Chapter VIII

McDowell had not quartered himself on the twelfth floor of the Clifton--as distinguished from the eleventh or the thirteenth or any other--by a mere chance. He had not been influenced by any finicky consideration of light, prospect, ventilation, or nearness to the elevators. His sole reason for selecting room number 1262 was that room number 1263 was occupied by Arthur J. Ingles, the owner of the building.

Ingles occupied a very small room, upon whose door was his name--his name and nothing more--in very small letters. The next door beyond was lettered "Office of the Building," and this second room had communication with the first by a door between. None of these three doors, however, had as much interest for McDowell as the one between his own office and the private office of Ingles. This door was closed, but it was McDowell's dream and ambition to see it open. In his thoughts he constantly saw it standing ajar in an intimate and friendly fashion, while he and Ingles and other magnates of Ingles's ilk circulated through it freely and all did business together.

Up to the present time this door had never been opened, nor had McDowell ever had access to the other suite except by the farther door, through which tenants passed to request repairs or to pay their monthly rent.

Ingles was enough of a lawyer to be a real-estate man, and enough of a real-estate man to need to be a lawyer. He supervised the drawing of his own deeds and leases, and seldom took counsel in matters between landlord and tenant. As a landlord, he had found it advantageous to divest himself of his soul by making the Clifton into a stock company; he himself held all the shares but five. He had an extraordinary faculty for keeping himself out of the papers; but this did not prevent McDowell from knowing that he was constantly engaged in enterprises of the first magnitude, and he felt that association with this great capitalist would be immensely to his own advantage.

But he had accomplished only one step that might be reckoned an advance: he had undertaken the financial arrangements connected with St. Asaph's choir. This was a large, well-trained body, and was provided with all the expensive paraphernalia of a "high" service. It included four or five tenors and basses who commanded rather good salaries, as well as an expert organist and an experienced choir-master who commanded larger ones. The management had been by committee, and several of the pillars of the church, Ingles among them, had learned the difficulty of mediating between music, money, and ritualism. A member of a previous committee had delighted in translating and adapting Latin hymns for Christmas and Easter, and in putting his hands into his pockets now and then to make good a small deficit in the budget. Ingles and his compeers were ready enough to put their hands into their pockets, but they were glad, one and all, to escape the details of administration.

It was here that McDowell stepped forward; he cynically acknowledged that religion must be made to play into the hands of business, and he justified himself to himself by many good arguments. The details of the new dispensation were arranged in a down-town office. McDowell had tried to contrive that that office should be Ingles's own; but the meeting was held, after all, in another tall tower a block or two down the street, and Ingles himself was not present more than ten minutes. McDowell regretted this; he felt very well disposed towards Ingles. He would have done almost anything for him--for a commission.

But McDowell did not push this choir matter to the neglect of his own proper business. He was engaged at about this time with a new subdivision out beyond the South Parks. He had bought up a ten-acre tract, which he himself acknowledged to be rather low-lying, and which his rivals, with an unusual disregard of the courtesies of the profession, did not hesitate to call an out-and-out swamp. He had mended matters somewhat by means of a dam and a sluice, which drained off a part of his moisture on to grounds lying lower still--other men's grounds; and on the driest and most accessible corner of his domain he had placed a portable one-story frame shanty which had already done duty on other subdivisions, and alongside of it stood a tall flagpole which flaunted a banner with his own name and number on it. This tract, by the way, had absorbed some moderate portion of Ann Wilde's hoarded savings.

A week of rainy weather now and then would lay a complete embargo on McDowell's operations in this quarter. His plank walks would float off in sections; the trees along his avenues would sag deeply into the slush and would sway sidewise, in spite of their networks of rusty wire; and the cellars of the three or four unfinished houses that he had artfully scattered through this promising tract would show odds and ends of carpenters' refuse floating around in muddy water a foot deep. It was an appalling spectacle to one who realized the narrow margins upon which many of these operations were conducted, or who failed to keep in mind the depths that human folly and credulity may sound.

"Oh, it's all right enough," McDowell would say. "It's going to dry up before long."

