The regulars were gradually withdrawn from the Garden City, as
old-timers loved to call Chicago, and Kenyon with his sturdy battalion
was among the first to be restored to his own station. The crusty
veteran left the home of his boyhood to resume duty at his proper post,
and left with feelings somewhat mixed. "We never had more temper-trying
work to do," said he, "and there isn't a man in the whole regiment that
wouldn't rather stand six months Indian-fighting than six hours mobbing
in Chicago. It's my own old home, so I've got a right to speak the truth
about it. For years its newspapers, with one exception, have made it a
point to sneer at, vilify, and hold up to public execration the officers
of the regular army. During the past four or five years the lampooning
and lying have been redoubled, and it is like heaping coals of fire on
their heads that the very regiment they have abused the most was the
most conspicuous in Chicago's defence. _We_ had no picnic, but the
Fifteenth simply had hell and repeat,--the meanest, most trying, most
perilous duty, from first to last. Those fellows were scattered in
little detachments all over Cook County, and faced fifty times their
weight in toughs, and carried out their orders and stood all manner of
foul abuse and never avenged it, when if any one of those young captains
or lieutenants commanding detachments had lost his temper and let drive
the lightning sleeping in those brown Springfields, there'd 'a' been a
cleaning out of the rabble that would have thinned the ranks of one
political party in our blessed country, at least. Oh, we're glad enough
to get away and see the change of tone in the Chicago press; but it
won't last."
And Kenyon's was by no means an exaggerated statement. In the
far-spreading course of the great strike "the regulars" came in for many
a hard knock from the mob and for not a few from the press. At one point
experienced railway-hands, not mere ruffian rioters, wrecked the track
at a trestle in front of a coming troop train, hurling the engine, with
its gallant guard of half a dozen artillerymen, into the depths below,
crushing or drowning them like rats. At another point, when baffled in
their efforts to overturn a sleeping-car in front of a patrol engine,
and dispersed by a dozen well-aimed shots, the rioters impanelled their
coroner's jury, and declared the red-handed participants innocent
spectators and the officer and his men murderers. At a third, when a
great railway centre was found in the hands of the strikers and the
troops were ordered to clear the platform, one surly specimen not only
refused to budge, but lavished on the captain commanding the foulest
epithets in a blackguard's vocabulary. The crowd outnumbered the troops
by twenty to one. The faintest irresolution or hesitancy would have been
fatal. One whack with the sword knocked the fight out of the bully, and,
while he was led off to be plastered in hospital, the maddened rioters
held their indignation meeting, and not only they, but high officials
eager for their votes, united in denouncing the officer to the President
of the United States, declaring the victim a model citizen, sober and
peaceable, and the captain drunk, foul-mouthed, and abusive. The press
of the neighborhood aided in spreading abroad the utterly false report
of the affair, with the usual result of the temporary humiliation and
distress of the officer and his friends, the inevitable official
investigation, and the prompt verdict, "The officer deserves
commendation, not condemnation." One paper, within five days of its
original report, announced that it had discovered that it was the
civilian who was drunk and who used the foul language attributed to the
officer. It furthermore said that the officer had done just right; but
this was the single and phenomenal instance. The other papers, like
Elmendorf, probably reasoned that if the officer wasn't the blackguard
they had striven to make him appear, he might as well have been.
These are specimens of experiences too well known to all concerned. "May
the Lord preserve us from any more riot duty!" said Kenyon, piously, as
they steamed away across the Illinois prairies; "but," he added, "I'll
bet ten dollars to ten cents the politicians will get us into more and
worse another year."
Yet even such scenes have their humorous side. It was Daniel O'Connell,
I believe, who defeated the female champion of Billingsgate by calmly
referring to her as the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle, which
was something utterly beyond her powers of repartee: it was he, at all
events, who silenced another virago with the cutting response, "Sure
every one knows, ma'am, ye're no better than a parallelogram, and you
keep a whole parallelopipedon concealed in your closet at home;" and it
was one of the trimmest, nattiest, most punctilious of our captains who
stood in front of the silent ranks, listening in apparently absorbed
attention to the furious tirade lavished on him by the spokeswoman of
the mob, a street drab of uncommon stature and powers of expression and
command of expletive. Winding up a three-minute speech with the remark,
"I could pick ye up and ate ye, only the taste would turn me stomach,
you white-livered, blue-bellied son of a scut," the lady had to pause
for breath, and the soldier looked up from under his hat-brim and
mildly remarked, "Madam, you're prejudiced," whereat even some of her
sympathizers forgot their rancor and roared with laughter, and the
idolatrous rank of his soldiery doubled up like so many blue
pocket-rules, and the newspaper men chuckled with glee. By tacit
consent, apparently, the Chicago papers were saying as little as
possible against the regulars just then, and many a bright fellow who
owned that he hadn't known anything about them before, except what he
had read in his paper in the past, found many a friend among them and
many a cause for writing of them in a new and different vein.
