Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated, knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come. Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men—of whom he intended to be one—intent upon growth.
In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a woman—tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward with a cry.
“Edith!” he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand. “For Janet,” he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to Van Buren Street.
Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of the street. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” sang the voice.
Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of growth worked.
From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air. Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” again insisted the voice.
After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him. From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish doorway and its dimly lighted “Ladies’ Entrance,” and into a region of neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city, had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs, reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years, and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle, died after having borne him the two daughters.
After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to his home state to settle on a farm.
About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father, Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no rest except to eat.
At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy, clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his humiliation.
To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made reclining wheeled chair.
Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with the money of the medical student. “Take it and make money for me,” the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking flamboyantly of Sam’s ability in affairs. “What is the good of having a talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven’t it?”
Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings spent together.
In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker. In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam’s friend.
Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam’s money making and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside Janet’s wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside, through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their talk.
Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
“You talk!” she broke out. “Books are not full of pretence and lies; you business men are—you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You haven’t read books, not real ones. Didn’t my father know; didn’t he save himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs. You think you know what’s going on in the world. You think you are doing things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind, all blind.”
The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam’s hair, laughing down into the astonished face he turned up to her.
“Oh, I’m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,” she went on impulsively. “I like you all right and if I were a well woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and men and machines that make guns.”
Sam grinned. “You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,” he declared; “you think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep.”
Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.
After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet, listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against the great world background she had drawn for him.
Sam did not understand Janet’s point of view. It was all too new and foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that she would have gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam’s work for the gun company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on Wabash Avenue.
After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St. Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel’s paunch protruding itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company’s only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped, showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.
“Sam, were you ever in love?” asked the colonel, with a sigh.
Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his bed danced up and down. “The old fool, has it come to that with him?” he asked himself. “After all these years of single life is he going to begin running after women now?”
He did not answer the colonel’s question. “There are breakers ahead for you, old boy,” he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue Rainey, the colonel’s daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade among women.
The colonel, oblivious of Sam’s mirth and of his silence regarding his experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might take worried him. “Children are so unfair,” he complained; “they forget about a man’s feelings and can’t realise that his heart is still young.”
With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman’s lying in his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. “She is an actress, a working girl,” he said feelingly. “I met her at a dinner given by Will Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an affinity for each other.”
Sam sat up in bed. “Letters!” he muttered. “The old dog is going to get himself involved.” He dropped again upon the pillow. “Well, let him. Why need I bother myself?”
The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. “Although we have seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful.”
A worried sigh broke from the colonel. “I want Sue to invite her to the house, but I am afraid,” he complained; “I am afraid she will be wrong-headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her she may make a scene and hurt Luella’s feelings.”
The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam’s eyes, and he turned his back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.
“I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little woman alive,” the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of his daughter or of the lady from the stage. “It is a wonderful thing,” half sobbed the colonel, “when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart into the keeping of a man like me.”
It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam’s desk and pulled off a glove while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had brought her there.
Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman, she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he thought her baffling and puzzling.
“The colonel,” she began, and then hesitated and smiled. “You, Mr. McPherson, have become a figure in my father’s life. He depends upon you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that the colonel and she should marry.”
Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his face was grave and disinterested.
“Yes?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Have you met Miss London?”
“I have,” answered Sue Rainey. “Have you?”
Sam shook his head.
“She is impossible,” declared the colonel’s daughter, clutching the glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose in her cheeks. “She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn’t even the grace to be ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a fix.”
Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey’s cheek and thought the texture of it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman. The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought, transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the matter of the colonel’s affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied by her having come to him. “She has self-respect,” he told himself, and felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by himself.
“I have been hearing of you a great deal,” she continued, glancing up at him and smiling. “At our house you are brought to the table with the soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of ‘Sam says’ and ‘Sam thinks.’ And the men who come to the house talk of you also. Teddy Foreman says that at directors’ meetings they all sit about like children waiting for you to tell them what to do.”
She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. “I am in a hole,” she said. “I might handle my father but I cannot handle that woman.”
While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been intending to help her.
“Give me the lady’s address,” he said; “I’ll go look her over.”
Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper at one of the town’s best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes’ talk near the stage door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over Geiger’s drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam had taken the rôle of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the rôle of villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer’s rage and at the frightened boy begging for mercy.
Luella London laughed heartily at Sam’s story and then, the coffee being served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into her eyes.
“And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about Colonel Rainey,” she said.
Sam lighted a cigar.
“Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the colonel?” he asked bluntly.
The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
“I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,” she said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. “Do you know, Mr. McPherson, I can’t just figure you. I can’t just see how you get into this. Where are your credentials, anyway?”
Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
“It’s this way,” he said, “I’m something of an adventurer myself. I fly the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him.”
Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice. “I’ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He’s going to help me get you if you do not drop it.”
Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to be defeated without a struggle.
