The drawings for the embellishment of the house on Walton Place were
undertaken by Atwater, and their scope broadened under the artist's
hands. George, at his wife's request, took the elevator one noon and
went up to the roof to see them.
In Atwater's absence he was received by the head draughtsman. The
scheme had widened, as such schemes will; there were suggestions for
the porch and for new hand--rails. There was also a drawing for a
cornice in harmony.
"Urn," said George, thoughtfully. "This is all very handsome."
At about the same time that work on the Ogden house began, the work
on the plans for the Floyd house received a check. This check was
due to the first Western trip of Winthrop C. Floyd, treasurer of the
Massachusetts Brass Company. He came on a general visit of inspection.
The morning after his arrival he sat in the office of the Chicago
branch; he had come down with Mrs. Floyd and Claudia. His keen and
quiet eye ran over the furnishings of the place. He was a bachelor of
forty; he was dressed simply but elegantly--he was completely _comme il
faut_, except for his muddy shoes, which seemed to trouble him.
"Well, Walworth," he said, with the manner of an elder brother and of
an official whose dictum had weight, "you are pretty well fixed up out
here--better than the home office, in fact."
"Have to be," returned the other. "Down East everybody knows the
company; you could do business in a coal-shed if you wanted to. Here
it's different. People don't know us from a hole in the ground; they go
by what they see."
"Do you use all these calls and things?"
The wall was set with electrical devices for calling boys from
everywhere for everything.
"Sometimes. Anyway it looks as if we did, and that helps business."
Little Claudia came creeping up to his desk.
"When are you going to begin, papa? I've come down to see you do it."
"Do what, my dear?"
"Make money. You said you did it here. When are you going to begin?"
Winthrop swung his chair towards the window and looked out at the
driving rain and at the crowds of vehicles and passengers in the filthy
streets below.
"Yes," he said, under his breath; "when are you going to begin?" Then
aloud, "What a beastly hole! Is there no government here?"
"Precious little for a million and a half of people, and precious bad
what there is."
"A million and a half? Nonsense!"
"Why nonsense? There's the census, and there's the regular annual
increase."
Winthrop favored his brother with a stare of frank curiosity. Walworth
had spoken with some warmth; he seemed disposed to throw an undue ardor
into his defence of his adopted home--a city where quality seemed to
count for less than quantity, and where the "prominent" citizen made
the "eminent" citizen a superfluity. Then, too, Winthrop coupled with
the earnest lines in his brother's forehead a slightly dingy necktie
under his brother's chin. He observed, moreover, in the polishing of
the shoe which Walworth, for greater emphasis, was beating on the
carpet, a neglect of the heel in favor of the toe. And there were
several other indications of a growing carelessness in dress.
"Well, Walworth," he remarked, "you are getting acclimated, I guess."
"Not to this sort of thing. Yes, there's a million and a half of us
here, and this little quarter of a square mile is probably the most
crowded and the most active of any on the globe, and yet it isn't found
worth while to keep it clean, or even decent, small as it is. On days
like this you feel as if you just wanted to remove the inhabitants and
annex the whole place to the Stock-yards."
Mrs. Floyd paused in the adjustment of her bedraggled skirts and looked
up fiercely.
"Why remove the inhabitants?" she inquired.
"Frances!" called her husband.
"Why, indeed?" asked Winthrop. "I never saw such a beastly rabble in my
life."
"Nor I," she cried. All her smouldering resentment against the town
broke out with the appearance of a new Eastern ally.
"Except in Madrid or Naples." Winthrop had travelled in his younger
days; he never made these European comparisons except under extreme
provocation.
"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd,
plaintively.
"Because there's no standard of manners--no resident country gentry to
provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and
this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What
little culture we have in the country generally we find principally
in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small
element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."
He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a
gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he
admitted further, "to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to
live it in such a place as this!"