Cranston's old home was decorated in style the day the cavalry marched
away. Mrs. Mac had the old guidons and a big flag swung out on the
porch, Mac in his most immaculate uniform standing at the salute. Many
an eye in the long, dusty column danced at sight of the honest couple,
and one young fellow, their graceless nephew, now a recruit in Captain
Davies's troop, braced up in saddle and fixed his eyes fiercely on his
file-leader, and for fear of the stern avuncular injunction to "Kape yer
eyes to the front, there!" couldn't be induced to peep at Aunt Mollie as
she swung a tattered guidon that had been carried by Mac in the ranks of
"C" troop many a year before. Captain Davies himself rode out of column
and held forth a cordial hand to the old sergeant, as the last troop
went clinking by. "We'll make a soldier of the boy, sergeant, as you
tried to make of me when I joined," said he; "and if he has half the
stuff there was in his uncle it'll be no trouble at all."
And so they went on up the avenue, with hats and handkerchiefs waving
adieu and cordial voices shouting approving words. Presently, riding at
ease now, they filed along under the beautiful façade of the Lambert
Memorial, and, glancing up, Cranston saw at the broad bow window the
familiar features of Mr. Wells and caught his joyous "Hurrah!" By his
side, smiling and nodding and kerchief-waving, was his buxom helpmeet,
one arm thrown about a fragile, pale-faced girl in black. Off came
Cranston's broad campaign hat; he bent low over the pommel of his
saddle, ay, and looked back again with admiration in his eyes and a
fervent "Thank God!" upon his lips. There were decorations in plenty,
and enthusiastic demonstrations, too, from a wide portico, "crowded with
prominent society people," as the papers said, when a few moments later
the column swung by Allison's impressive home; but here the major merely
raised his hat and neither bent nor bowed.
Riot duty over for the time being, Mr. Forrest was recalled from the
command of his company to a desk at head-quarters and bidden to complete
the maps and reports of his Oklahoma work. The maps he went at
methodically enough, but the report he hesitated over. "No," said
Wells, in response to his call and question, "Miss Wallen is not ready
to resume work at the Lambert, and it is my belief she never will be."
Then he looked keenly at the officer's face, and was gratified to see
the deep shade of anxiety and distress with which it was instantly
covered. "She'll be _well_ enough; it isn't that," he continued; "but
the girl is proud and sensitive, as any lady has a right to be, and she
hasn't forgiven Allison. Oh, yes, he sent her a sort of apology,--five
lines of somebody else's fault and ten pounds of fruit. She gave the
fruit to Mart's hopeful family, and I think she gave Allison the devil.
I didn't see her letter, but the old man dropped in here the other day
to ask when she'd be back, and incidentally remarked that she seemed to
be rapidly recovering, if fifty pounds of temper to the square inch was
any indication. 'How the mischief was I to know,' said he, 'that
hundreds of girls had to work in offices at night, had to find their way
home late at night, and that much of their work was dictated to them
during the day and had to be typed before early morning?' Even if he
didn't know, by gad," said Wells, bringing his fist down with resounding
whack on his big desk, "it's time he did know that this country isn't
France, and that these brave girls who are honorably earning their own
bread, and often, as was the case with her, supporting whole families,
are entitled to the respect, yes, by gad, the reverence, of every man
with a grain of decency in him. This is America, by the Eternal!--the
one country on the face of the globe where an honest girl may go
wheresoever her work may call her."
"Amen to that!" said Forrest, "But do you mean that she will not return
here?"
"Not unless she can be induced to withdraw her resignation. She comes to
live under our roof to-morrow, you know. That good fellow Cranston has
given Mart pay work. Her plan is to join forces with her old friend Miss
Bonner and reopen her typewriter down town, and I find she has a will of
her own."
This, too, was something Mr. Forrest became convinced of, even had he
not suspected it before. Though still sorrowing deeply over her mother's
death, Jenny was able to receive some callers by the time the troops
were going, and very prettily she thanked her friend and customer, as
she was pleased to call him, for the flowers sent so frequently during
her illness. Despite the faint color with which she had welcomed him,
Forrest could not but see how pale and fragile she looked, and the
slender white hand that he had watched so often flying over the clicking
keys seemed very limp and listless now. It only passively responded to
the warmth of his clasp. In fact, it hardly could be said to respond at
all. She was reclining in an easy-chair. A soft breeze, playing through
the open window, rippled the shining little curls about her white
temples, and Forrest drew his chair close to hers.
