Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site
of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous
territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the
rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm.
These great canons--conduits, in fact, for the leaping volume of an
ever-increasing prosperity--cross each other with a sort of systematic
rectangularity, and in deference to the practical directness of local
requirements they are in general called simply--streets. Each of these
canons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these
soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher
with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their
bases goes onward--the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages,
omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists,
which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. This
erosion, proceeding with a sort of fateful regularity, has come to be
a matter of constant and growing interest. Means have been found to
measure its progress--just as a scale has been arranged to measure the
rising of the Nile or to gauge the draught of an ocean liner. In this
case the unit of measurement is called the "story." Ten years ago the
most rushing and irrepressible of the torrents which devastate Chicago
had not worn its bed to a greater depth than that indicated seven of
these "stories." This depth has since increased to eight--to ten--to
fourteen--to sixteen, until some of the leading avenues of activity
promise soon to become little more than mere obscure trails half lost
between the bases of perpendicular precipices.
High above this architectural upheaval rise yet other structures in
crag-like isolation. El Capitan is duplicated time and again both in
bulk and in stature, and around him the floating spray of the Bridal
Veil is woven by the breezes of lake and prairie from the warp of
soot-flakes and the woof of damp-drenched smoke.
The explorer who has climbed to the shoulder of one of these great
captains and has found one of the thinnest folds in the veil may
readily make out the nature of the surrounding country. The rugged
and erratic plateau of the Bad Lands lies before him in all its
hideousness and impracticability. It is a wild tract full of sudden
falls, unexpected rises, precipitous dislocations. The high and the
low are met together. The big and the little alternate in a rapid and
illogical succession. Its perilous trails are followed successfully
by but few--by a lineman, perhaps, who is balanced on a cornice, by
a roofer astride some dizzy gable, by a youth here and there whose
early apprehension of the main chance and the multiplication table has
stood him in good stead. This country is a treeless country--if we
overlook the "forest of chimneys" comprised in a bird's-eye view of
any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analogies
in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose ramifying cables reach
out wherever they can, to fasten wherever they may. It is a shrubless
country--if we give no heed to the gnarled carpentry of the awkward
frame-works which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on
such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel. It is an
arid country--if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the
high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of
tar and gravel that ooze and shimmer in the summer sun on the roofs
of old-fashioned buildings of the humbler sort. It is an airless
country--if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen
which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of
sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the
remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up
grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.
From such conditions as these--along with the Tacoma, the Monadnock,
and a great host of other modern monsters--towers the Clifton. From
the beer-hall in its basement to the barber-shop just under its
roof the Clifton stands full eighteen stories tall. Its hundreds of
windows glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold and in silver,
and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the
tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana. Four ladder-like
constructions which rise skyward stage by stage promote the agility of
the clambering hordes that swarm within it, and ten elevators--devices
unknown to the real, aboriginal inhabitants--ameliorate the daily
cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time.
The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous.
All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers,
capitalists, lawyers, "promoters"; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork,
oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance
people--life, fire, marine, accident; a host of principals, agents,
middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys; and the
necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub-women, and elevator-hands.
All these thousands gather daily around their own great camp-fire. This
fire heats the four big boilers under the pavement of the court which
lies just behind, and it sends aloft a vast plume of smoke to mingle
with those of other like communities that are settled round about.
These same thousands may also gather--in instalments--at their tribal
feast, for the Clifton has its own lunch-counter just off one corner of
the grand court, as well as a restaurant several floors higher up. The
members of the tribe may also smoke the pipe of peace among themselves
whenever so minded, for the Clifton has its own cigar-stand just within
the principal entrance. Newspapers and periodicals, too, are sold at
the same place. The warriors may also communicate their messages,
hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote; for there is a
telegraph office in the corridor and a squad of messenger-boys in wait
close by.
In a word, the Clifton aims to be complete within itself, and it will
be unnecessary for us to go afield either far or frequently during
the present simple succession of brief episodes in the lives of the
Cliff-dwellers.
I
On the tenth floor of the Clifton is the office of the Massachusetts
Brass Company.
Those whose minds are attuned to an appreciation of upholstery
and kindred matters pronounce this little suite the gem of the
whole establishment. Even many who are not adepts in the matter of
house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become
such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's
long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass
Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with
certain home offices in mind,
"Now, why can't our people do as much for _us_?"
