The Pit

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"I guess," Laura was accustomed to reply, looking significantly at
Aunt Wess', "that our little girlie has a little bit of an eye on a
certain hard-working young fellow herself." And the answer
invariably roused Page.

"Now, Laura," she would cry, her eyes snapping, her breath coming
fast. "Now, Laura, that isn't right at all, and you know I don't
like it, and you just say it because you know it makes me cross. I
won't have you insinuate that I would run after any man or care in
the least whether he's in love or not. I just guess I've got some
self-respect; and as for Landry Court, we're no more nor less than
just good friends, and I appreciate his business talents and the way
he rustles 'round, and he merely respects me as a friend, and it
don't go any farther than that. 'An eye on him,' I do declare! As
if I hadn't yet to see the man I'd so much as look at a second
time."

And Laura, remembering her "Shakespeare," was ever ready with the
words:

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Just after breakfast, in fact, Landry did appear.

"Now," he began, with a long breath, addressing Laura, who was
unwrapping the pieces of cut glass and bureau ornaments as Page
passed them to her from the depths of a crate. "Now, I've done a lot
already. That's what made me late. I've ordered your newspaper sent
here, and I've telephoned the hotel to forward any mail that comes
for you to this address, and I sent word to the gas company to have
your gas turned on--"

"Oh, that's good," said Laura.

"Yes, I thought of that; the man will be up right away to fix it,
and I've ordered a cake of ice left here every day, and told the
telephone company that you wanted a telephone put in. Oh, yes, and
the bottled-milk man--I stopped in at a dairy on the way up. Now,
what do we do first?"

He took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and plunged into
the confusion of crates and boxes that congested the rooms and
hallways on the first floor of the house. The two sisters could hear
him attacking his task with tremendous blows of the kitchen hammer.
From time to time he called up the stairway:

"Hey, what do you want done with this jardiniere thing? ... Where
does this hanging lamp go, Laura?"

Laura, having unpacked all the cut-glass ornaments, came
down-stairs, and she and Landry set about hanging the parlour
curtains.

Landry fixed the tops of the window mouldings with a piercing eye,
his arms folded.

"I see, I see," he answered to Laura's explanations. "I see. Now
where's a screw-driver, and a step-ladder? Yes, and I'll have to
have some brass nails, and your hired man must let me have that
hammer again."

He sent the cook after the screw-driver, called the hired man from
the furnace, shouted upstairs to Page to ask for the whereabouts of
the brass nails, and delegated Laura to steady the step-ladder.

"Now, Landry," directed Laura, "those rods want to be about three
inches from the top."

"Well," he said, climbing up, "I'll mark the place with the screw
and you tell me if it is right."

She stepped back, her head to one side.

"No; higher, Landry. There, that's about it--or a _little_
lower--so. That's just right. Come down now and help me put the
hooks in."

They pulled a number of sofa cushions together and sat down on the
floor side by side, Landry snapping the hooks in place where Laura
had gathered the pleats. Inevitably his hands touched hers, and
their heads drew close together. Page and Mrs. Wessels were
unpacking linen in the upstairs hall. The cook and hired man raised
a great noise of clanking stove lids and grates as they wrestled
with the range in the kitchen.

"Well," said Landry, "you are going to have a pretty home." He was
meditating a phrase of which he purposed delivering himself when
opportunity afforded. It had to do with Laura's eyes, and her
ability of understanding him. She understood him; she was to know
that he thought so, that it was of immense importance to him. It was
thus he conceived of the manner of love making. The evening before
that palavering artist seemed to have managed to monopolise her
about all of the time. Now it was his turn, and this day of
household affairs, of little domestic commotions, appeared to him to
be infinitely more desirous than the pomp and formality of evening
dress and opera boxes. This morning the relations between himself
and Laura seemed charming, intimate, unconventional, and full of
opportunities. Never had she appeared prettier to him. She wore a
little pink flannel dressing-sack with full sleeves, and her hair,
carelessly twisted into great piles, was in a beautiful disarray,
curling about her cheeks and ears. "I didn't see anything of you at
all last night," he grumbled.

"Well, you didn't try."

"Oh, it was the Other Fellow's turn," he went on. "Say," he added,
"how often are you going to let me come to see you when you get
settled here? Twice a week--three times?"

"As if you wanted to see me as often as that. Why, Landry, I'm
growing up to be an old maid. You can't want to lose your time
calling on old maids."

