Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

Suddenly a hollow voice, hoarse and breathy, pushed from the wall.

"Kim roight up." She turned to the inner door which opened mysteriously, and a small boy in buttons motioned her to the elevator. She began to comprehend and felt grateful to the small boy for his considerate gravity.

At the landing the door was opened by Etta, the pretty little sister.

She said "How-do-you-do!" in her soft, timid little voice, and let Rose into an exquisite little bedroom off the hall and asked her to lay off her hat. She stood in awe of Rose, who seemed very large and stern to her.

Rose felt a little nervous about what was to come after, but contrived to keep outwardly calm while following her gentle guide out into the hall and forward into a small reception room. Isabel arose and greeted her with a smile of delight.

"Ah! here you are! Do you know I began to fear you were mythical – that I'd dreamed you. Warren, this is Miss Dutcher. Miss Dutcher, Mr. Mason." A slow, large man stepped forward and looked her in the face with penetrating eyes. He was a little taller than she was and his face had a weary look. He was blond as a Norwegian and his voice was very beautiful.

"I am very glad you're not a myth," he said, and his face lost its tired look for a moment.

"This is my nephew, Mr. Paul Herrick;" a slim young man came up to shake hands. He was plainly a college man, and Rose comprehended him at once.

Isabel's voice changed and a little flush came to her face as she put her hand on the shoulder of a tall, black-bearded man standing quietly in the shadow.

"This is Dr. Sanborn, my husband-who-is-to-be."

"If nothing happens." He smiled as he shook hands.

"If she doesn't conclude to take me instead," remarked Mason.

Rose had perception enough at command to feel the powerful personalities grouped about her. She sat near Dr. Sanborn, with whom she was at ease at once, he was so awkward and so kindly. He took off his glasses and polished them carefully as if anxious to see her better.

"Isabel tells me you gave her a little lecture the other day. I'm glad of it. We city folks need it once in a while. We get to thinking that country folks are necessarily fools and stupids by reason of our farce-comedies and our so-called comic weeklies."

"We're not so bad as that," said Rose.

"Of course not; nobody could be so bad as that."

Isabel sat down near Mason. "I tell you, Warren, that girl has a future before her."

"No doubt. It couldn't well be behind her."

"Don't be flippant! See that head! But it ain't that – she has power. I feel it, she made me feel it. I want you to see some of her writing and see what can be done for her."

Mason looked bored. "Writes, does she?"

"Of course she writes. See that head, I say."

"I see the head and it's a handsome head. I'll concede that. So is Sanborn's, but he can't write a prescription without a printed form."

"O well, if you are in the mood to be irreverent!"

Mason's face lighted up. "There, you can write! Anyone who is capable of a touch like that – in the presence of gods, men should be meek. At the same time I would hasten to warn you, the Doctor is becoming marvelously interested in this girl with a future. He has faced her; he is actually touching her knee with his forefinger!"

Isabel laughed. "He always does that when he argues anything. It won't do any harm."

"It mightn't do you any harm, but that innocent country girl!"

"She can take care of herself. You should have heard her put me down in my chair. I want you to take her in to dinner."

"I – madam? Etta is my choice, after the hostess, of course. I'm a little shy of these girls who write."

"Well, you take me in and I'll let Paul take Rose, but I want her to sit by you. I invited you, of all the men of my vast acquaintance, because I hoped your trained and fictive eye would see and appreciate her."

"My trained and fictive eye is regarding her, but maybe she is like an impressionist painting, better seen at a little distance. I confess she is attractive at this focus, but O, if her mind – !"

"You need not worry about her mind. She's a genius. Well, I guess Professor Roberts is not coming. Suppose we go in!"

"Aren't we rather formal tonight?"

"Well, yes, but Dr. Sanborn had no dinner in the middle of the day so I transferred ours."

"I'm glad you did, for I'm hungry too."

And so it happened Rose found herself seated beside the big blond man whose face seemed so weary and so old. Paul sat on her left, and they chatted easily on college affairs. He was from Ann Arbor, he told her.

