Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

"First, there's Mr. Taylor; he's from Colorado somewhere. He's a lawyer. He's a fine fellow too – you'll like him. Then there's Mr. Simons; he's a Jew, but he's not too much of a Jew. There's Alice Fletcher; she's queer and grumpy, but she reads a lot and she can talk when she wants to, and there's you and myself."

"I don't feel like meeting them tonight," Rose said; "if I had a cup of tea I'd stay in my room."

"All right! I'll bring it."

The bell rang and then the movement of feet and the banging of doors told of the rush to dinner.

Mary came back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and some pudding.

"Have more, if you wish," she said.

"This will do nicely. You're very kind, Mary Compton. I don't deserve it."

"You deserve the world," cried the adoring girl. "If I had your figure and complexion I'd make the universe wait on me."

In spite of all this fervor of praise Rose felt herself to be a very dejected and spiritless beauty. She was irritated and angry with the nagging of strange sights and sounds and smells. The air seemed laden with disease and filth. It was all so far from the coolly with its purple hills looming against the sapphire sunset sky.

But this she came for – to see the city; to plunge into its life. She roused herself therefore with a blush of shame at her weakness. She had appeared to be a child before this girl who had always been her inferior at school.

It was a very dignified young woman who arose to greet Mrs. Wilcox, the landlady, whom Mary brought back. This dignity was not needed. Mrs. Wilcox was a sweet-voiced, smiling woman of fifty – being of those toilers who smile when they are tired enough to drop. She was flushed with fatigue and moved languidly, but her kind, patient, pathetic smile touched Rose almost to tears.

"I'm glad to have you come here," the landlady said. "We're all nice people here, aren't we, Miss Compton?" Her eyes twinkled with humorous self-analysis.

"Every one of us," corroborated Mary.

"I hope you'll rest well. If there's anything we can do for you, my dear, let me know." Such was the spirit in which the over-worked woman served her boarders. They all called her "mother." She had no children of her own, and her husband was "not at all well," yet nothing could sour her sweet kindliness, which included all the world. She was a familiar type, and Rose loved her at once.

Miss Fletcher came in and was introduced. She was a teacher in a school near by.

"What anybody should come to this town for I can't understand. I stay here because I'm obliged to. I'm just back from the country to my work."

"The country is all right for a vacation," quoted Rose.

Mary broke in, "That's what I say. I lived on a farm and I lived in Castle Rock. When I lived on the farm I wanted to get to Castle Rock. When I got to Castle Rock I wanted to get to Madison. Madison made me hone for Chicago, and when I had a chance to come, I just dropped my work at the University and put for the city, and here I am and glad of it."

"I can't understand such folly," murmured Miss Fletcher.

"You could if you'd stayed on the farm the year round, with nobody to talk to and mighty little to read. It's all right for you to go up for a couple of months and lie about in a hammock, but you take a place like Castle Rock all the year round! It's worse than the farm. Gossip! They talk every rag of news to smithereens, don't they, Rose?"

Rose nodded.

"And then the people! They're the cullin's. All the bright boys and girls go to Madison and Chicago or Dakota, and then the rest marry and intermarry, and have idiot boys and freckle-faced girls!"

They all laughed. Mary was always extreme, no matter what her subject.

Miss Fletcher sighed resignedly.

"Well, it's fate. Here this big city sits and swallows you bright people like a great dragon, and the old folks are left alone in these dull places you talk about."

Rose felt her eyes filling with tears. The figure of her lonely old father came before her. She saw him sitting beside the kitchen table, his head on his palm, and all the new house empty and dark.

Mary jumped up. "Here now, stop that talk, we must leave Rose alone and let her go to sleep."

They left her alone, but sleep was impossible. The tramp of feet, the sound of pianos, the slam of doors, the singing, laughing of the other boarders made sleep impossible. The cars jangled by, the click-clack of horses' hoofs and the swift rattle of wagons kept up long after the house was silent. Between midnight and four o'clock she got a little sleep, out of which she awoke while a booming, clattering wagon thundered by. Other wagons clattered viciously along up the alleys, and then some early riser below began to sing, and Rose wearily dressed and sat down by the window to listen.

