Anyone who has lived in Chicago knows that you don't live on the South
Side. You simply do not live on the South Side. And yet Chicago's
South Side is a pleasant place of fine houses and neat lawns (and
this when every foot of lawn represents a tidy fortune); of trees,
and magnificent parks and boulevards; of stately (if smoke-blackened)
apartment houses; of children, and motor cars; of all that makes for
comfortable, middle-class American life. More than that, booming its
benisons upon the whole is the astounding spectacle of Lake Michigan
forming the section's eastern boundary. And yet Fashion had early
turned its back upon all this as is the way of Fashion with natural
beauty.
We know that the Paysons lived south; and why. We know, too, that
Carrie Payson was the kind of mother who would expect her married
daughter to live near her. Belle had had the courage to make an early
marriage as a way of escape from the Prairie avenue household, but
it was not until much later that she had the temerity to broach the
subject of moving north. She had been twenty when she married Henry
Kemp, ten years her senior. A successful marriage. Even now, nearing
forty, she still said, "Henry, bring me a chair," and Henry brought it.
Not that Henry was a worm. He was merely the American husband before
whom the foreign critic stands aghast. A rather silent, gray-haired,
eye-glassed man with a slim boyish waistline, a fair mashie stroke, a
keen business head, and a not altogether blind devotion to his selfish,
pampered semi-intellectual wife. There is no denying his disappointment
at the birth of his daughter Charlotte. He had needed a son to stand by
him in this family of strong-minded women. It was not altogether from
the standpoint of convenience that he had called Charlotte "Charley"
from the first.
Thwarted in her secret ambition to move north, Belle moved as far south
as possible from the old Prairie Avenue dwelling; which meant that
the Kemps were residents of Hyde Park. Between the two families--the
Kemps in Hyde Park and the Paysons in Prairie Avenue--there existed
a terrible intimacy, fostered by Mrs. Carrie Payson. They telephoned
each other daily. They saw one another almost daily. Mrs. Payson
insisted on keeping a finger on the pulse of her married daughter's
household as well as her own. During Charley's babyhood the innermost
secrets of the nursery, the infant's most personal functions, were
discussed daily via the telephone. Lottie, about sixteen at that time,
and just finishing at Armour, usually ate her hurried breakfast to the
accompaniment of the daily morning telephone talk carried on between
her mother and her married sister.
"How are they this morning?... Again!... Well then give her a little
oil.... Certainly not! I didn't have the doctor in every time you two
girls had a little something wrong.... Oh, you're always having that
baby specialist in every time she makes a face. We never heard of baby
specialists when I was a.... Well, but the oil won't hurt her.... If
they're not normal by to-morrow get him but.... You won't be able to go
to the luncheon, of course.... You are! But if Charley's.... Well, if
she's sick enough to have a doctor she's sick enough to need her mother
at home.... Oh, all right. Only, if anything happens.... How was the
chicken you bought yesterday?... Didn't I tell you it was a tough one!
You pay twice as much over there in Hyde Park.... What are you going to
wear to the luncheon?..."
Throughout her school years Lottie had always had a beau to squire
her about at school parties and boy-and-girl activities. He was
likely to be a rather superior beau, too. No girl as clear-headed as
Lottie, and as intelligently fun-loving and merry, would tolerate
a slow-witted sweetheart. The word sweetheart is used for want of
a better. Of sweethearting there was little among these seventeen-
and eighteen-year-olds. Viewed through the wise eyes of to-day's
adolescents they would have seemed as quaint and stiff as their
pompadours and high collars.
In a day when organised Social Work was considered an original and
rather daring departure for women Lottie Payson seemed destined by
temperament and character to be a successful settlement worker. But she
never became one. Lottie had too much humour and humaneness for the
drab routine of school-teaching; not enough hardness and aggressiveness
for business; none of the creative spark that marks the genius in
art. She was sympathetic without being sentimental; just and fair
without being at all stern or forbidding. Above all she had the gift of
listening. The kind of woman who is better-looking at thirty-five than
at twenty. The kind of woman who learns with living and who marries
early or never. With circumstance and a mother like Mrs. Carrie Payson
against her, Lottie's chances of marrying early were hardly worth
mentioning. Lottie was the kind of girl who "is needed at home."
