McDowell had not quartered himself on the twelfth floor of the
Clifton--as distinguished from the eleventh or the thirteenth or any
other--by a mere chance. He had not been influenced by any finicky
consideration of light, prospect, ventilation, or nearness to the
elevators. His sole reason for selecting room number 1262 was that room
number 1263 was occupied by Arthur J. Ingles, the owner of the building.
Ingles occupied a very small room, upon whose door was his name--his
name and nothing more--in very small letters. The next door beyond
was lettered "Office of the Building," and this second room had
communication with the first by a door between. None of these three
doors, however, had as much interest for McDowell as the one between
his own office and the private office of Ingles. This door was closed,
but it was McDowell's dream and ambition to see it open. In his
thoughts he constantly saw it standing ajar in an intimate and friendly
fashion, while he and Ingles and other magnates of Ingles's ilk
circulated through it freely and all did business together.
Up to the present time this door had never been opened, nor had
McDowell ever had access to the other suite except by the farther door,
through which tenants passed to request repairs or to pay their monthly
rent.
Ingles was enough of a lawyer to be a real-estate man, and enough of a
real-estate man to need to be a lawyer. He supervised the drawing of
his own deeds and leases, and seldom took counsel in matters between
landlord and tenant. As a landlord, he had found it advantageous to
divest himself of his soul by making the Clifton into a stock company;
he himself held all the shares but five. He had an extraordinary
faculty for keeping himself out of the papers; but this did not prevent
McDowell from knowing that he was constantly engaged in enterprises
of the first magnitude, and he felt that association with this great
capitalist would be immensely to his own advantage.
But he had accomplished only one step that might be reckoned an
advance: he had undertaken the financial arrangements connected with
St. Asaph's choir. This was a large, well-trained body, and was
provided with all the expensive paraphernalia of a "high" service.
It included four or five tenors and basses who commanded rather good
salaries, as well as an expert organist and an experienced choir-master
who commanded larger ones. The management had been by committee, and
several of the pillars of the church, Ingles among them, had learned
the difficulty of mediating between music, money, and ritualism.
A member of a previous committee had delighted in translating and
adapting Latin hymns for Christmas and Easter, and in putting his hands
into his pockets now and then to make good a small deficit in the
budget. Ingles and his compeers were ready enough to put their hands
into their pockets, but they were glad, one and all, to escape the
details of administration.
It was here that McDowell stepped forward; he cynically acknowledged
that religion must be made to play into the hands of business, and he
justified himself to himself by many good arguments. The details of
the new dispensation were arranged in a down-town office. McDowell had
tried to contrive that that office should be Ingles's own; but the
meeting was held, after all, in another tall tower a block or two down
the street, and Ingles himself was not present more than ten minutes.
McDowell regretted this; he felt very well disposed towards Ingles. He
would have done almost anything for him--for a commission.
But McDowell did not push this choir matter to the neglect of his
own proper business. He was engaged at about this time with a new
subdivision out beyond the South Parks. He had bought up a ten-acre
tract, which he himself acknowledged to be rather low-lying, and
which his rivals, with an unusual disregard of the courtesies of the
profession, did not hesitate to call an out-and-out swamp. He had
mended matters somewhat by means of a dam and a sluice, which drained
off a part of his moisture on to grounds lying lower still--other men's
grounds; and on the driest and most accessible corner of his domain he
had placed a portable one-story frame shanty which had already done
duty on other subdivisions, and alongside of it stood a tall flagpole
which flaunted a banner with his own name and number on it. This tract,
by the way, had absorbed some moderate portion of Ann Wilde's hoarded
savings.
A week of rainy weather now and then would lay a complete embargo on
McDowell's operations in this quarter. His plank walks would float off
in sections; the trees along his avenues would sag deeply into the
slush and would sway sidewise, in spite of their networks of rusty
wire; and the cellars of the three or four unfinished houses that he
had artfully scattered through this promising tract would show odds and
ends of carpenters' refuse floating around in muddy water a foot deep.
It was an appalling spectacle to one who realized the narrow margins
upon which many of these operations were conducted, or who failed to
keep in mind the depths that human folly and credulity may sound.
"Oh, it's all right enough," McDowell would say. "It's going to dry up
before long."
Occasionally it did dry up and stay so for several weeks. Then, on
bright Sunday afternoons, folly and credulity, in the shape of young
married couples who knew nothing about real estate, but who vaguely
understood that it was a "good investment," would come out and would
go over the ground--or try to. They were welcomed with a cynical
effrontery by the young fellow whom McDowell paid fifty dollars a month
to hold the office there. He had an insinuating manner, and frequently
sold a lot with the open effect of perpetrating a good joke.