Far to the south a low, intermittent, yet ever deepening, crescendo bass note began to sound. It was Chicago waking from the three hours' doze, which is its only sleep. It grew to a raucous, hot roar; and then to the north she heard the clear musical cry of a fruit vendor, – then another: "Black-berries! Fine fresh black-berries!"

The cars thickened, the sun grew hot and lay in squares of blinding light across her carpet. That curious pungent smell came in with the wind. Newsboys cried their morning papers. Children fought and played in the street. Distant whistles began to sound, and her first morning in Chicago came to Rose, hot, brazen, unnatural, and found her blinded, bruised, discouraged, abased, homesick.

CHAPTER XVI

HER FIRST CONQUEST

She was still sitting by the window wondering what to do next, when Mary tapped at her door.

"May I come in?"

She looked fresh and strong, and her cheery smile made her seem beautiful to Rose.

"How did you sleep?"

Rose shook her head. Mary laughed.

"I can tell by the looks of you. Look's if you'd been pulled through a knot-hole, as they say up in Molasses Gap. Heard everything that took place, didn't you? I did too. You'll get over that. I sleep like a top now."

"What is that smell? Pah!" shuddered Rose.

Mary elevated her freckled nose. "What smell? O, you mean that rotten, piney, turpentiney smell – that's the Chicago smell. It comes from the pavin' blocks, I guess. I never inquired. I'll ask Mr. Reed, he knows everything mean about Chicago. Well, you hadn't better go to breakfast looking like that. I want you to paralyze that Boston snipe. I'll bring in your breakfast."

Rose accepted this service passively; nothing else was to be done in Mary Compton's presence. She had the energy of a steam threshing machine, and affection to correspond.

Rose wondered again what she could do next. She was here to study art and literature – there was the library! She would read. And there were lectures perhaps; what she was to do would come to her after awhile.

Mary returned a little hot of color, bringing a tray.

"That Boston clothes-pin says you're a myth or a country gawk. You must lay him out cold as a handspike. I've been bragging about you and they were all on tip-toe to see you this morning. You sail in on 'em at dinner the way you used to do at our chapter-house spreads. Weren't they great! There now, I've got to vamoose. I'm not a lady of leisure. I'm a typewriter on trial and looks won't carry me through. I've got to rustle and walk chalk, as they say in Molasses Gap. So good-bye. Take it easy today. If you want to walk, go over to the lake front," and she banged out of the door and faced the city in her daily encounter.

Rose ate her breakfast and felt much better. Her trunk came and she got out her dresses and hung them up and made other preparations for staying, although it seemed impossible she should ever sleep another night in this terrible city.

She got out her portfolio and wrote a letter home and one also to Dr. Thatcher. Then she looked over the little bunch of letters of introduction she had. One was to Doctor Isabel Herrick, one to Professor H. Bevan Fowler at Evanston, and one was to Orrin Thatcher; that was the Doctor's cousin, a young lawyer in the Woman's building, whatever that was. With these and ten dollars a week she faced Chicago. The contest was unequal.

She felt this more keenly as she stood on the lake front a little later on in the day. She went there as the New Hampshire girl goes to the sea. This body of water, majestic in its immense shoreless spread, is wonderful to the young girl from Iowa or interior Wisconsin.

A fresh, keen east wind had arisen, pure and exhilarating, and the smooth expanse of glittering green-and-blue water stretched out under a vivid blue sky, in which great clouds floated like snow mountains, trailing great shadows like robes of state upon the lake.

The curving lake-wall was wet and glistening with the up-flung spray. The slender elms were fronded at the top like palms, and the vivid green grass set opposite the pink-gray wall, and the brilliant many-colored lake in magnificent, harmonious contrast. The girl felt her soul grow larger as she faced this scene, so strange, so oriental, and she looked and looked, until it became a part of her.

It was all so remote and so splendid. There the great violet-shadowed sails of ships stood, as she had seen them in pictures of the sea. There a gleaming steamer ran, trailing great banners of smoke. There glittered the white bodies and slant wings of gulls, dipping, upshooting and whirling. To her eyes this was infinity, and the purple mist in which the ships drave was ultimate mystery.