Don't think that she hadn't young men to walk home with her from
school. She had. But they were likely to be young men whose collars
were not guiltless of eraser marks; who were active in the debating
societies; and whose wrists hung, a red oblong, below their too-short
sleeves. The kind of young man destined for utter failure or great
success. The kind of young man who tries a pecan grove in Carolina,
or becomes president of a bank in New York. None of these young men
ever kissed Lottie. I think that sometimes, looking at her serious
pretty lips closed so firmly over the white teeth, they wanted to. I'm
sure that Lottie, though she did not know it, wished they would. But
they never did. Lottie absolutely lacked coquetry as does the woman
who tardily develops a sense of sex power. In Lottie's junior year
these gawky and studious young men narrowed down to one. His name
was Rutherford Hayes Adler and he was a Jew. There is no describing
him without the use of the word genius, and in view of his novels of
to-day (R. H. Adler) there is no need to apologise for the early use
of the word. He was a living refutation of the belief that a brilliant
mathematician has no imagination. His Armour report cards would have
done credit to young Euclid; and he wrote humorous light verse to
Lottie and sold insurance on the side. Being swarthy, black-haired, and
black-eyed he was cursed with a taste for tan suits and red neckties.
These, with the high choker collar of the period, gave him the look
of an end-man strayed from the minstrel troupe. Being naturally shy,
he assumed a swagger. He was lovable and rather helpless, and his
shoe strings were always coming untied. His humour sense was so keen,
so unerring, so fastidious as to be almost a vice. Armour students who
did not understand it said, "He's a funny fellow. I don't know--kind of
batty, isn't he?"
This young man it was who walked home with Lottie Payson all through
her junior and senior years; sat next to her at meetings of the
debating society; escorted her to school festivities; went bicycling
with her on Saturday afternoons. The Payson household paid little
attention to him or to Lottie. Belle was busy with her love affair.
Henry Kemp had just appeared on her horizon. Mrs. Payson was deep in
her real estate transactions. On the few occasions when Rutherford
Hayes actually entered the house and sat down to await Lottie the two
were usually on their way to some innocuous entertainment or outing.
So that it was Aunt Charlotte, if anybody, who said "How do you do,
young man. Oh yes, you're Mr. Adler. Lottie'll be right down." A little
silence. Then kindly, from Aunt Charlotte, "H'm! How do you like your
school work?" Years afterwards Adler put Aunt Charlotte into one of
his books. And Lottie. And Mrs. Carrie Payson, too. He had reason to
remember Mrs. Carrie Payson.
It was at the end of Lottie's senior year that Mrs. Payson became
aware of this young man whose swart face seemed always to be just
appearing or disappearing around the corner with Lottie either smiling
in greeting or waving a farewell. End-of-the-year school festivities
were accountable for this. Then, too, Belle must have registered some
objection. When next young Adler appeared at the Prairie Avenue house
it was Mrs. Payson who sailed down the rather faded green river of the
parlor carpet.
"How do you do," said Mrs. Payson; her glance said, "What are you doing
here, in this house?"
Rutherford Hayes Adler wanted to get up from the chair into which
his lank length was doubled. He knew he should get up. But a hideous
shyness kept him there--bound him with iron bands. When finally, with
a desperate effort, he broke them and stumbled to his feet it was too
late. Mrs. Payson had seated herself--if being seated can describe the
impermanent position which she now assumed on the extreme edge of the
stiffest of the stiff parlor chairs.
The sallow, skinny little Carrie Thrift had mellowed--no, that word
won't do--had developed into an erect, dignified, white-haired woman of
rather imposing mien. The white hair, in particular, was misleadingly
softening.
"May I ask your father's name?" she said. Just that.
