The Web of Life Part 25

He could feel that she caught her breath, but she said nothing.

"I should never be successful in that way, though it wasn't for that reason that I left."

"Do you think you can do more for people by putting yourself--away, holding off--"

Her voice sank.

"That is a subterfuge," Sommers answered hotly, "fit only for clergymen and beggars for charities. I am not sure, anyway, that I want 'to do for'

people. I think no fine theories about social service and all that settlement stuff. I want to be a man, and have a man's right to start with the crowd at the scratch, not given a handicap. There are too many handicaps in the crowd I have seen!"

Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k pressed her lips together, as if to restrain a hot reply.

She had grown white from the fatigue and excitement and heat. They were almost at her father's house, walking along the steaming asphalt of the quiet avenue. A few old trees had been allowed to remain on these blocks, and they drooped over the street, giving a pleasant shade to the broad houses and the little patches of sward. Just around the corner were some rickety wooden tenements, and a street so wretchedly paved that in the great holes where the blocks had rotted out stood pools of filthy, rankly smelling water.

"I have merely decided to move around the corner," the young man remarked grimly.

Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k's lips trembled. She walked more slowly, and she tried to say something, to make some ill-defined appeal. As she had almost found the words, a carriage approached the Hitchc.o.c.k house and drew up. Out of it Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k stepped heavily. His silk hat was crushed, and his clothes were covered with dust.

"Papa!" his daughter exclaimed, running forward anxiously. "What has happened? Where have you been? Are you hurt?"

"No, yes, I guess not," the old man laughed good-naturedly. "Howdy do, doctor! They stopped the train out by Grand Crossing, and some fellows began firing stones. It was pretty lively for a time. I thought you and your mother would worry, so I got out of it the best way I could and came in on the street cars."

"Poor papa!" the girl exclaimed, seizing his arm. She glanced at Sommers defiantly. Here was her argument. Sommers looked on coolly, not accepting the challenge.

"Won't you come in, doctor?" Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k asked. "Do come in and rest," his daughter added.

But the young doctor shook his head.

"I think I will go home and brush up--around the corner," he added with slight irony.

The girl turned to her father and took his arm, and they slowly walked up the path to the big darkened house.

CHAPTER XXI

Sommers did not go to his rooms, however. He could delay no longer reaching Mrs. Preston. From the quiet decorous boulevard, with its clean asphalt pavement and pleasant trees, he turned at once into the dirty cross street.

The oasis of the prosperous in the expanse of cheap houses and tawdry flat-buildings was so small! It was easy, indeed, to step at least physically from the one world to the other.

At a little shop near the cable line he bought a hat and tie, and bathed his face. Then he took the cable car, which connected with lines of electric cars that radiated far out into the distant prairie. Along the interminable avenue the cable train slowly jerked its way, grinding, jarring, lurching, grating, shrieking--an infernal public chariot. Sommers wondered what influence years of using this hideous machine would have upon the nerves of the people. This car-load seemed quiescent and dull enough--with the languor of unexpectant animals, who were accustomed to being hauled mile by mile through the dirty avenues of life. His attention was caught by the ever repeated phenomena of the squalid street. Block after block, mile after mile, it was the same thing. No other city on the globe could present quite this combination of tawdriness, slackness, dirt, vulgarity, which was Cottage Grove Avenue. India, the Spanish-American countries, might show something fouler as far as mere filth, but nothing so incomparably mean and long. The brick blocks, of many shades of grimy red and fawn color, thin as paper, cheap as dishonest contractor and bad labor could make them, were bulging and lopping at every angle. Built by the half mile for a day's smartness, they were going to pieces rapidly. Here was no uniformity of cheapness, however, for every now and then little squat cottages with mouldy earth plots broke the line of more pretentious ugliness. The saloons, the shops, the sidewalks, were coated with soot and ancient grime. From the cross streets savage gusts of the fierce west wind dashed down the avenue and swirled the acc.u.mulated refuse into the car, choking the pa.s.sengers, and covering every object with a cloud of filth.

Once and again the car jolted across intersecting boulevards that presented some relief in the way of green gra.s.s and large, heavy-fronted houses.

Except for these strips of parklike avenues, where the rich lived,--pieced into the cheaper stuff of the city, as it were,--all was alike, flat-building and house and store and wooden shanty,--a city of booths, of extemporized shifts.

Sommers picked up a newspaper that some pa.s.senger had thrown aside and endeavored to distract his mind from the forlorn sight. The sheets were gritty to the touch, and left a s.m.u.tch upon the fingers. His clothes were sifted over with dust and fine particles of manure. The seat grated beneath his legs. The great headlines in the newspaper announced that the troops were arriving. Columns of childish, reportorial prattle followed, describing the martial bearing of the officers, the fierceness of the "bronzed Indian fighters." The city was under martial law. He read also the bickering telegrams exchanged between the state authorities and the federal government, and interviews with leading citizens, praising the much-vilified President for his firm act in upholding law and order. The general managers were clever fellows! Sommers threw the grimy sheet aside.

It was right, this firm a.s.sertion of the law; but in what a cause, for what people!

He turned to the street once more.

This block, through which the car was grinding its way, had a freakish individuality in sidewalks. Each builder had had his own idea of what the proper street level should be, and had laid his sidewalk accordingly. There were at least six different levels in this one block. The same blunt expression of wilful individuality was evident in every line of every building. It was the apotheosis of democratic independence. This was not a squalid district, nor a tough one. Goose Island, the stock yards, the Bohemian district, the lumber yards, the factories,--all the aspects of the city monstrous by right, were miles away. But Halsted Street, with its picturesque mutations of poverty and its foreign air, was infinitely worthier than this. Sommers shuddered to think how many miles of Cottage Grove Avenue and its like Chicago contained,--not vicious, not squalid, merely desolate and unforgivably vulgar. If it were properly paved and cleaned, it would be bearable. But the selfish rich and the ignorant poor make bad housekeepers.