Rose looked with wonder at Dr. Herrick. She was quite another woman, entirely unprofessional. Her face was warm with color, and she wore an exquisite dress, simple as a uniform, yet falling into graceful soft folds about her feet. Her brown hair was drawn about her pretty head in wavy masses. Her eyes sparkled with the pleasure and pride of being hostess to such company. Altogether she looked scarcely older than Rose. The table was set with tall candles with colored shades, and the simple little dinner was exquisitely served. At the same time it all seemed artificial and unhomelike to Rose. The home which had no cellar and no yard was to her false, transitory and unwholesome no matter how lovely the walls might be. Air seemed lacking and the free flow of electricity. It was like staying in a hotel.

Mason turned to her after a little talk with Etta.

"And so you have joined the stream of fortune-seekers setting always to the city. Do you feel yourself to be a part of a predestinated movement?"

"I did not when I started – I do now."

"That's right. This is the Napoleon of cities. A city of colossal vices and colossal virtues. It is now devouring, one day it will begin to send back its best arterial blood into the nation. My metaphor is a bit questionable but that is due to my two minds concerning this salad – I alternately curse and bow down in wonder before this city. Its future is appalling to think of. In 1920 it will be the mightiest center of the English speaking race – thank you, I'll not take any more dressing – I envy you young people who come now when the worst of the fight against material greed is nearly over. We who have given twenty years of our lives – I beg your pardon. I don't know why I should moralize for your benefit – I meant to say I hope you have not come to Chicago to make your living."

"Why yes – I hope to – but my father gives me a little to live on till I find something to do."

"That's good. Then sit down and watch the city. It doesn't matter how humble your living place – sit above the city's tumult. Observe it, laugh at it but don't fight it – don't mix in the grind. Keep it in your brain, don't let it get into your blood."

Rose looked at him in wonder, his voice was so quiet and his words so vibrant with meaning.

"I never felt so drawn to a woman in my life," Isabel said to her betrothed. "I don't pretend to understand it. I just love her this minute."

"With due qualifications I can agree with you, my dear. She is very promising indeed."

"She has the power that compels. I wish she'd get hold of Mason." Isabel smiled wisely: "You see Mason is really listening to her now, and poor Etta is left alone. I wish Professor Roberts were here. He's such good fun for her. Before the evening's out every man in the house will be around that Wisconsin girl, and I don't blame 'em a bit."

A little later the maid announced Professor Roberts.

"Ah! bring him right in, Mary!"

A cheery voice was heard in the hallway.

"Don't rise, I'll find a place somewhere. I am delinquent I know; what's this – a roast?"

"Now don't you pretend to be starving just to please me; this Sunday evening dinner was given for me especially," said Sanborn.

"Hungry? Of course I'm hungry. I've come all the way from Fifty-second street."

Professor Roberts was a middle-aged man, with a chin whisker. He had a small, elegant figure, and his eyes were humorous.

Everybody took on new life the moment he came in.

"The fact is I got bridged," he explained, after being introduced to Rose.

"All from living on the south side," said Paul.

"I know – I know! However, somebody must live on the south side, and so I stay to keep up the general average."

"How modest and kind of you!"

"Professor belongs to the University settlement – down near the Indiana line," explained Paul to Rose.

"Anybody'd think, to hear you north siders talk, that Fifty-second street was at the uttermost parts of the earth."

"It is."

"Well, we don't have weekly burglaries on our side."

"We no longer sing 'Lily Dale' and the Sankey hymns up here."

All this banter was amusing to Rose. It opened to her the inner social landmarks of the city. She didn't know before that there was a west side and a north side to the city.

Professor Roberts bubbled over with fun. He was curiously like some of the men Rose had known at Bluff Siding. His chin whiskers, his mirthful eyes, and his hearty laughter were familiar as a dandelion. What could he be professor of, she thought – and asked her neighbor.

Paul told her. "He's professor of geology and paleontology, and knows, besides, a tremendous lot about bugs and animals. He made a trip up into the Yukon country last year. He was gone eighteen months, with no one but a couple of Indian guides. He's a big fellow, for all he's so jolly and everyday in his manners."

The talk that went on was a revelation to the country girl. The three men addressed themselves to Isabel, and every conceivable subject received some sort of mention. Roberts joked incessantly, and Dr. Sanborn held him a good second, while Mason said the most enigmatical things in his smooth, melodious bass. His face lost its heavy look under the eyes, and his smile was very attractive – though he never laughed.

