Chapter X

Ogden and his mother were now beginning to have frequent conferences with regard to the management of the property and to McDowell's connection with the matter. Perhaps the word "conference" puts, however, too set and formal a stamp on the brief, hap-hazard interchanges of ideas that took place, as chance permitted, within McDowell's own house--a few words after a Sunday dinner or at the front door late at night. And besides being handicapped as to occasion, they were further hampered by McDowell's new relation to them and by their own presence under his roof. Besides, Mrs. Ogden, with a multitude of small experiences, had no ability for grasping things in a large and general way; while George, with a broader and more comprehensive outlook, was embarrassed by a lack of experience in the actual details of business transactions. Added to this, he was a new-comer, under all a new-comer's disadvantages; he hardly knew where to turn for the proper agents, legal or financial, that might have been employed; while many of the agencies--courts, for instance--were different in procedure and even, in name from anything he had known East.

"All the same, though," he said to his mother, "things ought to be in different shape for you. I'm bound hand and foot in that bank--no time or thought for anything outside. I don't know but what you'd better put everything with some good real-estate firm, and let them look after repairs and collections and taxes."

His mother fixed a pair of anxious eyes upon him, and the wrinkles of perplexity appeared on her forehead.

"Eugene is real-estate."

"Or those lawyers," he went on. "Anyway, you ought to have an account as administratrix with some bank. I believe I'll open one to-morrow. Something has got to be done to make things quicker and clearer."

He presently took upon himself the delicate task of intimating to McDowell that a simpler and more regular way of doing things was desired.

He went up to McDowell's office in the latter part of the afternoon. As he entered, a tall, dark man was standing in the middle of the room. There was a sinister look in his eyes and a contemptuously sarcastic smile on his heavy red lips. He gave a last fold to a small piece of paper that he held in his hands and thrust it into his vest pocket. It was Vibert.

"It's pretty near four now," he was saying to McDowell, "so I can't try again to-day; but I expect to find this all right after ten to-morrow morning."

He gave his hand a hardy flip across one side of his dark moustache and passed out. McDowell looked after him sourly. "Damn the brute!" he muttered.

As Vibert's words implied, he had been in McDowell's office once before on the same day. His salary at St. Asaph's now meant more to him than it had meant a month ago, and he had called with reference to it and to the delay in its payment. Hitherto, the financial arrangements of the church had gone on with the same precision as its anthems and its processionals. In the present condition of things delay to Vibert was more than a surprise, more than an embarrassment; it was an exasperation.

"I don't sing for glory," he had declared with an offensive brusqueness. "It's the here and not the hereafter that I'm busy with."

McDowell looked at him uneasily. "I'm going to fix up all the salaries next week in one batch. I don't see why any particular man should be favored."

"Favored!" repeated Vibert, with a loud insolence. "I should say not. I don't feel favored in running my legs off for money three weeks overdue. We can't live on air. We have bills to pay. We ain't singing for the pleasure of it."

McDowell contracted his eyes to a critical narrowness. "You may not be singing much longer for anything else, either."

"That's another matter; it isn't you that put the choir together."

McDowell tapped his fingers on the yellow varnish of his desk. "I don't know about that. From what I hear, you're not making the sort of record for yourself that's useful in a church."

"My private life is nobody's business. I sing; I'm worth the money."

"That may work on the stage; it won't work quite so close to the pulpit. Come, now; I know a little something of your daily doings. Plenty of men sing who _don't_ hang around race-tracks and loaf in pool-rooms. And, from what I hear, you're helping that young Brainard along at a good gait, too. You'd better wait--along with the others."

"Waiting be hanged! I'm here for money--money that's mine. If I can't work it with the man who pays out the loaves and fishes, I'll try one of the men that contribute them, in the first place." He tossed his head insultingly towards the door that led to Ingles's office.

McDowell's elbow rested on the edge of his desk (his thumb on the tip of his ear and his middle finger rubbing his farther eyebrow) as he looked out steadily on Vibert from under his hand. "Joseph," he called to his clerk, "bring me that check-book."

The man opened a lower drawer and brought out a book whose covers enclosed a number of stubs and three or four blank checks.

McDowell wrote and passed the check to Vibert, who went out with no further words on either side.

McDowell did some figuring and saw some people, and somewhat later Vibert returned. He threw his check on McDowell's desk contemptuously. "That's no good."

"How's that?"

"No account with 'em."

"No ac--oh, I see. We've changed banks, and I forgot to change the name in the check." He picked up a ruler and drew the red-ink-bottle a little nearer. "I'll fix it. Sorry to have troubled you. We want to look out for this, Joseph."

Vibert withdrew, speaking the words that Ogden had heard on his entrance--words that would have been the reverse of assuring if he had fully understood them. "Bad egg," said McDowell to him, wagging his head in the direction of the just closed door.

