When Charlotte was thirty Carrie--twenty--married. After all, the
innocent little indiscretion which had so thoroughly poisoned
Charlotte's life was not to corrupt Carrie's matrimonial future, in
spite of Mrs. Thrift's mournful prediction. Carrie, whose philosophy of
life was based on that same finding's-keeping plan with which she had
filched the bit of orange silk from her sister so many years before,
married Samuel Payson, junior member of the firm of Thrift and Payson,
Real Estate, Bonds and Mortgages. Charlotte, it may be remembered,
had disdained to pick up the scrap of orange silk on which Carrie had
swooped. Just so with Samuel Payson.
Samuel Payson was destined to be a junior partner. Everything about
him was deferential, subservient. The very folds of his clothes
slanted away from you. He was as oblique and evasive as Isaac Thrift
was upright and forthright. In conversation with you he pronounced
your name at frequent intervals. Charlotte came to dread it: "Yes,
Miss Charlotte.... Do you think so, Miss Charlotte?... Sit here, Miss
Charlotte...." It was like a too-intimate hand on your shrinking arm.
The fashion for men of parting the hair in the middle had just come
in. Samuel Payson parted his from forehead to nape of neck. In some
mysterious way it gave to the back of his head an alert facial
expression very annoying to the beholder. He reminded Charlotte of
someone she had recently met and whom she despised; but for a long
time she could not think who this could be. She found herself staring
at him, fascinated, trying to trace the resemblance. Samuel Payson
misinterpreted her gaze.
Isaac and Hetty Thrift had too late relaxed their vigilant watch over
Charlotte. It had taken them all these years to realize that they were
guarding a prisoner who hugged her chains. Wretched as she was (in a
quiet and unobtrusive way) there is the possibility that she would
have been equally wretched married to a Hardscrabble Dick. Charlotte's
submission was all the more touching because she had nothing against
which to rebel. Once, in the very beginning, Mrs. Thrift, haunted by
something in Charlotte's eyes, had said in a burst of mingled spleen
and self-defense:
"And why do you look at me like that, I should like to know! I'm sure I
didn't kill your young man at Donelson. You're only moping like that to
aggravate me; for something that never could have been, anyway--thank
goodness!"
"He wouldn't have been killed," Charlotte said, unreasonably, and with
conviction.
Had they been as wise and understanding as they were well-meaning,
these two calvinistic parents might have cured Charlotte by one visit
to the Dicks' Hardscrabble kitchen, with a mangy cur nosing her skirts;
a red-faced hostess at the washtub; and a ruined, battered travesty of
the slim young rhyme-making Jesse Dick there in the person of old Pete
Dick squatting, sodden, in the doorway.
As the years went on they had, tardily, a vague and sneaking hope that
something might happen among the G.A.R. widowers of Chicago's better
families. During the reunions of Company I and Company E Charlotte
generally assisted with the dinner or the musical program. She had
a sweet, if small, contralto with notes in it that matched the fine
dark eyebrows. She sang a group of old-fashioned songs: When You and
I Were Young, Maggie; The Belle of Mohawk Vale; and Sleeping I Dream,
Love. Charlotte never suspected her parents' careful scheming behind
these public appearances of hers. Her deft capable hands at the G.A.R.
dinners, her voice lifted in song, were her offerings to Jesse Dick's
memory. Him she served. To him she sang. And gradually even Isaac
and Hetty Thrift realized that the G.A.R. widowers were looking for
younger game; and that Charlotte, surrounded by blue-uniformed figures,
still was gazing through them, past them, into space. Her last public
appearance was when she played the organ and acted as director for
_Queen Esther_, a cantata, which marked rather an epoch in the
amateur musical history of the town. After that she began to devote
herself to her sister's family and to her mother.
But all this was later. Charlotte, at thirty, still had a look of
vigor, and of fragrant (if slightly faded) bloom, together with a
little atmosphere of mystery of which she was entirely unconscious;
born, doubtless, of years of living with a ghost. Attractive qualities,
all three; and all three quite lacking in her tart-tongued and
acidulous younger sister, despite that miss's ten-year advantage.
Carrie was plain, spare, and sallow. Her mind marched with her
father's. The two would discuss real estate and holdings like two men.
Hers was the mathematical and legal-thinking type of brain rarely
found in a woman. She rather despised her mother. Samuel Payson used
to listen to her with an air of respectful admiration and attention.