At last she turned to look behind her. There on the left stood rows of immense houses, barred and grated like jails or fortresses; palaces where lived the mighty ones of Chicago commerce. Before their doors carriages stood, with attendants in livery, such as she had read about and had never seen. Up and down the curving ribbon of lavender sand other carriages were driving, with jingle of silver chains and soft roll of wheels. The horses flung foam from their bits; they were magnificent horses (she knew horses as well as any coachman), and their brass-trimmed harnesses glittered in the sun like burnished gold.

There was no noise here beyond the tread of these stately horses, the babble of a few soft-voiced children on the grass and the crackling, infrequent splash of the leaping breakers. It was a wide contrast to the Chicago of her first glimpses the day before. That side of the city terrified her, this oppressed and awed her. The social splendor of this life appealed to her perception as it would not to any man. Her quick imagination peopled these mansions with beautiful women and lordly men, and she felt herself rightful claimant of a place among them.

She turned and faced them with set teeth and a singular look in her half-closed eyes, and in her heart she said: "Before I die I'll go where I please in this city. I'll be counted as good as any of you – poor as I am."

To the onlooker – to Mrs. Oliver Frost, she was a girl in a picturesque attitude; to the coachmen on the carriages she was a possible nurse-girl; to the policeman she was a speck on the lake-front lawn.

Something of this mood was with her still when she went in to dinner with Mary. Mary ushered the way, beaming with joy. Rose never looked more beautiful nor more imperious. The Boston man was properly astonished; the Jew salesman smiled till his chubby face seemed not able to contain his gladness. Mr. Taylor, a gaunt young man, alone seemed unmoved; the morose teacher gave a sigh of sad envy.

Rose said little during the meal. She cordially hated Mr. Reed at once. His Boston accent annoyed her, and his brutal sarcasm upon the West aroused a new anger in her. She had never listened to such talk before. It didn't seem possible anybody could disparage the West.

"Civilization stops," he said during the meal, "after you leave the Hudson riveh."

"Some folks' manners stop after they leave the Hudson river, if they ever had any," Mary replied, and the Jew cackled joyously.

He defended Chicago. "It is the greatest place to do business in the world. I'm a New Yorker by birth, but Chicago suits me. I like its hustle."

"That's the point. It thinks of nothing but hustle," said the Boston man. "I was speaking of higher things. It lacks the art atmosphere of Boston and Cambridge."

"It has all the atmosphere I need," said the Jew.

To Rose all this was new. It had not occurred to her to differentiate the cities sharply from one another. Chicago, to her, was a great city, a splendid example of enterprise, and it was to be her city, the pride of the West. To the country mind a city is a great city when it acquires a million people. Like the young Jew, Rose had not missed any atmosphere. The tall young man voiced her opinion when he said:

"This finicky criticism don't count. You might just as well talk about the lack of gondolas and old palaces in Boston. Conditions here are unexampled. It's a new town and I think a splendid place to live. Of course you can find fault anywhere."

Rose looked at him with interest. Such precision and unhesitancy of speech she had not heard since leaving college.

Mary glowed with gratified admiration. The Jew was delighted, although he did not quite follow the implied rebuke. Miss Fletcher merely said:

"If Mr. Reed don't like Chicago he is privileged to go back to Boston. I don't think Chicago would experience any shock if he did."

Mr. Reed wilted a little, but he was not crushed.

"The trouble with you people is you don't know anything about any other city. You come in here from Oshkosh and Kalamazoo, and Okookono – "

"Hit him on the back!" called Mary, "he's choking."

"O-con-o-mo-woc," calmly interpreted Miss Fletcher.

Reed recovered – "And a lot more outlandish places – "

"How about Squantum and Skowhegan and Passamaquoddy," laughed Mary.

Reed collapsed – "O well, those are old, familiar – "

The others shouted with laughter.

"O yes! Everything old and New England goes. You are too provincial, old boy. You want to broaden out. I've seen a lot of fellows like you come here, snapping and snarling at Chicago, and end up by being wild promoters." The Jew was at the bat, and the table applauded every hit.

Rose did not share in the talk – she had so little knowledge of cities – but it served to make Mr. Taylor a strong figure in her eyes. He was tall and big-boned and unsmiling. He studied her with absent-minded interest, and she felt no irritation or embarrassment, for his eyes were clean and thoughtful. He looked at her as if she called up memories of some one he had loved in another world, and she somehow grew a little sad under his gaze.

