by Frank Norris
“Oh,” remarked Jadwin, “I’m sorry to hear you had a headache. I suppose my little micks” (he invariably spoke of his mission children thus) “do make more noise than music.”
“I found them very interesting.”
“No, excuse me, but I’m afraid you didn’t. My little micks are not interesting — to look at nor to listen to. But I, kind of — well, I don’t know,” he began pulling his mustache. “It seems to suit me to get down there and get hold of these people. You know Moody put me up to it. He was here about five years ago, and I went to one of his big meetings, and then to all of them. And I met the fellow, too, and I tell you, Miss Dearborn, he stirred me all up. I didn’t “get religion.” No, nothing like that. But I got a notion it was time to be up and doing, and I figured it out that business principles were as good in religion as they are — well, in La Salle Street, and that if the church people — the men I mean — put as much energy, and shrewdness, and competitive spirit into the saving of souls as they did into the saving of dollars that we might get somewhere. And so I took hold of a half dozen broken-down, bankrupt Sunday-school concerns over here on Archer Avenue that were fighting each other all the time, and amalgamated them all — a regular trust, just as if they were iron foundries — and turned the incompetents out and put my subordinates in, and put the thing on a business basis, and by now, I’ll venture to say, there’s not a better organised Sunday-school in all Chicago, and I’ll bet if D. L. Moody were here to-day he’d say, ‘Jadwin, well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”
“I haven’t a doubt of it, Mr. Jadwin,” Laura hastened to exclaim. “And you must not think that I don’t believe you are doing a splendid work.”
“Well, it suits me,” he repeated. “I like my little micks, and now and then I have a chance to get hold of the kind that it pays to push along. About four months ago I came across a boy in the Bible class; I guess he’s about sixteen; name is Bradley — Billy Bradley, father a confirmed drunk, mother takes in washing, sister — we won’t speak about; and he seemed to be bright and willing to work, and I gave him a job in my agent’s office, just directing envelopes. Well, Miss Dearborn, that boy has a desk of his own now, and the agent tells me he’s one of the very best men he’s got. He does his work so well that I’ve been able to discharge two other fellows who sat around and watched the clock for lunch hour, and Bradley does their work now better and quicker than they did, and saves me twenty dollars a week; that’s a thousand a year. So much for a business like Sunday-school; so much for taking a good aim when you cast your bread upon the waters. The last time I saw Moody I said, ‘Moody, my motto is “not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, praising the Lord.”’ I remember we were out driving at the time, I took him out behind Lizella — she’s almost straight Wilkes’ blood and can trot in two-ten, but you can believe he didn’t know that — and, as I say, I told him what my motto was, and he said, ‘J., good for you; you keep to that. There’s no better motto in the world for the American man of business.’ He shook my hand when he said it, and I haven’t ever forgotten it.”
Not a little embarrassed, Laura was at a loss just what to say, and in the end remarked lamely enough:
“I am sure it is the right spirit — the best motto.”
“Miss Dearborn,” Jadwin began again suddenly, “why don’t you take a class down there. The little micks aren’t so dreadful when you get to know them.”
“I!” exclaimed Laura, rather blankly. She shook her head. “Oh, no, Mr. Jadwin. I should be only an encumbrance. Don’t misunderstand me. I approve of the work with all my heart, but I am not fitted — I feel no call. I should be so inapt that I know I should do no good. My training has been so different, you know,” she said, smiling. “I am an Episcopalian— ‘of the straightest sect of the Pharisees.’ I should be teaching your little micks all about the meaning of candles, and ‘Eastings,’ and the absolution and remission of sins.”
“I wouldn’t care if you did,” he answered. “It’s the indirect influence I’m thinking of — the indirect influence that a beautiful, pure-hearted, noble-minded woman spreads around her wherever she goes. I know what it has done for me. And I know that not only my little micks, but every teacher and every superintendent in that school would be inspired, and stimulated, and born again so soon as ever you set foot in the building. Men need good women, Miss Dearborn. Men who are doing the work of the world. I believe in women as I believe in Christ. But I don’t believe they were made — any more than Christ was — to cultivate — beyond a certain point — their own souls, and refine their own minds, and live in a sort of warmed-over, dilettante, stained-glass world of seclusion and exclusion. No, sir, that won’t do for the United States and the men who are making them the greatest nation of the world. The men have got all the get-up-and-get they want, but they need the women to point them straight, and to show them how to lead that other kind of life that isn’t all grind. Since I’ve known you, Miss Dearborn, I’ve just begun to wake up to the fact that there is that other kind, but I can’t lead that life without you. There’s no kind of life that’s worth anything to me now that don’t include you. I don’t need to tell you that I want you to marry me. You know that by now, I guess, without any words from me. I love you, and I love you as a man, not as a boy, seriously and earnestly. I can give you no idea how seriously, how earnestly. I want you to be my wife. Laura, my dear girl, I know I could make you happy.”
“It isn’t,” answered Laura slowly, perceiving as he paused that he expected her to say something, “much a question of that.”