Indeed, there is cause enough for envy in that small square of velvety
Axminster, in the harmonious tinting of the walls, in the padded
leather backs of the swivel chairs, in the polished brightness of
the cherry desk-tops, in the fresh blotting-pads and the immaculate
inkstands. To sit in this pleasant little apartment for half an hour is
to receive quite a new impression of the possible luxury of business,
the ultimate elegance of trade. This may be managed as easily as
not if you happen to have any dealings with "D. Walworth Floyd,
Agt."--according to the legend on the translucent pane of the door--who
is quite unlikely to hurry you out before you have finished.
"Don't be in such a drive," he will perhaps say to you; "stay and smoke
a cigar."
For business is not too exacting a consideration with the western
branch of the Massachusetts Brass Company. It is less a hive of
industry than a social exchange. The hours are easy, and the habitues
are as frequently callers as customers. They are often Jacks or Toms,
whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large land-owners in
Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom--birds of passage in Scotch
cheviots and billycock hats--are given to alighting for a brief
breathing-spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod
dress and careless, speech of their friend's small office force by the
trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.
It may be guessed that this snug haven of refuge has been established
and maintained less to extend the Company's trade than to provide a
place for the Company's Walworth. I say _Company's_ Walworth, for
in this case "company" and "family" are interchangeable terms. The
Massachusetts Brass Company is the Floyd family, and the Floyd family
is the Massachusetts Brass Company. The Company pays no dividends, but
it is very generous in its salaries. It is liberal with Hosea G. Floyd,
who is its president, and with Winthrop C. Floyd, who is its treasurer,
and with H. Lovell Floyd, who is its New York agent, and with
Cadwallader P. Floyd, who looks after the Philadelphia interests; nor
does it quite forget D. Walworth Floyd, who holds up one end more or
less effectively in the West. But Walworth is the last and the youngest
of the Floyds; his marriage was not to the complete satisfaction of
his family, and his single independent venture before leaving home,
in the direction of coffee and spices, compelled his brothers to put
their hands into their pockets rather deeply. So, while the rest of the
Floyds think that, all considered, they have rather done the fair thing
by Walworth, yet Walworth, on the other hand, regards his assignment to
the West as a mild form of punishment and exile.
"It _does_ give me a little elbow-room, though."
This is the silent acknowledgment that Walworth sometimes makes to
himself--but grudgingly.
Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosperous-looking fellow of
thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced
absolutely good; but it is always strikingly well-dressed--for he has
lived in the West hardly a year as yet. His face is not handsome, but
it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating
lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect,
now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his
well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits
for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine
texture of the skin and the shapeliness of the nails, form a point that
is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipulations,
becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of
manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other
hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a
stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an
office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Walworth were
not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward
of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been
accustomed to fare sumptuously every day, and to worry his head about
as few things as possible. His dining he does for himself; his thinking
he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so
on are done in the East, and a friend of his--he has no enemies--once
said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston.
Walworth, considering his family training and traditions, is
inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for
business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood
has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a
wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He
is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without
any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without
experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of
introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the
extended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter
of an hour.
Most of us know something about letters of introduction--promised so
thoughtlessly, written so glibly, presented so reluctantly, received so
grudgingly. But when the letter is merely a trifling and insignificant
line--a line which has no great importance for the bearer and can cause
no great annoyance to the recipient--and when its presentation here and
its accounting for there may be considered as but a minute item in the
general system of social book-keeping, then we have an episode that
passes quickly and lightly for all concerned. Such appears to be the
situation in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.
[Illustration: "'We are living up on Pine Street'"]
Walworth is tilted back comfortably in one of his handsome chairs
and sends out a casual glance through the nearest window. The sun
is struggling with a half-luminous haze, and through this haze a
hundred streaks of smoke are driving headlong towards the lake. A
tall clock-tower looms up three or four streets away, and one of its
faces--on the looker's own level--gives the hour as half-past ten.
"Well, we are living up on Pine Street, Mr. Ogden," he is saying; "just
this side of the Water Works--the place where the 'wheels go round,'
you know. You beat me here by a few minutes this morning, but I think I
can promise to be the first on the ground when you call on us there."
He is running his fingers over the edges of several little sheets of
brass. A few bunches of these, together with a set or two of brass
rings of varying diameters and thicknesses, are the only intimations of
merchandise that the office yields. Sometimes even these are bundled
away into a drawer, and then commerce is refined completely beyond the
ken of the senses.
"However, don't go. I am a little late in getting around this morning,
but the mail is light. Ferguson will look after it. Sit down again."