The boy had heard that tone used many times in the past nineteen
hundred years. "Adler," he replied.
"Yes, I know. But his first name. What is his first name, please?"
"His first name was Abraham--Abraham I. Adler. The I stands for Isaac."
"Abraham--Isaac--Adler," repeated Mrs. Payson. As she uttered the words
they were an opprobrium.
"Your father's name was Isaac too, wasn't it?" said the boy.
"His name was Isaac Thrift." An altogether different kind of Isaac, you
would have thought. No relation to the gentleman in the Bible. A New
England Isaac not to be confused with the Levantine of that name.
"Yes. I remember I used to hear my grandfather speak of him."
"Indeed! In what connection, may I ask?"
"Why, he came to Chicago in '39, just about the time your father
came, I imagine. They were young men together. Grandfather was an old
settler."
Mrs. Payson's eyebrows doubted it. "I don't remember ever having seen
him mentioned in books on early Chicago."
"You wouldn't," said Adler; "he isn't."
"And why not?"
"Jew," said Rutherford Hayes, pleasantly, and laconically.
Mrs. Payson stood up. So did the boy. He had no difficulty in
rising now. No self-consciousness, no awkwardness. There was about
him suddenly a fluid grace, an easy muscular rhythm. "Of course,
grandfather has been dead a good many years now," he went on politely,
"and father, too."
"I'm afraid Lottie won't be able to go this evening," Mrs. Payson said.
"She has been going out too much. It is bad for her school work. Young
girls nowadays----"
"I see. I'm sorry." There was nothing of humility in the little bow he
made from the waist. Ten minutes earlier you would never have thought
him capable of so finished an act as that bow. He walked to the folding
doors that led to the hall. On the way his glance fell on the portrait
of old Isaac Thrift over the liver-coloured marble mantel. It was a
fine portrait. One of Healy's. Adler paused a moment before it. "Is
that a good portrait of your father?"
"It is considered very like him."
"It must be. I can see now why my grandfather took his part to the
last."
"Took his part!" But her tone was a shade less corroding. "In what, if
you please?"
"Grandfather lost his fortune when a firm he trusted proved--well, when
a member of it proved untrustworthy."
When he grew older he was always ashamed of having thus taken a mean
advantage of a woman. But he was so young at the time; and she had
hurt him so deeply. He turned again now, for the door. And there stood
Lottie, brave, but not quite brave enough. She was not wearing her
white dress--her party dress, for the evening. Her mother had forbidden
her to come down. And yet here she was. Braver--not much, but still
braver--than Charlotte had been before her.
"I--I can't go, Ford," she faltered.
"It's all right," he said, then. And there, before the white-haired,
relentless, and disapproving Carrie Payson he went up to her, put one
lean dark hand on her shoulder, drew her to him and kissed her, a funny
little boyish peck on the forehead. "Good-bye, Lottie," he said. And
was gone.
Lottie's being needed at home began before the failure of Aunt
Charlotte's sight. Aunt Charlotte had to go to the eye specialist's
daily. Lottie took her. This was even before the day of the ramshackle
electric. Lottie never begrudged Aunt Charlotte the service. Already
between these two women, the one hardly more than twenty, the other
already past sixty, there existed a curious and unspoken understanding.
They were not voluble women, these two. Lottie never forgot those two
hours in the waiting room of the famous specialist. Every chair was
occupied, always. Silent, idle, waiting figures with something more
crushed and apprehensive about them than ordinarily about the waiting
ones in a doctor's outer room. The neat little stack of magazines on
the centre table remained untouched. Sometimes, if the wait was a long
one, Lottie would run out for an hour's shopping; or would drop in at
her mother's office. Mrs. Payson usually was busy with a client; maps,
documents, sheafs of blue-bound papers. But if one of her daughters
came downtown without dropping in at the office she took it as a
deliberate slight; or as a disregard of parental authority. Lottie
hated the door marked:
CARRIE THRIFT PAYSON
REAL ESTATE
BONDS MORTGAGES
"Oh, you're busy."
