As the spring months moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and counter-meetings; agitators, panaceas, university lecturers, sociologizing preachers, philanthropists, politicians—discontent and discord. The laborer starved, and the employer sulked.

"The extravagant poor are unwilling to let the thrifty reap the rewards of their savings and abstinence," lectured the Political Economist of the standard school. "The law of wages and capital is immutable. More science is needed."

"The rich are vultures and sharks," shrieked the Labor Agitator.

"And will ye let your brother starve?" exhorted the Preacher.

"For it is as clear as the nose on your face that corporations corrupt legislatures, and buy judges, and oppress the poor," insinuated the Socialist.

"It's that wretched free trade," howled the hungry Politician, "and Cleveland and all his evil deeds. See what we will do for you."

"Yes, it's free trade," bawled one newspaper.

"It's nefarious England," snarled another.

"It's the greed of Wall Street, the crime against silver, the burden of the mortgage," vociferated a third.

"It's 'hard times,'" the meek sighed, and furbished up last year's clothes, and cut the butcher's bill.

"Yes, it's 'hard times,' a time of psychological depression and distrust," softly said the rich man. "A good time to invest my savings profitably. Real estate is low; bonds and mortgages are as cheap as dirt. Some day people will be cheerful once more, and these good things will multiply and yield fourfold. Yea, I will not bury my talent in a napkin."

Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of the world.

The first sore to break, ironically enough, was in the "model industrial town" of Pullman. That dispute over the question of a living wage grew bitterer day by day. Well-to-do people praised the directors for their firm resolve to keep the company's enormous surplus quite intact. The men said the officers of the company lied: it was an affair of complicated bookkeeping. The brutal fact of it was that the company rested within its legal rights. The unreasonable people were dissatisfied with an eighth of a loaf, while their employers were content with a half. Then there was trouble among the mines, and the state troops were called out. Sores multiplied; men talked; but capital could not be coerced.

But while politicians squabbled and capitalists sulked and economists talked, a strong tide of fellowship in misery was rising from west to east. Unconsciously, far beneath the surface, the current was moving,—a current of common feeling, of solidarity among those who work by day for their daily bread. The country was growing richer, but they were poorer. There began to be talk of Debs, the leader of a great labor machine. The A. R. U. had fought one greedy corporation with success, and intimidated another. Sometime in June this Debs and his lieutenant, Howard, came to Chicago. The newspapers had little paragraphs of meagre information about the A. R. U. convention. One day there was a meeting in which a committee of the Pullman strikers set forth their case. At the close of that meeting the great boycott had been declared. "Mere bluff," said the newspapers. But the managers of the railroads "got together." Some of them had already cut the wage lists on their roads. They did not feel sure that it was all "bluff."

* * * * *

It was the first day of the A. R. U. boycott. Sommers left the Athenian Building at noon, for Dr. Lindsay's clients carried their infirmities out of town in hot weather. He took his way across the city toward the station of the Northwestern Railroad, wondering whether Debs's threats had been carried out, and if consequently he should be compelled to remain in town over Sunday. On the street corners and in front of the newspaper offices little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country of theirs had been exploited,—shamefully, rapaciously, swinishly,—and now that the first signs of exhaustion were showing themselves, the people's eyes were opening to the story of greed. Democracy! Say, rather, Plutocracy, the most unblushing the world had ever seen,—the aristocracy of THOSE WHO HAVE.

Thus meditating, he jostled against a group of men who were coming from a saloon. All but one wore the typical black clothes and derby hats of the workman's best attire; one had on a loose-fitting, English tweed suit. In this latter person Sommers was scarcely surprised to recognize Dresser. The big shoulders of the blond-haired fellow towered above the others; he was talking excitedly, and they were listening. When they started to cross the street, Sommers touched Dresser.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded abruptly.

"What are you doing? You had better get out of town along with your rich friends." He motioned sneeringly at the bag in Sommers's hand.

"I fancied you might be up to something of this kind," Sommers went on, unheeding his sneer.

"I had enough of that job of faking up text-books and jollying schoolteachers. So I chucked it."

"Why did you chuck me, too?"

"I thought you might be sick of having me hang about, and especially now that I am in with the other crowd."

"That's rot," Sommers laughed. "However, you needn't feel it necessary to apologize. What are you doing with 'the other crowd'?"

"I'm secretary of the central committee," Dresser replied, with some importance.

"Oh, that's it!" Sommers exclaimed. "It's better than being a boot-licker to the rich."

"Like the doctors? Well, we won't quarrel. I suppose you mean to give 'us' a hard time of it? Come in when it is all settled, and we will talk it over. Meantime you've got enough mischief on your hands to last you for some months."

"I don't blame you," Dresser said benignantly, "for your position. Perhaps if I had had the opportunities—"

"That's just it. Your crowd are all alike, at least the leaders; they are hungry for the fleshpots. If they had the opportunities, we should be served as they are now. That's the chief trouble,—nobody really cares to make the sacrifices. And that is why this row will be ended on the old terms: the rich will buy out the leaders. Better times will come, and we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old basis. But you," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow, "people like you are the real curse."

"Why?"

"Because you are insincere. All you want is the pie. You make me feel that the privileged classes are right in getting what they can out of fools and—knaves."

"That's about enough. I suppose you are put out about the money—"

"Don't be an ass, Dresser. I don't need the hundred. And I don't want a quarrel. I think you are playing with dynamite, because you can't get the plunder others have got. Look out when the dynamite comes down."

"It makes no difference to me," Dresser protested sullenly.

"No! That's why you are dangerous. Well, good-by. Get your friends to leave the Northwestern open a day or two longer."

"There won't be a train running on the Northwestern to-morrow. I've seen the orders."

"Well, I shall foot it home, then."

They shook hands, and Dresser hurried on after his friends. Sommers retraced his steps toward the station. Dresser's vulgar and silly phrase, "boot-licker to the rich," turned up oddly in his memory. It annoyed him. Every man who sought to change his place, to get out of the ranks, was in a way a "boot-licker to the rich." He recalled that he was on his way to the rich now, with a subconscious purpose in his mind of joining them if he could. Miss Hitchcock's wealth would not be enormous, and it would be easy enough to show that he was not "boot-licker to the rich." But it was hard to escape caste prejudices, to live with those who prize ease and yet keep one's own ideals and opinions. If this woman had the courage to leave her people, to open a new life with him elsewhere—he smiled at the picture of Miss Hitchcock conjured up by the idea.

The streets were filthy as always, and the sultry west wind was sweeping the filth down the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant, their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along the river a strange stillness prevailed. "Nothing was doing," in the idiom of the street. Along the platforms of the railroad company's train house, however, a large crowd of idlers had assembled. They were watching to see whether the trainmen would make up the Overland Limited. Debs had said that this company would not move its through trains if it persisted in using the tabooed Pullmans. Stout chains had been attached to the sleepers to prevent any daring attempt to cut out the cars at the last moment. A number of officials from the general offices were hurrying to and fro apprehensively. There was some delay, but finally the heavy train began to move. It wound slowly out of the shed, in a sullen silence of the onlookers. In the yards it halted. There was a derisive cry, but in a few moments it started again and disappeared.

"I guess it's all bluff," a smartly dressed young man remarked to Sommers. "There's the general manager getting into the Lake Forest two-ten, and Smith of the C., B. and Q., and Rollins of the Santa Fe, are with him. The general managers have been in session most of last night and this morning. They're going to fight it out, if it costs a hundred millions."

The young man's views seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike now," remarked a fat, perspiring stockbroker. "Roads aren't earning anything, anyhow."

The conductor who was taking the tickets smiled and kept his own counsel.

"Good time to buy rails, all the same," his companion answered.

"I guess this'll yank old Pullman back to town," another remarked, glancing up from his paper.

"You don't know him. It won't bother him. He's keeping cool somewhere in the St. Lawrence. It's up to the railroads now."

"Let's see your clubs. Did you get 'em straight from Scotland? That's a pretty iron."

Older men were chatting confidentially and shaking their heads. But the atmosphere was not gloomy; an air of easy, assured optimism prevailed. "I guess it will all come out right, somehow, and the men will be glad to get back to work.... If Cleveland and his free trade were in hell!..." And the train sped on through the northern suburbs, coming every now and then within eyeshot of the sparkling lake. The holiday feeling gained as the train got farther away from the smoke and heat of the city. The young men belonged to the "nicer" people, who knew each other in a friendly, well-bred way. It was a comfortable, social kind of picnic of the better classes.