“What is it, then? I won’t make a scene. Don’t you love me? Don’t you think, my girl, you could ever love me?”
Laura hesitated a long moment. She had taken the rose from her shoulder, and plucking the petals one by one, put them delicately between her teeth. From the other end of the room came the clamorous exhortations of Monsieur Gerardy. Mrs. Cressler and the Gretry girl watched the progress of the rehearsal attentively from the doorway of the dining-room. Aunt Wess’ and Mr. Cressler were discussing psychic research and seances, on the sofa on the other side of the room. After a while Laura spoke.
“It isn’t that either,” she said, choosing her words carefully.
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know — exactly. For one thing, I don’t think I want to be married, Mr. Jadwin — to anybody.”
“I would wait for you.”
“Or to be engaged.”
“But the day must come, sooner or later, when you must be both engaged and married. You must ask yourself some time if you love the man who wishes to be your husband. Why not ask yourself now?”
“I do,” she answered. “I do ask myself. I have asked myself.”
“Well, what do you decide?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think you would love me in time? Laura, I am sure you would. I would make you.”
“I don’t know. I suppose that is a stupid answer. But it is, if I am to be honest, and I am trying very hard to be honest — with you and with myself — the only one I have. I am happy just as I am. I like you and Mr. Cressler and Mr. Corthell — everybody. But, Mr. Jadwin” — she looked him full in the face, her dark eyes full of gravity— “with a woman it is so serious — to be married. More so than any man ever understood. And, oh, one must be so sure, so sure. And I am not sure now. I am not sure now. Even if I were sure of you, I could not say I was sure of myself. Now and then I tell myself, and even poor, dear Aunt Wess’, that I shall never love anybody, that I shall never marry. But I should be bitterly sorry if I thought that was true. It is one of the greatest happinesses to which I look forward, that some day I shall love some one with all my heart and soul, and shall be a true wife, and find my husband’s love for me the sweetest thing in my life. But I am sure that that day has not come yet.”
“And when it does come,” he urged, “may I be the first to know?”
She smiled a little gravel
y.
“Ah,” she answered, “I would not know myself that that day had come until I woke to the fact that I loved the man who had asked me to be his wife, and then it might be too late — for you.”
“But now, at least,” he persisted, “you love no one.”
“Now,” she repeated, “I love — no one.”
“And I may take such encouragement in that as I can?”
And then, suddenly, capriciously even, Laura, an inexplicable spirit of inconsistency besetting her, was a very different woman from the one who an instant before had spoken so gravely of the seriousness of marriage. She hesitated a moment before answering Jadwin, her head on one side, looking at the rose leaf between her fingers. In a low voice she said at last:
“If you like.”
But before Jadwin could reply, Cressler and Aunt Wess’ who had been telling each other of their “experiences,” of their “premonitions,” of the unaccountable things that had happened to them, at length included the others in their conversation.
“J.,” remarked Cressler, “did anything funny ever happen to you — warnings, presentiments, that sort of thing? Mrs. Wessels and I have been talking spiritualism. Laura, have you ever had any ‘experiences’?”
She shook her head.
“No, no. I am too material, I am afraid.”
“How about you, ‘J.’?”
“Nothing much, except that I believe in ‘luck’ — a little. The other day I flipped a coin in Gretry’s office. If it fell heads I was to sell wheat short, and somehow I knew all the time that the coin would fall heads — and so it did.”
“And you made a great deal of money,” said Laura. “I know. Mr. Court was telling me. That was splendid.”
“That was deplorable, Laura,” said Cressler, gravely. “I hope some day,” he continued, “we can all of us get hold of this man and make him solemnly promise never to gamble in wheat again.”
Laura stared. To her mind the word “gambling” had always been suspect. It had a bad sound; it seemed to be associated with depravity of the baser sort.
“Gambling!” she murmured.
“They call it buying and selling,” he went on, “down there in La Salle Street. But it is simply betting. Betting on the condition of the market weeks, even months, in advance. You bet wheat goes up. I bet it goes down. Those fellows in the Pit don’t own the wheat; never even see it. Wou’dn’t know what to do with it if they had it. They don’t care in the least about the grain. But there are thousands upon thousands of farmers out here in Iowa and Kansas or Dakota who do, and hundreds of thousand of poor devils in Europe who care even more than the farmer. I mean the fellows who raise the grain, and the other fellows who eat it. It’s life or death for either of them. And right between these two comes the Chicago speculator, who raises or lowers the price out of all reason, for the benefit of his pocket. You see Laura, here is what I mean.” Cressler had suddenly become very earnest. Absorbed, interested, Laura listened intently. “Here is what I mean,” pursued Cressler. “It’s like this: If we send the price of wheat down too far, the farmer suffers, the fellow who raises it if we send it up too far, the poor man in Europe suffers, the fellow who eats it. And food to the peasant on the continent is bread — not meat or potatoes, as it is with us. The only way to do so that neither the American farmer nor the European peasant suffers, is to keep wheat at an average, legitimate value. The moment you inflate or depress that, somebody suffers right away. And that is just what these gamblers are doing all the time, booming it up or booming it down. Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price he simply starves. And as for the farmer, why it’s ludicrous. If I build a house and offer it for sale, I put my own price on it, and if the price offered don’t suit me I don’t sell. But if I go out here in Iowa and raise a crop of wheat, I’ve got to sell it, whether I want to or not at the figure named by some fellows in Chicago. And to make themselves rich, they may make me sell it at a price that bankrupts me.”
