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The Web of Life

R >> Robert Herrick >> The Web of Life




"Well, I've got to scare up some patients to live on, even to make three
dollars a day."

"You!" Dresser exclaimed, eying the letters with naive envy. "You are pals
with the fat-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy,
and one of these days you will marry one of their daughters. Then you will
join the bank accounts, and good-by."

He continued to rail, half jestingly, half in earnest, at McNamara and
Hills,--where he had obtained work, thanks to a letter which Sommers had
procured for him,--at his companion's relations with the well-to-do, which
he exaggerated offensively, and at the well-to-do themselves.

"It was lucky for you," Sommers remarked good-humoredly, "that I was thick
enough with the bloodsuckers to get you that letter from Hitchcock. One of
us will have to stand in with the 'swilling, fat-fed capitalist.'"

"Are those Hitchcocks rich?" Dresser asked, his eye resting wistfully on a
square note that the young doctor had laid aside.

"I suppose so," Sommers answered. "Shall we go and have some beer?"

Dresser's blue eyes still followed the little pile of letters--eyes hot
with desires and regrets. A lust burned in them, as his companion could
feel instinctively, a lust to taste luxury. Under its domination Dresser
was not unlike the patient in No. 8.

When they turned into the boulevard, which was crowded at this hour of
twilight, men were driving themselves home in high carts, and through the
windows of the broughams shone the luxuries of evening attire. Dresser's
glance shifted from face to face, from one trap to another, sucking in the
glitter of the showy scene. The flashing procession on the boulevard
pricked his hungry senses, goaded his ambitions. The men and women in the
carriages were the bait; the men and women on the street sniffed it,
cravingly, enviously.

"There's plenty of swag in the place," Dresser remarked.




CHAPTER III


The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in
Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before the
Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr. Sommers to
Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of the regiment in which
Isaac Sommers served as surgeon. Although the families had seen little of
one another since the war, yet Alexander Hitchcock's greeting to the young
doctor when he met the latter in Paris had been more than cordial.
Something in the generous, lingering hand-shake of the Chicago merchant had
made the younger man feel the strength of old ties.

"I knew your mother," Colonel Hitchcock had said, smiling gently into the
young student's face. "I knew her very well, and your father, too,--he was
a brave man, a remarkable man."

He had sympathetically rolled the hand he still retained in his broad palm.

"If Marion had only been Chicago! You say he died two years ago? And your
mother long ago? Where will you settle?"

With this abrupt question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly
intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came
to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the
vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a
good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since
the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago
agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed to say. 'We mustn't
lose you.'

Those pleasant days in Paris had been rendered more memorable to the young
doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss Hitchcock--a
friendship quite independent of anything her family might feel for him. She
let him see that she made her own world, and that she would welcome him as
a member of it. Accustomed as he had been only to the primitive daughters
of the local society in Marion and Exonia, or the chance intercourse with
unassorted women in Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course,
and in European pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and
delightful picture. That it was but one generation from Hill's Crossing,
Maine, to this self-possessed, carefully finished young woman, was
unbelievable. Tall and finished in detail, from the delicate hands and fine
ears to the sharply moulded chin, she presented a puzzling contrast to the
short, thick, sturdy figure of her mother. And her quick appropriation of
the blessings of wealth, her immediate enjoyment of the aristocratic
assurances that the Hitchcock position had given her in Chicago, showed
markedly in contrast with the tentativeness of Mrs. Hitchcock. Louise
Hitchcock handled her world with perfect self-command; Mrs. Hitchcock was
rather breathless over every manifestation of social change.