George looked at him studiously. He appeared to be in a state of extreme nervous irritation. His wiry moustache moved up and down stiffly as he felt about with, his teeth for the inner membrane of his lips. His long, lean fingers were interlaced, and a clicking sound came from his snapping his finger-nails together. It was clearly no occasion for more than a partial statement of Ogden's matter, and this was the most that he permitted himself.

But McDowell was in the sensitive state of mind when one word does the work of three, and in the irritable state of mind when talk is such a relief that three words evoke thirty in reply. He met George's brief and modest suggestions with a hitching of his shoulders, and answered them in a harsh and strident tone.

"The first thing in doing business," he said, "is to have an office to do it in." He looked about his own--his desks, his cashier's window, his letter-press. "And the second is to know how to do it." He looked out of the window in a wholly impersonal way, but his words had a more personal slant than he would have given them at almost any other time. "Gad knows I've got enough to do already, but Kittie's affairs are mine. She has equal interests with the others, and she seems to feel that I am able and willing to look after them."

He spoke with some show of reason, and George was obliged so to concede.

"There's taxes, for one thing. Or, take special assessments alone; they're almost a business by themselves. Say you've got ten acres or so just beyond the limits. Some fine day it's six hundred dollars or more for half a mile of side-walk--a sidewalk that won't be walked on by seven people a week. What's the reason? Oh, some one of those township politicians or other has got a friend that's a carpenter. Now, who's going to tackle the boards and stave off such things?"

George looked at him silently.

"There's tax-sales--I guess you never went to one of them. You'd strike a bloodthirsty crew if you did. Supposing you've got a mortgage, and the mortgager don't come to time with his taxes? You've got to buy 'em up to protect yourself. And you've got to get there first. Last year I fought this point for a week with one of those tax-sharks. And so it goes. Real estate is no kindergarten business, I can tell you."

The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive state of mind--well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge, a crack--the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the equator--the "line of the third principal meridian."

The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.

The elder daughter received him with a quiet and simple cordiality. He could not help looking about furtively for the possible presence of the younger. He had not remained ignorant of her half-hour wait in a cab outside the bank; but he might have surmised the inflexibility of her father's will. The old man had refused to see her or to let her see him; the most that he would yield was a species of non-committal communication through Burt.

Mrs. Brainard presented herself to Ogden as a peculiarly faded and ineffective person; it was easy enough to grant her an abysmal incapacity. Her husband, in fact, had fallen upon her, crushed her, absorbed her--as a heavy blotting-pad falls on a page of light and delicate writing. Except for one thing she had no aim, no occupation, no diversion--beyond her ills and remedies. This was a penchant for chess. To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it taken up by an elderly, invalided female who has rested content with a mere learning of the moves? It was thus with Mrs. Brainard; she played a good many games with herself every day, and they really soothed and rested her.

On the social board, however, she had hardly learned the first "opening," and the entertainment of the brilliant young couple now in her house fell almost altogether on Abbie; for the girl's mother sank back into a passive silence, while her father toured through the rooms occasionally, and threw out remarks, more or less _à propos_, in a gruff and abrupt fashion peculiar to himself.

His manner with young men had simply closed the house to them. To him it was an inexplicable and harassing thing that a young fellow of twenty-five should not possess the capacity, experience, and accumulations of a man of thirty-five or forty. He regarded every intruder in the light of a potential son-in-law, and no more potential than undesirable. Most of these callers would gulp down once, with such smile as they could master, the old man's abrupt ways and disconcerting comments; then they got out of the house in good order and never came back. However, at the present juncture he did not appear to resent Ogden's appearance--notwithstanding the young man's share in the episode at the bank; perhaps he looked upon him as a serviceable prop in another bad quarter of an hour.

"Yes, Mr. Brainard," Mrs. Valentine was saying, as George entered, "it's just as I have been telling Abbie; you ought to move over on the North Side, too."

Brainard happened to be passing through the room; it had occurred to him that he might turn down one of the side-burners in the back parlor.

"Um, no," he said, in an off-hand way; "too near the lake: fog; damp; rheumatism."

"And pneumonia too, perhaps," his wife suggested feebly.

"I'll risk it!" cried Mrs. Valentine, vivaciously. She had an expansive and affluent effect; she appeared mettlesome, decisive, confident. "It seemed to me that, so long as I was going to build, I might as well make a complete sweep--an out-and-out break. I've always had a fancy for that part of town. So I sent Adrian around to the different offices--"

She threw a look of passing reference towards her husband, who made a little bow in return.

"--and I had the good luck to get a lot on Bellevue Place--one of the last left, and only a block from the Lake Shore drive. Then I went to Mr. Atwater, and he has made my house a perfect little dream! I thought it best to have him to dinner once or twice, and I'm glad I did--he's been so interested all through. There hasn't been the least hitch to speak of, and I expect to get in within a fortnight. This," she went on, turning to Ogden with an undiminished vivacity, "is really my P. P. C."

