The Web of Life Part 14

"--Shall join them in Paris--dinner last Friday--did you see _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_--our horses are always ill--"

It sounded like the rustle of skirts, the stretching of kid. There was dulness in the atmosphere. Yet if it was dull, Sommers realized that it was his own fault--a conclusion he usually took away with him from the feasts of the rich which he attended. He lacked the power to make the most of his opportunities. The ability to cultivate acquaintances, to push his way into a good place in this sleek company of the well-to-do,--an ability characteristically American,--he was utterly without. It would be better for him, he reflected with depression, to return to Marion, Ohio, or some similar side-track of the world, or to reenter the hospital and bury himself in a quite subordinate position.

There was still an eddy of guests about the host and his wife near the great portrait. They were laughing loudly. Carson's thin face was beaming.

Even Mrs. Carson's face had lost some of its tension. Sommers could watch her manner from his position in the upper hall. She was dismissing a minor guest with a metallic smile. 'To aspire to this!' he murmured unconsciously. 'This, the triumph of success!'

"Still waiting?"

Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k was pa.s.sing, her long wrap trailing lightly behind. Her eyes glowed underneath a white mantilla.

"I am ready to go now," Sommers replied. "You are too tired for the dance."

"I must go--I can't bear to miss anything. It is stupid--but it is exciting at the same time. Good-by. Remember, Lake Forest in a fortnight. And learn to take it easily!"

She smiled and disappeared in the wake of Mrs. Porter. How easily she seemed to take it! The man she married would have to be of the world, as large a world as she could contrive to get. She would always be "going on."

Imaginatively, with the ignorance of a young man, he attributed to her appet.i.tes for luxury, for power, for success. _He_ was merely an instance of her tolerance. Really he was a very little thing in her cosmos, and if he wished to be more, he would have to take an interest in just this.

Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k came out at last, in close conversation with old Blaisdell. They were talking business. Hitchc.o.c.k's kindly face was furrowed and aged, Sommers noticed. The old merchant put his arm through the young doctor's, and with this support Sommers received the intimate farewell from Mrs. Carson.

Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k ordered the driver to take them to the Metropolitan Club.

"Our talk may take us some time," he explained. "I have been trying to find you for several days. I have something to ask you to do for me. You may think it strange that I should go to you instead of to one of my old friends. But it is something Isaac would have done for me. It is for my boy."

The weariness of years was in his voice. As briefly and as simply as he could, he stated the matter. Parker had disappeared; he had gone to New York and there drawn heavily on his father. The journey which Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k had made with his daughter had been largely for the purpose of finding Parker, and had failed. The boy was ashamed to come back. Now there was a clew, but it seemed unwise for the father to follow it up himself.

"I don't understand the boy," Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k concluded. "I'm afraid everything I do is wrong. I get angry. I have no patience with his polo, his spending so much money uselessly--he spends ten times as much money as any man among my friends did at his age."

"You have ten times as much as any one of their fathers had," Sommers protested with a smile.

"Well, then, I guess I had better stop, if that's what it means. He may find there isn't so much after all. This panic is pus.h.i.+ng me. _I_ can't leave Chicago another day. He should be here fighting with me, helping me--and he is sneaking in some hotel, with his tail between his legs."

He breathed heavily at the bitterness of the thought. Everything in his life had been honorable, open to all: he had fought fair and hard and long--for this.

"If it weren't for Louise and his mother, I would let him starve until he was ready to come home. But his mother is ill--she can't be troubled."

"And you can't let him disgrace himself publicly--do something that would make it hard for him to come back at all," Sommers suggested.

"No, I suppose not," the older man admitted, with a grateful glance. "I can't refuse to help him, poor boy; perhaps I have made him weak."

Sommers offered to do what he could,--to hunt Parker up, get him on his feet, and bring him back to Chicago. He would leave that night. They had stopped at the club to finish their talk, and while Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k was writing some letters, Sommers drove to his rooms for his bag. It was nearly midnight before he returned. As they drove over to the station, Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k said:

"I have told him the whole thing: how hard pressed I am; how his mother is worrying and ill--well, I don't feel it will make much difference. He could _see_ all that."

"You must remember that he has always had every inducement to enjoy himself," the young doctor ventured. "He doesn't understand _your_ life. You sent him to a very nice private school, and whenever he failed got him tutors. You made him feel that he was a special case in the world.

And he has always been thrown with boys and young men who felt _they_ were special cases. At college he lived with the same set--"

"His mother and I wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and self-indulgence."

Sommers nodded sympathetically. It was useless to discuss the matter. The upright, courageous old merchant, whose pride was that he had never committed one mean action in the acc.u.mulation of his fortune, could never understand this common misfortune. He belonged to a different world from that in which his son was to take his part. They turned to other topics,--the business depression, the strike, the threatened interference of the American Railway Union.

"Blaisdell, who is the general manager of the C. K. and G.," Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k remarked, "was saying tonight that he expected the Pullman people would induce the A. R. U. to strike. If they stir up the unions all over the country, business will get worse and worse. All we needed to make things as bad as can be was a great railroad strike."

"I suppose so," Sommers responded. "Why won't the Pullman people consent to arbitrate?"

The old merchant shook his head.

"They'd divide their twenty millions of surplus and go out of business first. They say they're saving money on the strike. Did you ever know of people with the whip-hand who had anything to arbitrate?"

CHAPTER XIII

Dr. Lindsay's offices were ingeniously arranged on three sides of the Athenian Building. The patient entering from the hall, just beside the elevators, pa.s.sed by a long, narrow corridor to the waiting room, and thence to one of the tiny offices of the attending physicians; or, if he were fortunate enough, he was led at once to the private office of the great Lindsay, at the end of the inner corridor. By a transverse pa.s.sage he was then shunted off to a door that opened into the public hall just opposite the elevator well. The incoming patient was received by a woman clerk, who took his name, and was dismissed by another woman clerk, who collected fees and made appointments. If he came by special appointment, several stages in his progress were omitted, and he pa.s.sed at once to one of the smaller offices, where he waited until the machine was ready to proceed with his case. Thus in the office there was a perpetual stream of the sick and suffering, in, around, out, crossed by the coming and going through transverse pa.s.sages of the "staff," the attendants, the clerks, messengers, etc. Each atom in the stream was welling over with egotistic woes, far too many for the brief moment in which he would be closeted with the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world below, where they must carry on the burden of living.

The attending physicians arrived at nine. The "shop," as they called it, opened at ten; Lindsay was due at eleven and departed at three. Thereafter the hive gradually emptied, and by four the stenographers and clerks were left alone to attend to purely business matters. Sommers came late the day after his return from New York. The general door being opened to admit a patient, he walked in and handed his coat and hat to the boy in b.u.t.tons at the door. The patient who had entered with him was being questioned by the neat young woman whose business it was to stand guard at the outer door.

"What is your name, please?"

Her tones were finely adjusted to the caste of the patient. Judging from the icy sharpness on this occasion, the patient was not high in the scale.

"Caroline Ducharme," the woman replied.

"Write it out, please."

The patient did so with some difficulty, scrawling half over the neat pad the clerk pushed toward her.

"You wish to consult Dr. Lindsay?"

"The big doctor,--yes, mum."

"Did he make an appointment with you?"

"What's that?"

"Have you been here before?"

"No, mum."

"You will have to pay the fee in advance."

"What's that, please?"

"Ten dollars."

"Ten?"