Parker Hitchcock, the son, Sommers had not seen until his coming to
Chicago. At a first glance, then, he could feel that in the son the family
had taken a further leap from the simplicity of the older generation.
Incidentally the young man's cool scrutiny had instructed him that the
family had not committed Parker Hitchcock to _him_. Young Hitchcock
had returned recently to the family lumber yards on the West Side and the
family residence on Michigan Avenue, with about equal disgust, so Sommers
judged, for both _milieux_. Even more than his sister, Parker was
conscious of the difference between the old state of things and the new.
Society in Chicago was becoming highly organized, a legitimate business of
the second generation of wealth. The family had the money to spend, and at
Yale in winter, at Newport and Beverly and Bar Harbor in summer, he had
learned how to spend it, had watched admiringly how others spent their
wealth. He had begun to educate his family in spending,--in using to
brilliant advantage the fruits of thirty years' hard work and frugality.
With his cousin Caspar Porter he maintained a small polo stable at Lake
Hurst, the new country club. On fair days he left the lumber yards at noon,
while Alexander Hitchcock was still shut in behind the dusty glass doors of
his office. His name was much oftener in the paragraphs of the city press
than his parents': he was leading the family to new ideals.

Ideals, Sommers judged, that were not agreeable to old Colonel Hitchcock,
slightly menacing even in the eyes of the daughter, whose horizon was
wider. Sommers had noticed the little signs of this heated family
atmosphere. A mist of undiscussed views hung about the house, out of which
flashed now and then a sharp speech, a bitter sigh. He had been at the
house a good deal in a thoroughly informal manner. The Hitchcocks rarely
entertained in the "new" way, for Mrs. Hitchcock had a terror of formality.
A dinner, as she understood it, meant a gathering of a few old friends,
much hearty food served in unpretentious abundance, and a very little bad
wine. The type of these entertainments had improved lately under Miss
Hitchcock's influence, but it remained essentially the same,--an occasion
for copious feeding and gossipy, neighborly chat.

To-night, as Sommers approached the sprawling green stone house on Michigan
Avenue, there were signs of unusual animation about the entrance. As he
reached the steps a hansom deposited the bulky figure of Brome Porter, Mrs.
Hitchcock's brother-in-law. The older man scowled interrogatively at the
young doctor, as if to say: 'You here? What the devil of a crowd has Alec
raked together?' But the two men exchanged essential courtesies and entered
the house together.

Porter, Sommers had heard, had once been Alexander Hitchcock's partner in
the lumber business, but had withdrawn from the firm years before. Brome
Porter was now a banker, as much as he was any one thing. It was easy to
see that the pedestrian business of selling lumber would not satisfy Brome
Porter. Popularly "rated at five millions," his fortune had not come out of
lumber. Alexander Hitchcock, with all his thrift, had not put by over a
million. Banking, too, would seem to be a tame enterprise for Brome Porter.
Mines, railroads, land speculations--he had put his hand into them all
masterfully. Large of limb and awkward, with a pallid, rather stolid face,
he looked as if Chicago had laid a heavy hand upon his liver, as if the
Carlsbad pilgrimage were a yearly necessity. 'Heavy eating and drinking,
strong excitements--too many of them,' commented the professional glance of
the doctor. 'Brute force, padded superficially by civilization,' Sommers
added to himself, disliking Porter's cold eye shots at him. 'Young man,'
his little buried eyes seemed to say, 'young man, if you know what's good
for you; if you are the right sort; if you do the proper thing, we'll push
you. Everything in this world depends on being in the right carriage.'
Sommers was tempted whenever he met him to ask him for a good tip: he
seemed always to have just come from New York; and when this barbarian went
to Rome, it was for a purpose, which expressed itself sooner or later over
the stock-ticker. But the tip had not come yet.

As Sommers was reaching the end of his conversational rope with Porter,
other guests arrived. Among them was Dr. Lindsay, a famous specialist in
throat diseases. The older doctor nodded genially to Sommers with the air
of saying: 'I am so glad to find you _here_. This is the right place
for a promising young man.'

And Sommers in a flash suspected why he had been bidden: the good-natured
Miss Hitchcock wished to bring him a little closer to this influential
member of his profession.

"Shall we wait for them?" Dr. Lindsay asked, joining Sommers. "Porter has
got hold of Carson, and they'll keep up their stories until some one hauls
them out. My wife and daughter have already gone down. How is St.
Isidore's?"

"I left to-day. My term is up. I feel homesick already," the young doctor
answered with a smile. "Chicago is so big," he added. "I didn't know it
before."