The visitor, thus urged, sank back into the chair from which he had
just risen. He was a slender young man, of good height, and his age was
perhaps twenty-four. His complexion was of the colorless kind that
good health alone keeps from sallowness. His hair was a light brown
and fine and thick, and it fell across his temples in the two smooth
wings that were made by an accurate parting in the middle. He had the
beginnings of a shadowy little moustache, and a pair of good eyes which
expressed a fair amount of self-reliance and any amount of hope.
"And how are you finding the West Side?" Walworth pursued. "I don't
know much about it myself. This is a big town and awfully cut up. A man
has to pick out his own quarter and stick to it. If you move from one
side of the river to another, you bid good-by to all your old friends;
you never see them again. You said you were somewhere near Union Park,
I believe?"
"Yes," George Ogden answered, "I have landed in a pretty good place,
and I want to stay there if I can. They're a sort of farming people
--or were, to start with. They came from New York State, I believe, and
haven't been here but a year or two. Is there anybody in this town who
hasn't come from somewhere else, or who has been here more than a year
or two?"
Walworth laughed. "_I_ haven't. But you go around some, and you may
find a few that have."
"The mother cooks, the father markets, the daughter helps to wait on
table. Nice, friendly people; make me think of those at home." He
smiled a little wistfully. "About the only people so far that do."
"Well, I have heard that there are some pretty good streets over
there," is Walworth's vague response.
"Ours is. We have trees--all of one sort and planted regularly, I
mean. And ornamental lamp-posts. And I'm only a block from the Park.
Everything seems all right enough."
"I dare say; but don't you find it rather far away from--?" queried
Floyd, with a sort of insinuating intentness.
However, I have no idea of reproducing Walworth's remarks on the local
topography. They were voluminous, but he would be found prejudiced and
but partly informed. Besides, his little tirade was presently thrown
out of joint by a dislocating interruption.
Walworth always experienced a mental dislocation, slight or serious,
whenever his wife called at the office. Nor were matters much helped
when his wife was accompanied by her sister. It was the latter of these
who now opened the door with an assured hand and who shut it after the
two of them with a confirmatory slam.
"Yes, here we are," she seemed to imply.
In Mrs. Walworth Floyd our young man met a lean and anxious little
body, who appeared strenuous and exacting and of the kind who, as the
expression goes, are hard to get along with. She had a sharp little
nose and a pair of inquisitorial eyes. She was dressed richly, but as
simply as a sword in its scabbard. If Walworth spent an evening abroad
it was a fair assumption that his wife knew where he was and all about
it. Otherwise the sword was drawn.
"We have been almost three quarters of an hour getting here," she said
in a tense way. "Something was the matter with the cable and they kept
us in the tunnel nearly twenty minutes. As I tell Ann, you can always
count on that sort of thing when you've got anything of real importance
on hand and not much time for it. And yet we talk about the jams and
delays in Tremont Street!"
She drew down her mouth and blinked her eyes indignantly. She felt all
the shortcomings of her new home very keenly; she made every one of
them a personal affront.
"Ann thought it was amusing. Perhaps it won't seem so after it has
happened to her three or four times more."
Walworth glanced apprehensively in the direction of his sister-in-law's
chair. She was understood to be in his house on a brief visit. He
trusted that she was not to be exposed a second time to so annoying an
accident.
Ann Wilde was a stout woman who was nearing forty. Her appearance
indicated that, while she had not escaped the buffets of the world,
yet her past experiences had only seasoned and toughened her for her
future ones. In this earthly turmoil of give and take she seemed to
have played a full inning on each side. She had begun as a poetess,
she had gone on as a boardinghouse keeper, and she was now ready to
take her first step as an investor. To turn from literature to lodgings
indicates talent; to do so well in lodgings as to have funds for the
purchase of property indicates genius. Miss "Wilde, at fourteen, was
a plain child whose straggling hair was drawn back from her forehead
by an india-rubber comb that passed over the top of her head from ear
to ear, and she was called Annie. At seventeen, conscious of the first
flutterings of sentiment and prompted by indications of increasing
comeliness, she re-named herself Annette. At twenty, somewhat
disappointed in the promise of beauty, yet consoled in some degree by a
spreading reputation as a versifier, she changed her name to Anne. At
twenty-six, as the result of a disappointment in an affair of the heart
and of a growing appreciation of the modesty of her social rôle, she
resignedly styled herself Anna. And at thirty-five, fully convinced of
her own hopeless plainness, of the completely practical cast of things
generally, and of the uselessness of flying the flag of idealism any
longer, she bobbed off at the same time both her hair and her name; she
presented a short-cut poll of frizzled gray and she signed herself Ann.