Rose sat with the other young people, absorbed in the touch and go, brilliancy and fun of the talk. It was wonderful to Rose that one little woman could sit so masterful and at ease before three such keen conversationalists as these men seemed to her.

After dinner they took on a quieter tone. Mason asked the privilege of ruminating over his coffee and cigar.

"Ruminate, yes; but don't make it an excuse for going to sleep," said Isabel. "You must wake up at any rate and tell us a story before the evening is over."

She got Roberts started on his recent trip to see the Indian snake dance at Walpi, and they listened breathlessly till he rounded up safely half-an-hour later. Then Dr. Sanborn was called upon.

"Come, Doctor, we must have your song!"

"His song!" exclaimed Roberts.

"One song?" asked Mason.

"One song alone is all he knows, and the only way he acquired that was by damnable iteration. It was a cheerful lay sung by his nurse in the hospital during a spell of brain fever," explained Isabel.

"Is this thing unavoidable?" asked Mason in illy concealed apprehension.

"Thus we earn our dinner," replied Roberts. "To what length this love of food will carry a man!"

"Well, let's have the agony over at once."

The Doctor lifted his tall frame to the perpendicular as if pulled by a string, and, marching to the piano, waited for Etta to play the chords. His face was expressionless, but his eyes laughed.

His voice shook the floor with the doleful cadences of a distressing ballad about a man who murdered his wife because she was "untrew," and was afterwards haunted by a "figger in white with pityous eyes and cries." He eventually died of remorse and the ballad ended by warning all men to refrain from hasty judgments upon their wives.

"Amen! So say we all!" Professor Roberts heartily agreed. A lively discussion was precipitated by Mason, who said "the man must be judged by the facts before him at the time the deed was done, not afterwards. I've no doubt there are wives whose murder would be justifiable homicide."

Isabel interrupted it at last by saying: "That will do, that is quite enough. You are on the road to vituperation."

"Miss Dutcher, you will sing for us, won't you?"

"O, I don't sing." Rose turned upon her in terror.

"Really and truly?"

"Really and truly."

"Then you play?"

"I have no accomplishments at all. All the music I can make is a whistle and a jewsharp, I assure you."

This set Roberts off. "Ah! La Belle Siffleuse! we will hear you whistle. Dr. Sanborn, Miss Dutcher can whistle."

Rose shrank back. "O, I can't whistle before company; I learned on the farm, I was alone so much."

They fell upon her in entreaties, and at last she half promised.

"If you won't look at me – "

"Turn down the gas!" shouted Roberts.

They made the room dim. There was a little silence, and then into the room crept a keen little sweet piping sound. It broadened out into a clear fluting and entered upon an old dance tune. As she went on she put more and more go into it, till Roberts burst out with a long-drawn nasal cry, "Sash-ay all!" and Rose broke down into a laugh. Everybody shouted "Bravo!"

Roberts exulted. "O, but I'd like to see an old-fashioned country dance again. Give us another old-fashioned tune."

"I don't know that I do them right," said Rose. "I hear the fiddlers playing them."

"More! more!" cried Roberts. "I like those old things. Mason here pretends not to know them, but he's danced them many a time."

Rose whistled more of the old tunes. "Haste to the Wedding," "Honest John," "Polly Perkins," and at last reached some fantastic furious tunes, which she had caught from the Norwegian fiddlers.

Then she stopped and they turned up the light. She looked a little ashamed of her performance, and Isabel seemed to understand it, so she said:

"Now that is only fooling, and I'm going to ask Miss Dutcher to read some of her verses to us. Dr. Thatcher writes me that she does verses excellently well." This sobered the company at once, as it well might, and Rose was in despair.

"O no, don't ask me to do that, please."

"This is your chance, rise to it," insisted Isabel.

"If you will I'll sing my song again for you," Sanborn said.

At last Rose gave up resistance. Her heart beat so terribly hard she felt smothered, but she recited a blank verse poem. It was an echo of Tennyson, of course, not exactly "Enoch Arden," but reminiscent of it, but the not too critical taste of Dr. Sanborn and Prof. Roberts accepted it with applause.