He was voluble in protestations. He was tired of young girls. They
were all very well to dance with, but when a man got too old for
that sort of thing, he wanted some one with sense to talk to. Yes,
he did. Some one with sense. Why, he would rather talk five minutes
with her--

"Honestly, Landry?" she asked, as though he were telling a thing
incredible.

He swore to her it was true. His eyes snapped. He struck his palm
with his fist.

"An old maid like me?" repeated Laura.

"Old maid nothing!" he vociferated. "Ah," he cried, "you seem to
understand me. When I look at you, straight into your eyes--"

From the doorway the cook announced that the man with the last load
of furnace coal had come, and handed Laura the voucher to sign. Then
needs must that Laura go with the cook to see if the range was
finally and properly adjusted, and while she was gone the man from
the gas company called to turn on the meter, and Landry was obliged
to look after him. It was half an hour before he and Laura could
once more settle themselves on the cushions in the parlour.

"Such a lot of things to do," she said; "and you are such a help,
Landry. It was so dear of you to want to come."

"I would do anything in the world for you, Laura," he exclaimed,
encouraged by her words; "anything. You know I would. It isn't so
much that I want you to care for me--and I guess I want that bad
enough--but it's because I love to be with you, and be helping you,
and all that sort of thing. Now, all this," he waved a hand at the
confusion of furniture, "all this to-day--I just feel," he declared
with tremendous earnestness, "I just feel as though I were entering
into your life. And just sitting here beside you and putting in
these curtain hooks, I want you to know that it's inspiring to me.
Yes, it is, inspiring; it's elevating. You don't know how it makes a
man feel to have the companionship of a good and lovely woman."

"Landry, as though I were all that. Here, put another hook in here."

She held the fold towards him. But he took her hand as their fingers
touched and raised it to his lips and kissed it. She did not
withdraw it, nor rebuke him, crying out instead, as though occupied
with quite another matter:

"Landry, careful, my dear boy; you'll make me prick my fingers.
Ah--there, you did."

He was all commiseration and self-reproach at once, and turned her
hand palm upwards, looking for the scratch.

"Um!" she breathed. "It hurts."

"Where now," he cried, "where was it? Ah, I was a beast; I'm so
ashamed." She indicated a spot on her wrist instead of her fingers,
and very naturally Landry kissed it again.

"How foolish!" she remonstrated. "The idea! As if I wasn't old
enough to be--"

"You're not so old but what you're going to marry me some day," he
declared.

"How perfectly silly, Landry!" she retorted. "Aren't you done with
my hand yet?"

"No, indeed," he cried, his clasp tightening over her fingers. "It's
mine. You can't have it till I say--or till you say that--some
day--you'll give it to me for good--for better or for worse."

"As if you really meant that," she said, willing to prolong the
little situation. It was very sweet to have this clean, fine-fibred
young boy so earnestly in love with her, very sweet that the lifting
of her finger, the mere tremble of her eyelid should so perturb him.

"Mean it! Mean it!" he vociferated. "You don't know how much I do
mean it. Why, Laura, why--why, I can't think of anything else."

"You!" she mocked. "As if I believed that. How many other girls have
you said it to this year?"

Landry compressed his lips.

"Miss Dearborn, you insult me."

"Oh, my!" exclaimed Laura, at last withdrawing her hand.

"And now you're mocking me. It isn't kind. No, it isn't; it isn't
kind."

"I never answered your question yet," she observed.

"What question?"

"About your coming to see me when we were settled. I thought you
wanted to know."

"How about lunch?" said Page, from the doorway. "Do you know it's
after twelve?"

"The girl has got something for us," said Laura. "I told her about
it. Oh, just a pick-up lunch--coffee, chops. I thought we wouldn't
bother to-day. We'll have to eat in the kitchen."

"Well, let's be about it," declared Landry, "and finish with these
curtains afterward. Inwardly I'm a ravening wolf."

It was past one o'clock by the time that luncheon, "picked up"
though it was, was over. By then everybody was very tired. Aunt
Wess' exclaimed that she could not stand another minute, and retired
to her room. Page, indefatigable, declaring they never would get
settled if they let things dawdle along, set to work unpacking her
trunk and putting her clothes away. Her fox terrier, whom the
family, for obscure reasons, called the Pig, arrived in the middle
of the afternoon in a crate, and shivering with the chill of the
house, was tied up behind the kitchen range, where, for all the
heat, he still trembled and shuddered at long intervals, his head
down, his eyes rolled up, bewildered and discountenanced by so much
confusion and so many new faces.

