Читать книгу The Memoirs of an American Citizen - Robert Herrick - Страница 8

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THE PIERSONS

A familiar face—A hospitable roof—The Pierson family, and others—The Enterprise Market, and ten dollars a week—Miss Hillary Cox—Crape—From the sidewalk—The company of successful adventurers—The great Strauss

"Hello! Here you be! Ain't I glad I found yer this soon," and Ed's brown eyes were looking into mine. His seemed to me just then about the best face in the world. "Seems though I was bound to be chasin' some one in this city!" he shouted, grabbing me by the arm. "But I've found all of 'em now."

He had missed me at the police station by a few minutes, and I had left no address. After looking up and down a few streets near by, Ed had thought of lying in wait for me on the lake front, feeling that unless some extraordinary good luck had happened to me I should bring up at that popular resort. He had not seen the little incident when the detective grabbed me in the great store, for just at that moment his attention had been attracted to a girl at one of the counters, who had called him by name. The girl, who was selling perfumes and tooth-washes, turned out to be his cousin Lou, his Aunt Pierson's younger daughter. After the surprise of their meeting Ed had looked for me, and the floor-walker told them of my misfortune. Then the cousin had made Ed go home with her. Mrs. Pierson, it seems, took in boarders in her three-story-and-basement house on West Van Buren Street. She and the two girls had given Ed a warm welcome, and for the first time in many days he had had the luxury of a bed, which had caused him to oversleep, and miss me at the station.

"Ma Pierson's."

All this I learned as we walked westward toward Ed's new home. At first I was a little shy about putting another burden on the boy's relations. But my friend would not hear of letting me go. When Ed tucked his arm under mine and hauled me along with country heartiness, saying I could share his bed and he had a job in view for us both, I felt as though the sun had begun to shine all over again that day. Through all the accidents of many years I have never forgotten that kindness, and my heart warms afresh when I stop to think how Ed grabbed my arm and pulled me along with him off those city streets....

So it happened at dinner-time that night I found myself in the basement dining room and made my first bow to some people who were to be near me for a number of years—one or two of them for life. I can remember just how they all looked sitting about the table, which was covered with a mussed red table-cloth, and lit by a big, smelly oil lamp. Pa Pierson sat at the head of the table, an untidy, gray-haired old man, who gave away his story in every line of his body. He had made some money in his country store back in Michigan; but the ambition to try his luck in the city had ruined him. He had gone broke on crockery. He was supposed to be looking for work, but he spent most of his time in this basement dining room, warming himself at the stove and reading the boarders' papers.

The girls and the boy, Dick, paid him even less respect than they did their mother. They were all the kind of children that don't tolerate much incompetence in their parents. Dick was a putty-faced, black-haired cub, who scrubbed blackboards and chewed gum in a Board of Trade man's office. Neither he nor his two sisters, who were also working downtown, contributed much to the house, and except that now and then Grace, the older one, would help clean up the dishes in a shamefaced way, or bring the food on the table when the meal was extra late or she wanted to get out for the evening, not one of the three ever raised a finger to help with the work. The whole place, from kitchen to garret, fell on poor old Ma Pierson, and the boarders were kinder to her than her own children. Lank and stooping, short-sighted, with a faded, tired smile, she came and went between the kitchen and the dining room, cooking the food and serving it, washing the dishes, scrubbing the floors, and making the beds—I never saw her sit down to the table with us except one Christmas Day, when she was too sick to cook. She took her fate like an Indian, and died on the steps of her treadmill.

There were two other regular boarders besides myself and Ed—a man and a woman. The latter, Miss Hillary Cox, was cashier in the New Enterprise Market, not far from the house. She was rather short and stout, with thick ropes of brown hair that she piled on her head in a solid mass to make her look tall. She had bright little eyes, and her rosy face showed that she had not been long in the city.

The man was a long, lean, thin-faced chap, somewhat older than I was. His name was Jaffrey Slocum; he was studying law and doing stenographic work in a law office in the city. When I first looked at him I thought that he would push his way over most of the rocks in the road—and he did. Slocum was a mighty silent man, but little passed before his eyes without his knowing what it meant. I learned later that he came from a good Maine family, and had been to college in the East. And he had it much on his mind to do several things with his life—the first of which was to buy back the old home in Portland, and put his folks there where they belonged. Old Sloco, we called him! For all his slow, draggy ways he had pounds of pressure on the gauge. He and I have fought through some big fights since then, and there's no man I had as soon have beside me in a scrap as that thin-faced, scrawny-necked old chip of Maine granite.