But it was her older sister to whom he turned at last with, "I thought
perhaps you might enjoy a drive to Cleaversville, since the evening's
so fine, Miss Charlotte. What do you say, Miss Charlotte?"
"Oh, thank you--I'm not properly dressed for driving--perhaps
Carrie----"
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Thrift would interpose tartly.
"But Miss Charlotte, you are quite perfectly dressed. If I may be so
bold, that is a style which suits you to a marvel."
There he was right. It did. Hoops were history. The form-fitting
basque, the flattering neck-frill, the hip sash, and the smart
(though grotesque) bustle revealed, and even emphasized, lines of the
feminine figure--the swell of the bust, the curve of the throat--that
the crinoline had for years concealed. This romantic, if somewhat
lumpy, costume well became Charlotte's slender figure and stern sad
young face. In it Carrie, on the other hand, resembled a shingle in a
flower's sheath.
This obstacle having been battered down, Charlotte raised another.
"They say the Cleaversville road is a sea of mud and no bottom to it
in places. The rains."
"Then," said Samuel Payson, agreeably, "we shall leave that for another
time"--Charlotte brightened--"and go boating in the lagoon instead. Eh,
Miss Charlotte?"
Charlotte, born fifty years later, would have looked her persistent and
unwelcome suitor in the eye and said, "I don't want to go." Charlotte,
with the parental eyes upon her, went dutifully upstairs for bonnet and
mantle.
The lagoon of Samuel Payson's naming was a basin of water between the
narrow strip of park on Michigan Avenue and the railway that ran along
the lake. It was much used for boating of a polite and restricted
nature.
It was a warm Sunday evening in the early summer. The better to get
the breeze the family was sociably seated out on what was known as the
platform. On fine evenings all Chicago sat out on its front steps--"the
stoop" it was called. The platform was even more informal than the
stoop. It was made of wooden planks built across the ditches that ran
along each side of the street. Across it carriages drove up to the
sidewalk when visitors contemplated alighting. All down Wabash Avenue
you saw families comfortably seated in rockers on these platforms,
enjoying the evening breeze and watching the world go by. Here the
Thrifts--Isaac, Hetty, and their daughter Carrie--were seated when the
triumphant Samuel left with the smoldering Charlotte. Here they were
seated when the two returned.
The basin reached, they had hired a boat and Samuel had paddled about
in a splashy and desultory way, not being in the least an oarsman. He
talked, Miss-Charlotteing her so insistently that in ten minutes she
felt thumbed all over. She looked out across the lake. He spoke of his
loneliness, living at the Tremont House. Before being raised to junior
partner he had been a clerk in Isaac Thrift's office. It was thus that
Charlotte still regarded him--when she regarded him at all. She looked
at him now, bent to the oars, his flat chest concave, his lean arms
stringy; panting a little with the unaccustomed exercise.
"It must be lonely," murmured Charlotte, absentmindedly if
sympathetically.
"Your father and mother have been very kind"--he bent a melting look on
her--"far kinder than you have been, Miss Charlotte."
"It's chilly, now that the sun's gone," said Charlotte. "Shall we row
in? This mantle is very light."
It cannot be said that he flushed then, but a little flood of dark
color came into his pallid face. He rowed for the boat-house. He
maneuvered the boat alongside the landing. Twilight had come on. The
shed-like place was too dim for safety, lighted at the far end with
one cobwebby lantern. He hallooed to the absent boatman, shipped his
oars, and stepped out none too expertly. Charlotte stood up, smiling.
She was glad to be in. Sitting opposite him thus, in the boat, it had
been impossible to evade his red-rimmed eyes. Still smiling a little,
with relief she took his proffered hand as he stood on the landing,
stepped up, stumbled a little because he had pulled with unexpected
(and unnecessary) strength, and was horrified suddenly to see him
thrust his head forward like a particularly nasty species of bird, and
press moist clammy lips to the hollow of her throat. Her reaction was
as unfortunate as it was unstudied. "Uriah Heep!" she cried (at last!
the resemblance that had been haunting her all these days), "Heep!
Heep!" and pushed him violently from her. The sacred memories of the
past twelve years, violated now, were behind that outraged push. It
sent him reeling over the edge of the platform, clutching at a post
that was not there, and into the shallow water on the other side. The
boatmen, running tardily toward them, fished him out and restored
him to a curiously unagitated young lady. He was wet but uninjured.
