Шервуд Андерсон
Windy McPherson's Son
Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company’s march toward a second place in its industry and had faced it about. All about him, in offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun laying lines with that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard. Through his head went big ambitious projects. “I have in my hand a great tool,” he thought; “with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to occupy among the big men of this city and this nation.”
CHAPTER III
Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated, knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come. Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men—of whom he intended to be one—intent upon growth.
In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a woman—tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward with a cry.
“Edith!” he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand. “For Janet,” he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to Van Buren Street.
Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of the street. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” sang the voice.
Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of growth worked.
From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air. Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night,” again insisted the voice.
After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him. From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish doorway and its dimly lighted “Ladies’ Entrance,” and into a region of neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.
The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city, had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs, reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years, and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.
The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked of as a vice-presidential possibility but had died at Washington before the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle, died after having borne him the two daughters.
After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to his home state to settle on a farm.
About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father, Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no rest except to eat.
At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy, clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his humiliation.
To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made reclining wheeled chair.
Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with the money of the medical student. “Take it and make money for me,” the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking flamboyantly of Sam’s ability in affairs. “What is the good of having a talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven’t it?”
Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings spent together.
In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker. In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.
Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam’s friend.
Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam’s money making and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.
Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside Janet’s wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside, through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their talk.
Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
“You talk!” she broke out. “Books are not full of pretence and lies; you business men are—you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You haven’t read books, not real ones. Didn’t my father know; didn’t he save himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs. You think you know what’s going on in the world. You think you are doing things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind, all blind.”
The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam’s hair, laughing down into the astonished face he turned up to her.
“Oh, I’m not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you,” she went on impulsively. “I like you all right and if I were a well woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and men and machines that make guns.”
Sam grinned. “You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings,” he declared; “you think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep.”
Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.
After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet, listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against the great world background she had drawn for him.
Sam did not understand Janet’s point of view. It was all too new and foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that she would have gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam’s work for the gun company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on Wabash Avenue.
After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.
CHAPTER IV
One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St. Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel’s paunch protruding itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company’s only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped, showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.
“Sam, were you ever in love?” asked the colonel, with a sigh.
Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his bed danced up and down. “The old fool, has it come to that with him?” he asked himself. “After all these years of single life is he going to begin running after women now?”
He did not answer the colonel’s question. “There are breakers ahead for you, old boy,” he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue Rainey, the colonel’s daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade among women.
The colonel, oblivious of Sam’s mirth and of his silence regarding his experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might take worried him. “Children are so unfair,” he complained; “they forget about a man’s feelings and can’t realise that his heart is still young.”
With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman’s lying in his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. “She is an actress, a working girl,” he said feelingly. “I met her at a dinner given by Will Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an affinity for each other.”
Sam sat up in bed. “Letters!” he muttered. “The old dog is going to get himself involved.” He dropped again upon the pillow. “Well, let him. Why need I bother myself?”
The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. “Although we have seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful.”
A worried sigh broke from the colonel. “I want Sue to invite her to the house, but I am afraid,” he complained; “I am afraid she will be wrong-headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her she may make a scene and hurt Luella’s feelings.”
The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam’s eyes, and he turned his back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.
“I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little woman alive,” the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of his daughter or of the lady from the stage. “It is a wonderful thing,” half sobbed the colonel, “when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart into the keeping of a man like me.”
It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam’s desk and pulled off a glove while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had brought her there.
Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman, she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he thought her baffling and puzzling.
“The colonel,” she began, and then hesitated and smiled. “You, Mr. McPherson, have become a figure in my father’s life. He depends upon you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that the colonel and she should marry.”
Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his face was grave and disinterested.
“Yes?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Have you met Miss London?”
“I have,” answered Sue Rainey. “Have you?”
Sam shook his head.
“She is impossible,” declared the colonel’s daughter, clutching the glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose in her cheeks. “She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn’t even the grace to be ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a fix.”
Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey’s cheek and thought the texture of it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman. The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought, transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the matter of the colonel’s affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied by her having come to him. “She has self-respect,” he told himself, and felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by himself.
“I have been hearing of you a great deal,” she continued, glancing up at him and smiling. “At our house you are brought to the table with the soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of ‘Sam says’ and ‘Sam thinks.’ And the men who come to the house talk of you also. Teddy Foreman says that at directors’ meetings they all sit about like children waiting for you to tell them what to do.”
She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. “I am in a hole,” she said. “I might handle my father but I cannot handle that woman.”
While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been intending to help her.
“Give me the lady’s address,” he said; “I’ll go look her over.”
Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper at one of the town’s best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes’ talk near the stage door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over Geiger’s drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam had taken the rôle of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the rôle of villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer’s rage and at the frightened boy begging for mercy.
Luella London laughed heartily at Sam’s story and then, the coffee being served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into her eyes.
“And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about Colonel Rainey,” she said.
Sam lighted a cigar.
“Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the colonel?” he asked bluntly.
The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.
“I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,” she said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. “Do you know, Mr. McPherson, I can’t just figure you. I can’t just see how you get into this. Where are your credentials, anyway?”
Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.
“It’s this way,” he said, “I’m something of an adventurer myself. I fly the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him.”
Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice. “I’ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He’s going to help me get you if you do not drop it.”
Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to be defeated without a struggle.
“You lie,” she cried, half springing from her chair. “Frank has never—”
“Oh yes, Frank has,” answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; “I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.”
Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and wiped her eyes.
“All right! All right!” she said, bracing herself, “I’ll drop it. If you’ve dug up Frank Robson you’ve got me. He’ll do anything you say for a piece of money.”
For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the woman’s eyes.
“I wish I was a man,” she said. “I get whipped at everything I tackle because I’m a woman. I’m getting past my money-making days in the theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game.”
“He is,” answered Sam dispassionately, “but you see I beat you to it. He’s mine.”
Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.
“Look here,” he said, “you’ve done a good piece of work. You should have won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?
“Anyway,” he went on, “I’m not going to see you trimmed. I’ve got ten thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse.”
“That’s square,” said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming back into her eyes.
Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him and a waiter sign as witnesses.
Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.
“What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?” she asked.
Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.
“Because I like you and I admire your skill,” he said, “and anyway I did not have you beaten until right now.”
They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with assured airs serving Sam’s mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat with him.