Most of the younger men, and Sommers with them, got into the omnibus waiting at the Lake Forest station, and proceeded at once to the club. There, in the sprawling, freshly painted club-house, set down on a sun-baked, treeless slope, people were already gathered. A polo match was in progress and also a golf tournament. The verandas were filled with ladies. One part of the verandas had been screened off, and there, in a kind of outdoor cafe, people were lunching or sipping cool drinks. At one of the tables Sommers found Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Porter, surrounded by a group of young men and women who were talking and laughing excitedly.

"Ah! you couldn't get the twelve-thirty," Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, as Sommers edged to her. "We waited luncheon for you until the train came; but you are in time for the polo. Caspar is playing—and Parker," she added in a lower tone. "Let us go down there and watch them."

Miss Hitchcock detached herself skilfully from the buzzing circle on the veranda, and the two stepped out on the springy turf. The undulating prairie was covered with a golden haze. Half a mile west a thin line of trees pencilled the horizon. The golf course lay up and down the gentle turfy swells between the club-house and the wind-break of trees. The polo grounds were off to the left, in a little hollow beside a copse of oak. There were not many trees over the sixty or more acres, and the roads on either side of the club grounds were marked by dense clouds of dust. Yet it was gay—open to the June heavens, with a sense of limitless breathing space. And it was also very decorous, well-bred, and conventional.

As they strolled leisurely over the lawns in front of the club-house, Miss Hitchcock stopped frequently to speak to some group of spectators, or to greet cheerfully a golfer as he started for the first tee. She seemed very animated and happy; the decorative scene fitted her admirably. Dr. Lindsay came up the slope, laboring toward the ninth hole with prodigious welter.

"That's the way he keeps young," Miss Hitchcock commented approvingly. "He's one of the best golfers in the club. I like to see the older men showing that they have powers of enjoyment left."

"I guess there's no doubt about Lindsay's powers of enjoyment," Sommers retorted idly.

They passed Mrs. Carson, "ingeniously and correctly associated," as Miss Hitchcock commented, and little Laura Lindsay flirting with young Polot.

Miss Hitchcock quickened her pace, for the polo had already begun. They saw Caspar Porter's little pony fidgeting under its heavy burden. It became unmanageable and careered wildly up and down the field, well out of range of the players. Indeed, most of the ponies seemed inclined to keep their shins out of the melee. Sommers laughed rather ill-naturedly, and Miss Hitchcock frowned. She disliked slovenly playing, and shoddy methods even in polo. When the umpire called time, Parker Hitchcock rode up to where they were standing and shook hands with the young doctor. As he trotted off, his sister said earnestly:

"You have done so much for him; we can never thank you."

"I don't believe I have done so very much," Sommers replied. He did not like to have her refer to his mission in New York, or to make, woman-wise, a sentimental story out of a nasty little scrape.

"I think polo will help him; papa agrees with me now."

"Indeed!" Sommers smiled,

"What is it that you don't say?" the girl flashed at him resentfully.

"Merely, that this is a nice green paddock for a young man to be turned out in—when he has barked his shins. Do you know what happens to the ordinary young man who is—a bit wild?"

"Well, let us not go into it. I am afraid of you to-day."

"Yes, I am in one of my crude moods to-day, I confess. I had no business to come."

"Not at all. This is just the place for you. Nice people, nice day, nice sporty feeling in the air. You need relaxation badly."

"I don't think I shall get it exactly here."

"Why not?"

The girl looked out over the shaven turf, dotted with the white figures of the golfers, at the careering ponies which had begun the new round in the match, up the slope where the club verandas were gay with familiar figures,—and it all seemed very good. The man at her side could see all that and more beyond. He had come within the hour from the din of the city, where the wealth that flowered here was made. And there was a primitive, eternal, unanswerable question harassing his soul.



CHAPTER XVI

"Shall we walk over to the lake," the girl suggested gently, as if anxious to humor some incomprehensible child. "There is a lovely ravine we can explore, all cool and shady, and this sun is growing oppressive."

Sommers accepted gratefully the concession she made to his unsocial mood. The ravine path revealed unexpected wildness and freshness. The peace of twilight had already descended there. Miss Hitchcock strolled on, apparently forgetful of fatigue, of the distance they were putting between them and the club-house. Sommers respected the charm of the occasion, and, content with evading the chattering crowd, refrained from all strenuous discussion. This happy, well-bred, contented woman, full of vitality and interest, soothed all asperities. She laid him in subtle subjection to her. So they chatted of the trivial things that must be crossed and explored before understanding can come. When they neared the lake, the sun had sunk so far that the beach was one long, dark strip of shade. The little waves lapped coolly along the breakwaters. They continued their stroll, walking easily on the hard sand, each unwilling to break the moment of perfect adjustment. Finally the girl confessed her fatigue, and sat down beside a breakwater, throwing off her hat, and pushing her hair away from her temples. She looked up at the man and smiled. 'You see,' she seemed to say, 'I can meet you on your own ground, and the world is very beautiful when one gets away, when one gets away!'

"Why did you refuse to go abroad with Uncle Brome?" she asked suddenly. She was looking out idly across the lake, but something in her voice puzzled Sommers.

"I didn't want to go."

"Chicago fascinates you already!"

"There were more reasons than one," he answered, after a moment's hesitation, as if he could trust himself no farther. The girl smiled a bit, quite to herself. Her throat palpitated a little, and then she turned her head.

"Tell me about the cases. Are they so interesting?"

"There is one curious case," the young doctor responded with masculine literalness. "It's hardly a case, but an affair I have mixed myself up with. Do you remember the night of the dinner at your house when Lindsay was there? The evening before I had been at the Paysons' dance, and when I returned there was an emergency case just brought to the hospital. They had telephoned for me, but had missed me. Well, the fellow was a drunken brute that had been shot a number of times. His wife was with him."

Sommers paused, finding now that he had started on his tale that it was difficult to bring out his point, to make this girl understand the significance of it, and the reason why he told it to her. She was attentive, but he thought she was a trifle bored. Soon he began again and went over all the steps of the affair.

"You see," he concluded, "I was morally certain that, if the operation succeeded, the fellow would be worse than useless in this world. Now it's coming true. Of course I have no responsibility; I did what any other doctor should have done, I suppose; and, if it had been an ordinary hospital case, I don't suppose that I should have thought twice about it. But you see that I—this woman has got her load of misery saddled on her, perhaps for life, and partly through me."

"I think she did right," the girl responded quickly, looking at the case from an entirely different side.

"I am not sure of that," Sommers retorted brusquely.

"What kind of a woman is she?" the girl inquired with interest, ignoring his last remark.

"I don't think I could make you understand her. I don't myself now."

"Is she pretty?"

"I don't know. She makes you see her always."

The girl moved as if the evening wind had touched her, and put on her hat.

"She's a desperately literal woman, primitive, the kind you never meet—well, out here. She has a thirst for happiness, and doesn't get a drop."

"She must be common, or she wouldn't have married that man," Miss Hitchcock commented in a hard tone. She rose, and without discussion they took the path that led along the bluff to the cottages.

"I didn't think so," the doctor answered positively. "And if you knew her, you wouldn't think so."

After a moment he said tentatively, "I wish you could meet her."

"I should be glad to," Miss Hitchcock replied sweetly, but without interest.

Sommers realized the instant he had spoken that he had made a mistake, that his idea was a purely conventional one. The two women could have nothing but their sex in common, and that common possession was as likely to be a ground for difference as for agreement. It was always useless to bring two people of different classes together. Three generations back the families of these two women were probably on the same level of society. And, as woman to woman, the schoolteacher, who travelled the dreary path between the dingy cottage and the Everglade School, was as full of power and beauty as this velvety specimen of plutocracy. It was sentimental, however, to ignore the present facts. Evidently Miss Hitchcock had followed the same line of reasoning, for when she spoke again she referred distantly to Mrs. Preston.

"Those people—teachers—have their own clubs and society. Mrs. Bannerton was a teacher in the schools before she was married. Do you know Mrs. Bannerton?"

"I have met Mrs. Bannerton," Sommers answered indifferently.

