XVIII
Elizabeth did not go often to the Country Club, and almost never for any pleasure she herself could find; now and then she went with her father, in order to lure him out of doors; but to-day she had come with Dick, who wanted some fitting destination for his new touring car. She was finding on a deserted end of the veranda a relief from the summer heat that for a week had smothered the city. A breeze was blowing off the river, and she lay back languidly in her wicker chair and let it play upon her brow. In her lap lay an open book, but she was not reading it nor meditating on it; she held it in readiness to ward off interruption; her reputation as a reader of books, while it made her formidable to many and gave her an unpopularity that was more and more grieving her mother, had its compensations–people would not often intrude upon a book. She looked off across the river. On its smooth surface tiny sail-boats were moving; on the opposite bank there was the picturesque windmill of a farm-house, white against the bright green. The slender young oak trees were rustling in the wind; the links were dotted with players in white, and the distant flags and fluttering guidons that marked hidden putting greens. Then suddenly Marriott was before her. He had come in from the links, and he stood now bareheaded, glowing from his exercise, folding his arms on the veranda rail. His forearms were blazing red from their first burning of the season, and his nose was burned red, giving him a merry look that made Elizabeth smile.
"My! but you're burned!" she exclaimed.
"Am I?" said Marriott, pleased.
"Yes–like a mower," she added, remembering some men working in a field that had fled past them as they came out in the automobile. She remembered she had fancied the men burned brown as golfers, and she had some half-formed notion of a sentence she might turn at the expense of a certain literary school that viewed life thus upside down. She might have gone on then and talked it over with Marriott, but her brain was too tired; she could moralize just then no further than to say:
"You don't deserve to be burned as a mower–your work isn't as hard."
"No," said Marriott, "it isn't work at all–it's exercise; it's a substitute for the work I should be doing." A look of disgust came to his face.
She did not wish then to talk seriously; she was trying to forget problems, and she and Marriott were always discussing problems.
"It's absurd," Marriott was saying. "I do this to get the exercise I ought to get by working, by producing something–the exercise is the end, not an incident of the means. You don't see any of these farmers around here playing golf. They're too tired–"
"Gordon," said Elizabeth, "I'm going away."
"Where to?" he asked, looking up suddenly.
"To Europe," she said.
"Europe! Why, when? You must have decided hurriedly."
"Yes, the other night after I came home from Mr. Parrish's–we decided rather quickly–or papa decided for us."
"Well!" Marriott exclaimed again. "That's fine!"
He looked away toward the first tee, where his caddie was waiting for him. He beckoned, and the boy came with his bag.
"Tell Mr. Phillips I'll not play any more–I'll see him later."
The caddie took up the bag and went lazily away, stopping to take several practice swings with one of Marriott's drivers. The boy was always swinging this club in the hope that Marriott would give it to him.
Marriott placed his hands on the rail, sprang over it, and drew up a chair.
"Well, this is sudden," he said, "but it's fine for you." He took out a cigarette. "How did it happen?"
"Do you want the real reason?" she asked.
"Of course; I've a passion for the real."
"I'm going in order to get away."
Marriott was sheltering in his palms a match for his cigarette. He looked up suddenly, the cigarette still between his lips.
"Away from what?"
"Oh, from–everything!" She waved her hands despairingly. Marriott did not understand.
"That's it," she said, looking him in the eyes. He saw that she was very serious. He lighted his cigarette, and flung away the match that was just beginning to burn his fingers.
"I'm going to run away; I'm going to forget for a whole summer. I'm going to have a good time. When I come back in the fall I'm going to the Charity Bureau and do some work, but until then–"
"Who's going with you?" asked Marriott. He had thought of other things to say, but decided against them.
"Mama."
"And your father?"
"Oh, he can't go. He and Dick will stay at home."
"Then you won't shut up the house?"
"No, we'll let the maids go, but we've got Gusta Koerner to come in every day and look after things. I'm glad for her sake–and ours. We can trust her."
"I should think Dick would want to go."
"No, he has this new automobile now, and he says, too, that he can't leave the bank." She smiled as she thought of the seriousness with which Dick was regarding his new duties.
"Then you'll not go to Mackinac?"
"No, we'll close the cottage this summer. Papa doesn't want to go there without us, and–"
"But Dick will miss his yacht."
"Oh, the yacht has been wholly superseded in his affections by the auto."
"Well," said Marriott, "I'll not go north myself then. I had thought of going up and hanging around, but now–"
She looked to see if he were in earnest.
"Really, I'm not as excited over the prospect of going to Europe as I should be," said Elizabeth with a little regret in her tone. "I haven't been in Europe since I graduated, and I've been looking forward to going again–"
"Oh, you'll have a great time," Marriott interrupted.
