Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

"O! well, I will take it right in. Be seated, please."

This seemed good treatment, and the soft voice of the girl was very grateful after the hoarse war-cries of the street. Rose looked around the little room with growing composure and delight. It was such a dainty little waiting room, and argued something attractive in Dr. Herrick.

"Come right in," the girl said on returning. "The Doctor is attending to her mail, but she will see you for a few moments."

Rose entered the second and larger room, and faced a small graceful woman, of keen, alert gaze. She appeared to be about thirty-five years of age. She shook hands briskly, but not warmly.

Her hand was small and firm and her tone quick and decisive. "How-d'-you-do! Sit down! I had a note from Dr. Thatcher the other day saying I might expect you."

Rose took a chair while the Doctor studied her, sitting meanwhile with small graceful head leaning on one palm, her elbow on the corner of her desk. No woman's eyes ever searched Rose like those of this little woman, and she rebelled against it inwardly, as Dr. Herrick curtly asked:

"Well, now, what can I do for you? Dr. Thatcher thought I could do something for you."

Rose was too dazed to reply. This small, resolute, brusque woman was a world's wonder to her. She looked down and stammered.

"I don't know – I – thought maybe you could help me to find out what I could do."

The Doctor studied her for an instant longer. She saw a large, apparently inexperienced girl, a little sullen and a little embarrassed – probably stupid.

"Don't you know what you want to do?"

"No – that is, I want to write," confessed Rose.

"Write! My dear girl, every addlepate wants to write. Have you friends in the city?"

"One; a classmate."

"Man?"

"No, a girl."

"Why did you leave home?"

Rose began to grow angry. "Because I couldn't live the life of a cow or a cabbage. I wanted to see the city."

The Doctor arose. "Come here a moment." Rose obeyed and stood beside her at the window, and they looked out across a stretch of roofs, heaped and humped into mountainous masses, blurred and blent and made appalling by smoke and plumes of steam. A scene as desolate as a burnt-out volcano – a jumble of hot bricks, jagged eave-spouts, gas-vomiting chimneys, spiked railings, glass skylights and lofty spires, a hideous and horrible stretch of stone and mortar, cracked and seamed into streets. It had no limits and it palpitated under the hot September sun, boundless and savage. At the bottom of the crevasses men and women speckled the pavement like minute larvæ.

"Is that what you came here to see?" asked the Doctor.

Rose drew a deep breath and faced her.

"Yes, and I'm not afraid of it. It's mighty! It is grander than I expected it to be – grand and terrible, but it's where things are done."

Isabel Herrick studied her a little closer.

"You'd leave your country home for this?"

Rose turned upon her and towered above her. Her eyes flashed and her abundant eye-brows drew down in a dark scowl.

"Would you be content to spend your life, day and night, summer and winter, in Dutcher's Coolly?"

"Pardon me," said Dr. Herrick cuttingly, "the problem is not the same. I have not the same – I – the question – "

"Yes, you who are born in the city and who come up to see us on the farms for a couple of weeks in June —you take it on yourselves to advise us to stay there! You who succeed are always ready to discourage us when we come to try our fortunes. I can succeed just as well as you, and I'll make you bow your head to me before five years are gone."

Rose was magnificent, masterful. She was flaming hot with wrath. This little woman had gone too far.

Dr. Herrick turned abruptly.

"I guess I've made a mistake; sit down again," she said, in softer tones.

Rose was not yet done. She kept her lofty pose.

"Yes, you certainly have. I am not afraid of this city; I can take care of myself. I wouldn't be under obligations to you now for the world. I want you to know I'm not a beggar asking a dollar from you; I'm not a school-girl, either. I know what I can do and you don't. I wouldn't have troubled you, only for Dr. Thatcher." She moved toward the door, gloriously angry, too angry to say good-day.

The Doctor's cold little face lighted up. She smiled the most radiant smile, and it made her look all at once like a girl.

"My dear – I am crushed. I am an ant at your feet. Come here now, you great splendid creature, and let me hug you this minute."

Rose kept on to the door, where she turned:

"I don't think I ought to trouble you further," she said coldly.

