The Memoirs of an American Citizen Part 6

_October 1._--Got job in Ent--mark., 1417 W. VanB St. $10. Is this the right road?

_October 23._--Went to address young lad. gav. me. Found c.r.a.pe on the door. Hope it's the old man.

From time to time since then I have taken out the little black memorandum-book, and made other entries of those happenings in my life that seemed to me especially important--sometimes a mere list of figures or names, writing them in very small. It lies here before me now, and out of these bare notes, keywords as it were, there rise before me many facts,--the deeds of twenty-five years.

When I got back to the Piersons' for dinner, Miss c.o.x was curious to know what I had done with my first day off.

"I bet he's been to see that girl who had him arrested," Lou suggested mischievously. "And from the way he looks I guess she told him she hadn't much use for a butcher-boy."

Pa Pierson laughed; he was a great admirer of his daughter's wit.

"I don't think he's that much of a fool, to waste his time trapesing about after _her_," Hillary c.o.x snapped back.

"Well, I did look up the house," I admitted, and added, "but the folks weren't at home."

After supper we sat out on the steps, and Hillary asked me what kind of a place the young woman lived in. I told her about the c.r.a.pe on the door, and she looked at me disgustedly.

"Why didn't you ask?" she demanded.

"I didn't care to know if it was so, perhaps."

"I don't see as you have any particular reason to care, one way or the other," she retorted. And she went off for that evening somewhere with Ed. For the want of anything better to do I borrowed a book from the law student, who was studying in his room, and thus, by way of an accident, began a habit of reading and talking over books with Sloc.u.m.

So I was soon fitted into my hole in the city. In that neighborhood there must have been many hundreds of places like Ma Pierson's boarding-house. The checker-board of prairie streets cut up the houses like marble cake--all the same, three-story-and-mansard-roof, yellow brick, with long lines of dirty, soft stone steps stretching from the wooden sidewalks to the second stories. And the group of us there in the little bas.e.m.e.nt dining room, noisy with the rattle of the street cars, and dirty with the smoke of factory chimneys in the rear, was a good deal like the others in the other houses--strugglers on the outside of prosperity, trying hard to climb up somewhere in the bread-and-b.u.t.ter order of life, and to hold on tight to what we had got. No one, I suppose, ever came to Chicago, at least in those days, without a hope in his pocket of landing at the head of the game sometime. Even old Ma Pierson cherished a secret dream of a rich marriage for one or other of her girls!

Hillary c.o.x smiled on me again the next day, and we were as good friends as ever. As I have said, the energetic cashier of the Enterprise Market had taken me in hand and was forming me to be a business man. She was a smart little woman, and had lots of good principles besides. She believed in religion on Sundays, as she believed in business on week days. So on the Sabbath morning we would leave Ed and Lou and d.i.c.k Pierson yawning over the breakfast table, while Sloc.u.m and I escorted Grace and Hillary downtown to hear some celebrated preacher in one of the prominent churches. Hillary c.o.x had no relish for the insignificant and humble in religion, such as we might have found around the corner.

She wanted the best there was to be had, she said, and she wanted to see the people who were so much talked about in the papers.

Perhaps the rich and prominent citizens made more of a point of going to church in those days than they do now. It was a pretty inferior church society that couldn't show up two or three of the city's solid merchants, who came every Sunday with their women, all dressed in their smartest and best. Hillary and Grace seemed to know most of these people by sight. Women are naturally curious about one another, and I suppose the girls saw their pictures and learned their names in the newspapers.

And in this way I, too, learned to know by sight some of the men whom later it was my fortune to meet elsewhere.

There was Steele, the great dry-goods merchant, and Purington, whose works for manufacturing farming tools were just behind Ma Pierson's house; Lardner, a great hardware merchant; Maybricks, a wholesale grocer; York, a rich lumberman--most of them thin-faced, shrewd Yankees, who had seized that tide of fate which the poet tells us sweeps men to fortune. And there were others, perhaps less honorably known as citizens, but equally important financially: Vitzer, who became known later as the famous duke of gas, and Maxim, who already had begun to stretch out his fingers over the street-car lines. This man had made his money buying up tax t.i.tles, that one building cars, and another laying out railroads, and wrecking them, too. They were the people of the land!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_That's Strauss!_"]

One fine winter morning, as the four of us idled on the sidewalk opposite a prominent South Side church that was discharging its prosperous congregation into the street, Sloc.u.m nudged me and pointed to a group of well-dressed people--two or three women and a short, stout, smooth-shaven man--who were standing on the steps of the church, surveying the scene and bowing to their neighbors.

"That's Strauss!"