Mrs. Payson would glance up. There was nothing absent-minded about the
glance. For the moment her attention was all on Lottie. "Sit down. Wait
a minute."
"I'll come back."
"Wait."
Lottie waited. Finally, "Aunt Charlotte will be wondering----"
"We're through now." She would sit back in her desk chair, her hands
busy with the papers, her eyes on her client. "Now, if you'll come
in again on Monday, say, at about this time, I'll have the abstract
for you, and the trust deed. In the meantime I'll get in touch with
Spielbauer----"
She would rise, as would her client, a man, usually. With the
conclusion of the business in hand she effected a quick change of
manner; became the woman in business instead of the business woman.
Sometimes the client happened to be an old time acquaintance, in which
case Carrie Payson would put a hand on Lottie's shoulder. "This is my
baby."
The client would laugh genially, "Quite a baby!" This before the word
had taken on its slang significance.
"I wouldn't know what to do without her," Mrs. Payson would say. "I
have to be here all day."
"Yes, they're a great help. Great help. Well--see you Monday, Mrs.
Payson. Same time. If you'll just see Spielbauer----"
The door closed, Mrs. Payson would turn again to Lottie. "What was the
girl doing when you left?"
"Why--she was still ironing."
"How far had she got?"
"All the fancy things. She was beginning on the sheets."
"Well, I should think so! At that hour."
Lottie turned toward the door. "Aunt Charlotte'll be waiting."
Mrs. Payson must have a final thumb on the clay. "Be very careful
crossing the streets." And yet there was pride and real affection in
her eyes as she looked after the sturdy vigorous figure speeding down
the corridor toward the elevator.
Once, when Lottie returned to the oculist's after a longer absence
than usual Aunt Charlotte had gone. "How long?" The attendant thought
it must be fifteen minutes. Chicago's downtown streets, even to the
young and the keen-sighted, were a maelstrom dotted at intervals by
blue-uniformed figures who held up a magic arm and blew a shrill blast
just when a swirl and torrent of drays, cabs, street-cars, and trucks
with plunging horses threatened completely to engulf them. Added to
this was the thunderous roar of the Wabash Avenue L trains. Even when
the crossing was comparatively safe and clear the deafening onrush of
a passing L train above always caused Aunt Charlotte to scuttle back
to the curb from which she was about to venture forth. The roar seemed
to be associated in her mind with danger; it added to her confusion.
Leading a horse out of a burning barn was play compared with ushering
Aunt Charlotte across a busy downtown street.
"Just let me take my time," she would say, tremulously but stubbornly
immovable.
"But Aunt Charlotte if we don't go now we'll be here forever. Now's the
time."
Aunt Charlotte would not budge. Then, at the wrong moment, she would
dart suddenly across to the accompaniment of the startled whoop or
curse of a driver, chauffeur, or car conductor obliged to draw a quick
rein or jam on an emergency brake to avoid running her down.
Lottie, knowing all this, sped toward Wabash Avenue with fear in her
heart, and a sort of anger born of fear. "Oh, dear! It does seem to me
she might have waited. Mother didn't want a thing. Not a thing. I told
her----"
She came to the corner of Wabash and Madison where they always took the
Indiana Avenue car. She saw a little group of people near the curb and
her heart contracted as she sped on, but when she came up to them it
was only a balky automobile engine that had drawn their attention. She
looked across at the corner which was their car-stop. There stood Aunt
Charlotte. At once cowering, brave; terrified, courageous. At sight of
that timorous, peering, black-garbed figure Lottie gave a little sob.
The blood rushed back to her heart as though it had lain suspended in
her veins.
"Aunt Charlotte, why did you do it?"
"I got across alone."
"But why didn't you wait for me? You knew----"
"I got across alone. But the street car--the wagons never stopping so
a body can get out to the street car. And no way of telling whether it
was an Indiana or a Cottage Grove. But I got across alone." She had her
five-cent piece in her black-gloved trembling hand.