But pity was not an important factor in Winthrop's Western mission. The
Chicago office was costing too much and earning too little. There was
to be a general reduction and scaling-down; the most important part of
Winthrop's baggage was the pruning-knife.
He remained a week. He used the knife pretty thoroughly. He snipped
Atwater's plans for Walworth's house into very small pieces. He left
Walworth in a great state of depression--a depression deeper than any
he had felt since his failure in coffee and spices.
His last evening in Chicago he spent in Walworth's library. It was a
sober little room, and Walworth was the soberest man in it. His wife
made only an occasional emergence from her unquiet silence; she no
longer looked on Winthrop as an ally. The Fairchilds were there, and
the Ogdens dropped in during the course of the evening. Fairchild and
Winthrop did most of the talking.
Winthrop's sensibilities had now lost their keenest edge; the
weather had improved, and the general aspect of things was a little
less disgusting. He listened to Fairchild with the cautious reserve
of a maturity that was accustomed to meet elderly strangers. He
acknowledged, too, that the city was a big fact, and perhaps a more
complicated fact than, he had imagined.
"You have seen the foundations," Fairchild said to him. The old
gentleman lay back in his chair and spoke in a quiet and dispassionate
tone. "It has taken fifty years to put them in, but the work is
finally done and well done. And now we are beginning to build on these
foundations. We might have put up our building first and then put in
the underpinning afterwards. That is a common way, but ours will be
found to have its advantages."
"I dare say," admitted Winthrop; "but you have made an awful muss doing
it."
"Well," rejoined Fairchild, "you may look at the external aspect of
things, which is distressing enough, I acknowledge, or you may consider
the people themselves, who are perhaps the real essential."
"Winthrop finds them rather distressing too." It was Walworth who
spoke; his voice came in a muffled tone from the darkest comer of the
room.
"What have we done to him?" demanded Jessie Ogden, quickly. "Haven't we
received him well?"
Winthrop had no ground for individual complaint, and he hastened to
make this clear. Personally, he had been made a great deal of. He was
rather a large figure at home, and he naturally grew larger still the
farther he travelled West.
"I don't think it can be denied," pursued Fairchild, tranquilly, "that
new-comers are pretty well received here, whether they come to stay
or to pass on or to go back. All that a man has to do, in order to
insure good treatment, is to put a certain valuation on himself. That
done, the more he claims, the more he receives; we take him at his
own figure. The more I think of it, the more I am astonished at so
much humility among people who have accomplished such great results.
Commercially, we feel our own footing; socially, we are rather abashed
by the pretensions that any new arrival chooses to make. We are a
little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of
each other."
"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that.
Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."
"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of
watching and waiting for cues--people of plain origin who are beginning
to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke
like a princess of the blood-royal.
"That is the point," said Fairchild. "Individually, we may be of a
rather humble grade of atoms, but we are crystallizing into a compound
that is going to exercise a tremendous force. To him that hath eyes
this crystallization, this organization, is the great thing to note
just now."
"I acknowledge to have seen the ferment of activity, as they call it,"
said Winthrop.
"You may have seen the boiling of the kettle," returned Fairchild,
"but you have hardly seen the force that feeds the flame. The big
buildings are all well enough, and the big crowds in the streets, and
the reports of the banks and railways and the Board of Trade. But there
is something, now, beyond and behind all that."
"Let me tell Winthrop," broke in Mrs. Floyd. "Since I can't take him
to our club, I must bring the club to him. At our last meeting"--there
was a sub-acid relish in all this--"it developed that the present
intellectual situation in Chicago is precisely that of Florence in the
days of the-the--"
"Medici," suggested Ogden.
"Yes, the Medici," said Ann Wilde, loudly. She looked at him with a
sharp aversion; he seemed to be taking part in her sister's joke.
"That's just exactly what my paper said; the Florence of the Medici
after the dispersal of the Greek scholars from Constantinople by the
Turks."
