Chapter XVIII

The drawings for the embellishment of the house on Walton Place were undertaken by Atwater, and their scope broadened under the artist's hands. George, at his wife's request, took the elevator one noon and went up to the roof to see them.

In Atwater's absence he was received by the head draughtsman. The scheme had widened, as such schemes will; there were suggestions for the porch and for new hand--rails. There was also a drawing for a cornice in harmony.

"Urn," said George, thoughtfully. "This is all very handsome."

At about the same time that work on the Ogden house began, the work on the plans for the Floyd house received a check. This check was due to the first Western trip of Winthrop C. Floyd, treasurer of the Massachusetts Brass Company. He came on a general visit of inspection.

The morning after his arrival he sat in the office of the Chicago branch; he had come down with Mrs. Floyd and Claudia. His keen and quiet eye ran over the furnishings of the place. He was a bachelor of forty; he was dressed simply but elegantly--he was completely _comme il faut_, except for his muddy shoes, which seemed to trouble him.

"Well, Walworth," he said, with the manner of an elder brother and of an official whose dictum had weight, "you are pretty well fixed up out here--better than the home office, in fact."

"Have to be," returned the other. "Down East everybody knows the company; you could do business in a coal-shed if you wanted to. Here it's different. People don't know us from a hole in the ground; they go by what they see."

"Do you use all these calls and things?"

The wall was set with electrical devices for calling boys from everywhere for everything.

"Sometimes. Anyway it looks as if we did, and that helps business."

Little Claudia came creeping up to his desk.

"When are you going to begin, papa? I've come down to see you do it."

"Do what, my dear?"

"Make money. You said you did it here. When are you going to begin?"

Winthrop swung his chair towards the window and looked out at the driving rain and at the crowds of vehicles and passengers in the filthy streets below.

"Yes," he said, under his breath; "when are you going to begin?" Then aloud, "What a beastly hole! Is there no government here?"

"Precious little for a million and a half of people, and precious bad what there is."

"A million and a half? Nonsense!"

"Why nonsense? There's the census, and there's the regular annual increase."

Winthrop favored his brother with a stare of frank curiosity. Walworth had spoken with some warmth; he seemed disposed to throw an undue ardor into his defence of his adopted home--a city where quality seemed to count for less than quantity, and where the "prominent" citizen made the "eminent" citizen a superfluity. Then, too, Winthrop coupled with the earnest lines in his brother's forehead a slightly dingy necktie under his brother's chin. He observed, moreover, in the polishing of the shoe which Walworth, for greater emphasis, was beating on the carpet, a neglect of the heel in favor of the toe. And there were several other indications of a growing carelessness in dress.

"Well, Walworth," he remarked, "you are getting acclimated, I guess."

"Not to this sort of thing. Yes, there's a million and a half of us here, and this little quarter of a square mile is probably the most crowded and the most active of any on the globe, and yet it isn't found worth while to keep it clean, or even decent, small as it is. On days like this you feel as if you just wanted to remove the inhabitants and annex the whole place to the Stock-yards."

Mrs. Floyd paused in the adjustment of her bedraggled skirts and looked up fiercely.

"Why remove the inhabitants?" she inquired.

"Frances!" called her husband.

"Why, indeed?" asked Winthrop. "I never saw such a beastly rabble in my life."

"Nor I," she cried. All her smouldering resentment against the town broke out with the appearance of a new Eastern ally.

"Except in Madrid or Naples." Winthrop had travelled in his younger days; he never made these European comparisons except under extreme provocation.

"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd, plaintively.

"Because there's no standard of manners--no resident country gentry to provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What little culture we have in the country generally we find principally in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."

He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he admitted further, "to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to live it in such a place as this!"

But pity was not an important factor in Winthrop's Western mission. The Chicago office was costing too much and earning too little. There was to be a general reduction and scaling-down; the most important part of Winthrop's baggage was the pruning-knife.

He remained a week. He used the knife pretty thoroughly. He snipped Atwater's plans for Walworth's house into very small pieces. He left Walworth in a great state of depression--a depression deeper than any he had felt since his failure in coffee and spices.

His last evening in Chicago he spent in Walworth's library. It was a sober little room, and Walworth was the soberest man in it. His wife made only an occasional emergence from her unquiet silence; she no longer looked on Winthrop as an ally. The Fairchilds were there, and the Ogdens dropped in during the course of the evening. Fairchild and Winthrop did most of the talking.

Winthrop's sensibilities had now lost their keenest edge; the weather had improved, and the general aspect of things was a little less disgusting. He listened to Fairchild with the cautious reserve of a maturity that was accustomed to meet elderly strangers. He acknowledged, too, that the city was a big fact, and perhaps a more complicated fact than, he had imagined.

"You have seen the foundations," Fairchild said to him. The old gentleman lay back in his chair and spoke in a quiet and dispassionate tone. "It has taken fifty years to put them in, but the work is finally done and well done. And now we are beginning to build on these foundations. We might have put up our building first and then put in the underpinning afterwards. That is a common way, but ours will be found to have its advantages."

"I dare say," admitted Winthrop; "but you have made an awful muss doing it."

"Well," rejoined Fairchild, "you may look at the external aspect of things, which is distressing enough, I acknowledge, or you may consider the people themselves, who are perhaps the real essential."

"Winthrop finds them rather distressing too." It was Walworth who spoke; his voice came in a muffled tone from the darkest comer of the room.

"What have we done to him?" demanded Jessie Ogden, quickly. "Haven't we received him well?"