He was annoyed at the trivial insertion of Mrs. Bannerton into the conversation. He had failed to make Mrs. Preston's story appear important, or even interesting, and the girl by his side had shown him delicately that he was a bore. They walked more rapidly in the gathering twilight. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the ravine below their path was gloomy. The mood of the day had changed, and he was sorry—for everything. It was a petty matter—it was always some petty thing—that came in between them. He longed to recall the moment on the beach when she had asked him, with a flicker of a smile upon her face, why he had decided to remain in Chicago. But they were strangers to each other now,—hopelessly strangers,—and the worst of it was that they both knew it.

* * * * *

There was a large house party at the Hitchcock cottage. The Porters and the Lindsays, with other guests, were there for the holidays of the Fourth, and some more people came in for dinner. The men who had arrived on the late trains brought more news of the strike: the Illinois Central was tied up, the Rock Island service was crippled, and there were reports that the Northwestern men were going out en masse on the morrow. The younger people took the matter gayly, as an opportune occasion for an extended lark. The older men discussed the strike from all sides, and looked grave. Over the cigars the general attitude toward the situation came out strongly: the strikers were rash fools; they'd find that out in a few weeks. They could do a great deal of harm under their dangerous leaders, but, if need be, the courts, the state, the federal government, would be invoked for aid. Law and order and private rights must be respected. The men said these things ponderously, with the conviction that they were reciting a holy creed of eternal right. They were men of experience, who had never questioned the worth of the society in which they were privileged to live. They knew each other, and they knew life, and at the bottom it was as useless to kick against the laws of society as to interfere with the laws of nature. Besides, it was all very good—a fair enough field for any one.

Sommers was excited by the reports. It made him restless to be lolling here outside of the storm when such a momentous affair was moving down the lake under the leaden pall of the city smoke. He asked questions eagerly, and finally got into discussion with old Boardman, one of the counsel for a large railroad.

"Who is that raw youth?" old Boardman asked Porter, when the younger men joined the ladies on the veranda.

"Some protege of Alec's," Brome Porter replied. "Son of an old friend—fresh chap."

"I am afraid our young friend is not going to turn out well," Dr. Lindsay, who had overheard the discussion, added in a distressed tone. "I have done what I can for him, but he is very opinionated and green—yes, very green. Pity—he is a clever fellow, one of the cleverest young surgeons in the city."

"He talks about what he doesn't know," Boardman pronounced sententiously. "When he's lived with decent folks a little longer, he'll get some sense knocked into his puppy head, maybe."

"Maybe," Brome Porter assented, dismissing this crude, raw, green, ignorant young man with a contemptuous grunt.

Outside on the brick terrace the younger people had gathered in a circle and were discussing the polo match. Miss Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came to his rescue.

"I say, Lou, it's absurd to compare us with the teams east. We haven't the stable. Who ever heard of playing with two ponies?"

He appealed to Sommers, who happened to be seated next him.

"Steve Bayliss buys ponies by the carload and takes his pick. You can't play polo without good ponies, can you?"

"I don't know," Sommers answered indifferently.

He was looking at the lights along the shore, and contriving some excuse to cut short his visit. It was clear that he was uncomfortably out of his element in the chattering circle. He was too dull to add joy to such a gathering, and he got little joy from it. And he was feverishly anxious to be doing something, to put his hand to some plough—to escape the perpetual irritation of talk.

The chatter went on from polo to golf and gossip until the group broke up into flirtation couples. As Sommers was about to stroll off to the beach, Lindsay came out of the dining room and sat down by him with the amiable purpose of giving his young colleague some good social doctrine. He talked admiringly of the manner in which the general managers had taken hold of the strike.

"Most of them are from the ranks, you know," he said, "fought their way up to the head, just as any one of those fellows could if he had the ability, and they know what they're doing."

"There is no one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the upper hand," Sommers commented philosophically.

"The son of a peasant?" Lindsay repeated, bewildered.

"Yes, that's what our money-makers are,—from the soil, from the masses. And when they feel their power, they use it worse than the most arrogant aristocrats. Of course the strikers are all wrong, poor fools!" he hastened to add. "But they are not as bad as the others, as those who have. The men will be licked fast enough, and licked badly. They always will be. But it is a brutal game, a brutal game, this business success,—a good deal worse than war, where you line up in the open at least."

Sommers spoke nonchalantly, as if his views could not interest Dr. Lindsay, but were interesting to himself, nevertheless.

"That's pretty fierce!" Lindsay remarked, with a laugh. "I guess you haven't seen much of business. If you had been here during the anarchist riots—"

Sommers involuntarily shrugged his shoulders. The anarchist was the most terrifying bugaboo in Chicago, referred to as a kind of Asiatic plague that might break out at any time. Before Lindsay could get his argument launched, however, some of the guests drifted out to the terrace, and the two men separated.

Later in the evening Sommers found Miss Hitchcock alone, and explained to her that he should have to leave in the morning, as that would probably be the last chance to reach Chicago for some days. She did not urge him to stay, and expressed her regret at his departure in conventional phrases. They were standing by the edge of the terrace, which ran along the bluff above the lake. A faint murmur of little waves rose to them from the beach beneath.

"It is so heavenly quiet!" the girl murmured, as if to reproach his dissatisfied, restless spirit. "So this is good-bye?" she added, at length.

Sommers knew that she meant this would be the end of their intimacy, of anything but the commonplace service of the world.

"I hope not," he answered regretfully.

"Why is it we differ?" she asked swiftly. "I am sorry we should disagree on such really unimportant matters."

"Don't say that," Sommers protested. "You know that it is just because you are intelligent and big enough to realize that they are important that—"

"We strike them every time?" she inquired.

"Laura Lindsay and Caspar would think we were drivelling idiots."

"I am not so sure they wouldn't be right!" She laughed nervously, and locked her hands tightly together. He turned away in discomfort, and neither spoke for a long time. Finally he broke the silence,—

"At any rate, you can see that I am scarcely a fit guest!"

"So you are determined to go in this way—back to your—case?"

At the scorn of her last words Sommers threw up his head haughtily.

"Yes, back to my case."



CHAPTER XVII

Mrs. Ducharme opened the door of the cottage in response to Sommers's knock. Attired in a black house dress, with her dark hair smoothly brushed back from round, fat features, she was a peaceful figure. Sommers thought there was some truth in her contention that "Ducharme ought to get a decent-looking woman, anyway."

"How is Mr. Preston?" he asked.

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head mournfully.

"Bad, allus awful bad—and pitiful. Calling for stuff in a voice fit to break your heart."

"Mind you don't let him get any," the doctor counselled, preparing to go upstairs.

"Better not go up there jest yet," the woman whispered. "He did get away from us yesterdy and had a terrible time over there." She hitched her shoulders in the direction of Stoney Island Avenue. "We ain't found out till he'd been gone 'most two hours, and, my! such goings on; we had to git two perlicemen."

"I suppose you were out looking for Ducharme?" the doctor asked, in a severe tone.

"It was the last time," the woman pleaded, her eyes downcast. "Come in here. Miss Preston ain't got back from school,—she's late to-day."

Sommers walked into the bare sitting room and sat down, while Mrs. Ducharme leaned against the door-post, fingering her apron in an embarrassed manner.

"I've got cured," she blurted out at last. "My eye was awful bad, and it's been most a week since you sent me here."

"Did you follow my treatment?"

"No! I was out one afternoon—after Mrs. Preston came back from school—and I had walked miles and miles. Comin' home I passed a buildin' down here a ways on the avenue where there were picter papers pasted all over the windows; the picters were all about healin' folks, heaps and heaps in great theaters, a nice white-haired old preacher doin' the healin'. While I was lookin' at the picters, a door opened and a young feller came along and helped 'em carry in a cripple in his chair. He turns to me arter finishin' with the cripple and says, 'Come in, lady, and be healed in the blood of the lamb.' In I went, sure enough, and there was a kind of rough church fitted up with texts printed in great show-bills, and they was healin' folks. The little feller was helpin' em up the steps to the platform, and the old feller was prayin', and at last the young feller comes to me and says, 'Want ter be healed?' and I just got up, couldn't help it, and walked to the platform, and they prayed over me—you aren't mad, are you?" she asked suspiciously.

Sommers laughed.

"Mrs. Preston said you'd be very angry with such nonsense. But at any rate the old fellow—Dr.—Dr.—Po—"

"Dr. Potz," Sommers suggested.

"That's him. He cured me, and I went back again and told him about Ducharme. And he says that he's got a devil, and he will cast it out by prayin'. But he wants money."

"How much will it cost to cast out the devil?" the doctor inquired.

"The doctor says he must have ten dollars to loosen the bonds."