Occasionally it did dry up and stay so for several weeks. Then, on bright Sunday afternoons, folly and credulity, in the shape of young married couples who knew nothing about real estate, but who vaguely understood that it was a "good investment," would come out and would go over the ground--or try to. They were welcomed with a cynical effrontery by the young fellow whom McDowell paid fifty dollars a month to hold the office there. He had an insinuating manner, and frequently sold a lot with the open effect of perpetrating a good joke.

McDowell sometimes joked about his customers, but never about his lands. He shed upon them the transfiguring light of the imagination, which is so useful and necessary in the environs of Chicago. Land generally--that is, subdivided and recorded land--he regarded as a serious thing, if not indeed as a high and holy thing, and his view of his own landed possessions--mortgaged though they might be, and so partly unpaid for--was not only serious but idealistic. He was able to ignore the pools whose rising and falling befouled the supports of his sidewalks with a green slime; and the tufts of reeds and rushes which appeared here and there spread themselves out before his gaze in the similitude of a turfy lawn. He was a poet--as every real-estate man should be.

We of Chicago are sometimes made to bear the reproach that the conditions of our local life draw us towards the sordid and the materialistic. Now, the most vital and typical of our human products is the real-estate agent: is he commonly found tied down by earth-bound prose?

"You fellows," said Floyd to McDowell, during one of Sister Ann's sessions, "are the greatest lot I ever struck." He spoke in a half-quizzical, half-admiring way, and showed some effort to handle the language with the Western ease and freedom of those to the manner born. "Do you know, when I had been here three or four months some fellows took me with them to the banquet of the Deal Estate Board. Well, it was an eye-opener; I never saw anything like it. It was Chicago--all Chicago. Heavens! how the town was hymned and celebrated! It was personified--"

"That's right," said McDowell.

"And glorified--"

"Of course."

"And deified--"

"Why not?"

"Why not, indeed?" cried Aim Wilde. "_I_ haven't been around much yet, but you strike me as the most imaginative lot of people I ever saw."

"Whenever Chicago is involved," amended Walworth.

"Sure."

"How you idealize it!" cried Ann, enthusiastically. "How you--"

"It needs to be idealized--and badly," said her sister.

But McDowell's interests in the southern suburbs as well as at St. Asaph's were soon set aside by another matter; domestic interests claimed his attention.

His father-in-law had now passed some two or three months in Chicago. He had entered the city without any conception of its magnitude, and he had remained in it without rising to any conception of its metropolitan complexities. He had made a change that was too great and too late. He made but an ineffectual attempt to connect and identify himself with the great rush of life going on all about him. He came down town almost every day to spend an hour or more in McDowell's office, where he took a certain satisfaction in following out the intricacies of the local topography by passing a thin, blue-veined hand over McDowell's maps and his canvas bound books of plats. McDowell treated him with considerable patience and with as much respect as was due to a man who had no great experience in real estate and little aptitude for learning. One day old Mr. Ogden, who apprehended the lake winds little better than the local "lay of the land," took a slight cold in returning home from the office; two days after pneumonia developed, and within a week he died.

George undertook the charge of such arrangements as recognized the old New-Englander as a dead man merely, and McDowell subsequently took charge of those which recognized him as a dead property-owner. First, the funeral; afterwards, the Probate Court.

A funeral is more disagreeable than a wedding, chiefly because its multifarious details make their demands with but a scanty notice in advance. All of these details George was now called upon to face and to dispose of.

He squared his jaw, set his eyes, put a cold, heavy paving-stone in place of his heart, and met these details one by one. It was a man's privilege.

Brower went with him to the undertaker's, and mediated between grief and rapacity.

"Be careful here," Brower said to him in an undertone. They were in a room where sample caskets stood on end against opposite walls and were let down one by one for the inspection of purchasers.

"They always show the most expensive ones first. Don't look at these. You don't need to pay a hundred and fifty dollars. You can select a suitable one for eighty or ninety--perfectly good and no loss of respect."

"How about the outside box?" asked the man in due course. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore a high silk hat.