Winthrop had no ground for individual complaint, and he hastened to make this clear. Personally, he had been made a great deal of. He was rather a large figure at home, and he naturally grew larger still the farther he travelled West.

"I don't think it can be denied," pursued Fairchild, tranquilly, "that new-comers are pretty well received here, whether they come to stay or to pass on or to go back. All that a man has to do, in order to insure good treatment, is to put a certain valuation on himself. That done, the more he claims, the more he receives; we take him at his own figure. The more I think of it, the more I am astonished at so much humility among people who have accomplished such great results. Commercially, we feel our own footing; socially, we are rather abashed by the pretensions that any new arrival chooses to make. We are a little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of each other."

"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that. Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."

"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of watching and waiting for cues--people of plain origin who are beginning to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke like a princess of the blood-royal.

"That is the point," said Fairchild. "Individually, we may be of a rather humble grade of atoms, but we are crystallizing into a compound that is going to exercise a tremendous force. To him that hath eyes this crystallization, this organization, is the great thing to note just now."

"I acknowledge to have seen the ferment of activity, as they call it," said Winthrop.

"You may have seen the boiling of the kettle," returned Fairchild, "but you have hardly seen the force that feeds the flame. The big buildings are all well enough, and the big crowds in the streets, and the reports of the banks and railways and the Board of Trade. But there is something, now, beyond and behind all that."

"Let me tell Winthrop," broke in Mrs. Floyd. "Since I can't take him to our club, I must bring the club to him. At our last meeting"--there was a sub-acid relish in all this--"it developed that the present intellectual situation in Chicago is precisely that of Florence in the days of the-the--"

"Medici," suggested Ogden.

"Yes, the Medici," said Ann Wilde, loudly. She looked at him with a sharp aversion; he seemed to be taking part in her sister's joke. "That's just exactly what my paper said; the Florence of the Medici after the dispersal of the Greek scholars from Constantinople by the Turks."

"Oh, murder!" said Walworth to himself; "what will Ann rig up next?"

"The Florentines of that day," pursued his sister-in-law, "didn't know so very much, perhaps, but they were bound to learn, and that was the main thing. And it's just so here."

"Quite right," said Fairchild; "we know what there is to learn, and we are determined to master it. Our Constantinoples are Berlin and London and the rest--yes, Boston, too; and all their learned exiles are flocking here to instruct us."

"And the books that are coming in!" cried Jessie Ogden. She was no great reader, and she spoke less as a student than as a Chicagoan--that is, she spoke more ardently than any student could have spoken. "Does the enemy know that four of the biggest buildings in this big city are built of books?"

"The new libraries," her husband explained--"the ones that are going to make us the literary centre."

"Dear me," said Winthrop, "are you expecting that?"

"And we expect to be the financial centre, and presently the political centre, too--Chicago, plus New York and Washington."

"And where is Boston?"

"A little behind," said Fairchild. "New York is the main-mast yet; Chicago ranks as foremast--at present; while Boston is--"

"The mizzen-mast," completed Ogden.

"And we Chicago folks stand at the bow," chimed in his wife, "and sniff the first freshness of the breeze."

"Yes," said Winthrop, in satirical assent; "the 'Windy City.'"

"Don't abuse our wind," cried Mrs. Floyd; "we should all die like flies without it."

"That's so," assented her husband. "The wind is our only scavenger."

"I see," said Winthrop. "If you can only be big you don't mind being dirty."

Then, half in amusement, half in amaze, he concentrated his attention on the banker. "Can it be that there are really any such expectations here as these?" He addressed Fairchild exclusively--the oldest and most sedate of the circle.

"Why not?" returned Fairchild. "Does it seem unreasonable that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis?"

"And you personally--is this your own belief?"

Fairchild leaned back his fine old head on the padded top of his chair and looked at his questioner with the kind of pity that has a faint tinge of weariness. His wife sat beside him silent, but with her hand on his, and when he answered she pressed it meaningly; for to the Chicagoan--even the middle-aged female Chicagoan--the name of the town, in its formal, ceremonial use, has a power that no other word in the language quite possesses. It is a shibboleth, as regards its pronunciation; it is a trumpet-call, as regards its effect. It has all the electrifying and unifying power of a college yell.

"Chicago is Chicago," he said. "It is the belief of all of us. It is inevitable; nothing can stop us now."

But Winthrop Floyd was glad to withdraw himself on the morrow from his temporary enlistment--or drafting--under the vociferous banner of the Western capital. He did all in his power, as well, to oppose its manifest destiny by transmitting to Walworth, immediately after his return to Boston, a full corporate confirmation of his own anathema against Walworth's office and house. The Chicago representative of the Massachusetts Brass Company was recommended to secure less expensive quarters at the earliest opportunity, and was directed to drop his architectural scheme forthwith.

Walworth at once adjusted matters with Atwater. The architect received his "reconsideration" with composure, but he was doubtless nettled to be balked in a work in which he had taken unusual personal interest, and he was also disappointed merely to be paid for his plans when he had looked for the fees that follow construction. These considerations may have had their influence on the account which he rendered a month later to the Ogdens--friends and relatives of the Floyds, and introduced, too, by them. This account was handed in much more promptly than is generally the case with an accredited client in other professions--the legal or the medical, let us say--and its final footing caused Ogden considerable consternation.

The account was mailed to the house instead of to the bank, and the stationery employed was such as to suggest a personal matter between gentlemen rather than a purely business matter between architect and client; and Ogden opened it under his wife's eyes to learn that design had cost him more than construction.

"Your drawings are more of an item than your porch itself," he said, rather faintly. "I shall have to step up there and see about it."