It was not necessary to say more. Even in those days the great Strauss had made his name as well known as that of the father of our country. He it was who knew each morning whether the rains had fallen on the plains beneath the Andes; how many cattle on the hoof had entered the gates of Omaha and Kansas City; how tight the pinch of starvation set upon Russian bellies; and whether the Sultan's subjects had bought their bread of Liverpool. Flesh and grain, meat and bread--Strauss held them in his hand, and he dealt them forth in the markets of the world!

Is it any wonder that I looked hard at the portly, red-faced man, standing there on the steps of his temple, where, with his women and children, he had been worshipping his G.o.d?

"My!" said Grace, "Mrs. Strauss is plain enough, and just common-looking."

(I have noticed that women find it hard to reconcile themselves to a rich man's early taste in their s.e.x.)

"She don't dress very stylish, that's true," Hillary observed thoughtfully. "But it weren't so very long ago, I guess, that she was saving his money."

Strauss, surrounded by his women folk, marched up the avenue in solemn order. We followed along slowly on the other side of the street.

"He didn't make his pile at the Enterprise Market," Grace remarked. She spoke the idea that was in all our minds: how did he and the others make their money?

"I guess they began like other folks," Hillary contended, "saving their earnings and not putting all their money in their stomachs and on their backs."

This last was aimed at Grace, who was pretty smartly dressed.

"Well," said Sloc.u.m, dryly, "probably by this time Strauss has something more than his savings in the bank."

Thus we followed them down the street, speculating on the great packer's success, on the success of all the fortunate ones in the great game of the market, wondering what magic power these men possessed to lift themselves out of the ma.s.s of people like ourselves. Pretty simple of us, perhaps you think, hanging around on the street a good winter morning and gossiping about our rich neighbors! But natural enough, too: we had no place to loaf in, except Ma Pierson's smelly dining room, and nothing to do with our Sunday holiday but to walk around the streets and stare up at the handsome new houses and our well-dressed and prosperous neighbors. Every keen boy who looks out on life from the city sidewalk has a pretty vigorous idea that if he isn't as good as the next man, at least he will make as much money if he can only learn the secret. We read about the rich and their doings in the newspapers; we see them in the streets; their horses and carriages flash by us--do you wonder that some poor clerks on a Sunday gape at the Steeles and the Strausses from the sidewalk?

What was the golden road? These men had found it--hundreds, thousands of them,--farming tools, railroads, groceries, gas, dry-goods. It made no matter what: fortunes were building on every side; the flowers of success were blooming before our eyes. To take my place with these mighty ones--I thought a good deal about that these days! And I remember Grace saying sentimentally to Sloc.u.m that Sunday:--

"You fellers keep thinkin' of nothin' but money and how you're goin' to make it. Perhaps rich folks ain't the only happy ones in the world."

"Yes," Hillary chimed in, "there's such a thing as being too greedy to eat."

"What else are we here for except to make money?" Sloc.u.m demanded more bitterly than usual.

He raised his long arm in explanation and swept it to and fro over the straggling prairie city, with its rough, patched look. I didn't see what there was in the city to object to: it was just a place like any other--to work, eat, and sleep in. Later, however, when I saw the little towns back East, the pleasant hills, the old homes in the valleys, and the red-brick house on the elm-shaded street in Portland, then I knew what Sloc.u.m meant.

Whatever was there in Chicago in 1877 to live for but Success?

CHAPTER V

A MAN'S BUSINESS

_Signs of trouble at the Enterprise--A possible partnership--He travels fastest who travels alone--John Carmichael--Feeding the peoples of the earth--I drive for Dround_

"Do you see that big, fat fellow talking with Mr. Joyce?" the cashier whispered to me one morning as I pa.s.sed her cage. "He's Dround's manager--his name is Carmichael. When he shows up, there is trouble coming to some one."

Dround & Co. was the name of the packing firm that the Enterprise dealt with. I tied up my bundles and made up my cash account, thinking a good deal about the appearance of the burly manager of the packing-house.

Pretty soon Mr. Carmichael came out into the front store very red in the face, followed by the elder Joyce, who had been drinking, and they had some words. The cashier winked at me.

The Enterprise had been doing a good business. It was run on a new principle for those days--strictly cash and all cut prices, a cent off here and there, a great sale of some one thing each day, which the house handled speculatively. The brothers Joyce kept branching out, but there wasn't any money to speak of behind the firm. The Drounds and a wholesale grocer had backed it from the start. Nevertheless, we should have got on all right if the elder Joyce had given up drinking and the younger one had not taken to driving fast horses. Latterly no matter how big a business we did, the profits went the wrong way.

That evening, as Hillary c.o.x and I walked over to the Piersons', she said to me abruptly, "There's going to be a new sign at the Enterprise before long!"

The smart little cashier must have divined the situation as I had.

"c.o.x's Market?" I suggested jokingly.