"Well," Sommers drew a bill from his pocket, "there's ten dollars on account of your wages. Now, don't you interfere with the doctor's work. You let him manage the devil his own way, and if you see Ducharme or the other woman, you run away as hard as you can. If you don't, you may bring the devil back again."

The woman took the money eagerly.

"You can go right off to find the doctor," Sommers continued. "I'll stay here until Mrs. Preston returns. But let me look at your eye, and see whether the doctor has cast that devil out for good and all."

He examined the eye as well as he could without appliances. Sure enough, so far as he could detect, the eye was normal, the peculiar paralysis had disappeared.

"You are quite right," he pronounced at last. "The doctor has handled this devil very ably. You can tell Mrs. Preston that I approve of your going to that doctor."

"I wonder where Mrs. Preston can be: she's most always here by half-past four, and it's after five. He," the woman pointed upstairs to Preston's rooms, "is sleeping off the effects of the dose Mrs. Preston gave him."

"The powders?" the doctor asked.

"Yes, sir. She had to give him two before he would sleep. Well, I'll be back by supper time. If he calls you, be careful about the bar on the door."

After Mrs. Ducharme had gone, the doctor examined every object in the little room. It was all so bare! Needlessly so, Sommers thought at first, contrasting the bleak room with the comfortable simplicity of his own rooms. The strip of coarse thin rug, the open Franklin stove, the pine kitchen table, the three straight chairs—it was as if the woman, crushed down from all aspirations, had defiantly willed to exist with as little of this world's furniture as might be. On the table were a few school books, a teacher's manual of drawing, a school mythology, and at one side two or three other volumes, which Sommers took up with more interest. One was a book on psychology—a large modern work on the subject. A second was an antiquated popular treatise on "Diseases of the Mind." Another volume was an even greater surprise—Balzac's Une Passion dans la Desert, a well-dirtied copy from the public library. They were fierce condiments for a lonely mind!

His examination over, he noiselessly stepped into the hall and went upstairs. After some fumbling he unbolted the door and tiptoed into the room, where Preston lay like a log. The fortnight had changed him markedly. There was no longer any prospect that he would sink under his disease, as Sommers had half expected. He had grown stouter, and his flesh had a healthy tint. "It will take it out of his mind," he muttered to himself, watching the hanging jaw that fell nervelessly away from the mouth, disclosing the teeth.

As he watched the man's form, so drearily promising of physical power, he heard a light footstep at the outer door, which he had left unbarred. On turning he caught the look of relief that passed over Mrs. Preston's face at the sight of the man lying quietly in his bed. What a state of fear she must live in!

Without a word the two descended, Sommers carefully barring and bolting the door. When they reached her room, her manner changed, and she spoke with a note of elation in her voice:

"I was so afraid that you would not come again after sending me help."

"I shall come as often and as long as you need me," Sommers answered, taking her hand kindly. "He has had another attack," he continued. "Mrs. Ducharme told me—I sent her out—and I suppose he's sleeping off the opiate."

"Yes, it was dreadful, worse than anything yet." She uttered these words jerkily, walking up and down the room in excitement. "And I've just left the schoolhouse. The assistant superintendent was there to see me. He was kind enough, but he said it couldn't happen again. There was scandal about it now. And yesterday I heard a child, one of my pupils, say to his companion, 'She's the teacher who's got a drunken husband.'"

Her voice was dreary, not rebellious.

"I don't know what to do. I cannot move. It would be worse in any other neighborhood. I thought," she added in a low voice, "that he would go away, for a time at least, but his mind is so weak, and he has some trouble with walking. But he gets stronger, stronger, O God, every day! I have to see him grow stronger, and I grow weaker."

"It is simply preposterous," the doctor protested in matter-of-fact tones, "to kill yourself, to put yourself in such a position for a man, who is no longer a man. For a man you cannot love," he added.

"What would be the use of running away from the trouble? He has ruined my life. Alves Preston is a mere thing that eats and sleeps. She will be that kind of thing as long as she lives."

"That is romantic rot," the doctor observed coldly. "No life is ruined in that way. One life has been wrecked; but you, you are bigger than that life. You can recover—bury it away—and love and have children and find that it is a good thing to live. That is the beauty of human weakness—we forget ourselves of yesterday."

In answer to his words her face, which he had once thought too immobile and passive for beauty, flamed with color, the dark eyes flashing beneath the broad white brow.

"Am I just caught in a fog?" she murmured.

"You are living in a way that would make any woman mad. I might twist myself into as many knots as you have. I might say that I had caused this disaster; that March evening my hand was too true. For I knew then the man ought to die."

He blurted out his admission roughly.

"I knew you did," she said softly, "and that has made it easier."

His voice trembled when he spoke again. "But I live with facts, not fancies. And the facts are that that ruined thing should not clog you, ruin you. Get rid of him in any way you will,—I advise the county asylum. Get rid of him, and do it quickly before he crazes you."

When he had finished, there was an oppressive stillness in the room, as if some sentence had been declared. Mrs. Preston got up and walked to and fro, evidently battling with herself. She stopped opposite him finally.

"The only thing that would justify that would be to know that you grasped it all—real happiness in that one bold stroke. Such conviction can never come."

"Happiness!" he exclaimed scornfully. "If you mean a good, comfortable time, you won't find any certainty about that. But you can get freedom to live out your life—"

"You fail to understand. There is happiness. See,—come here."

She led him to the front window, which was open toward the peaceful little lawn. On the railroad track behind the copse of scrub oak an unskilful train crew was making up a long train of freight cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works. One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house and the avenue.

"You can hear it in the night air," she murmured; "the joy that comes rising up from the earth, the joy of living. Ah! that is why we are made—to have happiness and joy, to rejoice the heart of God, to make God live, for He must be happiness itself; and when we are happy and feel joy in living, He must grow stronger. And when we are weak and bitter, when the world haunts us as I felt this afternoon on leaving the superintendent, when men strike and starve, and others are hard and grasping—then He must shrink and grow small and suffer. There is happiness," she ended, breathing her belief as a prayer into the solitude and night.

"What will you do to get it?" Sommers asked, shortly.

"Do to get it?" She drew back from the window, her figure tense. "When it comes within my grasp, I will do everything, everything, and nothing shall hinder me."

"Meantime?" the doctor questioned significantly.

"Don't ask me!" She sank into a chair and covered her eyes with her hand. And neither spoke until the sound of footsteps was heard on the walk.

"There is Mrs. Ducharme coming home from the charmer of devils. It is time for me to go," Sommers said.

The room was so dark that he could not see her face, as he extended his hand; but he could feel the repressed breathing, the passionate air about her person.

"Remember," he said slowly, "whenever you need me—want me for anything—send a message, and I shall come at once. We will settle this thing together."

There was a sharp pressure on his hand, her thin fingers drawing him toward her involuntarily. Then his hand dropped, and he groped his way to the door.



CHAPTER XVIII

The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of light. A gentle wind drew in shore from the lake, stirring the tall rushes in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still; the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand to move the perishing freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a grass-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on, unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious dream.

The little space of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss Hitchcock in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her. Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night. That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded away, and in her place was this passionate, large-hearted woman, who had spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to some subtle opiate.

Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,—all, all that made the waking world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy colors of the essential fire. The fire,—that was the one great thing,—the fire was life itself.

As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the noble human figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of man's corrupted carcass; the world that has, with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had found it.

Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends—for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house.

He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this God-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, from her. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in his life he was content to feel.

All emotion over life must come to be transmuted to this—an elemental state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and multitudes of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire—to love and have peace.



CHAPTER XIX

The Fourth, of July had never before been kept in the like manner in Chicago. There was a row or two at Grand Crossing between the strikers and the railroad officials, several derailed cars and spiked switches, a row at Blue Island, and a bonfire in the stock yards. People were not travelling on this holiday, and the main streets were strangely silent and dull.

Sommers had found no one at the office in the Athenian Building. Lindsay had not been in since the strike began. Probably he would not appear until the disorderly city had settled down. Sommers had taken the clinic yesterday; to-day there was nothing for him to do except exercise his horse by a long ride in the blazing sunshine. Before he left the office a telegram came from Lake Forest, announcing that a postponed meeting of the board of managers of the summer sanitarium for poor babies would be put off indefinitely. Sommers knew what that meant—no appropriation for carrying on the work. At the last meeting the board of managers, who were women for the most part, had disagreed about the advisability of undertaking the work this season, when every one was feeling poor. Some women had been especially violent against supporting the charity in those districts where the strikers lived.

