Chapter IV

On the twelfth floor of the Clifton--at the far end of a long corridor--is the office of Eugene H. McDowell, real estate.

Ogden, at the beginning of one of his brief noonings, took the elevator up to the quarters of his coming brother-in-law.

He found McDowell stretching himself violently in his swivel chair, which was tilted as far back as its mechanism would permit; his head was thrown back, too, as far as anatomical considerations would allow. His eyes would have seen the ceiling if they had not been so tight shut; his Adam's apple appeared prominently between the turned-down points of his collar. His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.

"Waugh--oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"

He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to another several years his junior--of a man in business for himself to a man in business for some one else--of a man who was presently to undertake the protection and support of the other's sister.

"Sit down." He motioned Ogden to a chair which stood close to the window--a window that looked out on the court and that commanded the multifarious panorama of daily business going on behind the ranks and rows of great glass sheets which formed the other three sides of the enclosure--the ends of over-crowded desks, the digital dumb-show of stenographers, the careful handling by shirt-sleeved clerks of the damp yellow sheets in copying-books, the shaking fingers and nodding heads that accompanied the persuasion and expostulation of personal interviews.

McDowell presented a physiognomy that seemed to have been stripped of all superfluities. He contrived to avoid the effect of absolute leanness, yet he was without a spare ounce of flesh. His cheek-bones did not obtrude themselves, nor were his finger-joints unduly prominent; yet his trousers seemed more satisfactory as trousers than his legs as legs, and his feet were in long, narrow, thin-soled shoes, through whose flexible leather one almost divined the articulations of his toes. His hair had shrunk back from his forehead and temples, but his moustache sprang out as boldly and decidedly as if constructed of steel wires. His nose was sharp; his eyes were like two gimlets. The effect of his presence was nervous, excitant, dry to aridity. He had a flattish chest and bony shoulders; his was an earthly tabernacle that gave its tailor considerable cause for study.

"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him. "We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that cousin of theirs live with them?"

"Cousin? Isn't she their sister--sister-in-law?"

"I mean the other one; Miss--Bradley, isn't it?"

"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then. But her people live in Hinsdale."

"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down--like around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."

He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them into the waste-basket.

"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of herself yet.

"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on. "What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems, resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street--she lugged in mediæval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her Boston literary business?"

He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one of his ears.

"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy. She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing--that's the amount of it."

"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how about that other affair--have you made any report to father?"

"Yes. That's as good as settled. The deeds are all made out; they've only got to be signed." He reached into one of his pigeon-holes and brought out a bulk of bluish paper whose fractious folds were held in some shape by a wide rubber strap. "Here's one of the abstracts--just come in. The other is a good deal longer and the copy isn't finished. I suppose they'll put that one on a board."

He snapped the band once or twice and put the abstract back again.

"I'm glad," he said, "that your father has finally decided to pull up altogether and to transfer everything to the West. That old block of his was wanting repairs all the time; I don't believe it paid him four per cent. It takes more than soldiers' monuments and musical festivals to make a town move."

George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so left-behind.

"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the North west and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking--"

"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"

"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's New York?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the wash-stand stood. "It ain't a city at all; it's like London--it's a province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny, you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have a bite myself."

"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were over at Brainard's house last night--he's a fine bird. And his son is like him. He's got another, hasn't he--a younger one? In the bank, isn't he? Used to be. Well, he might be without your knowing it. Queer genius--his father don't know what to do with him. He's kind of in the background, as it were. How did you happen to go over there?"

"Papers to sign. Mr. Brainard was at home, sick. It was something that they could hardly give to any of the boys to manage. I met his other daughter."

"Other? Didn't know he had any. Got two, has he? And two sons. Well, he's a great old father, from all I hear, and I shouldn't--D--ow--n!"

But the elevator was too far past them to return.

"Here's another coming," said George, to whom the indicator showed that a cab had left the top story and was half way down to their level.

Ogden had now gone through a novitiate of five or six weeks. After his first wrench--from the East to the West--his second one--from the West Side to the North--seemed an unimportant matter. He had learned his new neighborhood, had made a few acquaintances there, had become familiar with his work at the bank; and the early coming of his own family, who had elected to swell the great westward movement by the contribution of themselves and all their worldly goods, helped him to the feeling of being tolerably well at home. From the vantage-ground of a secure present and a promising future he became an interested observer of the life that swept and swirled about him. He found that there might be an inner quiet under all this vast and apparently unregulated din: he recalled how, in a cotton factory or a copper foundry, the hands talked among themselves in tones lower than the average, rather than higher. The rumble of drays and the clang of street-car gongs became less disconcerting; the town's swarming hordes presently appeared less slovenly in their dress and less offensive in their manners than his startled sensibilities had found them at first; even their varied physiognomies began to take on a cast less comprehensively cosmopolitan. His walks through the streets and his journeyings in the public conveyances showed him a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience; yet it soon came to seem possible that all these different elements might be scheduled, classified, brought into a sort of _catalogue raisonné_ which should give every feature its proper place--skulls, foreheads, gaits, odors, facial angles; ears, with their different shapes and sets; eyes, with their varying shapes and colors; hair, with its divergent shades and textures; noses, with their multiplied turns and outlines; dialects, brogues, patois, accents in all their palatal and labial varieties and according to all the differentiations in pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis.