“You lie,” she cried, half springing from her chair. “Frank has never—”
“Oh yes, Frank has,” answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; “I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.”
Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and wiped her eyes.
“All right! All right!” she said, bracing herself, “I’ll drop it. If you’ve dug up Frank Robson you’ve got me. He’ll do anything you say for a piece of money.”
For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the woman’s eyes.
“I wish I was a man,” she said. “I get whipped at everything I tackle because I’m a woman. I’m getting past my money-making days in the theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game.”
“He is,” answered Sam dispassionately, “but you see I beat you to it. He’s mine.”
Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
“Look here,” he said, “you’ve done a good piece of work. You should have won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?
“Anyway,” he went on, “I’m not going to see you trimmed. I’ve got ten thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse.”
“That’s square,” said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming back into her eyes.
Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him and a waiter sign as witnesses.
Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
“What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?” she asked.
Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
“Because I like you and I admire your skill,” he said, “and anyway I did not have you beaten until right now.”
They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with assured airs serving Sam’s mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat with him.
“I presume you are right about women,” he said musingly, “it must be a stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.”
“Winning! We don’t win.” The lips of the actress drew back showing her white teeth. “No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game for herself.”
Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
“Woman can’t stand alone,” she went on, “she is a sentimental fool. She reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to a woman, sells her out.”
Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
“Let’s not misunderstand each other,” he said quietly, “do not blame Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.”
A puzzled look came into the woman’s eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.
“You grafter!” she sneered.
Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
“What’s the use being sore?” he asked. “It’s simple enough. You staked against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven’t you?”
Luella reached for her purse.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ll look. Haven’t you decided to steal it back yet?”
Sam laughed.
“I’m coming to that,” he said, “don’t hurry me.”
For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.
“Look here!” he said, “I’m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can’t see you running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your hands.
“Give it to me,” he urged; “let me invest it for you. I’m a winner. I’ll double it for you in a year.”
The actress stared past Sam’s shoulder to where a group of young men sat about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her and laughed.
“As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel’s wife, looked to me,” he said. “I had to make you get out of my flower bed.”
A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of bills.
“I’m a sport,” she said, “and I’m going to lay a bet on the best horse I ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.”
Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw the roll on the table.
“Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,” she said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. “You ought to beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.”
The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
The colonel’s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam’s face.
“I thought so,” she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. “But I do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?”
“The paper,” Sam answered, “puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand dollars for it.”
Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the desk and sat down.
“Do you get your half?” she asked.
“I get it all,” answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look still in her eyes.
Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what had been in his mind to say to her.
“The woman will not bother the colonel any more,” he declared; “if that paper won’t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now. Make the check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it across the table.
“I cannot say that I understand yet,” she confessed. “Did you also fall in love with her?”
Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I like ability and good brains and that woman has them. She isn’t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That’s what she was after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing by her. That’s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
“And what about the colonel?” she asked. “What will he think of all this?”
Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
“We’ll have to agree not to consider him,” he said. “We really did that you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss London’s putting the finishing touches on the job.”
And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five hundred dollars into his hand.
“That’s not to invest for me,” she said, “that’s for yourself. By the agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.”
With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her room looking at her.
“What did you tell the colonel?” he asked.
“I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die in his arms.”
Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
“He began to beg off and make excuses,” she went on, “and then I brought out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six months.”
Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.
And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against women that lasted the rest of his life.
Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. “She’ll end by being an old maid,” they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than the colonel’s quiet little daughter.
After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped on her trail reached Sam’s ears. They would be in at the office to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were “squaring themselves with the colonel.” Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling them damned upstarts.
For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.
After Janet Eberly’s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was in Colonel Tom’s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting at the colonel’s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human endeavour.
The colonel’s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty of her life and character.
The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping praises upon her life.
When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey’s hand.
He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey’s eyes.
“I wish I had known her,” she said and drew her hand from between his fingers. “I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your Janet. They are rare—such women. They are worth much to know. Most women like most men—”
She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her. For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him disconcerting and engulfing him.
“I have been doing you an injustice,” said Sue Rainey, looking at the floor. “I have thought of you as something different from what you are. There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.”
Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
“What was the story you heard?” he asked.
“It was a story a young man told at our house,” she explained hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness. “It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up and given you. Why did you take the money?”
Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the city.
One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People crowded forward to grasp Sam’s hand and he had accepted the money collected and had put it in his pocket.
Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw back from going into Sam’s project, had thought his taking the money not manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
Now in Colonel Tom’s office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation that had so delighted Jack Prince.
“The crowd wanted to give me the money,” he said, slightly perplexed. “Why shouldn’t I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined clothes and the expenses of the trip.”
With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before him.
“And I wanted the money,” he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice. “I have always wanted money, any money I could get.”
Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
“I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk,” he wrote at the end of the letter. “They are full of sentiment and ideals which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the best, although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In the talk I had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself flew the black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign that I am the keener man.”
With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had written it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement of the business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd note to write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to reconsider his action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the general offices dropped it into the mail chute.
“It will let her know where I stand anyway,” he thought, with a return of the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on the boat.
Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom’s office Sam saw Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father’s office. Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes’ talk of Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick friendliness. “Like Janet she is more than half intellect,” he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that she was interested in him—all of these things came and went in his mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her a part of his plans for the future.
Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue’s mind also. After the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
“I stepped in,” said a voice above his head.
Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. “She must have been there some minutes looking down at me,” he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure in the thought.
Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a marriage with her were but vagaries. “Perhaps it would not be attractive to either her or myself when we came up to it,” he decided.
“I stepped in,” she began again. “I have been thinking. Some things you said—in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died—some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I—I got interested. I—are you a socialist?”
“I believe not,” Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought. “Are you?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Just what are you?” she went on. “What do you believe? I am curious to know. I thought your note—you will pardon me—I thought it a kind of pretence.”
Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business philosophy crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of Windy McPherson. He came around the desk and leaning against it looked at her. His secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone together. Sam laughed.
“There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a little mole working underground, intent upon worms,” he said, and then, waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, “I am a business man. Isn’t that enough? If you could go with me through some of these cost sheets you would agree they are needed.”
He turned and faced her again.
“What should I be doing with beliefs?” he asked.
“Well, I think you have them—some kind of beliefs,” she insisted, “you must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk of you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a wonderful fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you drive on and on. What drives you? I want to know.”
For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at him. Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped, regarding her.
The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked loudly.
Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she slowly turned up to his.
“I want to have a talk with you,” he said, and his voice broke. He had the illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her. Her interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half decision he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged silence between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed belief that she belonged to him—was a part of him—and he was charmed with her manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given him.
And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring thoughts, come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that she could lead the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her wealth and what it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power. And through these thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold of him—something that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning her curiosity about his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning her own beliefs. He could see none of Colonel Tom’s blustering incompetence in her and thought her filled with truth as a deep spring is filled with clear water. He believed she would give him something, something that all his life he had been wanting. An old aching hunger that had haunted his nights as a boy came back and he thought that at her hand it might be fed.
“I—I must read a book about socialism,” he said lamely.
Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in his voice.
Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him at the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had become to the colonel’s entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The interruption brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began talking of the colonel’s idea as though it had taken him unawares.
Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his eyes that first broke away.
From that day Sam’s mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking, going to his room or walking through the streets or in the parks instead of seeking his old companions in the clubs and drinking places. Sometimes pushing his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and opening the window would spend half the night watching the lights of boats far away over the water and thinking of her. He would imagine her in the room, moving here and there, and coming occasionally to put her hand in his hair and look down at him as Janet had done, helping by her sane talk and quiet ways to get his life straightened out for good living.
And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room with sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, “Truth, truth, give me back the truth that I may see,” and he awoke sick with horror at the thought of the look of suffering that had been in her face. Never did Sam dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses on her lips and neck as he had dreamed of other women who in the past had won his favour.
For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently his dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw her again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit to the East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on his business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to become absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he had said nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time to think it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her long letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman of the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day on the street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking in Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting on benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
“We might have that talk,” he said.
She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
“I have been thinking of it,” she said, the familiar serious look coming into her eyes. “After all what have we to say to each other?”
Sam watched her steadily.
“I have a lot of things to say to you,” he announced. “That is to say—well—I have, if things are as I hope.” She got off the horse and they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
“I have been thinking we might marry, you and I,” he said, and cursed himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
“You do get things done, don’t you?” she replied, smiling.
“Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?”
“Because I want to live with you,” he said; “I have been talking to the colonel.”
“About marrying me?” She seemed about to begin laughing.
He hurried on. “No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me about your ideas. I felt I had to know.”
Sam faced her.
“He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for weeks I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over and over to myself, ‘I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.’ I did not expect to go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will tell you.”
“Sam McPherson, you are a wonder,” she said, “and I do not know but that I will marry you in the end, but I can’t tell now. I want to know a lot of things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and to live for what I want to live.”
The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke to him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on the lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her with puzzled eyes.
“He was beautiful,” she said. “He was past sixty but looked like a boy of twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over him. He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient. He was clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion and co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in Wales, but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear what he said, but I kept thinking, ‘I want a man like that.’
“Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?” she persisted.
Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose her, that she would not marry him.
“I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly,” he said stoutly, “but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I haven’t any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts and changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you.”
“When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?”
“Now,” answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting in a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come back to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed through his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of ultimate success.
Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in his mind she looked up at him and said,
“I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I want you or any other man.”
There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks—all of these were a part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting to be fed. “We must have it all out here and now,” he told himself. “I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let her be.