Miss Hitchcock, who was the secretary, and Sommers had got the heated members of the board to suppress their prejudices for the present, and vote a temporary subsidy. The telegram meant that under the present circumstances it would be hopeless to try to extract money from the usual sources. The sanitarium and creche would have to close within a week, and Sommers was left to arrange matters. After he had taken the necessary measures, he started on his ride. He had in mind to ride out of the city along the lines of railroad to the southwest to see whether the newspaper reports of the strike were justified or, as he suspected, grossly exaggerated. The newspapers, at first inclined to side with the Pullman men in their demand for arbitration, had suddenly turned about and were denouncing the strikers as anarchists. They were spreading broadcast throughout the country violent reports of incendiarism and riot.

Outside of the stations and the adjacent yards Sommers found little to see. A great stagnation had settled over the city this hot July day. Somewhat disappointed in his search for excitement he came back at nightfall to the cool stretches of the South Parks. He turned into the desolate Midway, where the unsightly wheel hung an inert, abortive mass in the violet dusk. His way home lay in the other direction, and his horse trotted languidly. He had determined to turn back, when suddenly a tongue of flame shot up a mile away toward the lake. This first long tongue ran out, followed by another and another, and yet others that raced north and south and up into the night.

"The Fair Buildings!" a man on a bicycle shouted, and sped away.

The broad flames now illuminated the dome of the Administration Building and the facades of the Court of Honor. Sommers spurred his horse, while the loungers suddenly, with one cry, poured from the park along the rough paths of the Midway, streaming out across the prairie toward the fire. He plunged into the cool gulf under the Illinois Central tracks, then out into a glare of full day, before the wild, licking flames. The Court of Honor with its empty lagoon and broken bridges was more beautiful in the savage glow of the ravaging fire than ever on the gala nights of the exposition. The fantastic fury of the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the mass. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle—that noble fantasy plucked from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the lustrous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters of the lake caught the reflection and sombrely relighted the scene.

Sommers almost knocked over a woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery of the fierce fire.

"It is grand, beautiful," she murmured to Sommers, who had dismounted. Her large frame trembled with suppressed excitement, and her face glowed.

"Beauty eating beauty," Sommers replied sadly.

"They ought to go, just like this—shoot up into the sky in flame and die, expire in the last beauty."

The excitement of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, noble emptiness between the fire-eaten pillars of the Peristyle.

"That is better than the Fair itself. It is fiercer—not mere play."

"Nature has taken a hand," Sommers said grimly, "and knocks about man's toys. Look!"

He pointed to the fairylike brightness of the island in the lagoon. The green leafage of the shrubbery was suffused in tender light; the waters reflected calmly all their drapery, but none of the savage desolation of the pyre in the Court of Honor. Beyond where the gracious pile of the Art Building stretched across the horizon the light clouds of smoke floated, a gray wreath in the night. The seething mass of flame began to abate, to lessen almost imperceptibly, exhausting itself slowly with deep groans like the dying of a master passion.

Sommers suggested that they should circle the fire to the south, where they could see to better advantage the Peristyle now burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women—mere mites—were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping out of the gloom of dusk in a mountain valley. Helpless shapes doomed to wander on the sandy strand of the earth!

The two found a place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,—the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,—solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal figure of triumph the noble horseman still reined in his frightened chargers. The velvet shadows of the night were falling once more over the distant Art Building, creeping over the little island, leaving the lagoons in murky silence. The throngs of curious people that had clustered about the western end of the fire were thinning out rapidly. A light night breeze from the empty spaces of prairie wafted the smoke wreaths northward toward the city of men whose plaything had been taken. At their feet a white column of staff plunged into the water, hissed and was silent. The passion was well-nigh spent.

Mrs. Preston sighed, like a child waking from a long revery, a journey into another land.

"I never felt that the fierce things, the passions of life, could bring their happiness too. It seemed that happiness was something peaceful, like the fields at night or this lake when it is still. But that is but one kind. There are many others."

Her low voice, powerful in its restraint, took up the mood of the place.

"It dies," Sommers replied. "Burnt out!"

"No," she protested eagerly; "it remains in the heart, warming it in dull, cold times, and its great work comes after. It is not well to live without fierceness and passion."

The last lights from the fire flickered over her dark hair and sombre face. She was breathing heavily close by his side, throwing into the soft night a passionate warmth of feeling. It set his pulses beating in response.

"You are so insistent upon happiness," the man cried.

"Yes," she nodded. "To die out without this"—her hand pointed to the blackened Court of Honor—"is to have lived unfulfilled. That is what I felt as a child in the rich fields of Wisconsin, as a girl at the chapel of the seminary."

And she began, as if to explain herself, to tell the story of the Wisconsin farm, sleeping heavily in the warm sun among the little lakes; of the crude fervor that went on under the trees of the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human associations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,—the scents of field and of cattle, the fertile soil, and the broad-shouldered men, like Holstein cattle.

The excitement of the evening had set free the heart, and a torrent of feelings and memories surged up,—disordered, turbulent, yet strangely unified by the simple nature, the few aims of the being that held them. The waters of the past had been gathering these past weeks, and now she found peace in their release, in the abandonment of herself through speech. The night crept on, cooler now and clouded, the heavens covered with filaments of gray lace; the horse tied near by stamped and whinnied. But the two sitting on the shore of the silent lake felt neither the passing of time nor the increasing cold of the night.

At the end of her tale the dominant note sounded once more: "Eight or wrong, happiness! for if we make happiness in the world, we know God. God lives upon our happiness."

This belief, which seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure of joy.

"If you think that—if your whole story turns out that way—why did you—" But he paused, unwilling to force her by a brutal proof of illogicality.

"How is he?" he asked at last, with effort.

Her head had drooped forward, but with this question she moved quickly, as if suddenly lashed.

"He is better, always better."

"My God!" the man groaned.

"But his mind is weaker—it wanders. Sometimes it is clear; then it is dreadful."

"You must not endure it!"

She laid her hand lightly upon his arm, warning him of the inutility of his protest.

"I think we must endure it now. If it had been done earlier, before—" she answered tranquilly; and added definitely, "it is too late now for any relief."

It was on his lips to cry out, "Why, why?" but as his eyes looked into her face and met her warm, wistful glance, he acquiesced in the fate she had ordained. He took her hand, the one that had touched him, and for the time he was content that things should be as they were. She was looking out into the ruined buildings, where embers hissed; at last she lowered her eyes, and whispered:

"It is very good even as it is, now."

But he rebelled, manlike, unwilling to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been! I have fastened this monstrous chain about you—about us."

"Let us not think of it——to-night," she murmured, her eyes burning into his face.

* * * * *

The first gray of the morning was revealing the outlines of the scrub oaks in the field as the two came back to the cottage. Sommers tied his horse to a fence-post at the end of the lane, and went in to warm himself from the chill of the night air. Mrs. Preston prepared some coffee, while he built a fire in the unused stove. Then she drew up her work-table before the fire and poured out the coffee into two thick cups. As there was no cream, she remarked with a little smile, "It is very late for after-dinner coffee!"

She moved and spoke with extreme caution, not to disturb Mrs. Ducharme and Preston, who became excitable when awakened suddenly. They drank their coffee in silence, and Sommers had stood up to leave.

"I shall come very soon," he was saying, and her face responded with a little smile that lit up its sober corners and hard lines. Suddenly it grew rigid and white, and her eyes stared beyond the doctor into the gloom of the room. Sommers turned to follow her gaze. The door moved a little. There was some one outside, peering in. Sommers strode across the floor and threw the door open. In the dim light of the dawn he could see Preston, half dressed. He had slunk back from the door.

"Come in," the doctor ordered sternly.

The man obeyed, shambling into the room with an air of bravado.

"Oh, it's you, is it, doctor?" he remarked quite naturally, with an air of self-possession. "Haven't seen you for a long time; you don't come this way often, at least to see me," he added insinuatingly, looking at his wife. "I heard voices, and I thought I would come down to see what my wife was up to. Women always need a little watching, doctor, as you probably know."

He walked toward the table. As he stood there talking in a sneering voice, in full flesh, shaved and clean, he certainly did not look like a man stricken with paresis. Yet the doctor knew that this fitful mood of sanity was deceitful. The feeble brain had given a momentary spurt.