McDowell sometimes joked about his customers, but never about his
lands. He shed upon them the transfiguring light of the imagination,
which is so useful and necessary in the environs of Chicago. Land
generally--that is, subdivided and recorded land--he regarded as a
serious thing, if not indeed as a high and holy thing, and his view
of his own landed possessions--mortgaged though they might be, and so
partly unpaid for--was not only serious but idealistic. He was able to
ignore the pools whose rising and falling befouled the supports of his
sidewalks with a green slime; and the tufts of reeds and rushes which
appeared here and there spread themselves out before his gaze in the
similitude of a turfy lawn. He was a poet--as every real-estate man
should be.
We of Chicago are sometimes made to bear the reproach that the
conditions of our local life draw us towards the sordid and the
materialistic. Now, the most vital and typical of our human products is
the real-estate agent: is he commonly found tied down by earth-bound
prose?
"You fellows," said Floyd to McDowell, during one of Sister Ann's
sessions, "are the greatest lot I ever struck." He spoke in a
half-quizzical, half-admiring way, and showed some effort to handle the
language with the Western ease and freedom of those to the manner born.
"Do you know, when I had been here three or four months some fellows
took me with them to the banquet of the Deal Estate Board. Well, it
was an eye-opener; I never saw anything like it. It was Chicago--all
Chicago. Heavens! how the town was hymned and celebrated! It was
personified--"
"That's right," said McDowell.
"And glorified--"
"Of course."
"And deified--"
"Why not?"
"Why not, indeed?" cried Aim Wilde. "_I_ haven't been around much yet,
but you strike me as the most imaginative lot of people I ever saw."
"Whenever Chicago is involved," amended Walworth.
"Sure."
"How you idealize it!" cried Ann, enthusiastically. "How you--"
"It needs to be idealized--and badly," said her sister.
But McDowell's interests in the southern suburbs as well as at St.
Asaph's were soon set aside by another matter; domestic interests
claimed his attention.
His father-in-law had now passed some two or three months in Chicago.
He had entered the city without any conception of its magnitude, and he
had remained in it without rising to any conception of its metropolitan
complexities. He had made a change that was too great and too late. He
made but an ineffectual attempt to connect and identify himself with
the great rush of life going on all about him. He came down town almost
every day to spend an hour or more in McDowell's office, where he took
a certain satisfaction in following out the intricacies of the local
topography by passing a thin, blue-veined hand over McDowell's maps and
his canvas bound books of plats. McDowell treated him with considerable
patience and with as much respect as was due to a man who had no great
experience in real estate and little aptitude for learning. One day
old Mr. Ogden, who apprehended the lake winds little better than the
local "lay of the land," took a slight cold in returning home from the
office; two days after pneumonia developed, and within a week he died.
George undertook the charge of such arrangements as recognized the old
New-Englander as a dead man merely, and McDowell subsequently took
charge of those which recognized him as a dead property-owner. First,
the funeral; afterwards, the Probate Court.
A funeral is more disagreeable than a wedding, chiefly because its
multifarious details make their demands with but a scanty notice in
advance. All of these details George was now called upon to face and to
dispose of.
He squared his jaw, set his eyes, put a cold, heavy paving-stone in
place of his heart, and met these details one by one. It was a man's
privilege.
Brower went with him to the undertaker's, and mediated between grief
and rapacity.
"Be careful here," Brower said to him in an undertone. They were in a
room where sample caskets stood on end against opposite walls and were
let down one by one for the inspection of purchasers.
"They always show the most expensive ones first. Don't look at these.
You don't need to pay a hundred and fifty dollars. You can select
a suitable one for eighty or ninety--perfectly good and no loss of
respect."
"How about the outside box?" asked the man in due course. He was in his
shirt-sleeves and wore a high silk hat.
"Here," whispered Brower, "you'll have to take the most expensive. It's
chestnut--fifteen dollars. Nothing else but plain pine for a dollar
fifty. Shameful, isn't it?"
Brower arranged for the handles and the plates. He also met the family
at the railway-station next day, and saw the casket put on board the
east-bound express.
He and George were walking slowly up and down the platform alongside
the train when a man in blue overalls leaned out of the door of the
baggage-car and called to them. He held a paper in his hand.
"This ain't quite regular," he said. "Our road is pretty strict. The
air-tight casket is all right for inter-state travel, but the doctor
hasn't signed this certificate."
George turned on Brower with a look of anguish.
"Here!" cried Brower, stretching up his hand. "How forgetful of me!
I'll sign it now. Go along, Ogden."