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_ Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees of
the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces of the
men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so many aids
to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while yet a boy, had
because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a gift of
acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated, knowing
nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked out of the
offices of his company and along through the crowded streets to the new
apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday evening at the
end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things he had
accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come. Through
Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men and women,
boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon the
pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and the
whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in the shops
among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with unseeing eyes.
He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their cheap clothing;
the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine in restaurants;
the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting for his sweetheart
in the shadow of the towering office building. The eager, straining rush
of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for
action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men--of whom he intended
to be one--intent upon growth.
In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came out
again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a woman--
tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on her head. As
she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at her, their
eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward with a cry.
"Edith!" he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand.
"For Janet," he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to
Van Buren Street.
Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres and
dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and with a
peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered before the
theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs restaurant
came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of the street.
"There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," sang the voice.
Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long narrow
park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth where the
city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross street, standing in
the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed a whining, intoxicated
old woman who lurched forward and put a hand upon his coat. Sam had flung
her a quarter and passed on shrugging his shoulders. Here also he had
walked with unseeing eyes; this too was a part of the gigantic machine
with which the quiet, competent men of growth worked.
From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam
walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went
noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who
talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air.
Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the city
toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it. "There'll
be a hot time in the old town to-night," again insisted the voice.
After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting on
the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him. From
the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which saloons
stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish doorway and
its dimly lighted "Ladies' Entrance," and into a region of neat little
stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the counters and
Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one of
whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom he
had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city, had
been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all of the
five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had been a
residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that was now both
a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs, reached by a
stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years, and under the
hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in the simplicity
and completeness of its appointment.
The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the
middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather had
been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first governors and
later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a county and a
good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked of as a vice-
presidential possibility but had died at Washington before the convention
at which his name was to have been put forward. His one son, a youth of
great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly through the Civil
War, afterward commanding several western army posts and marrying the
daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle, died after having
borne him the two daughters.
After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away
from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his
wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to
his home state to settle on a farm.
About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father,
Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and
treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would
sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great many,
and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment of the two
girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no intrusion, were
followed by days of fierce industry during which he led team after team to
the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no rest except to eat.
At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once he
locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house and
stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court and
fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his humiliation.
To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about in
dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks in
the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of the
army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl of ten
this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were thrown on
their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight
woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous fingers,
black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so absorbed in the
exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation that her little intense
face became transfigured and her quick fingers clutched the arm of her
listener while her eyes looked into his and she lost all consciousness of
his presence or of the opinions he may have expressed. She was a cripple,
having fallen from the loft of a barn in her youth injuring her back so
that she sat all day in a specially made reclining wheeled chair.
Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down town,
and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street from the
house in which they lived. In his will the father left the money from the
sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his life for ten
thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession and handling
it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with the money of
the medical student. "Take it and make money for me," the little woman had
said impulsively one evening shortly after the beginning of their
acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking flamboyantly of Sam's
ability in affairs. "What is the good of having a talent if you do not use
it to benefit those who haven't it?"
Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly
points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In a
way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during the
time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of
understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a
miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When Sam
met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours in
talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings spent
together.
In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker.
In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year
into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good
living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was
guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the reddish-brown
hair and the air of physical completeness that made men stop to look at
her on the street, who first became Sam's friend.
Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid
intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in
the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam's money making and
of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his
affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his hand
a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway beside
the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there sprang up
between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped finally by
Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam had met Janet
Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all show of affection
or even of interest between him and Edith was at an end and the kiss upon
the stairs was forgotten.
* * * * *
Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside
Janet's wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing
Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal fire in
a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside, through an
open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking dishes from a
little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would come and take
her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their talk.
Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement
that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively on
his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
"You talk!" she broke out. "Books are not full of pretence and lies; you
business men are--you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They are
the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and forget to
lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You haven't read
books, not real ones. Didn't my father know; didn't he save himself from
insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the real feel of the
movement of the world through the books that men write? Suppose I saw
those men. They would swagger and strut and take themselves seriously just
like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs. You think you know what's
going on in the world. You think you are doing things, you Chicago men of
money and action and growth. You are blind, all blind."
The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned
forward and ran her fingers through Sam's hair, laughing down into the
astonished face he turned up to her.
"Oh, I'm not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,"
she went on impulsively. "I like you all right and if I were a well woman
I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there was
something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and men
and machines that make guns."
Sam grinned. "You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and
down under the church windows on Sunday mornings," he declared; "you think
you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should like to go
and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep."
Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight
and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.
After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet,
listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean to
a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever since
their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks they had
had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little black-eyed
woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of thought and
action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a new world of
men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming Russians,
analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with their sense
of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so much and getting
so little; so that at the end of the evening he went out of her presence
feeling strangely small and insignificant against the great world
background she had drawn for him.
Sam did not understand Janet's point of view. It was all too new and
foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought her
ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them and
he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when
she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it had so
often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to spring out of
the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone with her to the
clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that she would have
gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam's work for the gun
company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during the
years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense his
wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after night and
wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours when he
should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got hold of and
stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that made it possible
for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of vision that was no
part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars and of industry who
sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on Wabash Avenue.
After Janet's death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but
turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
Janet's money had grown in his hands and did not see her again. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER IV
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