It was the first time they had been alone together since the night
following his home-coming in the late spring, the night of the luckless
dinner at Allison's, the night in which, leaving her to work alone at
the Lambert over his rough notes, he had gone, as she believed, to spend
the evening with his _fiancée_, the night when with almost frenzied
fingers she worked to finish every word of his report that he might find
it ready on his return, and that she might find, as she did, her way
home without him. Then had come the sudden cloud of her mother's serious
illness, of Mart's disappearance, the gloom of the strike, the crash of
the riots, the blow of her mother's death, a grief the more pathetic
because for several years mother and daughter seemed to have reversed
their relative positions and the child had become the protector,
guardian, and provider. Then the brutal wrong of Allison's accusation,
told her with such well-simulated sympathy and reluctance, but with such
exquisitely feminine stab in every sentence; the collapse, the struggle,
the suffering, the half-reluctant convalescence--and the sudden sunshine
of that afternoon when he turned from the carriage of the girl to whom
he was declared engaged, let her drive away without another glance, and
stood there, tall and stalwart and manly, his soft brown eyes fastened
on her face,--hers, Jenny Wallen's, a penniless, motherless, homeless
working-girl. Mrs. Wells had hugged herself with delight all the way
back, and would have said no end of foolish things but for her patient's
prohibition. Even the prohibition had not kept her afterwards from
telling Jenny how Forrest had refused his hand to Mr. Allison, refused
once more to set foot within his doors, and what, what could that mean?
But the girl, despite her woman's heart, had a clear brain and cool
judgment. Holding herself in honesty, independence, and integrity the
peer of any man she ever heard of, brave, proud, and self-reliant, she
had schooled herself to study the difference between his social
surroundings and her own. Wells had spoken of Forrest's proud and
powerful kindred in the East, of a mother and sister who held their
heads far higher than ever could John Allison, who forty years before
was but a train-boy peddling peanuts for a livelihood. Even in the
wildly improbable event of her soldier knight's learning to love her,
what madness it would be to expect his people to welcome her, what
madness to think of being his without that welcome! Even if through love
for him they opened their arms to her, what would they say to Mart and
his brood? Jenny's sense of the humorous prevailed over her troubles at
this juncture and made her laugh at the contemplation of that mental
picture. Then she bristled again with honest pride. Mart was her own
brother, anyway, her father's son. He had been a dear boy and she very
fond of him in the old days; he had married beneath him, weakling as he
was; she'd stand by Mart and work for his wife and babies; they would
learn to love Aunt Jenny, and she would forget she ever had cried for
the moon or learned to love a soldier. She didn't love him! She
wouldn't! But here were boxes of exquisite cut flowers that had been
coming in for a fortnight, and here was the sender, his chair close to
hers, and he bending still closer. Then he began to speak, and his
voice--how utterly different it sounded now from that in which she heard
him say good-by to Florence Allison! She wasn't strong yet. How could
she control the throbbing of her heart?
And then the room seemed to begin a slow, solemn waltz, even when she
closed her eyes and firmly shut her hands, for his first words were, "I
have a world of things to say, and only this one blessed evening in
which to speak. I am ordered to my regiment at once."
Coming home later that night, Mr. Wells found the partner of his joys
and sorrows a tearful, lonely wreck on the parlor sofa. Jenny had
disappeared. For all explanation Mrs. Wells drew him by the coat-sleeve
into the room, shut the door behind him, precipitated herself upon her
shoulder, and sobbed, "She--she--she's refused him."
"Well, I suppose she thought he belonged to Miss Allison."
"No, no. It isn't that at all: it's pride. It's obstinacy. I don't know
what to call it. He told her--he told _me_ there had never been such a
thing as an engagement between Miss Allison and himself, and that there
probably never would or could have been. I could see he was cut to the
heart, that he loves our brave Jenny deeply, truly, and there isn't any
quixotism about it. But she--why, the girl's just marble! It was he who
called me and stood there with such sadness and reproach in his eyes and
told me what he'd told her and begged that I should plead with her when
he was gone, but she only covered her face, with the tears trickling
down through her fingers, and when he had to go she stood up like a
little queen and said she thanked him and honored him, and even assured
him that there was no other man on earth she cared for, but no, _no_,
NO, was her one answer to his plea that she would be his wife.