The Doctor advanced. "Come now, I beg your pardon. I'm knocked out. I took you for one of those romantic country girls, who come to the city – helpless as babes. Come back."

Rose came near going on. If she had, it would have lost her a good friend. She felt that and so, when the Doctor put an arm around her to lead her back to the desk, she yielded, but she was still palpitating with the heat of her wrath.

"My dear, you fairly scared me. I never was so taken by surprise in my life; tell me all about yourself; tell me how you came to come, where you are – and all about it."

Rose told her – not all, of course – she told her of her college work, of her father, of the coulé, of her parting from her father.

"O yes," the Doctor interrupted, "that's the way we go on – we new men and women. The ways of our fathers are not ours; it's tragedy either way you put it. Go on!"

At last she had the story, told with marvelous unconscious power, direct, personal, full of appeal. She looked at Rose with reflective eyes for a little space.

"Well, now we'll take time to consider. Meanwhile bring me something of yours; I'll show it to a friend of mine, an editor here, and if it pleases him we'll know what to do. Meanwhile, come and see me, and I'll introduce you to some nice people. Chicago is full of nice people if you only come at them. Come and see me tomorrow, can't you? O you great, splendid creature! I wish I had your inches." She glowed with admiration.

"Come Sunday at six and dine with me," yielding to a sudden impulse. "Come early and let me talk to you."

Rose promised and then went out into the waiting room.

"Etta, dear, this is Miss Dutcher; this is my sister. I want you to know each other." The little girl tip-toed up and took Rose's hand with a little inarticulate murmur.

There was a patient waiting, but Dr. Herrick ignored her and conducted Rose to the door.

"Good-bye, dear, I'm glad you came. You've given me a good shaking up. Remember, six, sharp!"

She looked after Rose with a wonderful glow in her heart.

"The girl is a genius – a jewel in the rough," she thought. "She must be guided. Heavens! How she towered."

When she stepped into the street Rose felt taller and stronger, and the street was less appalling. She raised her eyes to the faces of the men she met. Her eyes had begun their new search. The men streamed by in hundreds; impressive in mass, but comparatively uninteresting singly.

It was a sad comment upon her changing conceptions of life that she did not look at the poorly dressed men, the workmen. She put them aside as out of the question; not consciously, for the search at this stage was still unconscious, involuntary, like that of a bird seeking a mate, moved by a law which knows neither individuals nor time.

She saw also the splendor of the shop windows. She had a distinct love for beautiful fabrics as works of art, but she cared less for dress than one would suppose to see her pass lingeringly before great luminous cataracts of drapery. She was quietly dressed, and gracefully dressed, beyond this she had never cared to go, but she constructed wonderful homes and owners out of the glimpses of these windows, and from the passing of graceful young girls, clothed like duchesses, and painted (some of them) like women of the under world.

It all grew oppressive and disheartening to her at last, and she boarded a State street car (the only car she knew) and took her way up home. All the people in the car looked at her as if she had intruded into a private drawing room.

She was evidently from the country, for, though it was in the day of quaintness, she wore her hair plain. It was also the middle period of the curious and inexplicable little swagger which all duly-informed girls assumed, but Rose walked on her strong elastic feet with a powerful swing which was worth going miles to see. It was due to her unconscious imitation of the proud carriage of William De Lisle. She loved that forward swing of the thigh, with the flex of the side which accompanied it. It was her ideal of motion, that free action of knee, waist and neck, which she felt rather than saw in the great athlete.

She made a goodly figure to look at, and it was no especial wonder that the people in the car faced her. Her forehead was prominent and her eyes were sombre. It was impossible for the casual observer to define why she made so marked an impression upon him. It was because she was so fresh and strong, and unaffected and unconscious.

Pure men did not smile at her as they might at a pretty girl. They looked at her with wide, quiet eyes, and she knew they meant to be perfectly respectful. There was one man looking at her like that when she looked up to pay the conductor. There was a deep sorrowful look in his eyes, and his face, too, was sad.

She did not understand his mood, but was moved by it. When she looked at him again he dropped his eyes to his paper. He was a large man of thirty or more, and had a rugged, serious face. She remembered it long afterwards.