"Coffee?" Preston continued, as the others remained silent. "Haven't you got anything better than coffee? Where have you been, Mrs. Preston and Dr.—?"

Mrs. Preston tremblingly poured out some coffee and handed it to him. The act enraged the doctor. It seemed symbolical. Preston threw the cup to the floor.

"None of your rot," he shouted. "I bet you have had something more than coffee, you—" he glared at his wife, his limbs trembling and twitching as the nervous irritation gained on him. Sommers sprang forward.

"Go upstairs," he commanded sternly. "You are not fit to be here."

"Who are you to give me orders in my own house before my wife?" The man balanced himself against the table. "You get out of this and never come back. I am a gentleman, I want you to know, and I may be a drunkard and all that, but I am not going to have any man hanging—"

Sommers seized Preston by the collar of his shirt and dragged him to the stairs. The man fought and bit and cursed. A black slime of words fell from his lips, covering them all with its defilement. Finally the struggles subsided, and with one mighty effort the doctor threw him into the upper chamber and closed the door behind them. In a few moments he came downstairs, bolting the door carefully. When he entered the room, he saw Mrs. Preston staring at the door as if entranced, her face marble with horror.

"I gave him a hypodermic injection. He will sleep a few hours," Sommers muttered, throwing himself into a chair.

Mrs. Preston sat down at the table and folded her arms about her face. Her figure shook with her silent sobs.



CHAPTER XX

"When the men confront bayonets, you know, they'll give in quick enough. I have reason to believe that the President has already ordered United States troops to protect lives and property in Chicago. The general managers will get an injunction restraining Debs and his crew. When the courts take a hand—"

"So it's to be made into a civil war, is it?" Sommers interposed sarcastically. "I saw that the bankrupt roads had appealed to the government for protection. Like spendthrift sons, they run to their guardian in time of trouble."

"Oh! you know this thing can't go on. It's a disgrace. I was called to go to Detroit on an important case; it would mean two thousand dollars to me,—but I can't get out of the city."

Dr. Lindsay was in an ill humor, having spent three early morning hours in driving into town from Lake Forest. Sommers listened to his growling, patiently if not respectfully, and when the eminent physician had finished, he spoke to him about a certain operation that was on the office docket for the following week.

"You haven't asked my opinion, doctor," he said, in conclusion; "but I have been thinking over the case. I was present at General Horr's examination, and have seen a good deal of the case these last days while you were out of town." Lindsay stared, but the young man plunged on. "So I have ventured to remonstrate. It would do no good, and it might be serious."

The day was so hot that any feeling sent beads of perspiration to the face. Sommers paused when Lindsay began to mop his head.

"I may say to start with," Lindsay answered, with an irascible air, as if he intended to take this time to finish the young man's case, "that I am in the habit of consulting my attending physicians, and not having them dictate to me—"

"Who is dictating?" Sommers asked bluntly. "That old man can't possibly get any good from an operation—"

"It will do him no harm?" Lindsay retorted, with an interrogation in his tone that made the younger surgeon stare. What he might have said when he realized the full meaning of Lindsay's remark was not clear in his own mind. At that moment, however, one of the women employed in the office knocked at the door. She had a telephone message.

"Somebody, I think it was Mrs. Prestess or Preton, or something—"

"Preston," suggested Sommers.

"That's it. The message was she was in trouble and wanted you as soon as possible. But some one is at the wire now."

Sommers hastened out without making excuses. When he returned, Dr. Lindsay had dried his face and was calmer. But his aspect was sufficiently ominous; he was both pompous and severe.

"Sit down, doctor, will you. I have a few words—some things I have been meditating to say to you a long time, ever since our connection began, in fact."

Sommers did not sit down. He stood impatiently, twirling a stethoscope in his hand. He had passed the schoolboy age and was a bit overbearing himself.

"As a young man of good promise, well introduced, and vouched for by some of our best people, I have naturally looked for great things from you."

Sommers stopped the rotation of the stethoscope and squared about. His face was no longer flushed with irritation. Some swift purpose seemed to steady him. As Sommers made no reply to this exordium, Lindsay began again, in his diagnostic manner:

"But I have been disappointed. Not that you haven't done your work well enough, so far as I know. But you have more than a young man's self-assurance and self-assertion. I have noticed also a note of condescension, of criticism in your bearing to those about you. The critical attitude to society and individuals is a bad one for a successful practitioner of medicine to fall into. It is more than that—it is illiberal; it comes from a continued residence in a highly exotic society, in a narrow intellectual circle. Breadth of mind—"

Sommers made an impatient gesture. Every sentence led the florid practitioner farther and farther into the infinite. Another time the young surgeon would have derived a wicked satisfaction from driving the doctor around the field in his argument. To-day the world, life, was amove, and more important matters waited in the surcharged city. He must be gone. He said nothing, however, for another five minutes, waiting for some good opportunity to end the talk. But Lindsay had once lectured in a college; he did not easily finish his exposition. He vaguely sketched a social philosophy, and he preached the young specialist successful as he preached him on graduating days of the medical school. He was shrewd, eloquent, kind, and boresome. At last came the clause:

"If you are to continue your connection with this office—"

"I should like to talk that over with you some other day," Sommers interposed positively, "when I have more time. I am sorry that I shall have to leave at once." After a moment, he added, "And if you have any one in mind for my place, don't bother—"

Lindsay waved his hand.

"We never have to 'bother' about any member of our force."

"Oh! very well. I didn't want to leave you in a hole. Perhaps I was presumptuous to suppose I was of any importance in the office."

Sommers stepped briskly to the door, while Lindsay wheeled to his desk. Before he opened the door, he paused and called back pleasantly:

"But really I shouldn't operate on the General. Poor old man! And he hasn't much money—'the usual fee' would come hard on him."

Lindsay paid no attention to the remark. Sommers had passed from his world altogether; there would be a long, hard road for this young man in the practice of his profession in Chicago, if Dr. Lindsay, consulting surgeon at St. Isidore's, St. Martha's, the Home for Incurables, the Institute for Pulmonary Diseases, etc., could bring it about.

Sommers hastily rifled certain pigeonholes of his desk, tossing the letters into his little black bag, and seizing his hat hurried out. He stopped at the clerk's desk to leave a direction for forwarding his mail.

"Going away for a vacation?" Miss Clark queried.

"Yes, for a good long one," the young surgeon answered. As the door slammed behind him, the black-haired Miss Clark turned to the assistant stenographer with a yawn.

"He's got his travelling papers. I knew there was a fuss when I called him to the 'phone. I guess he wasn't tony enough for this office."

Sommers was now sinking down to the heated street, unmindful whether he was "tony" enough for the Athenian Building or not. Mrs. Ducharme had whispered over the telephone: "He's gone. Come quick. Mrs. Preston wants you bad."

For an instant he asked himself if he had made a mistake when he had given Preston the injection of morphine two days before. A glance at the little instrument reassured him. Perhaps the woman meant merely that he had got away again from the cottage. Why, then, such agitation over the creature's disappearance? But she wanted him "bad." He hurried into the torrid street out of the cool, marble-lined hall, like a factory hand dismissed from his job. It was the first break with the order of things he had grown into. But he had no time for regrets.

He crossed the deserted streets where the women usually shop, and turned into the strip of park bordered by the Illinois Central tracks. Possibly a train might be going out, under a heavy guard of deputy sheriffs, and in that case he would save much time in reaching Ninety-first Street. Exhilarated by his new freedom, he walked briskly, threading his way among the groups of idle workmen who had gathered in the park. As he skirted a large group, he recognized Dresser, who was shouting a declamatory speech. The men received it apathetically, and Dresser got off the bench on which he had stood and pushed his way through the crowd.

"Well," Sommers said, as Dresser came by him. "How does the good work move? You've got the courts down on you, and pretty soon there'll be the troops to settle with. There's only one finish when the workingmen are led by a man like Debs, and the capitalists have an association of general managers as staff. Besides, your people have put the issue badly before the public. The public understands now that it is a question of whether it, every one of them, shall do what he wants to or not. And the general public says it won't be held up in this pistol-in-your-face fashion. So Pullman and the others get in behind the great public opinion, and there you are!"

"All that newspaper talk about riot and destruction of property is a mass of lies," Dresser exclaimed bitterly. "Which, way are you going? I will walk along with you."

As the two men proceeded in the direction of the big station, Dresser continued:

"I know there isn't any violence from the strikers. It's the tough element and the railroads. They're burning cars themselves so as to rouse public opinion."