"It's quite a village, quite a village," Dr. Lindsay answered thoughtfully.
"We'll have some more talk later, won't we?" he added confidentially, as
they passed downstairs.

The Hitchcock house revealed itself in the floods of electric light as
large and undeniably ugly. Built before artistic ambitions and cosmopolitan
architects had undertaken to soften American angularities, it was merely a
commodious building, ample enough for a dozen Hitchcocks to loll about in.
Decoratively, it might be described as a museum of survivals from the
various stages of family history. At each advance in prosperity, in social
ideals, some of the former possessions had been swept out of the lower
rooms to the upper stories, in turn to be ousted by their more modern
neighbors. Thus one might begin with the rear rooms of the third story to
study the successive deposits. There the billiard chairs once did service
in the old home on the West Side. In the hall beside the Westminster clock
stood a "sofa," covered with figured velours. That had once adorned the old
Twentieth Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not
sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor
above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same
way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should degrade
the huge steel engraving of the Aurora, which hung prominently at the foot
of the stairs, in spite of its light oak frame, which was in shocking
contrast with the mahogany panels of the walls. Flanking the staircase were
other engravings,--Landseer's stags and the inevitable Queen Louise. Yet
through the open arch, in a pleasant study, one could see a good Zorn, a
Venom portrait, and some prints. This nook, formerly the library, had been
given over to the energetic Miss Hitchcock. It was done in
Shereton,--imitation, but good imitation. From this vantage point the
younger generation planned an extended attack upon the irregular household
gods.

Sommers realized for the first time how the Aurora and the Queen Louise
must worry Miss Hitchcock; how the neat Swedish maids and the hat-stand in
the hall must offend young Hitchcock. The incongruities of the house had
never disturbed him. So far as he had noticed them, they accorded well with
the simple characters of his host and hostess. In them, as in the house, a
keen observer could trace the series of developments that had taken place
since they had left Hill's Crossing. Yet the full gray beard with the broad
shaved upper lip still gave the Chicago merchant the air of a New England
worthy. And Alexander, in contrast with his brother-in-law, had knotty
hands and a tanned complexion that years of "inside business" had not
sufficed to smooth. The little habit of kneading the palm which you felt
when he shook hands, and the broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the
years passed him on from success to success. Mrs. Hitchcock still slurred
the present participle and indulged in other idiomatic freedoms that
endeared her to Sommers. These two, plainly, were not of the generation
that is tainted by ambition. Their story was too well known, from the
boarding-house struggle to this sprawling stone house, to be worth the
varnishing. Indeed, they would not tolerate any such detractions from their
well-earned reputation. The Brome Porters might draw distinctions and
prepare for a new social aristocracy; but to them old times were sweet and
old friends dear.

As the guests gathered in the large "front room," Alexander Hitchcock stood
above them, as the finest, most courteous spirit. There was race in
him--sweetness and strength and refinement--the qualities of the best
manhood of democracy. This effect of simplicity and sweetness was
heightened in the daughter, Louise. She had been born in Chicago, in the
first years of the Hitchcock fight. She remembered the time when the
billiard-room chairs were quite the most noted possessions in the basement
and three-story brick house on West Adams Street. She had followed the
chairs in the course of the Hitchcock evolution until her aunt had insisted
on her being sent east to the Beaumanor Park School. Two years of "refined
influences" in this famous establishment, with a dozen other girls from
new-rich families, had softened her tones and prolonged her participles,
but had touched her not essentially. Though she shared with her younger
brother the feeling that the Hitchcocks were not getting the most out of
their opportunities, she could understand the older people more than he. If
she sympathized with her father's belief that the boy ought to learn to
sell lumber, or "do something for himself," yet she liked the fact that he
played polo. It was the right thing to be energetic, upright, respected; it
was also nice to spend your money as others did. And it was very, very nice
to have the money to spend.