Safely in the car, Lottie waxed stern again. "Why didn't you wait, Aunt
Charlotte? You knew I'd be back as soon as I could. I didn't mean to be
late. That was awfully naughty of you, Charlotte Thrift."
Aunt Charlotte was looking out of the car window. What she saw must
have been little more than a blur to her. But something told Lottie
that in the dim eyes turned away from her was still another blur--a
blur of hot mist. Lottie leaned forward, covering with her own firm
cool young grasp the hand that lay so inertly in the black silk lap.
"What is it? Why----"
Aunt Charlotte turned and Lottie saw that what she had sensed was
true. "It isn't right!" said Aunt Charlotte almost fiercely, and yet
in a half-whisper, for the car was crowded and she had a horror of
attracting public notice.
"What isn't?"
"Your calling for me, and bringing me back. Every day. Every day."
"Now! You're just a little blue to-day; but the doctor said you'd only
have to come down for treatment a week or two more."
"It isn't me. It's you. Your life! Your life!"
A little flush crept into Lottie's face. "It's all right, dear."
"It isn't all right. Don't you think I know!" Aunt Charlotte's voice
suddenly took on a deep and resonant note--the note of exhortation.
"Lottie, you're going to be eaten alive by two old cannibal women. I
know. I know. Don't you let 'em! You've got your whole life before you.
Live it the way you want to. Then you'll have only yourself to blame.
Don't you let somebody else live it for you. Don't you."
"How about mother, slaving down in that office all day, when all the
other women of her age are taking it easy--a nap at noon, and afternoon
parties, and a husband to work for them?"
"Slaving fiddlesticks! She likes it. Your mother'd rather read the real
estate transfers than a novel. Besides, she doesn't need to. We could
live on the rents. Nothing very grand, maybe. But we could live. And
why not let you do something? That's what I'd like to know! Why not----"
"Oh, I'd love it. All the girls--that is, all the girls I like--are
doing some kind of work. But mother says----"
Aunt Charlotte sniffed. It was almost a snort. "I know what your mother
says. 'No daughter of mine is going to work for her living.' Hmph!"
(Which is not expressing it, but nearly.) "Calls herself modern. She's
your grandfather over again and he thought he was a whole generation
ahead of his generation. Wasn't, though. Little behind, if anything."
Sometimes Aunt Charlotte, the subdued, the vaguely wistful, had a
sparkling pugnacity, a sudden lift of spirits that showed for a
brief moment a glimpse of the girl of fifty years ago. A tiff with
Carrie Payson (in which Charlotte, strangely enough, usually came off
victorious) often brought about this brief phenomenon. At such times
she had even been known to sing, in a high off-key falsetto, such
ghostly, but rakish, echoes as: Champagne Charley Was His Name, or,
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, or even, Up in a Balloon Boys.
Strangely enough as she grew older this mood became more and more
familiar. It was a sort of rebirth. At times she assumed an almost
jaunty air. It was as though life, having done its worst, was no longer
feared by her.
In spite of objections, Lottie made sporadic attempts to mingle in the
stream of life that was flowing so swiftly past her--this new life of
service and self-expression into which women were entering. Settlement
work; folk dancing, pageantry, juvenile and girls' court work; social
service; departmental newspaper work. Lottie was attracted by all of
these and to any one of them she might have given valuable service. A
woman, Emma Barton, not yet fifty, had been appointed assistant judge
of the new girls' court. No woman had held a position such as that.
Lottie had met her. The two had become friends--close friends in spite
of the disparity in their ages.
"I need you so badly up here," Emma Barton often told Lottie. "You've
got a way with girls; and you're not school-teachery or judicial with
them. That's the trouble with the regular court worker. And they talk
to you, don't they? Why, I wonder?
"Maybe it's because I listen," Lottie replied. "And they think I'm sort
of simple. Maybe I am. But not so simple as they think." She laughed.
A visit to Judge Barton's court always stimulated her, even while it
saddened.