As they sat in her room after dinner, Mary asked:

"How do you like our crowd?"

"I can't tell yet. I don't like that Boston man. I never could bear the sound of 'ah'."

"He's a chump; but they ain't all like that. I have met two or three decent Boston fellows down in the office. Don't think they are all muffs."

"Of course not."

"Now take my 'boss' for example. He's fine. He's big enough so you don't mind his airs, but what do you think of Mr. Taylor?"

Rose looked thoughtful, and Mary hastened to say.

"Ain't he fine?" She hoped to forestall criticism.

"Yes, I think he's fine. He makes me think of Professor Jenks."

"A-hugh! so he does me. Say Rose, I'm going to tell you something, don't you ever tell, will you?"

"Why no – of course not."

"Hope to die?"

"Hope to die, hands crossed."

"Well!"

"Well?"

"I came here to board because he was here."

"Why, Mary Compton!"

"Ain't it awful? Of course, no one knows it but you. I'd just die if he knew it. I used to be afraid that he'd find out, but he can't, because you see, he never saw me till I came here, and he thinks it is just accident. He's so simple about such things anyway, and he's always dreaming of something away off. O he's wonderful! He's been all over the mountains. He adores John Muir – you know that man Professor Ellis told us about? Well, he's lived just that way weeks and weeks in the wildest mountains, and it's just glorious to hear him tell about it."

Rose was astonished at Mary, generally so self-contained. She talked as if she had volumes to tell and but short minutes to tell them in. Her cheeks glowed and her eyes grew deep and dark.

"He's here reading law, but he don't need to work. He's got a share in a big mine out there somewhere, which he discovered himself. He just thought he'd try civilization awhile, he said, and so he came to Chicago. He kind o' pokes around the law school (it's in our building – that's where I saw him first, in the elevator), just as an excuse. He hates the law; he told me so. He comes in to see me sometimes. Of course I leave the door open." She smiled. "But it don't make any difference to him. He's just the same here as he is anywhere – I mean he knows how to treat a woman. The school-ma'am said she thought it was terrible to have a man come into your room – the same room you sleep in – but I told her it depended on the man. That settled her, for Owen – I mean Mr. Taylor – don't like her."

Rose listened in silence to this torrent of words from Mary. Her mind was naturally fictive, and she divined the immense world suggested by the girl's incoherent sentences. The mysterious had come to her friend – the "one man of all the world," apparently – a striking personality, quite suited to Mary, with her practical ways and love of fun. It confirmed her in her conviction that a girl must adventure into the city to win a place and a husband.

She rose and put her arms about her friend's neck:

"I'm so glad, Mary."

"O goodness! don't congratulate me. He's never said a word – and maybe he won't. I can't understand him – anyway it's great fun."

A slow step crossed the hall, and a rap at the door nearly took away Mary's breath; for a moment she could not reply, then Mr. Taylor's voice was heard.

"I beg your pardon." He was turning away when Mary sprang up and opened the door.

"O Mr. Taylor, is it you?"

"Yes – I didn't know but you and your friend would like to go out somewhere?"

"Would you, Rose?"

"Not tonight, thank you. But you go. Don't keep in on my account."

Mary struggled a moment, then she smiled with tender archness.

"Very well, thank you, Mr. Taylor. I'll be ready soon." After he had gone she said:

"Perhaps he'll propose!"

Rose glowed sympathetically. "I hope he will."

The next day Rose went down town alone. The wind had veered to the south, the dust blew, and the whole terrifying panorama of life in the streets seemed some way blurred together, and forms of men and animals were like figures in tapestry. The grind and clang and clatter and hiss and howl of the traffic was all about her.

She came upon the river just as the bridge was being opened. Down toward the lake, which had to her all the wonder and expanse of the sea, boats lay thickly, steamers from deep water, long, narrow and black. Excursion boats, gleaming white, and trimmed with shining brass, lay beside the wharves, and low-lying tugs, sturdy, rowdyish little things, passed by, floating like ducks and pulling like bull-dogs, guiding great two-masted sailing boats and long, low, grimy steamers, with high decks at the ends. The river ran below, gray-green, covered with floating refuse. Mountainous buildings stood on either side of the waterway.