On, on they jolted and jarred, dropping along the cross streets a cargo of indifferent souls, and taking in a new cargo of white-ribboned men, who talked in loud voices or spat ruminatively over the floors. Sommers sank back listless. It was well that he had taken this way of entering the new life. To have galloped south through the cool parks would have been absurd, like playing at charity. This was the life of the people,--not the miserably poor, but the mean and small, the ma.s.s in this, our prosperous country. Through the dirty, common avenues, without one touch of beauty, they were destined to travel all their days, and he with them.

He shut his eyes and thought of the woman to whom he was journeying. Hers was the face he had seen in imagination in all his moods of revolt, of disgust with the privileged. She was the figure, paramount, of those who had soul enough to thirst for beauty, happiness, life, and to whom they were denied. The machine of society whirled some aloft--the woman he had just left--but it dragged her down. It was the machine that maddened him.

He was taking himself away from those who governed the machine, who ran it and oiled it, and turned it to their own pleasures. He had chosen to be of the mult.i.tude whom the machine ground. The brutal axioms of the economists urged men to climb, to dominate, and held out as the n.o.blest ideal of the great commonwealth the right of every man to triumph over his brother. If the world could not be run on any less brutal plan than this creed of _success, success_, then let there be anarchy--anything.

With a final groan the cable train came to a halt, and the hypnotic sleep of the pilgrimage through Cottage Grove Avenue ended. Sommers started up--alert, anxious, eager to see _her_ once more, the glow of enchantment, of love renewed in his soul. Yet at the very end of his journey he was fearful for the first time. How could they meet, after the foul scene with Preston?

Mrs. Ducharme opened the cottage door, and recognizing the young doctor in the twilight sighed with relief. Her placid countenance was ruffled.

"Where is Mrs. Preston?" he demanded hastily.

"She's gone out for a moment. I made her take a turn."

"How is Mr. Preston?"

Mrs. Ducharme's face a.s.sumed a frightened expression. She spoke in low tones, as if the patient might still overhear.

"He's rested for good, poor man! He won't want no more liquor this life, I guess." Then more solemnly she ended, "He's at peace."

Without further words Sommers went upstairs. The outer door was unbarred, and the door into the room open. Preston was lying, clean and quiet, in a clean bed with a fresh counterpane. His face was turned to one side, as if he were sleeping. His eyes were suspiciously reddened under the lids, and his cheeks had rather more bloat than the doctor remembered. He was dead, sure enough, at peace at last, and the special cause for the ending was of little importance. Sommers proceeded to make an examination, however; he would have to sign a certificate for the health officers. As he bent over the inert form, he had a feeling of commiseration rather than of relief.

Worthless clay that the man was, it seemed petty now to have been so disturbed over his living on, for such satisfactions as his poor fragment of life gave him. Like the insignificant insect which preyed on its own petty world, he had, maybe, his rights to his prey. At all events, now that he had ceased to trouble, it was foolish to have any feeling of disgust, of reproach, of hatred. G.o.d and life had made him so, as G.o.d and life had made the mighty....

Suddenly the doctor's eye detected something that arrested his attention, and he proceeded to look at the dead man more carefully. Then he started back and called out to the woman below. When she came panting up the stairs, he asked sternly:

"Was he given anything?"

"What?" she asked, retreating from the room.

"Any medicine?" the doctor pursued, eying her sharply.

"He was took bad last night, and Mrs. Preston went to see what was the matter. She might have given him somethin' to rest him. I dunno."

The doctor went back to the dead man and examined him again; the woman crawled away. Again Sommers abandoned his task, nervously twitching the bedclothes over the cold form. He went to the window and opened it, and stood breathing the night air. There was another step upon the stair, and Sommers turned. It was Mrs. Preston. She started on seeing the doctor, and he noticed how pale her face appeared, even in the darkening room. He was also conscious of the start she had given.

"I have looked for you so long!" she exclaimed eagerly, hastening toward him, and then stopping in embarra.s.sment.

"I was detained, hindered in every possible way," the doctor replied. His tone was chilling, preoccupied.

"He was ill last night, but I thought nothing of it. When I returned from an errand this noon, he had fallen into a kind of stupor--last night he was so excited--and I was alarmed. I had Mrs. Ducharme telephone for you then.

He did not come out of his stupor," she added in a low tone.

Sommers stepped back to the bedside. "Did you--" he began involuntarily, but he left his sentence unfinished, and turned away again.

"I have completed my examination," he said at last. "Let us go downstairs."

When they had reached the sitting room, Mrs. Preston lighted a lamp and placed it on the table beside the doctor. The strong light increased the pallor of her face. Sommers noticed that the eyes were sunken and had black circles. His glance rested on her hands, as she leaned with folded arms on the table. They were white and wan like the face. The blood seemed to have left her body.

Sommers raised his eyes and looked at her face. She returned his glance for a moment, then flushes of color spread over her face and died down, and she dropped her face. He laid his hand softly upon hers, and spoke her name for the first time, "Alves." A tear dropped on his hand beneath the lamp, then another and another. He started up from his seat and strode to the window, keeping his back turned to the quiescent woman. It was terrible! He knew that he was a fool, but none the less something awesome, cruel, forbidding, tainted the atmosphere.