She will not even let him write to her."
And Wells comforted his wife as best he could, but there was no
comforting himself.
That was the first of August,--the hottest, dryest ever known along the
lake, yet the dismal fog-horn tooted day after day and night after night
when not so much as a single tear could have been wrung from the ambient
air. It was all on account of the smoke-clouds that obscured the sun and
shut out the horizon weeks at a time, for the whole Northwest was one
blaze of forest fires, and Wells grew crabbed and ill tempered at his
desk and snapped at his new typewriter until, between the smoke and the
tears, her eyelids smarted. He delighted in bullying Allison whenever he
saw him. The magnate had offered Miss Wallen a permanent position and a
good salary in his own office, and marvelled at her refusal. She still
occupied her pretty room at the Wellses', but solely on her own
conditions,--that she should pay her board. She reopened her typewriter
in the big business block down town, and seemed to gain health, color,
and elasticity in her daily tramps to and fro. Business seemed to
prosper, now that the urgent need was over, and Jenny could have
afforded a better gown than that she chose to wear, but she didn't know
how soon Mart might lose his job again, and, as he never saved for the
wife and babies, she must needs save for them. Despite her prohibition,
two letters came from Forrest. She read them, answered the first, gently
and with womanly dignity in every line, but made no reply to the second.
Frequently on her evening homeward walk she encountered Miss Allison
riding or driving with some of the _jeunesse dorée_ of society. Hubbard
was immensely attentive again, with many prospects, said his friends, of
landing a winner, and as for Florence, it is due to her to say that she
hid her woe most womanfully, if ever woe existed. Indeed, her Lady
friends took much comfort in saying that she certainly had lost no flesh
over her _affaire de coeur_,--in fact, quite the contrary. And twice
did Jenny catch sight of Elmendorf, despite his promptitude in dodging
around the corner. He had become a full-fledged journalist now, writing
police reports for a daily and resounding leaders for a semi-occasional,
but, like Cary, his former pupil, who was bent still on going to the
Point, he had unlimited faith in the future.
So, too, have his fellow strike-leaders, and with some show of reason.
Not that their principles have been endorsed, but that, just as in 1877,
the active participants in the great riots have been allowed to go
practically unpunished. The individual citizen who should heave a brick
through the window of a crowded car, set fire to a sleeper, or slug a
locomotive engineer at his post of duty would undoubtedly be sent to
jail or the lunatic asylum, if detected; but when he conspires and
combines with hundreds of others, thereby a thousandfold increasing the
danger and damage, it becomes a delicate matter for office-holders to
handle, and so, while the leaders are free to roam the land and preach
sedition and rebellion, the criminal and vagabond classes, the ignorant
and vicious, and the great array of foreign-born, foreign-bred laborers,
eagerly await the next opportunity. The real sufferers are the
native-born or naturalized citizens, who, listening to the false
promises of professional agitators, have been egged on to riot and
outlawry and have lost through them their situations, their savings,
and, in some cases, even their little homes. This and what one of our
ablest generals aptly described as the "affected sympathy" of the men in
office, high or low, for the men in the workshop,--the more affected the
louder,--brought about and will bring about again these scenes of
tumult, riot, and rage that, but for the restraining hand of the regular
army, would result in anarchy.
"We've had to step in between two fires many a time before," said old
Kenyon, "and we'll have to do it many a time again. Any of you fellows
who like that sort of thing may welcome this change of station, but I
don't." And, indeed, marching orders had come. The autumn shaking up was
distributing regiments anew, and once more Kenyon's battalions were
striding through the Chicago streets,--Forrest, after sixteen years of
subaltern life, wearing at last the new shoulder-straps of the
captaincy. Cranston and his squadron, still retained within supporting
distance of the old homestead, eagerly welcomed their comrades of the
riot days, and no sooner were they fairly settled down in the fine
quarters at Sheridan than the new captain was out of uniform and into
civilian dress and speeding townward,--"to see Wells," he said. Forrest
lived with Cranston a few days while getting his own quarters in
readiness, and was there to help the major welcome home his wife on her
return from Europe late in October. Going to town "to see Wells" seemed
to prove a bootless errand, for he came back with gloom in his dark
brown eyes,--very pathetic gloom, Mrs. Cranston called it, and she, who
had early gone to town to call on Mrs. Wells, began going rather more
frequently than ever the major had contemplated, so interested was she
in Mrs. Wells's boarder. "I want to know her well enough to be able to
talk to her," she explained to her husband; but Cranston demurred.