To-night, as Sommers came across the hall to the drawing-room, she left the
group about the door to welcome him. "Weren't you surprised," she asked him
with an ironical laugh, "at the people, I mean--all ages and kinds? You see
Parker had to be appeased. He didn't want to stay, and I don't know why he
should. So we gave him Laura Lindsay." She nodded good-naturedly in the
direction of a young girl, whose sharp thin little face was turned joyfully
toward the handsome Parker. "And we added our cousin Caspar, not for
conversation, but to give an illusion of youth and gayety. Caspar is the
captain of the polo team. By the way, what do you think of polo?"

"I never had occasion to think," the young doctor replied, scrutinizing a
heavy, florid-faced young man whom he took to be Caspar Porter.

"Well, polo is with us at breakfast and dinner. Papa doesn't approve,
doesn't believe in young men keeping a stable as Caspar does. Mamma doesn't
know what she believes. I am arbitrator--it's terrible, the new
generation," she broke off whimsically.

"Which has the right of it?" Sommers asked idly. "The fathers who made the
money, or the sons who want to enjoy it?"

"Both; neither," she laughed back with an air of comfortable tolerance. She
might have added, 'You see, I like both kinds--you and Parker's set.'

"Do you know, Dr. Lindsay is here?"

Sommers smiled as he replied,--

"Yes; was it arranged?"

The girl blushed, and moved away.

"He was anxious to meet you."

"Of course," the doctor replied ironically.

"I could tell you more," she added alluringly.

"I have no doubt. Perhaps you had better not, however."

Miss Hitchcock ceased to smile and looked at him without reply. She had
something on the tip of her tongue to tell him, something she had thought
of pleasantly for the last three days, but she suspected that this man was
not one who would like to take his good fortune from a woman's hand.

"Dr. Lindsay is an old friend; we have known him for years." She spoke
neutrally. Sommers merely nodded.

"He is very successful, _very_," she added, giving in to her desire a
little.

"Chicago is a good place for a throat specialist."

"He is said to be the most--"

"What?"

"You know--has the largest income of any doctor in the city."
Sommers did not reply. At length the girl ventured once more.

"I hope you will be nice to him."

"There won't be any question of it."

"You can be so stiff, so set; I have counted a great deal on this."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers exclaimed awkwardly. "Who is the man with Mr.
Porter?"

"Railway Gazette Carson? That's what he is called. He swallows
railroads--absorbs 'em. He was a lawyer. They have a house on the North
Side and a picture, a Sargent. But I'll keep the story. Come! you must meet
Mrs. Lindsay."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers murmured to himself, as Miss Hitchcock moved
across the room.




CHAPTER IV

At the table there were awkward silences, followed by spasmodic local
bursts of talk. Sommers, who sat between Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Lindsay,
fell to listening to his host.

"I was taken for you to-day, Brome," Mr. Hitchcock said, with a touch of
humor in his voice.

Porter laughed at the apparent absurdity of the accusation.

"I was detained at the office over at the yards. The men and the girls had
pretty nearly all gone. I was just about to leave, when a fellow opened the
door--he looked like a Swede or a Norwegian.

"'Is the boss here?' he asked.

"'Yes,' said I; 'what can I do for you?'

"'I wants a yob, a yob,' he shouted, 'and no foolin'. I worked for de boss
ten years and never lost a day!'

"I thought the man was drunk. 'Who did you work for?' I asked. 'For
Pullman, in de vorks,' he said; then I saw how it was. He was one of the
strikers, or had lost his job before the strike. Some one told him you were
in with me, Brome, and a director of the Pullman works. He had footed it
clear in from Pullman to find you, to lay hands on you personally."

Porter laughed rather grimly.

"That's the first sign!" Carson exclaimed.

"They'll have enough of it before the works open," Porter added.

Parker Hitchcock looked bored. Such things were not in good form; they came
from the trade element in the family. His cousin Caspar had Miss Lindsay's
attention. She was describing a Polish estate where she had visited the
preceding summer.

"Did you send him round to our office?" Porter asked jokingly.

Sommers's keen eyes rested on his host's face inquiringly.

"No-oh," Alexander Hitchcock drawled; "I had a talk with him."

"They are rather dangerous people to talk with," Dr. Lindsay remarked.