When Ed introduced me at the table, Grace made a place beside her, and her sister Lou hospitably shoved over a plate of stew. Then Lou smiled at me and opened fire:—

"We read all about you in the papers this morning, Mr. Harrington!"

"Heh, heh!" Pa Pierson cackled.

"Say, Lou, I don't call that polite," Grace protested in an affected tone.

"Don't mind me," I called out. "I guess I'm a public character, anyway."

"What did the lady say when she found she was wrong?" Lou went on. "I should think she'd want to die, doing a mean thing like that."

"Did she give you any little souvenir of the occasion?" Dick inquired.

"If they are real nice folks, I should think they'd try to make it up some way," Grace added.

"But what we want to know first," Slocum drawled gravely, "is, did you take the purse, and, if so, where did you put it?"

"Why, Mr. Slocum!" Miss Cox sputtered, not catching the joke. "What a thing to insinuate! I am sure Mr. Harrington doesn't look like that—any one could see he wouldn't steal."

In this way they passed me back and forth, up and down the table, until the last scrap of meat was gnawed from the bone. Then they sniffed at Jasonville. Where was it? What did I do there? Why did I come to the city? Miss Cox was the sharpest one at the questions. She wanted to know all about my father's store. She had already got Ed a place as delivery clerk in the Enterprise Market, and there might be an opening in the same store for me. I could see that there would be a place all right if I met the approval of the smart little cashier. It has never been one of my faults to be backward with women,—all except May,—and as Miss Hillary Cox was far from unprepossessing, I fixed my attention on her for the rest of the evening.

The Pierson girls tired of me quickly enough, as they had already tired of Ed. Lou soon ceased to smile at me and open her eyes in her silly stare when I made a remark. After dinner she went out on the steps to wait for a beau, who was to take her to a dance. Grace sat awhile to chaff with the lawyer's clerk. He seemed to make fun of her, but I could see that he liked her pretty well. (It must be a stupid sort of woman, indeed, who can't get hold of a man when he has nothing to do after his work except walk the streets or read a book!) There was nothing bad in either of the girls: they were just soft, purring things, shut up all day long, one in a big shop and the other in a dentist's office. Of course, when they got home, they were frantic for amusement, dress, the theatre—anything bright and happy; anything that would make a change. They had a knack of stylish dressing, and on the street looked for all the world like a rich man's daughters. Nothing bad in either one, then—only that kind gets its eyes opened too late!...

The next morning I stepped around to the Enterprise Market, and Miss Cox introduced me to the proprietors. They were two brothers, sharp-looking young men, up-to-date in their ideas, the cashier had told me, and bound to make the Enterprise the largest market on the West Side. Miss Cox had evidently said a good word for me, and that afternoon I found myself tying up parcels and taking orders at ten dollars a week.

Not a very brilliant start on fortune's road, but I was glad enough to get it. The capable cashier kept a friendly eye on me, and saved me from getting into trouble. Before long I had my pay raised, and then raised again. Ed had taken hold well, too, and was given more pay. He was more content with his job than I was. The work suited him—the driving about the city streets, the rush at the market mornings, the big crates of country stuff that came smelling fresh from the fields. The city was all that he had hoped to find it. Not so to me—I looked beyond; but I worked hard and took my cues from the pretty cashier, who grew more friendly every day. We used to go to places in the evenings,—lectures and concerts mostly,—for Miss Cox thought the theatre was wicked. She was a regular church attendant, and made me go with her Sundays. She was thrifty, too, and taught me to be stingy with my quarters and halves.

The Enterprise Market.

The first day I could take off I went to the police station and paid my loan from the judge. I had to wait an hour before I could speak to him, while he ground out a string of drunks and assaults, shooting out his sentences like a rapid-fire battery. When I finally got his attention, he turned one eye on me:—

"Well, Edward, so you haven't gone home yet!" And that was all he said as he dropped the coin into his pocket. (I hope that my paying back that money made him merciful to the next young tramp that was cast up there before him!)