Thus dripping he still insisted on accompanying her home. She had not
murmured so much as, "I'm sorry." They walked home in hurried silence,
his boots squashing at every step. The Thrifts--father, mother, and
daughter--still were seated on the platform before the house, probably
discussing real estate values--two of them, at least. Followed
exclamations, explanations, sympathy, flurry.
"I fell in. A bad landing place. No light. A wretched hole."
Charlotte turned abruptly and walked up the front steps and into the
house. "She's upset," said Mrs. Thrift, automatically voicing the
proper thing, flustered though she was. "Usually it's Charlotte that
falls into things. You must get that coat off at once. And the....
Isaac, your pepper-and-salt suit. A little large but.... Come in....
Dear, dear!... I'll have a hot toddy ready.... Carrie...."
* * * * *
It was soon after the second Chicago fire that Isaac Thrift and his
son-in-law built the three-story-and-basement house on Prairie avenue,
near 29th Street. The old man recalled the boast made almost forty
years before, that some day he would build as far south as Thirtieth
Street; though it was not, as he had then predicted, a country home.
"I was a little wrong there," he admitted, "but only because I was
too conservative. They laughed at me. Well, you can't deny the truth
of it now. It'll be as good a hundred years from now as it is to-day.
Only the finest houses because of the cost of the ground. No chance of
business ever coming up this way. From Sixteenth to Thirtieth it's a
residential paradise. Yes sir! A res-i-den-tial paradise!"
A good thing that he did not live the twenty-five years, or less,
that transformed the paradise into a smoke-blackened and disreputable
inferno, with dusky faces, surmounted by chemically unkinked though
woolly heads, peering from every decayed mansion and tumble-down
rooming house. Sixteenth Street became a sore that would not
heal--scrofulous, filthy. Thirty-first Street was the centre of the
Black Belt. Of all that region Prairie Avenue alone resisted wave
after wave of the black flood that engulfed the streets south, east,
and west. There, in Isaac Thrift's day, lived much of Chicago's
aristocracy; millionaire if mercantile; plutocratic though porcine. And
there its great stone and brick mansions with their mushroom-topped
conservatories, their porte-cochères, their high wrought-iron fences,
and their careful lawns still defied the years, though ruin, dirt, and
decay waited just outside to destroy them. The window-hangings of any
street are its character index. The lace and silk draperies before
the windows of these old mansions still were immaculate, though the
Illinois Central trains, as they screeched derisively by, spat huge
mouthsful of smoke and cinders into their very faces.
Isaac Thrift had fallen far behind his neighbours in the race for
wealth. They had started as he had, with only courage, ambition, and
foresight as capital. But they--merchants, pork-packers--had dealt
in food and clothing on an increasingly greater scale, while Isaac
Thrift had early given up his store to devote all his time to real
estate. There had been his mistake. Bread and pork, hardware and
clothing--these were fundamental needs, changing little with the years.
Millions came to the man who, starting as a purveyor of these, stayed
with them. At best, real estate was a gamble. And Isaac Thrift lost.
His own occasional short-sightedness was not to blame for his most
devastating loss, however. This was dealt him, cruelly and criminally,
by his business partner and son-in-law, the plausible Payson.
The two families dwelt comfortably enough together in the new house on
Prairie. There was room and to spare, even after two children--Belle,
and then Lottie--were born to the Paysons. The house was thought a
grand affair, with its tin bathtub and boxed-in wash-bowl on the second
floor, besides an extra washroom on the first, off the hall; a red
and yellow stained-glass window in the dining room; a butler's pantry
(understand, no butler; Chicago boasted no more than half a dozen of
these); a fine furnace in the lower hall just under the stairway;
oilcloth on the first flight of stairs; Brussels on the second; ingrain
on the third; a liver-colored marble mantel in the front parlor, with
anemic replicas in the back parlor and the more important bedrooms.
It was an age when every possible article of household furniture
was disguised to represent something it was not. A miniature Gothic
cathedral was really a work-basket; a fauteuil was, like as not, a
music box. The Thrifts' parlor carpet was green, woven to represent a
river flowing along from the back parlor folding doors to the street
windows, with a pattern of full-sailed ships on it, and, by way of
variety, occasional bunches of flowers strewn carelessly here and
there, between the ships. On rare and thrilling occasions, during their
infancy, Belle and little Lottie were allowed to crawl down the carpet
river and poke a fascinated finger into a ship's sail or a floral
garland.
