________________________________________________
_ For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in
Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom
Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before
country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting
back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and
among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From
time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in
Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.
In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the
farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the
store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose--the same John Telfer had
watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show
Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker
barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane
and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not
got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and
make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that
opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of
many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he
had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had
touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid
goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the
bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to
make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he
had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out
flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.
Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now
that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom
Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the
wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith
walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.
"What has happened to Sam--he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping a
foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the
city has changed him," he added regretfully.
Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.
"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the
store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he
leaves town. What has got into him?"
Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of
the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been
hurled at him.
"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all
right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes
to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it."
* * * * *
For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing,
hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from
the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money-
maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life
and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in
which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently
until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With
the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam
felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it
ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of
unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took
advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague,
uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.
He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes
with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful
business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter,
scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler,
Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when
as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and
then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city
where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the
street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited
saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."
Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked
on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of
himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a
knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast
work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the
most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him,
keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.
During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton
family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that
still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer
vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed
him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him
had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to
dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk
of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.
"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day--does he still drive that team of
black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty,
would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of
baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be
erected in the Loop.
"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a
machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been
the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked
upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was home that he
intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add, looking at the
youth challengingly.
The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and
bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart
toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its
mainstay, could be found in that paradise.
Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache,
and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they
stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn,
worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to
bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room
to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting
in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed
in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his
pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week's living, sat down to
dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled
waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-
possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation
for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain
Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his
weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam
upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
wife.
The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each week the faith
healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer's
wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
the house.
In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind of
genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday
afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and purposeful
like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
"but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I
want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand
and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice
I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do
not understand her just the same."
One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became
acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very
much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had
friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar
room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance
acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a
kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of
him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on
mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting
about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and
Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been
cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out
with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing
street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of
the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.
After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with
young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after
hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own
impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played,
for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place and
drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome,
and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the
circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred
the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into
his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets,
getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the
faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars
in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes,
the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim
prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In
his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only
as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his
own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in
the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he
looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against
him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the
imaginary struggle.
There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above
the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy
nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving
swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by
hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon
Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to
smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours
with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and
admiration of the silent power of it.
One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an
incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a
power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a
little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of
women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of
the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices
called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men
looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their
hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women
pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly,
sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on
the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they
hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In
the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam's brain and he stood
hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a
story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death
that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren
Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the
elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk
for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The
wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the
lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the
eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his
voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great
masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there
was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of,
moving always forward, silent, powerful--the force of sex. He wondered how
the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater it
would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and crept
into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time utterly
tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and resolutely closing
his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to be understood," he told
himself. "To live decently is a matter of good sense. I will keep thinking
of what I want to do and not go into such a place again."
One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident
of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth,
that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked
in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the
remembrance of some new detail of the affair.
Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk,
and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at
the stars like a wood god on the bend.
Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him
on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked
to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The
man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the
cheeks of a maiden."
Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and
a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a
Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil
stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them,"
Prince had explained.
Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising
and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher, as I
am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's ideas
and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man's story
better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to advertising."
He began laughing.
"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man
for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat
phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will
howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he will try
to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to
send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off
the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."
Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way to
the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he
explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of a
circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock
of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."
Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind
the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will
always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet
McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him
with."
Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small and
soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained; "I have
my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live."
For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a
place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me of
the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on a
railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here
comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."
The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from
Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them
with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he
announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man.
Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming
society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and
putting it in his wife's name."
Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began and
then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said uncertainly.
Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness
started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering
steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's
hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger under
Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends the
cradle will fall."
The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head
feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the
sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner
Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his
glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it seems to me
that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab
with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to
catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish lies about."
The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of
liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in
the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced
in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the
little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the
edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on the voice, the
gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer.
And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and
Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill the lamp,
man--the light of reason has gone out."
From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the three
friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home
half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the
skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and
thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the
soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a
saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"
Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear.
In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of
himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and
there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the
bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until
the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone
into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair
upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of
beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to
celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag
Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.
Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of
grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every
one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.
And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking
again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.
On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to
efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio
containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under
Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses,
peered at Sam.
"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these
parts?" he asked. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER II
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER VIII
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