He disposed as readily of the Germans, Irish, and Swedes as of the negroes and the Chinese. But how to tell the Poles from the Bohemians? How to distinguish the Sicilians from the Greeks? How to catalogue the various grades of Jews? How to tabulate the Medes, and the Elamites, and the Cappadocians, and the dwellers from Mesopotamia?

During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise--the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.

The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality--no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items.

In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. It had pleased him, therefore, to find that Brainard's house was in the neighborhood of Union Park and in the immediate vicinity of his own first lodgings: and when he went over there with his documents in his pocket he appreciated the privilege of ringing the bell of a door behind which were one or two faces that he might recognize.

The Brainards lived on a corner, and the house was so set as to allow a narrow strip of yard along the side street. It was built in the yellow limestone which used to come from quarries at Joliet, and the architect had shown his preference for the exaggerated keystones that had so great a vogue in the late sixties. The house had a basement, and above the elaborate wooden cornice there was a mansard with several windows that were set in a frame-work of clumsy and pretentious carpentry. Behind the house was a brick stable; it had been built of cheap material and covered with a cheaper red wash. The dampness of the lower walls had caused this wash to discolor and then to fall off altogether. Around the premises there ran an old-fashioned iron fence; it stood on a stone coping that was covered with perpendicular streaks of yellow rust. In the yard a meandering asphalt walk led past a few lilacs and syringas, which were looked down upon by a painful side porch that nobody ever used. The walk in front of the house was of stone; that at the side was of plank and showed three long lines of nail-heads.

The interior, so far as it came under Ogden's notice, was furnished with a horrible yet consistent simplicity. The large rooms were set sparely with chairs, tables, and sofas that represented the spoil of Centralia, and there were few modern additions to introduce discords. An ideal sculptured head, placed on a marble pedestal swathed in a fringed scarf of saffron silk and set between the lace curtains so as to show from the street, would have ruined the effect both within and without. Perhaps the same might be said of any other house.

Brainard himself was not visible; he was only audible. His deep voice came in a sort of deadened growl through the closed door of a small side room; and mingled with it were the querulous tones of a woman's voice--an elderly woman, a woman in poor health, a woman whom some sudden and distressful stroke had brought to the verge of tears.

The house had been built in the primitive days when local architecture was still in such exact accord with local society that anything like graded receptions was undreamed of. Everybody who seemed too good to be kept waiting in the hall was shown into the front parlor. This room had a carpet whose design was in large baskets of bright flowers, and a ceiling that was frescoed in a manner derived from a former style of railroad decoration. This scheme of decoration centred around a massive and contorted chandelier with eight globes. Nobody had ever seen the whole eight "going" at one time. Lincoln and his family were on one side of the marble mantel-piece; Grant and his family on the other.

It was in this room that Ogden was received by the elder daughter of the house. She seemed a quiet, self-poised girl, four or five years the senior of her sister. She amply filled her gown of gray woollen; her hair was drawn back from her forehead and made a knot just above the nape of her neck. She had a pair of cool, steady gray eyes. She appeared wholesome, stable, capable of keeping herself well in hand.

"My father isn't able to see you," she said; "but if you will give me what you have brought I will take it to him."

There was a tremulousness in her voice, quite at variance with her manner and appearance. She put out her hand with a wavering motion; the flaring of the gas in her face seemed to strike her with a positive pain.

A door opened suddenly and her brother Burt came in. He was a stocky young man three or four years older than Ogden. He seemed stuffed with importance both present and future, both personal and parental--he was himself and his father rolled into one.

"Abbie," he said, in a sharp, curt way, "I wish you'd find father the copy of that report you made for him yesterday." He looked at Ogden in a fashion that changed the young man from a person to a thing. "We have been looking for you some time," he said. "I'll take those papers myself."

He spoke in a way that was abrupt and autocratic. Ogden recognized it as the utterance of a masterful nature, but he was unable to see that the masterful nature was moved by an emotion that must be controlled and concealed. His indignation made no allowance for this, and his subsequent ten minutes of solitary reflection left a bitterness that passed away but lingeringly. More and more, with every moment of this short wait, did he feel himself a gentleman turned into a lackey by his inferiors.

There was no salve for his wounded sensibilities save, perhaps, in the look of dumb expostulation which the girl cast upon her brother and in the few commonplace words which she addressed to their caller before she went out.

"Kindly wait a few moments, and the papers will be ready to take back. Perhaps you will find this other chair more comfortable."

It was after this fashion that he first met Abbie Brainard; met her--as he reported it to McDowell--and hardly more.

He followed his brother-in-law into the elevator and they dropped swiftly to the ground floor. At this level is situated the Acme Lunch Room.