Carrie's two children were born in this house. Isaac and Hetty Thrift
died in it. And in it Carrie was left worse than widowed.
Samuel Payson must have been about forty-six when, having gathered
together in the office of Thrift & Payson all the uninvested
moneys--together with negotiable bonds, stocks, and securities--on
which he could lay hands, he decamped and was never seen again. He
must have been planning it for years. It was all quite simple. He had
had active charge of the business. Again and again Isaac Thrift had
turned over to Payson money entrusted him for investment by widows of
lifelong friends; by the sons and daughters of old Chicago settlers; by
lifelong friends themselves. This money Payson had taken, ostensibly
for investment. He had carefully discussed its investment with his
father-in-law, had reported such investments made. In reality he had
invested not a penny. On it had been paid one supposed dividend,
or possibly two. The bulk of it remained untouched. When his time
came Samuel Payson gathered together the practically virgin sums and
vanished to live some strange life of his own of which he had been
dreaming behind that truckling manner and the Heepish face, with its
red-rimmed eyes.
He had been a model husband, father, and son-in-law. Chess with old
Isaac, evenings; wool-windings for Mrs. Thrift; games with the two
little girls; church on Sundays with Carrie. Between him and Charlotte
little talk was wasted, and no pretense.
A thousand times, in those years of their dwelling together, Mrs.
Thrift's eyes had seemed to say to Charlotte, "You see! This is what a
husband should be. This is a son-in-law. No Dick disgracing us here."
The blow stunned the two old people almost beyond realising its
enormity. The loss was, altogether, about one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. Isaac Thrift set about repaying it. Real estate on
Indiana, Wabash, Michigan, Prairie was sold and the money distributed
to make good the default. They kept the house on Prairie; clung to it.
Anything but that. After it was all over Isaac Thrift was an old man
with palsied hands. Hair and beard whose color had defied the years
were suddenly white. Hetty Thrift's tongue lost its venomous bite.
After Isaac Thrift's death she turned to Charlotte. Charlotte alone
could quell her querulousness. Carrie acted as an irritant, naturally.
They were so much alike. It was Charlotte who made broths and jellies,
milk-toast and gruel with which to tempt the mother's appetite.
Carrie, the mathematical, was a notoriously poor cook. Her mind was
orderly and painstaking enough when it came to figuring on a piece of
property, or a depreciated bond. But it lacked that peculiar patience
necessary to the watching of a boiling pot or a simmering pan.
"Oh, it's done by now," she would cry, and dump a pan's contents into a
dish. Oftener than not it was half-cooked or burned.
Charlotte announced, rather timidly, that she would give music
lessons; sewing lessons; do fine embroidery. But her tinkling tunes
were ghostly echoes of a bygone day. People were even beginning to say
that perhaps, after all, this madman Wagner could be played so that one
might endure listening. Hand embroidery was little appreciated at a
time when imitations were the craze.
Carrie it was who became head of that manless household. It was well
she had wasted her time in doing sums instead of being more elegantly
occupied while at Miss Tait's Finishing School, in the old Wabash
Avenue days. She now juggled interest, simple and compound, with ease;
took charge of the few remaining bits of scattered property saved from
the ruins; talked glibly of lots, quarter-sections, sub-divisions.
All through their childhood Belle and Lottie heard reiterated: "Run
away. Can't you see mother's busy! Ask Aunt Charlotte." So then, it
was Aunt Charlotte who gave them their bread-and-butter with sugar on
top. Gradually the whole household revolved about Carrie, though it was
Charlotte who kept it in motion. When Carrie went to bed the household
went to bed. She must have her rest. Meals were timed to suit Carrie's
needs. She became a business woman in a day when business women were
practically unheard of. She actually opened an office in one of the
new big Clark Street office buildings, near Washington, and had a sign
printed on the door:
MRS. CARRIE PAYSON
REAL ESTATE
BONDS MORTGAGES
_Successor to late Isaac Thrift_
Later she changed this to "Carrie Thrift Payson." Change came easily
to Carrie. Adaptability was one of her gifts. In 1893 (World's Fair
year) she was one of the first to wear the new Eton jacket and separate
skirt of blue serge (it became almost a uniform with women); and the
shirtwaist, a garment that marked an innovation in women's clothes. She
worked like a man, ruled the roost, was as ruthless as a man. She was
neither a good housekeeper nor marketer, but something perverse in her
made her insist on keeping a hand on the reins of household as well as
business. It was, perhaps, due to a colossal egotism and a petty love
of power. Charlotte could have marketed expertly and thriftily but
Carrie liked to do it on her way downtown in the morning, stopping at
grocer's and butcher's on Thirty-first Street and prefacing her order
always with, "I'm in a hurry." The meat, vegetables, and fruit she
selected were never strictly first-grade. A bargain delighted her. If
an orange was a little soft in one spot she reckoned that the spot
could be cut away. Such was her system of false economy.