At lunch she found no one but Mr. Taylor. He loomed up at the further end of the table, his gaunt, grave face and broad shoulders towering up like a farmer's. She studied him closely, now that she knew more about him. He had a big, wide, plain face, with gentle gray eyes. His beard was trimmed round and made him look older than he was. He was a man into whose eyes women could look unafraid and unabashed. He greeted Rose with a smile.

"I'm very glad you've come. I was afraid I should eat lunch alone. With your permission I'll move down to your end of the table."

Rose was very glad to have him take a seat near, and they were friends at once. They naturally fell upon Mary as a topic. Mr. Taylor spoke of her quietly:

"Mary's a fine girl," he said. "I don't like to see her work. I don't like to see any woman do work like that. I don't claim any right to say what women shall do or not do, but I imagine they wouldn't go into shops if they were not, in a way, forced into it."

Rose defended the right of a girl to earn her own living. He hastened to explain further:

"Of course a woman should be free and independent, but is she free when pressure forces her into typewriting or working in a sweat-shop?"

Rose turned his thoughts at last by asking about the West. He expanded like flame at the thought.

"Ah! the old equatorial wind is blowing today, and my hair crackles with electricity." He smiled as he ran his hands through his hair. "On such days I long for my pony again. Sometimes, when I can't stand it any longer, I take a train to some little station and go out and lie flat down on the grass on my back, so that I can't see anything but sky; then I can almost imagine myself back again where the lone old peaks bulge against the sky. Do you know John Muir and Joaquin Miller?"

Rose shook her head. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm.

"There are two men who know the wilderness. Your Thoreau I've read, but he don't interest me the way these Rocky Mountain fellows do. Your eastern fellows don't really know a wilderness – they're sort o' back pasture explorers. John isn't a bit theatrical, he's been there. He doesn't take a train of guides to explore a glacier, he sticks a crust of bread in his belt along with a tin cup, and goes alone. I've been with John in the Sierras, and once he came over into my range."

Rose defended Emerson and Thoreau as if she were the easterner this Colorado hunter considered her. As she talked he fixed great absent-minded eyes upon her, and absorbed every line of her face, every curve of her lips – every changing wave of color.

"I don't care for the wilderness as you do. What is a bird compared to a man, anyway? I like people. I want to be where dramas are being played. Men make the world, bears don't." She ended hotly.

He slowly withdrew his gaze.

"I guess you're right." He smiled a wise smile. "If the wilderness had been everything in the world, I wouldn't be here. A woman is more than a flower. A woman would make my mountains a paradise."

"You have no right to ask a woman to go there with you – not to stay," she added quickly.

His smile passed.

"You're right again. Unless I could find a woman who loves the wilderness as I do."

"That is out of the question," she replied. "No woman loves the wilderness – as a home. All women love cities and streets and children." She had a young person's readiness to generalize, and pitilessly flung these hopeless truisms at him. He arose, apparently made sadder by them. He sighed.

"But civilization carries such terrible suffering with it."

Rose went to her room and looked at her other letters of introduction. Should she present them? What would be the use. The scene with Dr. Herrick had not been pleasant; true, it had apparently brought her a friend, but it was a rigorous experience, and she hardly felt it worth while at the moment to go through another such scene to win another such friend.

She fell to looking over her manuscripts. They were on lined paper, stitched together at the top. They were imitative, of course, and leaned toward the Elizabethan drama, and toward Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, so far as verse-form went. There were also essays which she had written at college, which inquired mournfully, who will take the place of the fallen giants, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson? She had eloquent studies of Hugo and valiant defences of Dickens. She reflected in her writing (naturally) all the conventional positions in literature. She stood upon the graves of the dead as if she feared they might be desecrated.

She was a pupil, and as a pupil she had considered literature as something necessarily afar off, in England or France, in Boston and Cambridge, though she had come to think Chicago might be a place suitable for a humble beginning, but that it might be the subject of literature had not occurred to her. She had never known a person who had written a book. Professor Ellis and the President had written scientific treatises, but, not being a fool, she knew there was a difference between getting an article into a country weekly and getting into a big daily, to say nothing of the great magazines. She wished for advice. Being out in the world now, something must be done with her writings.