She leaned back and Marriott eyed her narrowly; he saw that her look was weary.
"Well, you need a rest. It was such a long, hard winter."
Elizabeth did not reply. She looked away across the river and Marriott followed her gaze; the sky in the west was darkening, the afternoon had grown sultry.
"Gordon," she said presently, "I want you to do something for me."
His heart leaped a little at her words.
"Anything you say," he answered.
"Won't you"–she hesitated a moment–"won't you look after Dick a little this summer? Just keep an eye on him, don't you know?"
Marriott laughed, and then he grew sober. He realized that he, perhaps, understood the seriousness that was behind her request better than she did, but he said nothing, for it was all so difficult.
"Oh, he doesn't need any watching," he said, by way of reassuring her.
"You will understand me, I'm sure." She turned her gray eyes on him. "I think it is a critical time with him. I don't know what he does–I don't want to know; I don't mean that you are to pry about, or do anything surreptitious, or anything of that sort. You know, of course; don't you?"
"Why, certainly," he said.
"But I have felt–you see," she scarcely knew how to go about it; "I have an idea that if he could have a certain kind of influence in his life, something wholesome–I think you could supply that."
Marriott was moved by her confidence; he felt a great affection for her in that instant.
"It's good in you, Elizabeth," he said, and he lingered an instant in pronouncing the syllables of her name, "but you really overestimate. Dick's all right, but he's young. I'm not old, to be sure; but he'd think me old."
"I can see that would be in the way," she frankly admitted. "I don't know just how it could be done; perhaps it can't be done at all."
"And then, besides all that," Marriott went on, "I don't know of any good I could do him. I don't know that there is anything he really needs more than we all need."
"Oh, yes there is," she insisted. "And there is much you could give him. Perhaps it would bore you–"
He protested.
"Oh, I know!" she said determinedly. "We can be frank with each other, Gordon. Dick is a man only in size and the clothes he wears; he's still a child–a good, kind-hearted, affectionate, thoughtless child. The whole thing perplexes me and it has perplexed papa–you might as well know that. I have tried, and I can do nothing. He doesn't care for books, and somehow when I prescribe books and they fail, or are not accepted, I'm at the end of my resources. I have been trying to think it all out, but I can't. I know that something is wrong, but I can't tell you what it is. I only know that I feel it, and that it troubles me and worries me–and that I am tired." Then, as if he might misunderstand, she went on with an air of haste: "I don't mean necessarily anything wrong in Dick himself, but something wrong in–oh, I don't know what I mean!"
She lifted her hand in a little gesture of despair.
"I feel somehow that the poor boy has had no chance in the world–though he has had every advantage and opportunity." Her face lighted up instantly with a kind of pleasure. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "You see"–it was all clear to her just then, or would be if she could put the thought into words before she lost it–"there is nothing for him to do; there is no work for him, no necessity for his working at all. This new place he has in the Trust Company–he seems happy and important in it just now, but after all it doesn't seem to me real; he isn't actually needed there; he got the place just because Mr. Hunter is a friend of papa." The thought that for an instant had seemed on the point of being posited was nebulous again. "Don't you understand?" she said, turning to him for help.
"I think I do," said Marriott. His brows were contracted and he was trying to grasp her meaning.
"It's hard to express," Elizabeth went on. "I think I mean that Dick would be a great deal better off if he did not have a–rich father." She hesitated before saying it, a little embarrassed. "If he had to work, if he had his own way to make in the world–"
"It is generally considered a great blessing to have a rich father," said Marriott.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it is. I've heard that very word used–in church, too. But with Dick"–she went back to the personal aspect of the question, which seemed easier–"what is his life? Last summer, up at the island, it was the yacht–with a hired skipper to do the real work. This summer it's the touring-car; it's always some sensation, something physical, something to kill time with–and what kind of conception of life is that?"
She turned and looked at him with' a little arch of triumph in her brows, at having attained this expression of her thought.
"We all have a conception of life that is more or less confused," Marriott generalized. "That is, when we have any conception at all."
"Of course," said Elizabeth, "I presume Dick's conception is as good as mine; and that his life is quite as useful. My life has been every bit as objective–I have a round of little duties–teas and balls and parties, and all that sort of thing, of course. I've been sheltered, like all girls of my class; but poor Dick–he's exposed, that is the difference."
She was silent for a while. Marriott had not known before how deep her thought had gone.
"I'm utterly useless in the world," she went on, "and I'm sick of it! Sick of it!" She had grown vehement, and her little fists clenched in her lap, until the knuckles showed white.
"Do you know what I've a notion of doing?" she said.
"No; what?"
"I've a notion to go and work in a factory, say half a day, and give some poor girl a half-holiday."