Sommers laughed.

"You don't believe it? I suppose you won't believe that the general managers are offering us, the leaders, money,—money down and a lot of it, to call the strike off."

"Yes, I'll believe that; but you won't get any one to believe the other thing. And you'd better take the money!"

"We'll have every laboring man in Chicago out on a strike in a week," Dresser added confidentially. "There hasn't been a car of beef shipped out of the stock yards, or of cattle shipped in. I guess when the country begins to feel hungry, it will know something's on here. The butchers haven't a three days' supply left for the city. We'll starve 'em out!"

Sommers knew there was some truth in this. The huge slaughter-houses that fed a good part of the world were silent and empty, for lack of animal material. The stock yards had nothing to fill their bloody maw, while trains of cars of hogs and steers stood unswitched on the hundreds of sidings about the city. The world would shortly feel this stoppage of its Chicago beef and Armour pork, and the world would grumble and know for once that Chicago fed it. Inside the city there was talk of a famine. The condition was like that of the beleaguered city of the Middle Ages, threatened with starvation while wheat and cattle rotted outside its grasp. But the enemy was within its walls, either rioting up and down the iron roadways, or sipping its cooling draughts and fanning itself with the garish pages of the morning paper at some comfortable club. It was a war of injunctions and court decrees. But the passions were the same as those that set Paris flaming a century before, and it was a war with but one end: the well-fed, well-equipped legions must always win.

"They're too strong for you," Sommers said at last. "You will save a good many people from a lot of misery, if you will sell out now quietly, and prevent the shooting."

"That's the cynicism of your crowd."

"You can't say my crowd any longer; they never were my crowd, I guess."

"Have you been fired?" Dresser asked, with childish interest.

"Not exactly, but I fancy Lindsay and I won't find each other's society healthy in the future."

"It isn't the same thing, though. Professional men like you can never get very far from the rich. It isn't like losing your bread and butter."

"Pretty much that, at present. And I think I shall get some distance from the rich—perhaps go out farther west into some small town." Dresser did not reply; he kept on with Sommers, as if to express his sympathy over a misfortune. The court that led to the Park Row station was full of people. Men wearing white ribbons were thickly sprinkled in the crowd. The badge fluttered even from the broad breasts of the few apathetic policemen.

The crowd was kept off the tracks and the station premises by an iron fence, defended by a few railway police and cowed deputy sheriffs. Every now and then, however, a man climbed the ugly fence and dropped down on the other side. Then he ran for the shelter of the long lines of cars standing on the siding. A crew of men recruited from the office force of the railroad was trying to make up a train. The rabble that had gained entrance to the yards were blocking their movements by throwing switches at the critical moment. As Sommers came up to the fence, the switching engine had been thrown into the wrong siding, and had bunted up at full speed against a milk car, sending the latter down the siding to the main track. It took the switch at a sharp pace, was derailed, and blocked the track. The crowd in the court gave a shout of delight. The switching engine had to be abandoned.

At this moment Sommers was jostled against a stylishly dressed woman, who was trying to work her way through the seething mass that swayed up and down the narrow court. He turned to apologize, and was amazed to see that the young woman was Louise Hitchcock. She was frightened, but keeping her head she was doing her best to gain the vestibule of a neighboring store. She recognized Sommers and smiled in joyful relief. Then her glance passed over Sommers to Dresser, who was sullenly standing with his hands in his pockets, and ended in a polite stare, as if to say, 'Well, is that a specimen of the people you prefer to my friends?'

"You've got one of your crowd on your hands," Dresser muttered, and edged off into the mob.

"What are you doing here?" Sommers demanded, rather impatiently.

"I drove down to meet papa. He was to come by the Michigan Central, and Uncle Brome telephoned that the railroad people said the train would get through. But he didn't come. I waited and waited, and at last tried to get into the station to find out what had happened. I couldn't get through."

Sommers had edged her into a protected corner formed by a large telephone post. The jostling people stared impudently at the prettily dressed young woman. To their eyes she betrayed herself at a glance as one of the privileged, who used the banned Pullman cars.

"Whar's your kerridge?" a woman called out over Sommers's shoulder. A man pushed him rudely into his companion.

"Why don't you take your private kyar?"

"The road is good enough for me!"

"Come," Sommers shouted in her ear, "we must get out of this at once. Take my arm,—no, follow me,—that will attract less attention."

The girl was quite at ease, now that this welcome friend had appeared opportunely. Another prolonged shout, almost a howl of derision, went up by the fence at some new trick played upon the frantic railroad officials.

"What people!" the girl exclaimed scornfully. "Where are the police?"

"Don't speak so loud," Sommers answered impatiently, "if you wish to escape insult. There the police are, over there by the park. They don't seem especially interested."

The girl closed her lips tightly and followed Sommers. It was no easy task to penetrate the hot, sweating mob that was packing into the court, and bearing down toward the tracks where the fun was going on. Sommers made three feet, then lost two. The crowd seemed especially anxious to keep them back, and Miss Hitchcock was hustled and pushed roughly hither and thither until she grasped Sommers's coat with trembling hands. A fleshy man, with a dirty two weeks' beard on his tanned face, shoved Sommers back with a brutal laugh. Sommers pushed him off. In a moment fists were up, the young doctor's hat was knocked off, and some one threw a stone that he received on his cheek.

Sommers turned, grasped the girl with one arm, and threw himself and her upon the more yielding corner of the press. Then he dragged his companion for a few steps until the jam slackened at the open door of a saloon. Into this the two were pushed by the eddying mob, and escaped. For a moment they stood against the bar that protected the window. The saloon was full of men, foul with tobacco smoke, and the floor was filthy. Flies sluggishly buzzed about the pools of beer on the bar counter. The men were talking excitedly; a few thin, ragged hangers-on were looting the free-lunch dishes surreptitiously. Miss Hitchcock's face expressed her disgust, but she said nothing. She had learned her lesson.

"Wait here," Sommers ordered, "while I find out whether we can get out of this by a back door."

He spoke to the barkeeper, who lethargically jerked a thumb over his shoulder. They elbowed their way across the room, Miss Hitchcock rather ostentatiously drawing up her skirts and threading her way among the pools of the dirty floor. The occupants of the bar-room, however, gave the strangers only slight attention. The heavy atmosphere of smoke and beer, heated to the boiling point by the afternoon sun, seemed to have soddened their senses. Behind the bar the two found a passage to the alley in the rear, which led by a cross alley into a deserted street. Finally they emerged on the placid boulevard.

"Your face is bleeding!" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed. "Are you hurt?"

"No," Sommers answered, mopping his brow and settling his collar. "They were good enough to spare the eye."

"Brutes!"

"I wouldn't say that," her companion interrupted sharply. "We are all brutes each in our way," he added quietly.

The girl's face reddened, and she dropped his arm, which was no longer necessary for protection. She raised her crushed and soiled skirt, and looked at it ruefully.

"I wonder what has become of poor papa!" she exclaimed. "This strike has caused him so much worry. I came in from Lake Forest to open the house for him and stay with him until the trains begin to run again."

She seemed to expect sympathy for the disagreeable circumstances that persisted in upsetting the Hitchcock plans. But Sommers paid no attention to this social demand, and they walked on briskly. Finally Miss Hitchcock said coldly:

"I can go home alone, now, if you have anything to do. Of course I should like to have you come home and rest after this—"

"I shall have to return to my room for a hat," Sommers replied, in a matter-of-fact way. "I will leave you at your house."

Miss Hitchcock insensibly drew herself up and walked more quickly. The boulevard, usually gay with carriages in the late afternoon, was absolutely deserted except for an occasional shop-boy on a bicycle. Sommers, hatless, with a torn coat, walking beside a somewhat bedraggled young woman, could arouse no comment from the darkened windows of the large houses. As they passed Twenty-second Street, Miss Hitchcock slackened her pace and spoke again.

"You don't think they are right, surely?"