These essays were good and thoughtful, they represented study and toil, but they did not represent her real self, her real emotions, any more than her reading represented her real liking. Her emotions, big, vital, contemporaneous, had no part in this formal and colorless pedantry. Of this she was still ignorant, however.

She was sorting her poems over and dreaming about them when Mary came home.

"O, you dear! I've been thinking about you all day. Did you see your woman doctor?"

"Yes."

"Did you like her?"

"Well, I don't know – yes, I think I do. I didn't at first."

"Where else did you go?"

"Nowhere. I came home to lunch."

"Eat alone?" Mary was taking off her things and was more than usually fragmentary.

"No. Mr. Taylor was there." Mary faced her.

"Now see here, Rose Dutcher, do you want to break my heart into smithereens? If you do, you go on lunching with Owen Taylor."

Rose laughed at her tone of simulated sorrow and dismay.

"He moved down to my end of the table, too."

Mary plumped into a chair and stared.

"Well, that finishes me. I'm coming home to lunch after this. If you prove a terrater, I'll have your back hair, Rose Dutcher."

"I couldn't help it. He didn't want to shout at me across the table."

Mary's voice softened.

"What did you talk about?"

"He talked about you."

"Did he? What did he say?"

"He said you were a good girl, and you are."

"Is that all?"

"What more could you ask?"

"He might 'ave praised me beauty!" Then she laughed and rushed at Rose and hugged her for some reason not expressed.

"Isn't he just grand?"

"I'm going out to dinner Sunday night!"

"Where? Woman doctor's?"

"Yes. I met her sister, too."

"O, you'll soon be getting so swell you won't notice us. Well, anyhow, you'll leave me Owen?"

In the mood in which she went to sleep that night, there was no premonition of conquest. The tide of her life sank low. It was impossible for her to succeed – she, a little country girl, of five feet nine. She looked at her bulk as it showed under the quilts. How small a thing she was to be set over against the mighty city.

And yet Napoleon was less than she. And Patti and Edwin Booth were not so large. The life of a great actor, like Edwin Booth, a singer, like Patti, interested her deeply. She wondered that they could do things like other people. They were so public, so admired, so lifted into the white-hot glare of success.

She brought her mind back to the point. They succeeded, small beings though they were, they faced the millions of the earth and became the masters, the kings and queens of art.

By what necromancy did they do this? If it was born in them, then there was hope for her; if they reached it by toil, then, surely, there was hope for her.

CHAPTER XVII

HER FIRST DINNER OUT

Rose went to see the parts of the city which no true Chicagoan ever visits. That is to say, she spent Sunday in the park, admiring with pathetic fortitude the sward, the curving drives, and the bridges and the statues, in company with the lowly and nameless multitude – she even crowded in to see the animals.

She had intended to get back to church, conformable to Mary's programme, which was to start in St. James, and go in rotation to all the great churches and hear the choirs; but it happened that on this first Sunday there was a fine west wind, and the three-masters were setting sail to the north close inshore, and when Rose found she could sit on the park benches and see those mighty birds sail by she was content to do that and nothing more.

She had no cheap, easy and damnable comparisons. The passage of each purple-sailed lumber freighter was a poem to her. They floated noiselessly, effortlessly, on a beautiful sea of color. They drove like butterflies in dreams, their motive power indiscernible.

She sat with her chin in her palm, her big eyes, like beautiful windows, letting in the sunshine and the grace of ships and clouds without effort, fixed in an ecstasy of reverie. Around her streamed floods of the city's newly acquired residents, clerks, bookkeepers, typewriters, shop-girls, butcher's boys, salesmen, all fresh from the small towns and from the farms of the West. As the ships passed, she gave her attention to these people – recognized in them many familiar types. There was the smart young man, son of the tavernkeeper in Cyene. There was the blundering big wag, Ed Smith of Molasses Gap (assistant shipping clerk in Smith & Rydal's hardware store now). There were types like Mary, hearty, loud-voiced, cheery, wholesome, whom the city could never rob of their native twang. There were Tom and Grace and Elsa and Bert and all the rest of the bright, restless spirits of the country towns and wide-awake school districts come to try their fortunes in the great city like herself.