"But you'd take her wages from her," said Marriott.
"Oh, I'd give her the wages."
Marriott shook his head slowly, doubtingly.
"I know it's impractical," Elizabeth went on. "Of course, I'd never do it. Why, people would think I'd gone crazy! Imagine what mama would say!"
She smiled at the absurdity.
"No," she said, "I'll have to go on, and lead my idle, useless life. That's what it is, Gordon." He saw the latent fires of indignation and protest leap into her eyes. "It's this life–this horrible, false, insane life! That's what it is! The poor boy is beside himself with it, and he doesn't know it. There is no place for him, nothing for him to do; it's the logic of events."
He was surprised to see such penetration in her.
"I've been thinking it out," she hurried to explain. "I've suffered from it myself. I've felt it for a long time, without understanding it, and I don't understand it very well now, but I'm beginning to. Of what use am I in the world? Not a bit–there isn't a single thing I can do. All this whole winter I've been going about to a lot of useless affairs, meeting and chattering with a lot of people who have no real life at all–who are of no more use in the world than I. I'm wearing myself out at it–and here I am, glad that the long, necessary waste of time is over–tired and sick, of this–this–sofa-pillow existence!" She thumped a silken pillow that lay on a long wicker divan beside her, thumped it viciously and with a hatred.
"Sometimes I feel that I'd like to leave the town and never see anybody in it again!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "Don't you?"
"Yes–but–"
"But what?"
"But is there any place where we could escape it all?"
"There must be some place–some place where we know no one, so that no one's cares could be our cares, where we could be mere disinterested spectators and sit aloof, and observe life, and not feel that it was any concern of ours at all. That's what I want. I'd like to escape this horrible ennui."
"Well, the summer's here and we can have our vacations. Of course," he added whimsically, "the Koerners will have no vacation."
"Gordon, don't you ever dare to mention the Koerners again!"
XIX
A few days later Eades and Marriott stood on a step at the Union Station, and watched the majestic Limited pull out for the east. The white-haired engineer in his faded blue jumper looked calmly down from the high window of his cab, the black porters grinned in the vestibule, the elderly conductor carrying his responsibilities seriously and unaffectedly, swung gracefully aboard, his watch in his hand, and there, on the observation platform, stood Elizabeth, very pretty in her gray gown and the little hat with the violets, Eades's flowers in one hand, Marriott's book in the other, waving her adieux. They watched her out of sight, and then Ward, standing beside them, sighed heavily.
"Well," he said, "it'll be lonesome now, with everybody out of town."
They waited for Dick, who alone of all of them had braved the high corporate authority at the gate, and gone with the travelers to their train. He came, and they went through the clamorous station to the street, where Dick's automobile was waiting, shaking as if it would shake itself to pieces. They rode down town in solemn silence. Eades and Marriott, indeed, had had little to say; during the strain of the parting moments with Elizabeth they had been stiff and formal with each other.
"I hope to get away myself next week," said Eades, "The town will soon be empty."
The city day was drawing to a close. Forge fires were glowing in the foundries they passed. Through the gloom within they could see the workmen, stripped like gunners to the waist, their moist, polished skins glowing in the fierce glare. They passed noisy machine-shops whence machinists glanced out at them. In some of the factories bevies of girls were thronging the windows, calling now and then to the workmen, who, for some reason earlier released from toil, were already trooping by on the sidewalk. In the crowded streets great patient horses nodded as they easily drew the empty trucks that had borne such heavy loads all day; their drivers were smoking pipes, greeting one another, and whistling or singing; one of them in the camaraderie of toil had taken on a load of workmen, to haul them on their homeward way. The street-cars were filled with men whose faces showed the grime their hasty washing had not removed.
Suddenly whistles blew, then there was a strange silence. Something like a sigh went up from all that quarter of the town.
The automobile was tearing through the tenderloin with its gaudily-painted saloons and second-hand stores sandwiched between. Old clothes fluttered above the sidewalk, and violins, revolvers, boxing-gloves and bits of jewelry, the trash and rubbish of wasted, feverish lives showed in the windows. Fat Jewish women sat in the doorways of pawn-shops, their swarthy children playing on the dirty sidewalk. In the swinging green doors of saloons stood bartenders; and everywhere groups of men and women, laughing, joking, haggling, scuffling and quarreling. Now and then girls with their tawdry finery tripped down from upper rooms, stood a moment in the dark, narrow doorways, looked up and down the street, and then suddenly went forth. In some of the cheap theaters, the miserable tunes that never ended, day or night, were jingling from metallic pianos. They passed on into the business district. Shops were closing, the tall office buildings, each a city in itself, were pouring forth their human contents; the sidewalks were thronged–everywhere life, swarming, seething life, spawned out upon the world.