Ogden glanced at the husband of the lady whose use of the first person singular was so frank and continuous. He was a young man with a pleasant and amiable face, and that face was set in a meek little smile, from whose forced lines the element of deception was most pitifully lacking.

"Yes, Abbie dear," Mrs. Valentine went on, "I'm afraid it's good-by--or nearly the same thing." She took the girl's hand within her own and gave it repeated pats in a rather careless and self-absorbed way. "I shall try to see you often, of course; but it will be so far. How nice it would be if you could only come up there and settle down right next door to me."

Ogden sighed unconsciously. He had fancied the first rays of social illumination as falling upon this benighted family; but it was only the last faint glow of a Speeding twilight, after all.

Abbie withdrew _her_ hand with a quiet dignity; she seemed to put but a moderate value on these protestations.

"I believe we are satisfied where we are, Fanny," she said in a low and even tone. "We have always lived here; we feel more at home in this house than we could anywhere else. All our--all our--friends are near us"--a desolate little blush came in here--"and then there's the church and everything. I've heard my sis--I'm told that the North Side is very pleasant on some accounts, but I don't think we are likely ever to change."

"Change!" called her father, suddenly. "I wouldn't live anywhere else if you paid me to. What's better than this?"

"So attached," murmured her mother, vaguely.

Mrs. Valentine continued for some time further to flutter her hands, her clothing, and her conversation, but she was very slow about getting up and fluttering away. She was a neighbor, and her return home was a matter of three minutes. Ogden's return was a matter of nearly an hour, and he left first. He carried away the discontented feeling of a young man whose aim in the direction of a young woman is frustrated by the presence of uncongenial elders and irrelevant outsiders. He had been quite certain of his ability to meet Abbie Brainard after the bank episode without any particular embarrassment or restraint; certainly he had come to view with more interest a girl whose hand had lain in his and whose head had rested on his shoulder. There had been no embarrassment in her greeting of him; her manner had been as straightforward and sensible as it always was. But never mind; he should try again; he was only too certain of soon finding her alone.

He took his hour through the clamor and the slime of the public ways. He escaped from these by his talismanic night-key, and stumbled up thoughtfully to his room.

There was a light burning in it, and the fireplace showed the faint red of dying coals. A valise, open and half unpacked, stood in the middle of the floor, and sitting up in bed was Brower, busy with the last volume of "Monte Cristo." They now occupied a large front room together, which Ogden had to himself a good half of the time.

"Back, are you?" said George. "When did you get in?"

"About seven."

"How's Missouri?"

"Weather good; eating bad."

"Heading all this time?"

"Went to theatre."

"What did you see?"

"'Crackling of Thorns.'"

"Any good?"

"Hot much; one pretty girl. Where have _you_ been?"

"West Side; Brainard's."

"Anybody there?"

"The old people. And some friends--Valentines."

"Valentine? I used to know a Valentine--nice, quiet fellow, light complexion. His name was Alpheus--no, Adrian."

"That's the one."

"Poor fellow! he deserved a better fate."

"What's the matter with him?"

"His wife owns him."

George smiled. Brower hitched himself up on his pillow and put his finger into the book to keep the place. "He was a first-rate fellow --good all through and kind of capable; that is, he was worth a salary of eighteen hundred a year--or two thousand. He married a girl with two thousand a month. No head book-keeper, no cashier, no secretary could she let him be after that; no, Johnny must be his own master--except as regarded her. To-day he sort o' hangs on the outskirts of business, and picks up a little here and a little there--he has desk-room somewhere in the Clifton, I believe. He does the best he can to preserve his self-respect, but I don't see how he can pay the bills and the house-rent too."

"House-rent? They're building--I mean, _she_ is."

"Yaugh!" cried Brower, with deep meaning.

"Atwater's doing the house for them--for her."

"Atwater?" Brower gave a second hitch to the pillow, and threw the book to the foot of the bed. "He's another. He's had a trip in the same boat."

"Why, he isn't married."

"I guess he is--just about as hard as any man ever was. But he has fought through gallantly--I'll say that for him."

"What's _his_ story?"

"Begins in the same way. She was rich, too, and a high-flyer. He had education and family and his profession--and no money. He struggled up for ten years, and now--now he stands on his own legs; his wife has her own money for her clothes and amusements. He saw he had got to strike society, and he struck it--hard; he costs like smoke. But he snatched victory from defeat. It was a great act. Speaking of acts--who do you think I saw there in a stage-box to-night?"

"Who?"

"Burt Brainard. Just kick that valise out of the way if you want to."

"All alone?"

"Hope. Girl with him. One of the Clifton type-writers--the one who used to be down in the lunch-room."

"Healie McNabb?"

"U'm h'm."