Outside the weather continued lamentable. The rain beat down
steadily upon the heaps of snow on the grass-plats by the
curbstones, melting it, dirtying it, and reducing it to viscid
slush. The sky was lead grey; the trees, bare and black as though
built of iron and wire, dripped incessantly. The sparrows, huddling
under the house-eaves or in interstices of the mouldings, chirped
feebly from time to time, sitting disconsolate, their feathers
puffed out till their bodies assumed globular shapes. Delivery
wagons trundled up and down the street at intervals, the horses and
drivers housed in oil-skins.

The neighborhood was quiet. There was no sound of voices in the
streets. But occasionally, from far away in the direction of the
river or the Lake Front, came the faint sounds of steamer and tug
whistles. The sidewalks in either direction were deserted. Only a
solitary policeman, his star pinned to be outside of his dripping
rubber coat, his helmet shedding rivulets, stood on the corner
absorbed in the contemplation of the brown torrent of the gutter
plunging into a sewer vent.

Landry and Laura were in the library at the rear of the house, a
small room, two sides of which were occupied with book-cases. They
were busy putting the books in place. Laura stood half-way up the
step-ladder taking volume after volume from Landry as he passed them
to her.

"Do you wipe them carefully, Landry?" she asked.

He held a strip of cloth torn from an old sheet in his hand, and
rubbed the dust from each book before he handed it to her.

"Yes, yes; very carefully," he assured her. "Say," he added, "where
are all your modern novels? You've got Scott and Dickens and
Thackeray, of course, and Eliot--yes, and here's Hawthorne and Poe.
But I haven't struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Laura put up her chin. "Modern novels--no indeed. When I've yet to
read 'Jane Eyre,' and have only read 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Newcomes'
once."

She made a point of the fact that her taste was the extreme of
conservatism, refusing to acknowledge hardly any fiction that was
not almost classic. Even Stevenson aroused her suspicions.

"Well, here's 'The Wrecker,'" observed Landry, handing it up to her.
"I read it last summer-vacation at Waukesha. Just about took the top
of my head off."

"I tried to read it," she answered. "Such an outlandish story, no
love story in it, and so coarse, so brutal, and then so improbable.
I couldn't get interested."

But abruptly Landry uttered an exclamation:

"Well, what do you call this? 'Wanda,' by Ouida. How is this for
modern?"

She blushed to her hair, snatching the book from him.

"Page brought it home. It's hers."

But her confusion betrayed her, and Landry shouted derisively.

"Well, I did read it then," she suddenly declared defiantly. "No,
I'm not ashamed. Yes, I read it from cover to cover. It made me cry
like I haven't cried over a book since I was a little tot. You can
say what you like, but it's beautiful--a beautiful love story--and
it does tell about noble, unselfish people. I suppose it has its
faults, but it makes you feel better for reading it, and that's what
all your 'Wreckers' in the world would never do."

"Well," answered Landry, "I don't know much about that sort of
thing. Corthell does. He can talk you blind about literature. I've
heard him run on by the hour. He says the novel of the future is
going to be the novel without a love story."

But Laura nodded her head incredulously.

"It will be long after I am dead--that's one consolation," she said.

"Corthell is full of crazy ideas anyhow," Landry went on, still
continuing to pass the books up to her. "He's a good sort, and I
like him well enough, but he's the kind of man that gets up a
reputation for being clever and artistic by running down the very
one particular thing that every one likes, and cracking up some book
or picture or play that no one has ever heard of. Just let anything
get popular once and Sheldon Corthell can't speak of it without
shuddering. But he'll go over here to some Archer Avenue pawn shop,
dig up an old brass stewpan, or coffee-pot that some greasy old
Russian Jew has chucked away, and he'll stick it up in his studio
and regularly kow-tow to it, and talk about the 'decadence of
American industrial arts.' I've heard him. I say it's pure
affectation, that's what it is, pure affectation."

But the book-case meanwhile had been filling up, and now Laura
remarked:

"No more, Landry. That's all that will go here."

She prepared to descend from the ladder. In filling the higher
shelves she had mounted almost to the topmost step.

"Careful now," said Landry, as he came forward. "Give me your hand."

She gave it to him, and then, as she descended, Landry had the
assurance to put his arm around her waist as if to steady her. He
was surprised at his own audacity, for he had premeditated nothing,
and his arm was about her before he was well aware. He yet found
time to experience a qualm of apprehension. Just how would Laura
take it? Had he gone too far?