"No," the doctor replied absent-mindedly. He was thinking how he had been delayed from going to Mrs. Preston's, and how strange was this promenade down the fashionable boulevard where he had so often walked with Miss Hitchcock on bright Sundays, bowing at every step to the gayly dressed groups of acquaintances. He was taking the stroll for the last time, something told him, on this hot, stifling July afternoon, between the rows of deserted houses. In twenty-four hours he should be a part of them in all practical ways—a part of the struggling mob, that lived from day to day, not knowing when the bread would give out, with no privileges, no pleasant vacations, no agreeable houses to frequent, no dinner parties at the close of a busy day. He was not sorry for the change, so far as he had thought of it. At least he should escape the feeling of irritation, of criticism, which Lindsay so much deplored, that had been growing ever since he had left hospital work. The body social was diseased, and he could not make any satisfactory diagnosis of the evil; but at least he should feel better to have done with the privileged assertive classes, to have taken up his part with the less Philistine, more pitiably blind mob.

With the absolute character of his nature and the finality of youth, he saw in a very decisive manner the plunge he was about to make. He was to leave one life and enter another, just as much as if he should leave Chicago and move to Calcutta—more so, indeed. He was to leave one set of people, and all their ways, and start with life on the simplest, crudest base. He should not call on his Chicago friends, who for the most part belonged to one set, and after a word from Lindsay they would cease to bother him. He would be out of place among the successful, and they would realize it as well as he. But he should be sorry to lose sight of certain parts of this life,—of this girl, for example, whom he had liked so much from the very first, who had been so good to him, who was so sincere and honest and personally attractive.

Yet it was strange, the change in his feelings toward her brought about in the few days that had elapsed since they had parted at Lake Forest. It was so obvious today that they could never have come together. While he had tried to do the things that she approved, he had been hot and restless, and had never, for one moment, had the calm certainty, the exquisite fulness of feeling that he had now—that the other woman had given him without a single outspoken word.

If things had gone differently these past months,—no, from his birth and from hers, too,—if every circumstance of society had not conspired to put them apart, who knows! They might have solved a riddle or two together and been happy. But it was all foolish speculation now, and it was well that their differences should be emphasized at this last chance meeting; that she should be hostile to him. He summed the matter up thus, and, as if answering her last remark, said:

"They, my dear Miss Hitchcock, are wrong, and you are wrong, if we can use pronouns so loosely. But I have come to feel that I had rather be wrong with them than wrong with you. From to-day, when you speak of 'them,' you can include me."

And to correct any vagueness in his declaration, he added,—

"I have left Lindsay's shop, and shall never go back."

He could feel that she caught her breath, but she said nothing.

"I should never be successful in that way, though it wasn't for that reason that I left."

"Do you think you can do more for people by putting yourself—away, holding off—"

Her voice sank.

"That is a subterfuge," Sommers answered hotly, "fit only for clergymen and beggars for charities. I am not sure, anyway, that I want 'to do for' people. I think no fine theories about social service and all that settlement stuff. I want to be a man, and have a man's right to start with the crowd at the scratch, not given a handicap. There are too many handicaps in the crowd I have seen!"

Miss Hitchcock pressed her lips together, as if to restrain a hot reply. She had grown white from the fatigue and excitement and heat. They were almost at her father's house, walking along the steaming asphalt of the quiet avenue. A few old trees had been allowed to remain on these blocks, and they drooped over the street, giving a pleasant shade to the broad houses and the little patches of sward. Just around the corner were some rickety wooden tenements, and a street so wretchedly paved that in the great holes where the blocks had rotted out stood pools of filthy, rankly smelling water.

"I have merely decided to move around the corner," the young man remarked grimly.

Miss Hitchcock's lips trembled. She walked more slowly, and she tried to say something, to make some ill-defined appeal. As she had almost found the words, a carriage approached the Hitchcock house and drew up. Out of it Colonel Hitchcock stepped heavily. His silk hat was crushed, and his clothes were covered with dust.

"Papa!" his daughter exclaimed, running forward anxiously. "What has happened? Where have you been? Are you hurt?"

"No, yes, I guess not," the old man laughed good-naturedly. "Howdy do, doctor! They stopped the train out by Grand Crossing, and some fellows began firing stones. It was pretty lively for a time. I thought you and your mother would worry, so I got out of it the best way I could and came in on the street cars."

"Poor papa!" the girl exclaimed, seizing his arm. She glanced at Sommers defiantly. Here was her argument. Sommers looked on coolly, not accepting the challenge.

"Won't you come in, doctor?" Colonel Hitchcock asked. "Do come in and rest," his daughter added.

But the young doctor shook his head.

"I think I will go home and brush up—around the corner," he added with slight irony.

The girl turned to her father and took his arm, and they slowly walked up the path to the big darkened house.



CHAPTER XXI

Sommers did not go to his rooms, however. He could delay no longer reaching Mrs. Preston. From the quiet decorous boulevard, with its clean asphalt pavement and pleasant trees, he turned at once into the dirty cross street. The oasis of the prosperous in the expanse of cheap houses and tawdry flat-buildings was so small! It was easy, indeed, to step at least physically from the one world to the other.

At a little shop near the cable line he bought a hat and tie, and bathed his face. Then he took the cable car, which connected with lines of electric cars that radiated far out into the distant prairie. Along the interminable avenue the cable train slowly jerked its way, grinding, jarring, lurching, grating, shrieking—an infernal public chariot. Sommers wondered what influence years of using this hideous machine would have upon the nerves of the people. This car-load seemed quiescent and dull enough—with the languor of unexpectant animals, who were accustomed to being hauled mile by mile through the dirty avenues of life. His attention was caught by the ever repeated phenomena of the squalid street. Block after block, mile after mile, it was the same thing. No other city on the globe could present quite this combination of tawdriness, slackness, dirt, vulgarity, which was Cottage Grove Avenue. India, the Spanish-American countries, might show something fouler as far as mere filth, but nothing so incomparably mean and long. The brick blocks, of many shades of grimy red and fawn color, thin as paper, cheap as dishonest contractor and bad labor could make them, were bulging and lopping at every angle. Built by the half mile for a day's smartness, they were going to pieces rapidly. Here was no uniformity of cheapness, however, for every now and then little squat cottages with mouldy earth plots broke the line of more pretentious ugliness. The saloons, the shops, the sidewalks, were coated with soot and ancient grime. From the cross streets savage gusts of the fierce west wind dashed down the avenue and swirled the accumulated refuse into the car, choking the passengers, and covering every object with a cloud of filth. Once and again the car jolted across intersecting boulevards that presented some relief in the way of green grass and large, heavy-fronted houses. Except for these strips of parklike avenues, where the rich lived,—pieced into the cheaper stuff of the city, as it were,—all was alike, flat-building and house and store and wooden shanty,—a city of booths, of extemporized shifts.

Sommers picked up a newspaper that some passenger had thrown aside and endeavored to distract his mind from the forlorn sight. The sheets were gritty to the touch, and left a smutch upon the fingers. His clothes were sifted over with dust and fine particles of manure. The seat grated beneath his legs. The great headlines in the newspaper announced that the troops were arriving. Columns of childish, reportorial prattle followed, describing the martial bearing of the officers, the fierceness of the "bronzed Indian fighters." The city was under martial law. He read also the bickering telegrams exchanged between the state authorities and the federal government, and interviews with leading citizens, praising the much-vilified President for his firm act in upholding law and order. The general managers were clever fellows! Sommers threw the grimy sheet aside. It was right, this firm assertion of the law; but in what a cause, for what people!

He turned to the street once more.

This block, through which the car was grinding its way, had a freakish individuality in sidewalks. Each builder had had his own idea of what the proper street level should be, and had laid his sidewalk accordingly. There were at least six different levels in this one block. The same blunt expression of wilful individuality was evident in every line of every building. It was the apotheosis of democratic independence. This was not a squalid district, nor a tough one. Goose Island, the stock yards, the Bohemian district, the lumber yards, the factories,—all the aspects of the city monstrous by right, were miles away. But Halsted Street, with its picturesque mutations of poverty and its foreign air, was infinitely worthier than this. Sommers shuddered to think how many miles of Cottage Grove Avenue and its like Chicago contained,—not vicious, not squalid, merely desolate and unforgivably vulgar. If it were properly paved and cleaned, it would be bearable. But the selfish rich and the ignorant poor make bad housekeepers.

On, on they jolted and jarred, dropping along the cross streets a cargo of indifferent souls, and taking in a new cargo of white-ribboned men, who talked in loud voices or spat ruminatively over the floors. Sommers sank back listless. It was well that he had taken this way of entering the new life. To have galloped south through the cool parks would have been absurd, like playing at charity. This was the life of the people,—not the miserably poor, but the mean and small, the mass in this, our prosperous country. Through the dirty, common avenues, without one touch of beauty, they were destined to travel all their days, and he with them.