The next morning I was awake early, stirred by the thoughts of Chicago,
the Fair, Miss W—— (my favorite), as well as the group of attractive
creatures who now formed a sort of background for her. One of the
characteristics of my very youthful temperament at that time was the
power to invest every place I had ever left with a romance and
strangeness such as might have attached to something abandoned, say, a
thousand or two years before and which I was now revisiting for the
first time to find it nearly all done over. So it was now in my attitude
toward Chicago. I had been away for only eight or nine months, and still
I expected—what did I not expect?—the whole skyline and landscape to be
done over, or all that I had known done away with. Going into Chicago I
studied every street and crossing and house and car. How sad to think I
had ever had to leave it, to leave Alice, my home, my father, all my
relatives and old friends! Where was E——, A——, T——, my father? At
thought of the latter I was deeply moved, for had I not left him about a
year before and without very much ceremony at the time I had chosen to
follow the fortunes of my sister C——? Now that I looked back on it all
from the vantage point of a year’s work I was much chastened and began
to think how snippy and unkind I had been. Poor, tottering, broken soul,
I thought. I could see him then as he really was, a warm, generous and
yet bigoted and ignorant soul, led captive in his childhood to a
brainless theory and having no power within himself to break that chain,
and now wandering distrait and forlorn amid a storm of difficulties:
age, the death of his wife, the flight of his children, doubt as to
their salvation, poverty, a declining health.
I can see him now, a thin grasshopper of a man, brooding wearily with
those black-brown Teutonic eyes of his, as sad as failure itself. What
thoughts! What moods! He was very much like one of those old men whom
Rembrandt has portrayed, wrinkled, sallow, leathery. My father’s
peculiarly German hair and beard were always carefully combed and
brushed, the hair back over his forehead like Nietzsche’s, the beard
resting reddishly on his chest. His clothes were always loose and
ill-fitting, being bought for durability, not style, or made over from
abandoned clothes of some one—my brother Paul or my sister M——’s
husband. He always wore an old and very carefully preserved black derby
hat, very wide of brim and out of style, which he pulled low over his
deep-set weary eyes. I always wondered where and when he had bought it.
On this trip I offered to buy him a new one, but he preferred to use the
money for a mass for the repose of my good mother’s soul! Under his arm
or in one of his capacious pockets was always a Catholic prayerbook from
which he read prayers as familiar to him as his own hands, yet from the
mumbling repetition of which he extracted some comfort, as does the
Hindu from meditating upon space or time. In health he was always
fluttering to one or another of a score of favorite Catholic churches,
each as commonplace as the other, and there, before some trashy plaster
image of some saint or virgin as dead or helpless as his own past,
making supplication for what?—peace in death, the reconversion and right
conduct of his children, the salvation of his own and my mother’s soul?
Debts were his great misery, as I had always known. If one died and left
unpaid an old bill of some kind one had to stay in purgatory so much
longer!
Riding into Chicago this morning I speculated as to the thinness of his
hands as I had known them, the tremulousness of his inquiries, the
appeal in his sad resigned eyes, whence all power to compel or convince
had long since gone. In the vast cosmic flight of force, flowing from
what heart we know not but in which as little corks our suns and planets
float, it is possible that there may be some care, an equation, a
balancing of the scales of suffering and pleasure. I hope so. If not I
know not the reason for tears or those emotions with which so many of us
salve the memory of seemingly immedicable ills. If immedicable, why cry?
I sought Miss W——, who was up before me and sitting beside her section
window. I was about to go and talk with her when my attention was
claimed by other girls. This bevy could not very well afford to see the
attention of the only man on board so easily monopolized. There were so
many pretty faces among them that I wavered. I talked idly among them,
interested to see what overtures and how much of an impression I might
make. My natural love of womankind made them all inviting.
When the train drew into Chicago we were met by a tally-ho, which the
obliging Mr. Dean had been kind enough to announce to each and every one
of us as the train stopped. The idea of riding to the World’s Fair in
such a thing and with this somewhat conspicuous party of school-teachers
went very much against the grain. Being very conscious of my personal
dignity in the presence of others and knowing the American and
middle-West attitude toward all these new and persistently derided toys
and pleasures of the effete East and England, I was inclined to look
upon this one as out of place in Chicago. Besides, a canvas strip on the
coach advertising the nature of this expedition infuriated me and seemed
spiritually involved with the character of Mr. Dean. That bounder had
done this, I was sure. I wondered whether the sophisticated and
well-groomed superintendent of schools would lend himself to any such
thing when plainly it was to be written up in the _Republic_, but since
he did not seem to mind it I was mollified; in fact, he took it all with
a charming gayety and grace which eventually succeeded in putting my own
silly provincialism and pride to rout. He sat up in front with me and
the driver discussing philosophy, education, the Fair, a dozen things,
during which I made a great pretense at wise deductions and a wider
reading than I had ever had.
