"I don"t feel like meeting them tonight," Rose said; "if I had a cup of tea I"d stay in my room."
"All right! I"ll bring it."
The bell rang and then the movement of feet and the banging of doors told of the rush to dinner.
Mary came back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and some pudding.
"Have more, if you wish," she said.
"This will do nicely. You"re very kind, Mary Compton. I don"t deserve it."
"You deserve the world," cried the adoring girl. "If I had your figure and complexion I"d make the universe wait on me."
In spite of all this fervor of praise Rose felt herself to be a very dejected and spiritless beauty. She was irritated and angry with the nagging of strange sights and sounds and smells. The air seemed laden with disease and filth. It was all so far from the coolly with its purple hills looming against the sapphire sunset sky.
But this she came for--to see the city; to plunge into its life. She roused herself therefore with a blush of shame at her weakness. She had appeared to be a child before this girl who had always been her inferior at school.
It was a very dignified young woman who arose to greet Mrs. Wilc.o.x, the landlady, whom Mary brought back. This dignity was not needed. Mrs.
Wilc.o.x was a sweet-voiced, smiling woman of fifty--being of those toilers who smile when they are tired enough to drop. She was flushed with fatigue and moved languidly, but her kind, patient, pathetic smile touched Rose almost to tears.
"I"m glad to have you come here," the landlady said. "We"re all nice people here, aren"t we, Miss Compton?" Her eyes twinkled with humorous self-a.n.a.lysis.
"Every one of us," corroborated Mary.
"I hope you"ll rest well. If there"s anything we can do for you, my dear, let me know." Such was the spirit in which the over-worked woman served her boarders. They all called her "mother." She had no children of her own, and her husband was "not at all well," yet nothing could sour her sweet kindliness, which included all the world. She was a familiar type, and Rose loved her at once.
Miss Fletcher came in and was introduced. She was a teacher in a school near by.
"What anybody should come to this town for I can"t understand. I stay here because I"m obliged to. I"m just back from the country to my work."
"The country is all right for a vacation," quoted Rose.
Mary broke in, "That"s what I say. I lived on a farm and I lived in Castle Rock. When I lived on the farm I wanted to get to Castle Rock.
When I got to Castle Rock I wanted to get to Madison. Madison made me hone for Chicago, and when I had a chance to come, I just dropped my work at the University and put for the city, and here I am and glad of it."
"I can"t understand such folly," murmured Miss Fletcher.
"You could if you"d stayed on the farm the year round, with n.o.body to talk to and mighty little to read. It"s all right for you to go up for a couple of months and lie about in a hammock, but you take a place like Castle Rock all the year round! It"s worse than the farm. Gossip! They talk every rag of news to smithereens, don"t they, Rose?"
Rose nodded.
"And then the people! They"re the cullin"s. All the bright boys and girls go to Madison and Chicago or Dakota, and then the rest marry and intermarry, and have idiot boys and freckle-faced girls!"
They all laughed. Mary was always extreme, no matter what her subject.
Miss Fletcher sighed resignedly.
"Well, it"s fate. Here this big city sits and swallows you bright people like a great dragon, and the old folks are left alone in these dull places you talk about."
Rose felt her eyes filling with tears. The figure of her lonely old father came before her. She saw him sitting beside the kitchen table, his head on his palm, and all the new house empty and dark.
Mary jumped up. "Here now, stop that talk, we must leave Rose alone and let her go to sleep."
They left her alone, but sleep was impossible. The tramp of feet, the sound of pianos, the slam of doors, the singing, laughing of the other boarders made sleep impossible. The cars jangled by, the click-clack of horses" hoofs and the swift rattle of wagons kept up long after the house was silent. Between midnight and four o"clock she got a little sleep, out of which she awoke while a booming, clattering wagon thundered by. Other wagons clattered viciously along up the alleys, and then some early riser below began to sing, and Rose wearily dressed and sat down by the window to listen.
Far to the south a low, intermittent, yet ever deepening, crescendo ba.s.s note began to sound. It was Chicago waking from the three hours" doze, which is its only sleep. It grew to a raucous, hot roar; and then to the north she heard the clear musical cry of a fruit vendor,--then another: "_Black-berries! Fine fresh black-berries!_"
The cars thickened, the sun grew hot and lay in squares of blinding light across her carpet. That curious pungent smell came in with the wind. Newsboys cried their morning papers. Children fought and played in the street. Distant whistles began to sound, and her first morning in Chicago came to Rose, hot, brazen, unnatural, and found her blinded, bruised, discouraged, abased, homesick.
CHAPTER XVI
HER FIRST CONQUEST
She was still sitting by the window wondering what to do next, when Mary tapped at her door.
"May I come in?"
She looked fresh and strong, and her cheery smile made her seem beautiful to Rose.
"How did you sleep?"
Rose shook her head. Mary laughed.
"I can tell by the looks of you. Look"s if you"d been pulled through a knot-hole, as they say up in Mola.s.ses Gap. Heard everything that took place, didn"t you? I did too. You"ll get over that. I sleep like a top now."
"What is that smell? Pah!" shuddered Rose.
Mary elevated her freckled nose. "What smell? O, you mean that rotten, piney, turpentiney smell--that"s the Chicago smell. It comes from the pavin" blocks, I guess. I never inquired. I"ll ask Mr. Reed, he knows everything mean about Chicago. Well, you hadn"t better go to breakfast looking like that. I want you to paralyze that Boston snipe. I"ll bring in your breakfast."
Rose accepted this service pa.s.sively; nothing else was to be done in Mary Compton"s presence. She had the energy of a steam threshing machine, and affection to correspond.
Rose wondered again what she could do next. She was here to study art and literature--there was the library! She would read. And there were lectures perhaps; what she was to do would come to her after awhile.
Mary returned a little hot of color, bringing a tray.
"That Boston clothes-pin says you"re a myth or a country gawk. You must lay him out cold as a handspike. I"ve been bragging about you and they were all on tip-toe to see you this morning. You sail in on "em at dinner the way you used to do at our chapter-house spreads. Weren"t they great! There now, I"ve got to vamoose. I"m not a lady of leisure. I"m a typewriter on trial and looks won"t carry _me_ through. I"ve got to rustle and walk chalk, as they say in Mola.s.ses Gap. So good-bye. Take it easy today. If you want to walk, go over to the lake front," and she banged out of the door and faced the city in her daily encounter.
Rose ate her breakfast and felt much better. Her trunk came and she got out her dresses and hung them up and made other preparations for staying, although it seemed impossible she should ever sleep another night in this terrible city.
She got out her portfolio and wrote a letter home and one also to Dr.
Thatcher. Then she looked over the little bunch of letters of introduction she had. One was to Doctor Isabel Herrick, one to Professor H. Bevan Fowler at Evanston, and one was to Orrin Thatcher; that was the Doctor"s cousin, a young lawyer in the Woman"s building, whatever that was. With these and ten dollars a week she faced Chicago. The contest was unequal.
She felt this more keenly as she stood on the lake front a little later on in the day. She went there as the New Hampshire girl goes to the sea.
This body of water, majestic in its immense sh.o.r.eless spread, is wonderful to the young girl from Iowa or interior Wisconsin.