"Yes, yes," she murmured, as if all this were familiar ground to her mind.
"But I am the nearest member of society--the one whose business it is to attend to this mistake. It"s my contribution," she ended with a feeble smile.
"Society has no right to expect too much from any one. The whole sacrifice mustn"t fall where it crushes. I say that such a case should be treated by the public authorities, and should be treated once for all."
She rose and looked into his eyes, as if to say, "You _were_ society, and you did not dare." In a moment she turned away, and said, "Don"t you believe in a soul?"
"Yes," he smiled back. "And that poor soul and others like it, many, many thousands, who cannot grow, should be at rest--one long rest; to let other souls grow, unblasted by their foul touch."
"I have thought so," she replied calmly, taking his belief as an equal. "To let joy into the world somewhere before death." Her wistful tone rang out into the room. "But that would be murder," she continued. "We should have to call it murder, shouldn"t we? And that is a fearful word. I could never quite forget it. I should always ask myself if I were right, if I had the right to judge. I am a coward. The work is too much for me."
"We will not think of it," Sommers replied abruptly, unconsciously putting himself in company with her, as she had herself with him. "We have but to follow the conventions of medicine and wait."
"Yes, wait!"
"Medicine, medicine," he continued irritably. "All our medicine is but a contrivance to keep up the farce, to continue the ills of humanity, to keep the wretched and diseased where they have no right to be!"
"And you are a doctor! How can you be?"
"Because," he answered in the same tone of unprofessional honesty that he had used toward her, "like most men, I am a coward and conventional. I have learned to do as the others do. Medicine and education!" Sommers laughed ironically. "They are the two sciences where men turn and turn and emit noise and do nothing. The doctor and the teacher learn a few tricks and keep on repeating them as the priest does the ceremony of the ma.s.s."
"That"s about right for the teacher," she laughed. "We cut our cloth almost all alike."
Unconsciously they drifted farther and farther into intimacy. Sommers talked as he thought, with question and protest, intolerant of conventions, of formulas. They forgot the diseased burden that lay in the chamber above, with its incessant claims, its daily problems. They forgot themselves, thus strangely brought together and revealed to each other, at one glance as it were, without the tiresome preliminary acquaintanceship of civilization. It had grown dark in the room before Sommers came back to the reality of an evening engagement.
"You can get a train on the railroad west of the avenue," Mrs. Preston suggested. "But won"t you let me give you something to eat?"
"Not this time," Sommers answered, taking his hat "Perhaps when I come again--in a few days. I want to think--what can be done."
She did not urge him to stay. She was surprised at her boldness in suggesting it. He had a.s.sumed the impersonal, professional manner once more. That precious hour of free talk had been but an episode, a relaxation. He gave directions as he went to the door.
"The patient will sleep till to-morrow. It will take two or three days to get over this relapse."
Then he took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription.
"Should he grow unmanageable, you had better give him one of these powders--two, if necessary. But no more; they are pretty strong."
He placed the leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her--a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with rare beauty.
CHAPTER XII
The engagement was not one to be missed, at least by a young professional man who had his way to make, his patients to a.s.semble, in the fierce struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid enough,--a lecture at the Carsons" by one of the innumerable lecturers to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage in their pilgrimage.
They had come from Omaha five years before; they were on their way to New York, where they would be due five years hence. From railroad law, Carson had grown to the business of organizing monopolies. Some of his handiworks in this order of art had been among the first to take the field. He was resting now, while the country was suffering from its prolonged fit of the blues, and his wife was organizing their social life. They had picked up a large house on the North Boulevard, a bargain ready for their needs; it had been built for the Bidwells, just before the panic.
A rapid glance over the rooms proved to Sommers that Mrs. Carson was as clever a manipulator of capitalists as her husband. There were a few of the more important people of the city, such as Alexander Hitchc.o.c.k, Ferdinand Dunster, the Polot families, the Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchc.o.c.ks"
introduction, and also to the receptive att.i.tude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them.
Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago.
Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that appeared daily in print. As such it offered unrivalled opportunities for aspiration.
Sommers had not come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration.
Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise Hitchc.o.c.k was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly over, and lingered in the hall on the fringe of the gathering.
Carson had some reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque coat, with the negligent lounging air of the hotel foyer, he stared at you, this Mr. R. Gordon Carson, impudently almost, very much at his ease. Narrow head, high forehead, thin hair, large eyes, a great protruding nose, a thin chin, smooth-shaven, yet with a bristly complexion,--there he was, the man from an Iowa farm, the man from the Sioux Falls court-house, the man from Omaha, the man now fully ripe from Chicago. Here was no cla.s.s, no race, nothing in order; a feature picked up here, another there, a third developed, a fourth dormant--the whole memorable but unforgivably ordinary.
Not far away, standing in the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself.
The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to hang in one"s own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was self-a.s.surance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this one great expression of egotism.
When the lecture was finished, a little group formed about the host; he was telling his experience with the great master, a series of anecdotes that had made his way in circles where success was not enough.
"I knew he was a hard customer," Sommers overheard him saying, "and I gave him all the rope he wanted. "It may be two years before I do anything on your portrait, Mr. Carson," he said.
""Take five," I told him.
""I shall charge five thousand."
""Make it ten," said I.
""I shall paint your ears."
""And the nose too."
"Well, he sent it to me inside of a year with his compliments. The fancy struck him, he wrote. It was easy to do; I was a good type and all that.
Well, there it is."
He turned on an additional bunch of electric lights before the picture.
"Good, isn"t it?" Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k exclaimed behind Sommers.
"Too good," he muttered. "I shouldn"t have dared to hang it."
The girl"s smooth brow contracted.
"Don"t you think it was fine, though, his making up his mind out there in Sioux Falls that what he wanted was pictures, and the best pictures, and that he"d have Sargent do his portrait?"
"No more than it"s fine for all the rest of these well-dressed men and women to make up their minds that they want to be rich and luxurious and important and all that."
Her face became still more puzzled.
"But it is fine! And the successful people are the interesting people."
"That has nothing to do with the matter," he returned dogmatically.
"Don"t you think so?" she replied distantly, with a note of reproof in her voice. He was too young, too unimportant to cast such aspersion upon this comfortable, good-natured world where there was so much fun to be had. She could not see the possessing image in his mind, the picture of the afternoon--the unsuccessful woman.
"There is nothing honorable in wealth," he added, as she turned to examine a delicate landscape. Her eyes flashed defiantly.