What's in a name? Sometimes nothing; sometimes a whole biography.
"I have been telling Mr. Ogden," said Walworth, "that he ought to
be in our part of town--he ought to be one of our little circle."
His wife looked up rather coldly; her little circle was not open to
any new candidate that the uncalculating good-nature of her husband
might propose. "That house around on Hush Street could take him in,
I imagine. And all the people he will want to know are right around
there. Why, you have been in Worcester, Frances; you know the Parkers.
Well, Mrs. Parker is Mr. Ogden's aunt--aunt, I think you said?--yes,
aunt; so you see about how it is. Always glad to welcome one more
Eastern pilgrim to our little what-you-may-call-it--oasis, you know."
"Why didn't you say Mr. Ogden was from the East, Walworth?" asked his
wife, taxingly, and looked at the young man for the first time.
Her gaze was critical, but not forbidding.
"Yes, most of _us_ are on the North Side," she observed.
"Ogden is as good as a neighbor already," Walworth went on,
perseveringly; "a business neighbor. He is going into the Underground
National. Letters and all that, you know. Pretty good for three weeks,
I call it. If most of our fellows who come out here did as well in
three months it would be money in Mrs. Lloyd's pocket. To think of the
fives and tens and twenties that have gone to old schoolmates of Win's
and to fellows who knew Lovell when he was on the road!"
Ogden flushed a little and took the first step towards a frown.
It is not pleasant to contemplate your possible inclusion in the
reprehensible class of the strapped and the stranded, nor to feel
that only a lucky letter of recommendation has saved a friend's wife
from being crossed in some caprice or balked in some whim. But Floyd,
although cordial and liberal, was not invariably fine.
"They stop me on the street, and they buttonhole me in the hotels, and
you can't think how many of them come right here. Of course, I always
do what I can. But how do they find me out? And why is it that when I
am going up home late over the viaduct and somebody is hanging about to
strike some man for a quarter, I am always the man to be struck? One or
two of them have actually paid me back, but--"
"Who?" asked his sister-in-law. She had a loud, rasping voice. "The men
on the viaduct?"
"The others," Walworth indicated briefly.
"You are too generous," said Ogden. What a position for a man who was
_not_ to enter upon an engagement to-morrow! And what might three
months be, if judged by the hopes and fears and expectations and
disappointments of his three weeks!
"The Underground?" repeated Mrs. Floyd, turning towards her husband.
"Isn't that Mayme Brainard's father's bank?" she asked in a general way.
"Mr. Brainard is the president," assented Ogden, with a severe smile.
"I addressed myself to the cashier," he added shortly.
"I was sure I had heard of it," she rejoined, with a glacial
graciousness.
"Well, if _you_-have heard of it, my dear," her husband joked, "how
widely known it must be! You ought to have heard of it; you've had
enough checks on it, I'm sure!"
But Mrs. Floyd did not pursue the subject. She looked at her sister
with that prim seriousness which means something on the mind--or on
two minds--and her sister returned the look in kind; and they both
looked in the same fashion back and forth between Walworth and his
caller. Ann Wilde snapped the catch of her hand-bag once or twice, and
glanced between times at some loose papers inside it. Ferguson, in the
other room, thought he perceived the approach of a domestic crisis--a
disputed dress-maker's bill, perhaps. Yet there might be other
reasons. He knew that the cook was sometimes impertinent, and that
the market-man now and then forgot to send the white-fish. He himself
was a mere boarding bachelor, yet he had come to learn something of
the relief which follows the shifting of a housekeeper's cares to the
shoulders of the housekeeper's husband. Ferguson had relieved the
tedium of many a half-hour by short-handing bits of dialogue that
accompanied connubial spats between his employer and his employer's
wife.
These signs and tokens were not lost on Ogden; he rose again to go. You
were they lost on Floyd himself, whose apprehension of a bad quarter of
an hour was heightened by the absence, as yet, of any exact data. He
had no wish to hold the field alone, and he begged Ogden not to hurry
his departure.
"Where are the girls?" he asked his wife. "I thought you said they came
along with you."
"They did. They are in the building. They will be up in a few minutes.
That child!--somebody ought to look after her."
"Then why not wait a little while?" Floyd suggested to Ogden. "My
wife's affair won't take long. Ferguson, won't you just clear off that
chair out there and find the paper? And now, what is it?" he asked the
two women when they were left together.