With the World's Fair came a boom in real estate and Carrie Payson rode
on the crest of it. There still were heart-breaking debts to pay and
she paid them honestly. She was too much a Thrift to do otherwise. She
never became rich, but she did manage a decent livelihood. Fortunately
for all of them, old Isaac Thrift had bought some low swampy land far
out in what was considered the wilderness, near the lake, even beyond
the section known as Cottage Grove. With the Fair this land became
suddenly valuable.
There's no denying that Carrie lacked a certain feminine quality. If
one of the children chanced to fall ill, their mother, bustling home
from the office, had no knack of smoothing a pillow or cooling a hot
little body or easing a pain. "Please, mother, would you mind not doing
that? It makes my headache worse." Her fingers were heavy, clumsy,
almost rough, like a man's. Her maternal guidance of her two daughters
took the form of absent-minded and rather nagging admonitions:
"Belle, you're reading against the light."
"Lottie, did you change your dress when you came home from school?"
"Don't bite that thread with your teeth!" Or, as it became later,
merely, "Your teeth!"
Slowly, but inevitably, the Paysons dropped out of the circle made up
of Chicago's rich old families--old, that is, in a city that reckoned
a twenty-year building a landmark. The dollar sign was beginning to be
the open sesame and this symbol had long been violently erased from
the Thrift-Payson escutcheon. To the ladies in landaus with the little
screw-jointed sun parasols held stiffly before them, Carrie Payson and
Charlotte Thrift still were "Carrie" and "Charlotte dear." They--and
later Belle and Lottie--were asked to the big, inclusive crushes
pretty regularly once a year. But the small smart dinners that were
just coming in; the intimate social gayeties; the clubby affairs, knew
them not. "One of the Thrift girls" might mean anyone in the Prairie
Avenue household, but it was never anything but a term of respect and
meant much to anyone who was native to Chicago. Other Prairie Avenue
mansions sent their daughters to local private schools, or to the
Eastern finishing schools. Belle and Lottie attended the public grammar
school and later Armour Institute for the high school course only.
Middle-aged folk said to Lottie, "My, how much like your Aunt Charlotte
you do look, child!" They never exclaimed in Belle's presence at the
likeness they found in her face. Belle's family resemblance could be
plainly traced to one of whom friends did not speak in public. Belle
was six years her sister's senior, but Lottie, with her serious brow
and her clear, steady eyes, looked almost Belle's age. Though Belle
was known as the flighty one there was more real fun in Lottie. In
Lottie's bedroom there still hangs a picture of the two of them, framed
in passepartout. It was taken--arm in arm--when Lottie was finishing
high school and Belle was about to marry Henry Kemp; high pompadours
over enormous "rats," the whole edifice surmounted by a life-size
_chou_ of ribbon; shirtwaists with broad Gibson tucks that gave
them shoulders of a coal-heaver; plaid circular skirts fitting snugly
about the hips and flaring out in great bell-shaped width at the hem;
and trailing.
"What in the world do you keep that comic valentine hanging up for!"
Belle always exclaimed when she chanced into Lottie's room in later
years.
Often and often, during these years, you might have heard Carrie Payson
say, with bitterness, "I don't want my girls to have the life I've had.
I'll see to it that they don't."
"How are you going to do it?" Charlotte would ask, with a curious smile.
"I'll stay young with them. And I'll watch for mistakes. I know the
world. I ought to. For that matter, I'd as soon they never married."
Charlotte would flare into sudden and inexplicable protest. "You let
them live their own lives, the way they want to, good or bad. How do
you know the way it'll turn out! Nobody knows. Let them live their own
lives."
"Nonsense," from Carrie, crisply. "A mother knows. One uses a little
common sense in these things, that's all. Don't you think a mother
knows?" a rhetorical question, plainly, but:
"No," said Charlotte.