Laura nodded. She was intensely interested. A whole new order of things was being disclosed, and for the first time in her life she looked into the workings of political economy.
“Oh, that’s only one side of it,” Cressler went on, heedless of Jadwin’s good-humoured protests. “Yes, I know I am a crank on speculating. I’m going to preach a little if you’ll let me. I’ve been a speculator myself, and a ruined one at that, and I know what I am talking about. Here is what I was going to say. These fellows themselves, the gamblers — well, call them speculators, if you like. Oh, the fine, promising manly young men I’ve seen wrecked — absolutely and hopelessly wrecked and ruined by speculation! It’s as easy to get into as going across the street. They make three hundred, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars sometimes in a couple of hours, without so much as raising a finger. Think what that means to a boy of twenty-five who’s doing clerk work at seventy-five a month. Why, it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he’s made it in a single morning. Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he’s thrown up his honest, humdrum position — oh, I’ve seen it hundreds of times — and takes to hanging round the customers’ rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can’t pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in the palm of his hand, tightens one finger, and our young man is ruined, body and mind. He’s lost the taste, the very capacity for legitimate business, and he stays on hanging round the Board till he gets to be — all of a sudden — an old man. And then some day some one says, ‘Why, where’s So-and-so?’ and you wake up to the fact that the young fellow has simply disappeared — lost. I tell you the fascination of this Pit gambling is something no one who hasn’t experienced it can have the faintest conception of. I believe it’s worse than liquor, worse than morphine. Once you get into it, it grips you and draws you and draws you, and the nearer you get to the end the easier it seems to win, till all of a sudden, ah! there’s the whirlpool.... ‘J.,’ keep away from it, my boy.”
Jadwin laughed, and leaning over, put his fingers upon Cressler’s breast, as though turning off a switch.
“Now, Miss Dearborn,” he announced, “we’ve shut him off. Charlie means all right, but now and then some one brushes against him and opens that switch.”
Cressler, good-humouredly laughed with the others, but Laura’s smile was perfunctory and her eyes were grave. But there was a diversion. While the others had been talking the rehearsal had proceeded, and now Page beckoned to Laura from the far end of the parlor, calling out:
“Laura— ‘Beatrice,’ it’s the third act. You are wanted.”
“Oh, I must run,” exclaimed Laura, catching up her play-book. “Poor Monsieur Gerardy — we must be a trial to him.”
She hurried across the room, where the coach was disposing the furniture for the scene, consulting the stage directions in his book:
“Here the kitchen table, here the old-fashioned writing-desk, here the armoire with practicable doors, here the window. Soh! Who is on? Ah, the young lady of the sick nose, ‘Marion.’ She is discovered — knitting. And then the duchess — later. That’s you Mademoiselle Dearborn. You interrupt — you remember. But then you, ah, you always are right. If they were all like you. Very well, we begin.”
Creditably enough the Gretry girl read her part, Monsieur Gerardy interrupting to indicate the crossings and business. Then at her cue, Laura, who was to play the role of the duchess, entered with the words:
“I beg your pardon, but the door stood open. May I come in?”
Monsieur Gerardy murmured:
“Elle est vraiment superbe.”
Laura to the very life, to every little trick of carriage and manner was the high-born gentlewoman visiting the home of a depen
dent. Nothing could have been more dignified, more gracious, more gracefully condescending than her poise. She dramatised not only her role, but the whole of her surroundings. The interior of the little cottage seemed to define itself with almost visible distinctness the moment she set foot upon the scene.
Gerardy tiptoed from group to group, whispering:
“Eh? Very fine, our duchess. She would do well professionally.”
But Mrs. Wessels was not altogether convinced. Her eyes following her niece, she said to Corthell:
“It’s Laura’s ‘grand manner.’ My word, I know her in that part. That’s the way she is when she comes down to the parlor of an evening, and Page introduces her to one of her young men.”
“I nearly die,” protested Page, beginning to laugh. “Of course it’s very natural I should want my friends to like my sister. And Laura comes in as though she were walking on eggs, and gets their names wrong, as though it didn’t much matter, and calls them Pinky when their name is Pinckney, and don’t listen to what they say, till I want to sink right through the floor with mortification.”
In haphazard fashion the rehearsal wore to a close. Monsieur Gerardy stormed and fretted and insisted upon repeating certain scenes over and over again. By ten o’clock the actors were quite worn out. A little supper was served, and very soon afterward Laura made a move toward departing. She was wondering who would see her home, Landry, Jadwin, or Sheldon Corthell.