Possibly he knew from old experiences that one way not to influence a
girl in favor of a friend was for Margaret to set to work to try. With
the caution born of a quarter of a century of married bliss, however, he
did not remind his better half of previous experiments. He meekly
suggested that, as Forrest was likely to remain on duty all winter
within besieging distance, it might be well to leave him and the lady to
work out their own destiny.
"But it's so absurd, Wilbur!" said Margaret. "He is deeply, honestly,
utterly in love with her, and she's worthy of every bit of it, if I'm
any judge of a girl, and if she isn't careful she'll drive him away or
anger him with her refusals to hear him. Why, she has refused even to
see him, Mrs. Wells tells me, and--it's nothing but stubborn pride."
Evidently, therefore, these two dames had been putting their heads
together and were now in the combination to force Jenny to surrender.
Yet Jenny was right, knew she was right, and was to be moved neither by
Forrest's pleadings nor by his friends' reproaches. There had been one
long and painful interview between her and her lover soon after his
return, and then very gently but very firmly she had told him that the
matter must end then and there. She had asked him one question, and only
one, in the course of that interview, and he could not answer her: "Mr.
Forrest, what welcome would your mother, your sister, extend to me, a
working-girl?"
Forrest said he really hadn't consulted them; he was seeking a wife for
himself, not for the family. He said that once they knew her they would
honor and love her as she deserved. But that wouldn't do. Miss Wallen
had seen something of society leaders, and had formed her own opinion as
to the law of caste. She had seen Robertson's charming play, too, and
had her own views as to the matrimonial joys in store for its heroine.
She had asked herself whether she would submit to being either tolerated
or patronized by people who had wealth and position, to be sure, but not
one whit more pride or principle, nor, for that matter, refinement, than
she had. Down in the bottom of her brave heart was the craving of the
woman to be loved for herself, to be appreciated for her true worth, but
she believed that people in high position would not and could not
accept one of her antecedents and connections, and she would have no
concealment whatever. "Knowing me just as I am, just as I have been,
knowing my brother and his people, you know well yours could not welcome
me."
And Forrest knew even more. Divining one cause of Jeannette's refusal,
he had told the whole story to his mother in the longest letter he had
ever written,--and sorely he missed his typewriter in doing it,--and
that letter proved a shock. The Forrests had built upon the story of his
engagement to the beauty and heiress Miss Allison, and had long been
awaiting his announcement to write the glowing letters of welcome, but
here was a thunderbolt. Floyd had fallen in love with a working-girl, a
shop-girl, a nobody, and actually wished his mother and sister to send
gushing letters expressive of their approval and assurance of loving
welcome. It was preposterous. They had expected a Florence and were told
to be content with a Jenny. It was absurd in Floyd to point out that
forty years ago Miss Allison's father was a peanut-peddler and Miss
Wallen's a professor. Forty years in this country made vast changes.
Floyd was simply pelting them with some of his ridiculous theories about
the common people, their rights and wrongs. Lincoln, not Washington, was
Floyd's ideal of the good and great and grand type of the American, and
it had spoiled him. All this was what was said to one another in excited
household chat. What was written was more diplomatic, but quite to the
purpose. They could not endorse his choice, and he could not assure his
proud, independent lady-love that they would. "He was awfully in love
once before for years, and got over it," said Floyd's married sister,
"and he'll get over this."
But there were those nearest to Captain Forrest about that time who
arrived at a widely different conclusion. Jenny Wallen might have
yielded could she have seen him and listened. Perhaps that was why she
would not. It was no longer "Starkey's friend" who waylaid her on her
homeward walks in the gloaming,--it was Captain Floyd Forrest, when he
could get to town, and she took long, roundabout ways of reaching home
and outmanoeuvred her soldier. With her whole heart crying out against
her, pleading for him and home and love and protection, she stilled it
like the sturdy little aristocrat she was, and would have none of him or
his. "What can one do with a girl like that?" asked Mrs. Cranston of her
grizzled major one bleak November evening on her return from town. "She
has told Mrs. Wells that she is going to leave her roof and live with
Miss Bonner away down on the south side, and it's all because Forrest is
received at the Wellses' and she is determined not to see him." The
major was hard-hearted enough to say he believed that interference even
on Meg's part would only make matters worse.
But the captain heard of the proposed move, and then he placed in Mrs.
Wells's hands a brief note. He was conquered now. Rather than see her
leave the roof of such devoted friends, he pledged himself to vex her no
more. Neither there nor on her homeward way would he seek to speak with
her again. Jenny, yielding perhaps as much to the Wellses' pleading as
to this, remained. What ever could be the outcome? was now the question.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]