Mason stole a sly look at Isabel, who did not give up. She asked for one more and Rose read a second selection, a spasmodic, equally artificial graft, a supposedly deeply emotional lyric, an echo of Mrs. Browning, with a third line which went plumping to the deeps of passion after a rhyme. It had power in it, and a sort of sincerity in the reading which carried even Isabel away – besides that, her magnificent figure was a poem in itself.

"What a voice you have!" she said as she seized her by the hands. "You read beautifully – and you write well, too."

Rose noticed that Mr. Mason, the large man, said nothing at all. In the midst of the talk the maid approached Isabel.

"Some one has called for Miss Dutcher." Every one shook hands with her cordially; they received her as an equal, that was evident.

Isabel went in with Rose to help her put on her things.

"My dear, you've pleased them all and I've just fallen in love with you. I'm going to have you at the Woman's Club. You must come and see me. Come often, won't you?"

"I shall be glad to," Rose said simply, but her face was flushed and her eyes shining with joy.

Owen was outside in the hall alone.

"Didn't Mary come too?"

"No, she concluded it would look awkward if she came and stood outside the door."

They walked along side by side. Taylor considered it an affectation to offer a strong young woman his arm, except at critical passages of the street.

"Did you have a good time?"

"O splendid!" she said, the joy of her social success upon her. "It was lovely! I never met such fine people. Everything was so full of fun and they were intellectual, too. Dr. Herrick is wonderful! Mr. Mason, too."

"What Mr. Mason?"

"Warren Mason, I think they call him."

"Is that so? Warren Mason is considered one of the finest newspaper men in the city. All the fellows look up to him."

"I'm glad I met him. O, now I see! Dr. Herrick invited him there to hear me read. I made a failure, I'm afraid."

She thought so more and more as the rose color of her little triumph grew gray. She ended by tossing to and fro on her bed, raging to think how foolishly she had acted. The long poem was bad, she saw it now. It was involved and twisted and dull. She saw Mason's face darken again, and it seemed now it wore a look of disgust.

And the whistling! Good heavens, was there no limit to her folly, her childishness?

So she writhed and groaned, her hopes all pathetically trampled and dust-covered now. Everybody would hear of her idiocy. She had been so determined to do something worth while, and she had read her worst lines, and whistled – whistled like a cow-boy.

The houses of the Lake Shore seemed like impenetrable castles in the deep of her despair, and Mason's words about the city grew each moment deeper in meaning.

After Rose left, Dr. Herrick came back into the room radiant.

"There, what do you think of her? Am I crazy or not? I claim to have discovered a genius."

"My dear, seems to me Thatcher has a prior claim."

"Well, anyhow, she is a genius. Don't you think so, Warren?"

"She can whistle."

"O, don't be so enigmatical, it is out of place. She's got power. You can't deny that."

"Time enough to say what she can do when she finds out what polly-rot she is writing now. The whistling interested me," he added, malevolently.

Isabel's face darkened a little.

"I understand, this is one of your prank nights. But I shall not allow it to affect me. You cannot sneer down that beautiful girl."

"I'm not sneering her down. I am merely indicating where she needs help. She is a glorious creature physically and she's keen mentally – morally, no doubt, she's well instructed – after the manner of country girls – but esthetically she's in a sorrowful way. Taste is our weak point in America, and in the rural regions – well, there isn't any taste above that for shortcake, dollar chromos and the New York Repository."

"He's started, he's off!" said Roberts. "Now, I like the girl's verses; they are full of dignity and fervor, it seems to me."

"Full of fever, you mean. You specialists in nerve diseases and spotted bugs wouldn't know a crass imitation of Tennyson if you had it in a glass vial. It's such poor creatures as you who keep these young writers imitating successes. The girl has a fine roll of voice and a splendid curve of bust, and that made the stuff she read, poetry – to impressionable persons."

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" chorused the young people.

"Roberts, you are a sensualist," Sanborn interposed gravely.

Mason imperturbably proceeded.

"The girl has power of some sort. I rather suspect it to be dramatic, but that's mimetic and of a low order, anyway. Her primary distinction, with me, consists in something quite other than these. The girl has character, and that's saying a good deal about a woman, especially a girl. She has departed widely from the conventional type without losing essential womanliness."

