they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be
measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of the species is
more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the
one being brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air
of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity,
"The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a
Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal.
Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream
dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal
youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity--and none of
it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food,
sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs
and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of
faith, hoping for a life to come.
Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
days before his mother's illness and to get again the strong belief in his
own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He
didn't succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst
of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and,
turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: "I
will go and talk to Mary Underwood."
While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that
after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual,
half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was
gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence
the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he
would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money
maker, one without dreams.
Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the
house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that
planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the
land at the end of winter.
"What is it, boy?" asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety.
The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her
thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown
herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs
of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town
and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at
herself and said tenderly, "You are an old fool."
Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station
platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda
rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as
it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad
station.
"Something kept telling me not to go away," he said. "It must have been in
the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work. Oh,
if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others here,
had an appreciation of the sense of privacy."
Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
"I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you
a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of
privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was
better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
flourish."
Sam shook his head.
"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said
stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to be
met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in
their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one way and
we must take it. You and I will have to marry."
Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
"What a proposal!" she cried.
On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through
the quiet night.
"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
she sang, and laughed again.
"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
Don't you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of his
two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don't be absurd. I don't want
a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I
adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and
covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I'll face them down
--I did it once before and I'll do it again. Go to your city and make your
fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman's fight."
"It is horrible. You don't understand," Sam protested.
A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood's face.
"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
make the matter worse."
The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She
was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How
differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.
"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud,
putting her hand on Sam's arm.
Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road.
He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to
play, but he could see no alternative.
"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible--it is a woman's battle."
Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms
and gave her a great hug.
"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome
with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the
house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her
tears she called after him.
"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.
* * * * *
From Mary's house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come
to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with
pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he
could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again.
Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over
what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the
house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and roused him out of
bed.
"I'll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything,"
Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."
"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,"
Sam thought.
Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore's
suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter's jewelry store. For an hour they
bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice
was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the
counter Telfer made a speech.
"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not going
to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail
me. I shall tell him that if he doesn't make money in that Chicago I shall
come and take the watch from him."
Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
the street to Eleanor's shop. He strutted through the display room and
into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
"What am I going to do, Eleanor?" he demanded, standing with legs spread
apart and frowning down upon her, "what am I going to do without Sam?"
A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again
through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung
the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane
hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running
from door to door along the street.
"I shall have to be adopting a new son," he said musingly.
After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the
statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on
the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew
into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he
drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of
his nightgown.
"On the night of my mother's death," ran the statement, "I sat in the
kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my
hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried
him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house
of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had
done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the
body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this
is true, if he can be made to tell the truth."
Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
the news and advertising for _The Argus_.
"Ain't that a slasher?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
written.
"Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
Underwood," she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with
_The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been to a
state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, "Poor Jane
McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than
that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any
spunk they would finish the job."
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in
Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom
Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before
country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting
back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and
among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From
time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in
Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the
store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer had
watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane
and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not
got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and
make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that
opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of
many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he
had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had
touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid
goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the
bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to
make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he
had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out
flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the
wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith
walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping a
foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the
city has changed him," he added regretfully.
Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the
store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he
leaves town. What has got into him?"
Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of
the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been
hurled at him.
"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it."
* * * * *
For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from
the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money-
maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life
and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in
which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently
until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With
the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam
felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it
ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of
unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took
advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague,
uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes
with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful
business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter,
scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler,
Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when
as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and
then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city
where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the
street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited
saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."
Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast
work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that team of
black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty,
would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of
baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be
erected in the Loop.
"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been
the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was home that he
intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add, looking at the
youth challengingly.
The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week's living, sat down to
dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-
possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation
for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain
Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his
weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam
upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
wife.
The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each week the faith
healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer's
wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
the house.
In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind of
genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and purposeful
like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
"but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I
want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand
and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice
I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do
not understand her just the same."
One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had
friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar
room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a
kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of
him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on
mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out
with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing
street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of
the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place and
drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in
the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he
looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against
him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the
imaginary struggle.
There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above
the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy
nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving
swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by
hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon
Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to
smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours
with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and
admiration of the silent power of it.
One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a
power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a
little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of
the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices
called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men
looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their
hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women
pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly,
sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on
the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they
hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In
the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam's brain and he stood
hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a
story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death
that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren
Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the
elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk
for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The
wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the
lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the
eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his
voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered how
the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater it
would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and crept
into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time utterly
tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and resolutely closing
his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to be understood," he told
himself. "To live decently is a matter of good sense. I will keep thinking
of what I want to do and not go into such a place again."
One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident
of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth,
that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked
in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the
remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk,
and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at
the stars like a wood god on the bend.
Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him
on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked
to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The
man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the
cheeks of a maiden."
Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and
a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a
Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil
stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them,"
Prince had explained.
Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising
and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher, as I
am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's ideas
and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man's story
better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to advertising."
He began laughing.
"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man
for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat
phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will
howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he will try
to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to
send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off
the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."
Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way to
the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he
explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of a
circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock
of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."
Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind
the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will
always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet
McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him
with."
Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small and
soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained; "I have
my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live."
For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a
place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me of
the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on a
railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."