"Here," whispered Brower, "you'll have to take the most expensive. It's chestnut--fifteen dollars. Nothing else but plain pine for a dollar fifty. Shameful, isn't it?"

Brower arranged for the handles and the plates. He also met the family at the railway-station next day, and saw the casket put on board the east-bound express.

He and George were walking slowly up and down the platform alongside the train when a man in blue overalls leaned out of the door of the baggage-car and called to them. He held a paper in his hand.

"This ain't quite regular," he said. "Our road is pretty strict. The air-tight casket is all right for inter-state travel, but the doctor hasn't signed this certificate."

George turned on Brower with a look of anguish.

"Here!" cried Brower, stretching up his hand. "How forgetful of me! I'll sign it now. Go along, Ogden."

The man hesitated. "Not contagious?"

"Certainly not. Hand it down. Got a pencil? There! Here's a two. Take extra care."

The dead man's son paid for the music and flowers, his wife and daughter folded away his clothes, and his son-in-law undertook to see his estate through the courts.

"I don't believe you'd better pay the doctors and undertaker yet," he counselled. "Let them file their claims with the Probate people. It doesn't cost but a dollar, and if you pay without, you might be liable over again--you are on other claims. I'll keep a general eye on matters, of course, but questions will be coming up all the time. I don't know but what we'd better have a lawyer first as last. The Probate arrangements are different now from what they used to be--more expensive, for one thing. Now there's Freeze & Freeze--they're as good as any, and they're right there in the Clifton, George, only five floors above you."

"Have we got to go into this thing right away?" asked George, as if in physical pain.

"Oh, no. Wait a few weeks--wait a month, if you like."

"Yes, we'll wait," he sighed.

McDowell made no opposition to his wife's suggestion that her mother now come and live with them. He had not anticipated his mother-in-law as a member of his own household; but he liked her well enough, and he generally treated her with a dry and sapless sort of kindness. Besides, he looked on domestic arrangements as a mere incident in business life, anyway. George, who for some time had been anticipating a home with his parents, could not find an equivalent in a home with the McDowells, and he remained with Brower on Bush Street.

There was no will; the recasting and consolidation of the small estate had required too much time and attention to leave much for any-thought of its redistribution. Mrs. Ogden went into court at the proper time and qualified as administratrix. She was a figure-head, of course. She signed various documents at George's instance; George himself was guided by McDowell, principally; and McDowell got a point, now and then, from the attorneys. However, the legal labors of Freeze & Freeze on the Ogden estate were chiefly clerical; this did not prevent them from charging like chancellors and chief-justices.

These charges and others were paid, by McDowell, who began informally by giving checks on his own private account. He came to receive, too, most of the rents and other payments, which were more conveniently made to him in his own office than to George in the office of the bank. And since he paid the estate charges out of his own private account, it seemed natural enough that his own account (which was with the Underground) should receive the sums coming in. This arrangement came about gradually, without receiving any formal acquiescence; but George appeared satisfied with the business capacity of his sister's husband; while his mother was an inmate of her son-in-law's house, where inquiry and explanation were easily enough made.

These details, once in hand, appeared to give little hinderance to the course of McDowell's regular business. His acquaintances in his own line noticed its increasing spread, and agreed among themselves that he was flying a little high for a man of his limited resources. He had more work for the surveyors and sign-painters, and he presently added a clerk or so to his office force.

Various small claims were filed in the Probate Court and were allowed. "I think," said George to McDowell, "that we'll use Kastner's rent for them. To-day is the third; he has been in, I suppose?"

"He'll have to be punched up," replied McDowell. "It doesn't do to give them any leeway."

"He has always been prompt on the first," said George, somewhat annoyed.

The next morning he entered the paying-teller's pen for a moment, as occasionally happened. His eye chanced to alight on the balance sheet that ran from L to Z.

McAvoy, Louis M. 81.98

McCloud, Peters & Co. 1187.25

McDowell, E. H. .0

"How's this, Jo?" asked Ogden. "What's the matter with McDowell?"

"Pulled out yesterday," responded the payer, briefly.