"He was a Norwegian, a big, fine-looking man. He was _all right_. He
couldn't talk much English, but he knew that his folks were hungry. 'You
gif me a yob,' he kept saying, until I explained I wasn't in the business,
had nothing to do with the Pullman works. Then he sat down and looked at
the floor. 'I vas fooled.' Well, it seems he did inlaying work, fine
cabinet work, and got good pay. He built a house for himself out in some
place, and he was fired among the first last winter,--I guess because he
didn't live in Pullman."

"That's the story they use," Brome Porter said sceptically. "You should
call the watchman; they're apt to be dangerous."

"A crowd of 'em," put in Carson, "were at the Pullman office this morning;
wanted to _arbitrate_."

He spoke deprecatingly of their innocence, but Porter's tones were harsh.

"To arbitrate! to arbitrate! when we are making money by having 'em quit."

Miss Hitchcock turned apprehensively to her companion. Her handsome, clear
face was perplexed; she was distressed over the way the talk was going.

"It's as bad as polo!" she exclaimed, in low tones. But the doctor did not
hear her.

"Is it so," he was asking Colonel Hitchcock, "that the men who had been
thrifty enough to get homes outside of Pullman had to go first because they
didn't pay rent to the company? I heard the same story from a patient in
the hospital."

By this time Caspar Porter had turned his attention to the conversation at
the other end of the table. His florid face was agape with astonishment at
the doctor's temerity. Parker Hitchcock shrugged his shoulders and
muttered something to Miss Lindsay. The older men moved in their chairs.
It was an unhappy topic for dinner conversation in this circle.

"Well, I don't know," Colonel Hitchcock replied, a slight smile creeping
across his face. "Some say yes, and some say no. Perhaps Porter can tell
you."

"We leave all that to the superintendent," the latter replied stiffly. "I
haven't looked into it. The works isn't a hospital."

"That's a minor point," Carson added, in a high-pitched voice. "The real
thing is whether a corporation can manage its own affairs as it thinks best
or not."

"The thrifty and the shiftless," interposed Dr.

Lindsay, nodding to his young colleague.

"Well, the directors are a unit. That settles the matter," Porter ended
dogmatically. "The men may starve, but they'll never get back now."

The young doctor's face set in rather rigid lines. He had made a mistake,
had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss
Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching
for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable
slough, when Brome Porter began again sententiously:

"The laborer has got some hard lessons to learn. This trouble is only a
small part of the bigger trouble. He wants to get more than he is worth.
And all our education, the higher education, is a bad thing." He turned
with marked emphasis toward the young doctor. "That's why I wouldn't give a
dollar to any begging college--not a dollar to make a lot of discontented,
lazy duffers who go round exciting workingmen to think they're badly
treated. Every dollar given a man to educate himself above his natural
position is a dollar given to disturb society."

Before Sommers could accept the challenge in this speech, Miss Hitchcock
asked,--

"But what did you do with your visitor, papa?"

"Well, we had some more talk," he replied evasively. "Maybe that's why I
missed you, Brome, at the club. He stayed most an hour."

"Did he go then?" the girl pressed on mischievously.

"Well, I gave him a 'yob' over at the yards. It wasn't much of a 'yob'
though."

This speech aroused some laughter, and the talk drifted on in little waves
into safer channels. The episode, however, seemed to have made an undue
impression upon Sommers. Miss Hitchcock's efforts to bring him into the
conversation failed. As for Mrs. Lindsay, he paid her not the slightest
attention. He was coolly taking his own time to think, without any sense of
social responsibility.

"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low,
insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one
wants you to?"

Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream.
Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled.

"I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly.

"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head
to catch every syllable of his reply.

"I seemed to see things in a flash--to feel an iron crust of prejudice."

The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young
doctor tried again to phrase the matter.

"These people--I mean your comfortable rich--seem to have taken a kind of
oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you
must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he
blundered on.

"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising
her head and glancing over the table.

"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks
sound 'young' even to me."


"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk
business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"

She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half
lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.

"Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand."

It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the
aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock
was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited,
personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further
opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even
tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end.

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