The draw, as it began to move, made a noise precisely like an old fashioned threshing machine – a rising howl, which went to her heart like a familiar voice. Her eyes for a moment released hold upon the scene before her, and took a slant far over the town to the coulé farm, and the days when the threshing machine howled and rattled in the yard came back, and she was rushing to get dinner ready for the crew.

When the bridge returned to its place she walked slowly across, studying each vista. To the west, other bridges, swarming with people, arched the stream – on each side was equal mystery. These wonderful great boats and their grim brave sailors she had read about, but had never seen. They came from far up the great tumultuous lake, and they were going to anchor somewhere in that wild tangle of masts and chimneys and towering big buildings to the west. They looked as if they might go to the ends of the earth. At the stern of an outgoing boat four sailors were pulling at a rope, the leader singing a wild, thrilling song in time to the action.

So it was – the wonderful and the terrifying appealed to her mind first. In all the city she saw the huge and the fierce. She perceived only contrasts. She saw the ragged newsboy and the towering policeman. She saw the rag-pickers, the street vermin, with a shudder of pity and horror, and she saw also the gorgeous show windows of the great stores. She saw the beautiful new gowns and hats, and she saw also the curious dress of swart Italian girls scavenging with baskets on their arms. Their faces were old and grimy, their voices sounded like the chattered colloquies of monkeys in the circus.

It all seemed a battlefield. There was no hint of repose or home in it all. People were just staying here like herself, trying to get work, trying to make a living, trying to make a name. They had left their homes as she had, and though she conceived of them as having a foot-hold she could not imagine them having reached security. The home-life of the city had not revealed itself to her.

She made her way about the first few blocks below Water street, looking for Dr. Herrick's address. It was ten o'clock, and the streets were in a frenzy of exchange. The sidewalks were brooks, the streets rivers of life which curled into doors and swirled around mountainous buildings.

It was almost pathetic to see how helpless she seemed in the midst of these alien sounds. It took away from her the calm, almost scornful, self-reliance which characterized her in familiar surroundings. Her senses were as acute as a hare's and sluiced in upon her a bewildering flood of sights and sounds. She did not appear childish, but she seemed slow and stupid, which of course she was not. She thought and thought till she grew sick with thought. She struggled to digest all that came to her, but it was like trampling sand; she apparently gained nothing by her toil.

The streets led away into thunderous tunnels, beyond which some other strange hell of sound and stir imaginatively lay. The brutal voices of drivers of cabs and drays assaulted her. The clang of gongs drew her attention, now here, now there, and her anxiety to understand each sound and to appear calm added to her confusion.

She heard crashes and yells that were of murder and sudden death. It was the crash of a falling bundle of sheet iron, but she knew not that. She looked around thinking to see some savage battle scene.

She saw women with painted faces and bleached hair whom she took to be those mysterious and appalling women who sell themselves to men. They were in fact simple-minded shop girls or vulgar little housewives with sad lack of taste.

Every street she crossed, she studied, looking both up and down it, in the effort to see some end of its mystery. They all vanished in lurid, desolate distance, save toward the lake. Out there she knew, the water lay serene and blue.

This walk was to her like entrance into war. It thrilled and engaged her at every turn. She was in the center of human life. To win here was to win all she cared to have.

It was a relief to pass into the rotunda of the splendid building in which Dr. Herrick's office was. Outside the war sounded, and around her men hastened. She entered the elevator as one in a dream. The man hustled her through the door without ceremony and clanged the door as if it were a prison gate. They soared to the ninth floor like a balloon suddenly liberated, and the attendant fairly pushed her out.

"Here's your floor – Herrick, to the left."

Rose was humiliated and indignant, but submitted. The hallway along which she moved was marble and specklessly clean. On each side doors of glass with letters in black told of the occupations of the tenants.

She came at length to the half-open door of Dr. Herrick's office and timidly entered. A young girl came forward courteously.

"Would you like to see the Doctor?" she asked in a soft voice.

"Yes, please. I have a letter to her from Dr. Thatcher of Madison."