Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees
of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces
of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so
many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while
yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a
gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated,
knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked
out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets
to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday
evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things
he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come.
Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men
and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon
the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and
the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in
the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with
unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their
cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine
in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting
for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The
eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of
gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable
men--of whom he intended to be one--intent upon growth.
In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came
out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a
woman--tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on
her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at
her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward
with a cry.
“Edith!” he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
“For Janet,” he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State
to Van Buren Street.
Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres
and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and
with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered
before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs
restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of
the street. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” sang the
voice.
Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long
narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth
where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross
street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed
a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand
upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his
shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was
a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of
growth worked.
From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam
walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went
noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who
talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air.
Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the
city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it.
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” again insisted the
voice.
After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting
on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him.
From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which
saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish
doorway and its dimly lighted “Ladies’ Entrance,” and into a region of
neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the
counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one
of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom
he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city,
had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all
of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had
been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that
was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs,
reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years,
and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in
the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the
middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather
had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first
governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a
county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked
of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before
the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one
son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly
through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts
and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle,
died after having borne him the two daughters.
After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away
from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his
wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to
his home state to settle on a farm.
About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father,
Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and
treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would
sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great
many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment
of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no
intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led
team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no
rest except to eat.
At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once
he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house
and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court
and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his
humiliation.
To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about
in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks
in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of
the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl
of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were
thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight
woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous
fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so
absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation
that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers
clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she
lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have
expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in
her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made
reclining wheeled chair.
Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down
town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street
from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the
money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his
life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession
and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with
the money of the medical student. “Take it and make money for me,”
the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the
beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking
flamboyantly of Sam’s ability in affairs. “What is the good of having a
talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven’t it?”
Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly
points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In
a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during
the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of
understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a
miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When
Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours
in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings
spent together.
In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker.
In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year
into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good
living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was
guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the
reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men
stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam’s friend.
Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid
intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in
the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam’s money making
and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his
affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his
hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway
beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there
sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped
finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam
had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all
show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an
end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
* * * * *
Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
Janet’s wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing
Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal
fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside,
through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking
dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would
come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their
talk.
Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement
that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively
on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
“You talk!” she broke out. “Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
business men are--you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They
are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and
forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You
haven’t read books, not real ones. Didn’t my father know; didn’t he save
himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the
real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men
write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take
themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs.
You think you know what’s going on in the world. You think you are doing
things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind,
all blind.”
The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes,
leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam’s hair, laughing down
into the astonished face he turned up to her.
“Oh, I’m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,”
she went on impulsively. “I like you all right and if I were a well
woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there
was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and
men and machines that make guns.”
Sam grinned. “You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up
and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,” he declared; “you
think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should
like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep.”
Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with
delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome
evening.
After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet,
listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean
to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever
since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks
they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little
black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of
thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a
new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming
Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with
their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so
much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went
out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against
the great world background she had drawn for him.
Sam did not understand Janet’s point of view. It was all too new and
foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought
her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them
and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince
when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it
had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to
spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone
with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that
she would have gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam’s work for the gun
company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during
the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense
his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after
night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours
when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got
hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that
made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of
vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars
and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on
Wabash Avenue.
After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but
turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.