"Ah, now we are coming at it!" they all exclaimed, as they drew around him, with exaggerated expressions of interest.

"The girl is darkly individual, and very attractive because of it; but you make of her a social success, as I can see Isabel is planning to do, and get her to wearing low-necked dresses and impoverishing her people, and you'll take all the charm out of her."

"I don't believe it!" said Isabel.

"It hasn't hurt Dr. Herrick," put in Roberts. "I must say I'd like to see the girl in a low-necked dress" – he waved his hand to hold them in check. "Now, hold on! I know that sounds bad, but I mean it all right."

"Oh, no doubt!" They laughed at his embarrassment.

Mason interposed. "Roberts' long stay among the Wallapi and Tlinkit wigwams has perverted his naturally moral nature."

Roberts shook his hands in deprecation, but made no further protest.

Sanborn said: "It's a serious thing to advise a girl like that. What do you intend to do, Isabel? Is a social success the thing the girl needs?"

"It won't do her any harm to meet nice people – of course, she ought not to go out too much if she's going to write."

"You amuse me," Mason began again, in his measured way. "First because you assume that the girl can go where she pleases – "

"She can, too, if she's got the quality we think she has. Chicago society isn't the New York four hundred. We're all workers here."

"Workers and thieves," Mason went on; "but if the girl has the quality I think she has, she will map out her own career and follow it irresistibly. The question that interests me is this – how did the girl get here? Why didn't she stay on the farm like Susan, and Sally, and Ed and Joe? How did she get through college without marrying Harry or Tommy? These are the vital questions."

"I don't know," replied Isabel. "I thought of those things, but of course I couldn't ask her on first acquaintance."

Mason lifted his eye-brows. "Ah! You drew the line at love and marriage. Most women – "

Isabel resented this.

"I'm not 'most women' – I'm not even a type. Don't lecture me, please."

"I beg your pardon, Isabel; you're quite right." His tone was sincere, and restored peace. "I always except you in any generalization."

"This is the most significant thing of all," Isabel said finally. "The girl has set us talking of her as if she were a personage, instead of a girl from a Wisconsin valley – "

"That's true," Mason admitted. "She's of the countless unknown hundreds of the brightest minds from the country, streaming into the city side by side with the most vicious and licentious loafers of the towns. It leaves the country dull, but moral. The end is not yet. In the end the dull and moral people survey the ruined walls of the bright and vicious."

"And the dull and the moral are prolific," Sanborn put in.

"Precisely, and they can eat and sleep, which gives them long life and vast stomachs."

Roberts sprang up, "I propose to escape while I can. Mason is wound up for all night." There was a little bustle of parting, and eventually Sanborn and Mason walked off together.

"It's no time to go to sleep. Come to my room and smoke a pipe," suggested Mason. "I'm in a mood to talk if you're in a mood to listen."

Sanborn was a modest fellow, who admired his friend. "I am always ready to listen to you," he said.

"Probably that is your amiable weakness," Mason dryly responded.

CHAPTER XVIII

MASON TALKS ON MARRIAGE

Men are not easily intimate. They confide in each other rather seldom. Of love and marriage coarse men speak with sneers and obscene jests. Of these deep themes serious men speak in hints, with apologetic smiles, as if they were betraying a weakness, seldom going to any length of statement. They express their meaning in broken sentences – in indirect statements.

Sanborn had known Mason for some years. They were both from the country; Mason from a small interior town in Illinois, Sanborn from Indiana. Mason was an older man than Sanborn, and generally presumed upon it, also upon Sanborn's reticence.

They rode up the elevator in the Berkeley flats in silence, and in silence they removed their coats and filled their pipes, and took seats before the fire. Mason was accustomed to say he supported two rooms and an open grate fire, and he regretted it was not cold enough to have the grate lighted for that evening.

They sat some minutes in smoke. Mason sitting low in his chair, with face in repose, looked old and tired, and Sanborn was moved to say:

"Mason, I'm going to ask you a plump question: Why don't you get married? You're getting old."

"I've tried to."

"What! tried to?"

"Exactly."

"That is incredible!"

"It is the fact," replied the older man, placidly.

Sanborn did not believe it. He knew Mason to be somewhat seclusive in his life, but he also knew the high place he held in the eyes of several women.