Once clear of the depot and turning into Adams Street, we were off
behind six good horses through as interesting a business section as one
might wish to see, its high buildings (the earliest and most numerous in
America) and its mass of congested traffic making a brisk summer morning
scene. I was reëngaged by Michigan Avenue, that splendid boulevard with
its brief vista of the lake, which was whipped to cotton-tops this
bright morning by a fresh wind, and then the long residence-lined avenue
to the south with its wealth of new and pretentious homes, its smart
paving and lighting, its crush of pleasure traffic hurrying townward or
to the Fair. Within an hour we were assigned rooms in a comfortable
hotel near the Fair grounds, one of those hastily and yet fairly well
constructed buildings which later were changed into flats or apartments.
One wall of this hotel, as I now discovered, the side on which my room
was, faced a portion of the Fair grounds, and from my windows I could
see some of its classic façades, porticoes, roofs, domes, lagoons. All
at once and out of nothing in this dingy city of six or seven hundred
thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass
and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years before was a
lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious
collection of perfectly constructed and snowy buildings, containing in
their delightful interiors the artistic, mechanical and scientific
achievements of the world. Greece, Italy, India, Egypt, Japan, Germany,
South America, the West and East Indies, the Arctics—all represented! I
have often thought since how those pessimists who up to that time had
imagined that nothing of any artistic or scientific import could
possibly be brought to fruition in America, especially in the middle
West, must have opened their eyes as I did mine at the sight of this
realized dream of beauty, this splendid picture of the world’s own hope
for itself. I have long marveled at it and do now as I recall it, its
splendid Court of Honor, with its monumental stateliness and simple
grandeur; the peristyle with its amazing grace of columns and sculptured
figures; the great central arch with its triumphal quadriga; the dome of
the Administration Building with its daring nudes; the splendid
groupings on the Agricultural Building, as well as those on the
Manufacturers’ and Women’s buildings. It was not as if many minds had
labored toward this great end, or as if the great raw city which did not
quite understand itself as yet had endeavored to make a great show, but
rather as though some brooding spirit of beauty, inherent possibly in
some directing over-soul, had waved a magic wand quite as might have
Prospero in _The Tempest_ or Queen Mab in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_,
and lo, this fairyland.
In the morning when I came down from my room I fell in with Miss W—— in
the diningroom and was thrilled by the contact. She was so gay,
good-natured, smiling, unaffected. And with her now was a younger sister
of whom I had not heard and who had come to Chicago by a different route
to join her. I was promptly introduced, and we sat down at the same
table. It was not long before we were joined by the others, and then I
could see by the exchange of glances that it was presumed that I had
fallen a victim to this charmer of the night before. But already the
personality of the younger sister was appealing to me quite as much as
the elder. She was so radiant of humor, freckled, plump, laughing and
with such an easy and natural mode of address. Somehow she struck me as
knowing more of life than her sister, being more sophisticated and yet
quite as innocent.
After breakfast the company broke up into groups of two and three. Each
had plans for the day and began talking them over.
We started off finally for the Fair gate and on the way I had an
opportunity to study some of the other members of the party and make up
my mind as to whether I really preferred her above all. Despite my
leaning toward Miss W—— I now discovered that there was a number whose
charms, if not superior to those of Miss W——, were greater than I had
imagined, while some of those who had attracted me the night before were
being modified by little traits of character or mannerism which I did
not like. Among them was one rosy black-haired Irish girl whose solid
beauty attracted me very much. She was young and dark and robust, with
the air of a hoyden. I looked at her, quite taken by her snapping black
eyes, but nothing came of it for the moment: we were all becoming
interested in the Fair.
Together, then, we drifted for an hour or more in this world of glorious
sights, an hour or more of dreaming over the arches, the reflections in
the water, the statues, the shadowy throngs by the steps of the lagoons
moving like figures in a dream. Was it real? I sometimes wonder, for it
is all gone. Gone the summer days and nights, the air, the color, the
form, the mood. In its place is a green park by a lake, still beautiful
but bereft, a city that grows and grows, ever larger, but harder,
colder, grayer.
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