"Oh, murder!" said Walworth to himself; "what will Ann rig up next?"
"The Florentines of that day," pursued his sister-in-law, "didn't know
so very much, perhaps, but they were bound to learn, and that was the
main thing. And it's just so here."
"Quite right," said Fairchild; "we know what there is to learn, and
we are determined to master it. Our Constantinoples are Berlin and
London and the rest--yes, Boston, too; and all their learned exiles are
flocking here to instruct us."
"And the books that are coming in!" cried Jessie Ogden. She was no
great reader, and she spoke less as a student than as a Chicagoan--that
is, she spoke more ardently than any student could have spoken. "Does
the enemy know that four of the biggest buildings in this big city are
built of books?"
"The new libraries," her husband explained--"the ones that are going
to make us the literary centre."
"Dear me," said Winthrop, "are you expecting that?"
"And we expect to be the financial centre, and presently the political
centre, too--Chicago, plus New York and Washington."
"And where is Boston?"
"A little behind," said Fairchild. "New York is the main-mast yet;
Chicago ranks as foremast--at present; while Boston is--"
"The mizzen-mast," completed Ogden.
"And we Chicago folks stand at the bow," chimed in his wife, "and sniff
the first freshness of the breeze."
"Yes," said Winthrop, in satirical assent; "the 'Windy City.'"
"Don't abuse our wind," cried Mrs. Floyd; "we should all die like flies
without it."
"That's so," assented her husband. "The wind is our only scavenger."
"I see," said Winthrop. "If you can only be big you don't mind being
dirty."
Then, half in amusement, half in amaze, he concentrated his attention
on the banker. "Can it be that there are really any such expectations
here as these?" He addressed Fairchild exclusively--the oldest and most
sedate of the circle.
"Why not?" returned Fairchild. "Does it seem unreasonable that the
State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in
our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check
alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give
the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate
metropolis?"
"And you personally--is this your own belief?"
Fairchild leaned back his fine old head on the padded top of his chair
and looked at his questioner with the kind of pity that has a faint
tinge of weariness. His wife sat beside him silent, but with her hand
on his, and when he answered she pressed it meaningly; for to the
Chicagoan--even the middle-aged female Chicagoan--the name of the
town, in its formal, ceremonial use, has a power that no other word
in the language quite possesses. It is a shibboleth, as regards its
pronunciation; it is a trumpet-call, as regards its effect. It has all
the electrifying and unifying power of a college yell.
"Chicago is Chicago," he said. "It is the belief of all of us. It is
inevitable; nothing can stop us now."
But Winthrop Floyd was glad to withdraw himself on the morrow from
his temporary enlistment--or drafting--under the vociferous banner of
the Western capital. He did all in his power, as well, to oppose its
manifest destiny by transmitting to Walworth, immediately after his
return to Boston, a full corporate confirmation of his own anathema
against Walworth's office and house. The Chicago representative of the
Massachusetts Brass Company was recommended to secure less expensive
quarters at the earliest opportunity, and was directed to drop his
architectural scheme forthwith.
Walworth at once adjusted matters with Atwater. The architect received
his "reconsideration" with composure, but he was doubtless nettled to
be balked in a work in which he had taken unusual personal interest,
and he was also disappointed merely to be paid for his plans when he
had looked for the fees that follow construction. These considerations
may have had their influence on the account which he rendered a
month later to the Ogdens--friends and relatives of the Floyds,
and introduced, too, by them. This account was handed in much more
promptly than is generally the case with an accredited client in other
professions--the legal or the medical, let us say--and its final
footing caused Ogden considerable consternation.
The account was mailed to the house instead of to the bank, and the
stationery employed was such as to suggest a personal matter between
gentlemen rather than a purely business matter between architect and
client; and Ogden opened it under his wife's eyes to learn that design
had cost him more than construction.
"Your drawings are more of an item than your porch itself," he said,
rather faintly. "I shall have to step up there and see about it."