They wore bargains in ready-made clothing pretty generally, but it was up-to-date and they were all clean as a new dime. They laughed, shouted jokes, scuffled and pushed the girls, quite in the good country way. They made quaint and sometimes insolent remarks about the park and its adornments, assuming blasé airs as old residents, and pointing out to the later arrivals the various attractions.

There came by other groups, as alien as the foregoing were familiar. Dark-skinned, queer, bow-legged, bewhiskered little men, followed by their wives and children, all sallow and crooked.

They were all foreigners. Great droves, whole neighborhoods drifted along, chattering unintelligible languages, incomprehensible to the country girl as the Chinese. Whether they were Italians or Jews or Bohemians she could not tell, but she could see the marks of hunger and hard work on their pallid faces. These were, no doubt, the people who moved about under the murk of that deadly region through which she had been borne by her train that first night.

She went home from this first visit to the park oppressed and over-borne with the multitude of her new impressions. She felt quite as she did upon her return from the Art Institute, to which she had hastened early in the first week. So much that was artificially beautiful tired her and irritated her, like eating a meal of honey and sponge cake. Her head ached with the formal curves of the drives, with the unchanging fixedness of the statues, just as the unnatural murky tones of the landscapes in frames gave her vague discomfort.

In the few days between her meeting with Isabel and her dinner she saw the Wheat Exchange (which interested her mightily, like battle), she went again to the Art Institute, she visited other parks, she went to the top of the Masonic Temple, and did many other things which the native high-class Chicagoan prides himself on never doing. Happily she apprehended not the enormity of her offence; on the contrary, she was seeing life, and this feeling compensated her when she did not otherwise enjoy "a sight." It was a duty, and she felt grateful to the unknown city officials for the chance to see these things, even if it nearly broke her neck and tired her out to see them. She looked forward to her dinner with great interest. She had thought a great deal about Dr. Herrick, and had come to the conclusion that she was not much to blame. "I suppose she thought I was a poor helpless ninny coming to ask her for a job," she said to Mary.

"Well, she couldn't have had much gumption," Mary loyally replied.

Mary came home from a walk with Mr. Taylor on purpose to help Rose "fix up and get off," but found her quite dressed and watching the clock.

"Well, you are a prompt one! Stand up now, and let me see if you're all right."

Rose obediently stood and was twirled about in various lights.

"That's fine! That grey dress is such a fit, and scarlet goes well with it. O, you sweet thing! How're you going to get home?"

"Walk, of course."

"Shall I send Owen over for you?"

They both laughed at her tone.

"O, what a self-sacrificing friend!" Rose exclaimed. "I guess I can walk home alone. I'm not afraid of the dark."

"O, it ain't that. It would be sweller to have some one come after you."

"Well, you and Owen both come."

"Well, I'll see. If I feel safe by nine-thirty I'll send him. But if you're not back here by ten o'clock I'll be after ye." This made them both laugh again.

"Where is this address?"

Rose gave her the card.

"Why, this is away up in the swell part. My, ain't you comin' on!" Mary clucked with her tongue. "You'll be calling on the Lake Drive soon."

Rose looked neat and altogether well composed in her simple grey dress and sober-hued bonnet and gloves. She wasn't in the very latest fall fashion, of course, but she was not noticeably out of vogue. She felt quite at ease as she walked up the street.

This ease began to desert her as the houses grew larger and the doorplates more ornate. What if Dr. Herrick lived in one of these houses! They were not, of course, palatial like those houses on the lake front, but they looked too grand for any of her friends to live in them. Her fear of getting tangled in social intricacies grew keener as she walked up the steps to a large cream-colored brick building. The mystery of "flats" was to be faced. The entrance was tiled and flecklessly clean. On the right were three bells, one above the other. Over the second one she saw Dr. Herrick's name. She pulled the bell and waited for developments.