After I had paid the judge I strolled down to the South Side, into the new residence district, with some idea of seeing where the young lady lived who had first had me arrested and then wanted to reform me. When I came to the number she had written in the memorandum-book, there was a piece of crape on the door. It gave me a shock. I hung around for a while, not caring to disturb the people inside, and yet hoping to find out that it was not the young lady who had died. Finally I came away, having made up my mind, somehow, that it was the young lady, and feeling sorry that she was gone. That night I opened the memorandum-book she had given me, and began a sort of diary in a cramped, abbreviated hand. The first items read as follows:—

September 30. Giv. this book by young la. who tho't I stole her purse. She hopes I may take the right road.

October 1.—Got job in Ent—mark., 1417 W. VanB St. $10. Is this the right road?

October 23.—Went to address young lad. gav. me. Found crape on the door. Hope it's the old man.

From time to time since then I have taken out the little black memorandum-book, and made other entries of those happenings in my life that seemed to me especially important—sometimes a mere list of figures or names, writing them in very small. It lies here before me now, and out of these bare notes, keywords as it were, there rise before me many facts,—the deeds of twenty-five years.

When I got back to the Piersons' for dinner, Miss Cox was curious to know what I had done with my first day off.

"I bet he's been to see that girl who had him arrested," Lou suggested mischievously. "And from the way he looks I guess she told him she hadn't much use for a butcher-boy."

Pa Pierson laughed; he was a great admirer of his daughter's wit.

"I don't think he's that much of a fool, to waste his time trapesing about after her," Hillary Cox snapped back.

"Well, I did look up the house," I admitted, and added, "but the folks weren't at home."

After supper we sat out on the steps, and Hillary asked me what kind of a place the young woman lived in. I told her about the crape on the door, and she looked at me disgustedly.

"Why didn't you ask?" she demanded.

"I didn't care to know if it was so, perhaps."

"I don't see as you have any particular reason to care, one way or the other," she retorted. And she went off for that evening somewhere with Ed. For the want of anything better to do I borrowed a book from the law student, who was studying in his room, and thus, by way of an accident, began a habit of reading and talking over books with Slocum.

So I was soon fitted into my hole in the city. In that neighborhood there must have been many hundreds of places like Ma Pierson's boarding-house. The checker-board of prairie streets cut up the houses like marble cake—all the same, three-story-and-mansard-roof, yellow brick, with long lines of dirty, soft stone steps stretching from the wooden sidewalks to the second stories. And the group of us there in the little basement dining room, noisy with the rattle of the street cars, and dirty with the smoke of factory chimneys in the rear, was a good deal like the others in the other houses—strugglers on the outside of prosperity, trying hard to climb up somewhere in the bread-and-butter order of life, and to hold on tight to what we had got. No one, I suppose, ever came to Chicago, at least in those days, without a hope in his pocket of landing at the head of the game sometime. Even old Ma Pierson cherished a secret dream of a rich marriage for one or other of her girls!

Hillary Cox smiled on me again the next day, and we were as good friends as ever. As I have said, the energetic cashier of the Enterprise Market had taken me in hand and was forming me to be a business man. She was a smart little woman, and had lots of good principles besides. She believed in religion on Sundays, as she believed in business on week days. So on the Sabbath morning we would leave Ed and Lou and Dick Pierson yawning over the breakfast table, while Slocum and I escorted Grace and Hillary downtown to hear some celebrated preacher in one of the prominent churches. Hillary Cox had no relish for the insignificant and humble in religion, such as we might have found around the corner. She wanted the best there was to be had, she said, and she wanted to see the people who were so much talked about in the papers.

Perhaps the rich and prominent citizens made more of a point of going to church in those days than they do now. It was a pretty inferior church society that couldn't show up two or three of the city's solid merchants, who came every Sunday with their women, all dressed in their smartest and best. Hillary and Grace seemed to know most of these people by sight. Women are naturally curious about one another, and I suppose the girls saw their pictures and learned their names in the newspapers. And in this way I, too, learned to know by sight some of the men whom later it was my fortune to meet elsewhere.