Chicagoans, for the most part, read in the papers of Judge Barton and
pictured in their minds a stout and pink-jowled judiciary in a black
coat, imposing black-ribboned eyeglasses, and careful linen. These
people, if they chanced to be brought face to face with Judge Barton,
were generally seen to smile uncertainly as though a joke were being
played on them without success. They saw a small, mild-faced woman
with graying hair and bright brown eyes--piercing eyes that yet had a
certain liquid quality. She was like a wise little wren who has seen
much of life and understands more than she has seen, and forgives more
than she understands. A blue cloth dress with, probably, some bright
embroidery worked on it. A modern workaday dress on a modern woman.
Underneath, characteristically enough, a black sateen petticoat with a
pocket in it, like a market woman. A morning spent in Judge Barton's
court was life with the cover off. It was a sight vouchsafed to few.
Emma Barton discouraged the curious and ousted the morbidly prying.
Besides, there was no space in her tiny room for more than the persons
concerned. It was less like a court room than your own office, perhaps.
Then there was Winnie Steppler, who wrote for Chicago's luridest
newspaper under the nom de plume of "Alice Yorke." A pink-cheeked,
white-haired, Falstaffian woman with the look and air of a picture-book
duchess and the wit and drollery of a gamin. Twice married, twice
widowed; wise with a terrible wisdom; seeing life so plainly that she
could not write of what she saw. There were no words. Or perhaps the
gift of words had kindly been denied her. Her "feature stuff" was
likely to be just that. Her conversation was razor-keen and as Irish as
she cared to make it. People were always saying to her, "Why don't you
write the way you talk?"
"It's lucky for my friends I don't talk the way I write."
Perhaps these two women, more than anything or anyone else, had
influenced Lottie to intolerance of aimless diversion. Not that Lottie
had much time for her own aimless diversion even if she had fancied it.
Rheumatism of a painful and crippling kind had laid its iron fingers
upon Carrie Payson. Arthritis, the doctors called it. It affected only
the fingers of the left hand--but because of it the downtown real
estate office was closed. The three women were home together now in the
big old house on Prairie, and Mrs. Payson was talking of selling it
and moving into an apartment out south. It was about this time, too,
that she bought the electric--one of the thousands that now began to
skim Chicago's boulevards--and to which Lottie became a galley slave.
She sometimes thought humorously of the shiny black levers as oars and
the miles of boulevard as an endless sea to which she was condemned.
Don't think that Lottie Payson was sorry for herself. If she had been
perhaps it would have been better for her. For ten years or more she
had been so fully occupied in doing her duty--or what she considered
her obvious duty--that she had scarcely thought of her obligations
toward herself. If you had disturbing thoughts you put them out of
your mind. And slammed the door on them. When she was twenty-nine, or
thereabouts, she had read a story that stuck in her memory. It was
Balzac's short story of the old maid who threw herself into the well.
She went to Aunt Charlotte with it.
"Now that's a morbid, unnatural kind of story, isn't it?" she said.
Aunt Charlotte's forefinger made circles, round and round, on her
black-silk knee. Lottie had read the story aloud to her. "No. It's
true. And it's natural."
"I don't see how you can say so. Now, when you were about forty----"
"When I was thirty-five or forty I had you and Belle. To tend to, I
mean, and look after. If I hadn't had you I don't say that I would have
gone off with the butcher boy, but I don't say that I wouldn't. Every
time I wiped your noses or buttoned you up or spatted your hands when
you were naughty it was a--well--a----"
"A sort of safety valve, you mean?" Lottie supplied the figure for her.
"Yes. Between thirty-five and forty--that's the time to look out for.
You can fool nature just so long, and then she turns around and hits
back."
"But look at all the girls I know--women of my age, and older--who are
happy, and busy and contented."
There came a soft look into the dark eyes beneath the heavy black
brows. From the vantage point of her years and experience she
pronounced upon her sex. "Women are wonderful, Lottie," she said. "Just
wonderful. A good thing for the race that men aren't like 'em. In
self-control, I mean, and that. Wouldn't _be_ any race, I reckon."