BOOK II
I
All day long Archie Koerner and Curly Jackson had ridden in the empty box-car. They had made themselves as comfortable as they could, and had beguiled the time with talk and stories and cigarettes. Now and then they had fallen asleep, but not for long, for their joints ached with the jolting of the train, and, more than all else, there was a constant concern in their minds that made them restless, furtive and uneasy. The day was warm, and toward noon the sun beat down, hotter and hotter; the car was stifling, its atmosphere charged with the reminiscent odors of all the cargoes it had ever hauled. Long before daylight that morning they had crawled into the car as it stood on a siding in a village a hundred miles away. Just before dawn the train came, and they heard the conductor and brakeman moving about outside; now and then they caught the twinkle of their lanterns. Then the car was shunted and jolted back and forth for half an hour; finally the train was made up, and pulled out of the sleeping village they were so glad to get away from. With the coming of the dawn, they peeped out to see the sun come up over the fields. They watched the old miracle in silence until they saw a farmer coming across the field with a team. The farmer stopped, watched the train go by, then turned and began to plow corn.
"Pipe the Hoosier," Curly had said, the sight of a human being relieving the silence imposed by nature in her loneliness. "We call 'em suckers. He'll be plowing all day, but next winter he'll be sitting by a fire–and we'll–we'll be macing old women for lumps at the back doors."
Archie was not much affected by Curly's sarcastic philosophy; he had not yet attained to Curly's point of view.
Two days before, at evening, they had left the city and spent the first half of the night on foot, trudging along a country road; then a freight-train had taken them to a little town far to the south, where, in the small hours of the morning, they had broken into a post-office, blown open the safe with nitroglycerin, and taken out the stamps and currency. Curly considered the venture successful, though marred by one mishap: in the explosion the currency had been shattered and burned. But he had carefully gathered up the remnants, wrapped them in a paper, and stowed them away in his pocket with the stamps. The next day they hid in a wood. Curly made a fire, cooked bacon, and brewed tea in a tomato can, and these, with bread, had made a meal for them. Then he had carefully sorted the stamps, and had hidden in the ground all the five- and ten-cent stamps, preserving only those of the one- and two-cent denominations. After that he had lain down on the grass and slept.
While Curly slept, Archie sat and examined with an expert's loving interest and the fascination of a boy a new revolver he had stolen from a hardware store in the city three days before. Curly at first had opposed the theft of the revolver, but had finally consented because he recognized Archie's need; Archie had had no revolver since he was sent to the workhouse. The one he had when he was arrested had been confiscated–as it is called–by the police, and given by Bostwick to a friend, a lawyer who had long wanted a revolver to shoot burglars in case any should break into his home. Curly had consented to Archie's stealing the revolver, but he had commanded him to take nothing else, and had waited outside while Archie went into the hardware store. Archie had chosen a fine one, a double-acting, self-cocking revolver of thirty-eight caliber, like those carried by the police. He had been childishly happy in the possession of this weapon; he had taken it out and looked at it a hundred times, and had been tempted when they were alone in the woods to take a few practice shots, but when Curly ordered him not to think of such nonsense, he drew the cartridges, aimed at trees, twigs, birds, and snapped the trigger. Every little while in the box-car that day he had taken it out, looked at it, caressed it, turned it over in his palm, delicately tested its weight, and called Curly to admire it with him. He thought much more of the revolver than he did of the stamps and blasted currency they had stolen, and Curly had spoken sharply to him at last and said:
"If you don't put up that rod, I'll ditch it for you."
Archie obeyed Curly, but when he had restored the revolver to his pocket, he continued to talk of it, and then of other weapons he had owned, and he told Curly how he had won the sharp-shooter's medal in the army.
But finally, in his weariness, Archie lost interest even in his new revolver, and when Curly would not let him go to the door of the car and look out, lest the trainmen should see them and force them into an encounter, Archie had fallen asleep in a corner.
It was a relief to Curly when Archie went to sleep, for in addition to his joy in his revolver, Archie had been excited over their adventure. Curly was in many ways peculiar; he was inclined to be secretive; he frequently worked alone, and his operations were as much a mystery to his companions and to Gibbs as they were to the police. He had had his eye on the little post-office at Trenton for months; it had called to him, as it were, to come and rob it. It had advantages, the building was old; an entrance could be effected easily. He had stationed Archie outside to watch while he knocked off the peter, and Archie had acquitted himself to Curly's satisfaction. The affair came off smoothly. Though it was in the short summer night, no one had been abroad; they got away without molestation. Now, as they drew near the city, Curly felt easy.
Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city's outposts–the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.
It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke. They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.
They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people–working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it–the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man's little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.
Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,–lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man's vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings–the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes–who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.