There was Steele, the great dry-goods merchant, and Purington, whose works for manufacturing farming tools were just behind Ma Pierson's house; Lardner, a great hardware merchant; Maybricks, a wholesale grocer; York, a rich lumberman—most of them thin-faced, shrewd Yankees, who had seized that tide of fate which the poet tells us sweeps men to fortune. And there were others, perhaps less honorably known as citizens, but equally important financially: Vitzer, who became known later as the famous duke of gas, and Maxim, who already had begun to stretch out his fingers over the street-car lines. This man had made his money buying up tax titles, that one building cars, and another laying out railroads, and wrecking them, too. They were the people of the land!

"That's Strauss!"

One fine winter morning, as the four of us idled on the sidewalk opposite a prominent South Side church that was discharging its prosperous congregation into the street, Slocum nudged me and pointed to a group of well-dressed people—two or three women and a short, stout, smooth-shaven man—who were standing on the steps of the church, surveying the scene and bowing to their neighbors.

"That's Strauss!"

It was not necessary to say more. Even in those days the great Strauss had made his name as well known as that of the father of our country. He it was who knew each morning whether the rains had fallen on the plains beneath the Andes; how many cattle on the hoof had entered the gates of Omaha and Kansas City; how tight the pinch of starvation set upon Russian bellies; and whether the Sultan's subjects had bought their bread of Liverpool. Flesh and grain, meat and bread—Strauss held them in his hand, and he dealt them forth in the markets of the world!

Is it any wonder that I looked hard at the portly, red-faced man, standing there on the steps of his temple, where, with his women and children, he had been worshipping his God?

"My!" said Grace, "Mrs. Strauss is plain enough, and just common-looking."

(I have noticed that women find it hard to reconcile themselves to a rich man's early taste in their sex.)

"She don't dress very stylish, that's true," Hillary observed thoughtfully. "But it weren't so very long ago, I guess, that she was saving his money."

Strauss, surrounded by his women folk, marched up the avenue in solemn order. We followed along slowly on the other side of the street.

"He didn't make his pile at the Enterprise Market," Grace remarked. She spoke the idea that was in all our minds: how did he and the others make their money?

"I guess they began like other folks," Hillary contended, "saving their earnings and not putting all their money in their stomachs and on their backs."

This last was aimed at Grace, who was pretty smartly dressed.

"Well," said Slocum, dryly, "probably by this time Strauss has something more than his savings in the bank."

Thus we followed them down the street, speculating on the great packer's success, on the success of all the fortunate ones in the great game of the market, wondering what magic power these men possessed to lift themselves out of the mass of people like ourselves. Pretty simple of us, perhaps you think, hanging around on the street a good winter morning and gossiping about our rich neighbors! But natural enough, too: we had no place to loaf in, except Ma Pierson's smelly dining room, and nothing to do with our Sunday holiday but to walk around the streets and stare up at the handsome new houses and our well-dressed and prosperous neighbors. Every keen boy who looks out on life from the city sidewalk has a pretty vigorous idea that if he isn't as good as the next man, at least he will make as much money if he can only learn the secret. We read about the rich and their doings in the newspapers; we see them in the streets; their horses and carriages flash by us—do you wonder that some poor clerks on a Sunday gape at the Steeles and the Strausses from the sidewalk?

What was the golden road? These men had found it—hundreds, thousands of them,—farming tools, railroads, groceries, gas, dry-goods. It made no matter what: fortunes were building on every side; the flowers of success were blooming before our eyes. To take my place with these mighty ones—I thought a good deal about that these days! And I remember Grace saying sentimentally to Slocum that Sunday:—

"You fellers keep thinkin' of nothin' but money and how you're goin' to make it. Perhaps rich folks ain't the only happy ones in the world."

"Yes," Hillary chimed in, "there's such a thing as being too greedy to eat."

"What else are we here for except to make money?" Slocum demanded more bitterly than usual.

He raised his long arm in explanation and swept it to and fro over the straggling prairie city, with its rough, patched look. I didn't see what there was in the city to object to: it was just a place like any other—to work, eat, and sleep in. Later, however, when I saw the little towns back East, the pleasant hills, the old homes in the valleys, and the red-brick house on the elm-shaded street in Portland, then I knew what Slocum meant.

Whatever was there in Chicago in 1877 to live for but Success?