But Laura did not even seem to notice, all her attention apparently
fixed upon coming safely down to the floor. She descended and shook
out her skirts.

"There," she said, "that's over with. Look, I'm all dusty."

There was a knock at the half-open door. It was the cook.

"What are you going to have for supper, Miss Dearborn?" she
inquired. "There's nothing in the house."

"Oh, dear," said Laura with sudden blankness, "I never thought of
supper. Isn't there anything?"

"Nothing but some eggs and coffee." The cook assumed an air of
aloofness, as if the entire affair were totally foreign to any
interest or concern of hers. Laura dismissed her, saying that she
would see to it.

"We'll have to go out and get some things," she said. "We'll all go.
I'm tired of staying in the house."

"No, I've a better scheme," announced Landry. "I'll invite you all
out to dine with me. I know a place where you can get the best steak
in America. It has stopped raining. See," he showed her the window.

"But, Landry, we are all so dirty and miserable."

"We'll go right now and get there early. There will be nobody there,
and we can have a room to ourselves. Oh, it's all right," he
declared. "You just trust me."

"We'll see what Page and Aunt Wess' say. Of course Aunt Wess' would
have to come."

"Of course," he said. "I wouldn't think of asking you unless she
could come."

A little later the two sisters, Mrs. Wessels, and Landry came out of
the house, but before taking their car they crossed to the opposite
side of the street, Laura having said that she wanted to note the
effect of her parlour curtains from the outside.

"I think they are looped up just far enough," she declared. But
Landry was observing the house itself.

"It is the best-looking place on the block," he answered.

In fact, the house was not without a certain attractiveness. It
occupied a corner lot at the intersection of Huron and North State
streets. Directly opposite was St. James' Church, and at one time
the house had served as the rectory. For the matter of that, it had
been built for just that purpose. Its style of architecture was
distantly ecclesiastic, with a suggestion of Gothic to some of the
doors and windows. The material used was solid, massive, the walls
thick, the foundation heavy. It did not occupy the entire lot, the
original builder seeming to have preferred garden space to mere
amplitude of construction, and in addition to the inevitable "back
yard," a lawn bordered it on three sides. It gave the place a
certain air of distinction and exclusiveness. Vines grew thick upon
the southern walls; in the summer time fuchsias, geraniums, and
pansies would flourish in the flower beds by the front stoop. The
grass plat by the curb boasted a couple of trees. The whole place
was distinctive, individual, and very homelike, and came as a
grateful relief to the endless lines of houses built of yellow
Michigan limestone that pervaded the rest of the neighbourhood in
every direction.

"I love the place," exclaimed Laura. "I think it's as pretty a house
as I have seen in Chicago."

"Well, it isn't so spick and span," commented Page. "It gives you
the idea that we're not new-rich and showy and all."

But Aunt Wess' was not yet satisfied.

"_You_ may see, Laura," she remarked, "how you are going to heat all
that house with that one furnace, but I declare I don't."

Their car, or rather their train of cars, coupled together in
threes, in Chicago style, came, and Landry escorted them down town.
All the way Laura could not refrain from looking out of the windows,
absorbed in the contemplation of the life and aspects of the
streets.

"You will give yourself away," said Page. "Everybody will know
you're from the country."

"I am," she retorted. "But there's a difference between just mere
'country' and Massachusetts, and I'm not ashamed of it."

Chicago, the great grey city, interested her at every instant and
under every condition. As yet she was not sure that she liked it;
she could not forgive its dirty streets, the unspeakable squalor of
some of its poorer neighbourhoods that sometimes developed, like
cancerous growths, in the very heart of fine residence districts.
The black murk that closed every vista of the business streets
oppressed her, and the soot that stained linen and gloves each time
she stirred abroad was a never-ending distress.

But the life was tremendous. All around, on every side, in every
direction the vast machinery of Commonwealth clashed and thundered
from dawn to dark and from dark till dawn. Even now, as the car
carried her farther into the business quarter, she could hear it,
see it, and feel in her every fibre the trepidation of its motion.
The blackened waters of the river, seen an instant between
stanchions as the car trundled across the State Street bridge,
disappeared under fleets of tugs, of lake steamers, of lumber barges
from Sheboygan and Mackinac, of grain boats from Duluth, of coal
scows that filled the air with impalpable dust, of cumbersome
schooners laden with produce, of grimy rowboats dodging the prows
and paddles of the larger craft, while on all sides, blocking the
horizon, red in color and designated by Brobdignag letters, towered
the hump-shouldered grain elevators.