The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he
announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
putting it in his wife's name."
Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began and
then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said uncertainly.
Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's
hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger under
Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends the
cradle will fall."
The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head
feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the
sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner
Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his
glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it seems to me
that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab
with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to
catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish lies about."
The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in
the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced
in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the
little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the
edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on the voice, the
gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer.
And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and
Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill the lamp,
man--the light of reason has gone out."
From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the three
friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home
half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the
skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and
thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the
soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"
Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the
bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until
the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone
into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair
upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of
beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to
celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag
Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking
again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to
efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio
containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under
Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses,
peered at Sam.
"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
parts?" he asked.
CHAPTER II
It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of
high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in
boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs
from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the
plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and
potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their
way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million
hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand
hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to
add to the confusion.
Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things
and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars
and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he
was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the
streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of
voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was
an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities
sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. "What loot!"
a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he
should get his share of it.
Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a
carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired,
dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, "I worked here once and
used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how
clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the
apples made in a year."
The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
"The foodstuff of an empire rattling o'er the stones," he said.
"I should have made more money here," answered Sam dryly.
The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went
in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in
a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused
at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the
church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the
church in Caxton.
The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought,
a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of
about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out
two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the
firm's stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let
him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after
several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in
the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took
most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm
writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go
East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to
Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going
from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed,
however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on
the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an
iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and
rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk
in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.
In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river
of foodstuff through his firm's front door.
With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his
hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he
thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress.
From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned
and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that
had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the
Pergrin house.
Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game, smuggled
across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen in cold
storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long profit to
hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of
corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River ready to
be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the margins by which he
kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at a word from a LaSalle
Street broker.
Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking of
the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning with
it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the power of
cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came running
into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking Narrow-Face
to help them over rough spots in the day's trading. Broad-Shoulders, who
had no business ability but who had married a rich woman, went on month
after month taking half the profits brought in by the ability of his tall,
shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken a liking for Sam and who
occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke of the matter often and
eloquently.
"Spend your time with no one who hasn't money to help you," he said; "on
the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That's all
there is to business--money-getting." And then looking across to the desk
of his brother he would add, "I would kick half the men in business out of
it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money plays."
One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
Narrow-Face.
"I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose," he said.
The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
man.
"What collateral?" he asked.
Sam shook his head. "Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
what will it cost me?" he asked.
The lawyer laughed good naturedly. "I can draw it of course. Why not?"
measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of the species is
more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the
one being brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air
of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity,
"The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a
Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal.
Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream
dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal
youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity--and none of
it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food,
sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs
and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of
faith, hoping for a life to come.
Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
days before his mother's illness and to get again the strong belief in his
own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He
didn't succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst
of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and,
turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: "I
will go and talk to Mary Underwood."
While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that
after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual,
half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was
gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence
the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he
would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money
maker, one without dreams.
Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the
house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that
planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the
land at the end of winter.
"What is it, boy?" asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety.
The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her
thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown
herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs
of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town
and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at
herself and said tenderly, "You are an old fool."
Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station
platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda
rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as
it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad
station.
"Something kept telling me not to go away," he said. "It must have been in
the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work. Oh,
if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others here,
had an appreciation of the sense of privacy."
Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
"I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you
a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of
privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was
better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
flourish."
Sam shook his head.
"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said
stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to be
met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in
their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one way and
we must take it. You and I will have to marry."
Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.
"What a proposal!" she cried.
On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through
the quiet night.
"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
she sang, and laughed again.
"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
Don't you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of his
two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don't be absurd. I don't want
a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I
adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and
covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I'll face them down
--I did it once before and I'll do it again. Go to your city and make your
fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman's fight."
"It is horrible. You don't understand," Sam protested.
A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood's face.
"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
make the matter worse."
The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She
was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How
differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.
"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud,
putting her hand on Sam's arm.
Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road.
He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to
play, but he could see no alternative.
"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible--it is a woman's battle."
Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms
and gave her a great hug.
"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.
And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome
with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the
house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her
tears she called after him.
"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.
* * * * *
From Mary's house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come
to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with
pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he
could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again.
Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over
what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the
house of Tom Comstock, editor of the _Caxton Argus_, and roused him out of
bed.
"I'll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything,"
Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."
"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,"
Sam thought.
Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore's
suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter's jewelry store. For an hour they
bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice
was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the
counter Telfer made a speech.
"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not going
to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail
me. I shall tell him that if he doesn't make money in that Chicago I shall
come and take the watch from him."
Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along
the street to Eleanor's shop. He strutted through the display room and
into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.
"What am I going to do, Eleanor?" he demanded, standing with legs spread
apart and frowning down upon her, "what am I going to do without Sam?"
A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the
floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again
through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung
the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane
hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running
from door to door along the street.
"I shall have to be adopting a new son," he said musingly.
After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the
statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on
the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew
into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he
drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of
his nightgown.
"On the night of my mother's death," ran the statement, "I sat in the
kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began
shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my
hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried
him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house
of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had
done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the
body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this
is true, if he can be made to tell the truth."
Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks,
who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of
the news and advertising for _The Argus_.
"Ain't that a slasher?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had
written.
"Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary
Underwood," she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and
looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with
_The Argus_, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been to a
state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, "Poor Jane
McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than
that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any
spunk they would finish the job."
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in
Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom
Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before
country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting
back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and
among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From
time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in
Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the
store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer had
watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane
and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not
got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and
make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that
opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of
many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he
had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had
touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid
goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the
bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to
make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he
had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out
flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the
wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith
walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping a
foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the
city has changed him," he added regretfully.
Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the
store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he
leaves town. What has got into him?"
Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of
the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been
hurled at him.
"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it."
* * * * *
For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from
the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money-
maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life
and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in
which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently
until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With
the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam
felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it
ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of
unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took
advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague,
uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes
with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful
business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter,
scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler,
Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when
as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and
then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city
where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the
street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited
saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."
Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast
work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that team of
black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty,
would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of
baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be
erected in the Loop.
"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been
the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was home that he
intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add, looking at the
youth challengingly.
The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week's living, sat down to
dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-
possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation
for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain
Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his
weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam
upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
wife.
The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each week the faith
healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer's
wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
the house.
In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind of
genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and purposeful
like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
"but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I
want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand
and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice
I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do
not understand her just the same."
One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had
friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar
room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a
kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of
him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on
mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out
with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing
street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of
the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place and
drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in
the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he
looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against
him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the
imaginary struggle.
There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above
the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy
nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving
swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by
hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon
Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to
smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours
with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and
admiration of the silent power of it.
One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a
power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a
little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of
the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices
called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men
looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their
hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women
pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly,
sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on
the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they
hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In
the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam's brain and he stood
hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a
story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death
that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren
Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the
elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk
for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The
wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the
lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the
eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his
voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered how
the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater it
would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and crept
into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time utterly
tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and resolutely closing
his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to be understood," he told
himself. "To live decently is a matter of good sense. I will keep thinking
of what I want to do and not go into such a place again."
One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident
of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth,
that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked
in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the
remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk,
and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at
the stars like a wood god on the bend.
Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him
on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked
to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The
man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the
cheeks of a maiden."
Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and
a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a
Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil
stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them,"
Prince had explained.
Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising
and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher, as I
am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's ideas
and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man's story
better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to advertising."
He began laughing.
"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man
for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat
phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will
howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he will try
to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to
send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off
the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."
Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way to
the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he
explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of a
circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock
of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."
Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind
the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will
always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet
McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him
with."
Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small and
soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained; "I have
my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live."
For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a
place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me of
the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on a
railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."
The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he
announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
putting it in his wife's name."
Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began and
then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said uncertainly.
Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's
hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger under
Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends the
cradle will fall."
The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head
feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the
sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner
Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his
glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it seems to me
that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab
with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to
catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish lies about."
The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in
the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced
in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the
little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the
edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on the voice, the
gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer.
And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and
Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill the lamp,
man--the light of reason has gone out."
From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the three
friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home
half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the
skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and
thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the
soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"
Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the
bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until
the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone
into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair
upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of
beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to
celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag
Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking
again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to
efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio
containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under
Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses,
peered at Sam.
"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
parts?" he asked.
CHAPTER II
It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam
came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry
unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and
its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the
narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of
high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in
boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs
from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the
plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and
potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the
forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their
way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million
hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand
hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to
add to the confusion.
Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things
and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars
and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he
was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the
streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of
voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was
an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities
sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. "What loot!"
a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he
should get his share of it.
Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a
carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired,
dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, "I worked here once and
used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how
clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the
apples made in a year."
The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to
epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.
"The foodstuff of an empire rattling o'er the stones," he said.
"I should have made more money here," answered Sam dryly.
The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a
corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that
the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face
and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the
ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went
in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded
street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in
a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous
business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the
suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused
at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the
church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the
church in Caxton.
The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought,
a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of
about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out
two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the
firm's stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let
him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after
several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in
the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took
most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm
writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go
East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to
Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going
from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed,
however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on
the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.
Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an
iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the
street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and
rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk
in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.
In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred
dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out
from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river
of foodstuff through his firm's front door.
With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of
him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his
hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he
thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress.
From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned
and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that
had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the
Pergrin house.
Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game, smuggled
across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen in cold
storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long profit to
hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of
corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River ready to
be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the margins by which he
kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at a word from a LaSalle
Street broker.
Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical
student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday he walked
with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking of
the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning with
it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the power of
cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came running
into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking Narrow-Face
to help them over rough spots in the day's trading. Broad-Shoulders, who
had no business ability but who had married a rich woman, went on month
after month taking half the profits brought in by the ability of his tall,
shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken a liking for Sam and who
occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke of the matter often and
eloquently.
"Spend your time with no one who hasn't money to help you," he said; "on
the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That's all
there is to business--money-getting." And then looking across to the desk
of his brother he would add, "I would kick half the men in business out of
it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money plays."
One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose
reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from
Narrow-Face.
"I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty
thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no
promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose," he said.
The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black
hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young
man.
"What collateral?" he asked.
Sam shook his head. "Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and
what will it cost me?" he asked.
The lawyer laughed good naturedly. "I can draw it of course. Why not?"