, in certain aspects at least.