Just before crossing the bridge on the north side of the river she
had caught a glimpse of a great railway terminus. Down below there,
rectilinear, scientifically paralleled and squared, the Yard
disclosed itself. A system of grey rails beyond words complicated
opened out and spread immeasurably. Switches, semaphores, and signal
towers stood here and there. A dozen trains, freight and passenger,
puffed and steamed, waiting the word to depart. Detached engines
hurried in and out of sheds and roundhouses, seeking their trains,
or bunted the ponderous freight cars into switches; trundling up and
down, clanking, shrieking, their bells filling the air with the
clangour of tocsins. Men in visored caps shouted hoarsely, waving
their arms or red flags; drays, their big dappled horses, feeding in
their nose bags, stood backed up to the open doors of freight cars
and received their loads. A train departed roaring. Before midnight
it would be leagues away boring through the Great Northwest,
carrying Trade--the life blood of nations--into communities of which
Laura had never heard. Another train, reeking with fatigue, the air
brakes screaming, arrived and halted, debouching a flood of
passengers, business men, bringing Trade--a galvanising elixir--from
the very ends and corners of the continent.

Or, again, it was South Water Street--a jam of delivery wagons and
market carts backed to the curbs, leaving only a tortuous path
between the endless files of horses, suggestive of an actual barrack
of cavalry. Provisions, market produce, "garden truck" and fruits,
in an infinite welter of crates and baskets, boxes, and sacks,
crowded the sidewalks. The gutter was choked with an overflow of
refuse cabbage leaves, soft oranges, decaying beet tops. The air was
thick with the heavy smell of vegetation. Food was trodden under
foot, food crammed the stores and warehouses to bursting. Food
mingled with the mud of the highway. The very dray horses were
gorged with an unending nourishment of snatched mouthfuls picked
from backboard, from barrel top, and from the edge of the sidewalk.
The entire locality reeked with the fatness of a hundred thousand
furrows. A land of plenty, the inordinate abundance of the earth
itself emptied itself upon the asphalt and cobbles of the quarter.
It was the Mouth of the City, and drawn from all directions, over a
territory of immense area, this glut of crude subsistence was sucked
in, as if into a rapacious gullet, to feed the sinews and to nourish
the fibres of an immeasurable colossus.

Suddenly the meaning and significance of it all dawned upon Laura.
The Great Grey City, brooking no rival, imposed its dominion upon a
reach of country larger than many a kingdom of the Old World. For,
thousands of miles beyond its confines was its influence felt. Out,
far out, far away in the snow and shadow of Northern Wisconsin
forests, axes and saws bit the bark of century-old trees, stimulated
by this city's energy. Just as far to the southward pick and drill
leaped to the assault of veins of anthracite, moved by her central
power. Her force turned the wheels of harvester and seeder a
thousand miles distant in Iowa and Kansas. Her force spun the screws
and propellers of innumerable squadrons of lake steamers crowding
the Sault Sainte Marie. For her and because of her all the Central
States, all the Great Northwest roared with traffic and industry;
sawmills screamed; factories, their smoke blackening the sky,
clashed and flamed; wheels turned, pistons leaped in their
cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings clasped the drums of mammoth
wheels; and converters of forges belched into the clouded air their
tempest breath of molten steel.

It was Empire, the resistless subjugation of all this central world
of the lakes and the prairies. Here, mid-most in the land, beat the
Heart of the Nation, whence inevitably must come its immeasurable
power, its infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality. Here, of all
her cities, throbbed the true life--the true power and spirit of
America; gigantic, crude with the crudity of youth, disdaining
rivalry; sane and healthy and vigorous; brutal in its ambition,
arrogant in the new-found knowledge of its giant strength, prodigal
of its wealth, infinite in its desires. In its capacity boundless,
in its courage indomitable; subduing the wilderness in a single
generation, defying calamity, and through the flame and the debris
of a commonwealth in ashes, rising suddenly renewed, formidable, and
Titanic.

Laura, her eyes dizzied, her ears stunned, watched tirelessly.

"There is something terrible about it," she murmured, half to
herself, "something insensate. In a way, it doesn't seem human. It's
like a great tidal wave. It's all very well for the individual just
so long as he can keep afloat, but once fallen, how horribly quick
it would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with
such horrible indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the
making, the thing that isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too
elemental, too--primordial; like the first verses of Genesis."

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