Mary Wollaston Part 12

Back in New England she probably would not have married him for she was a cut or more above him socially, the played-out end of a very fine line, as her beautiful speech would have made evident to any sensitive ear. But in Chicago, the disheveled, terrifying Chicago of the roaring eighties, to all intents and purposes alone, clinging precariously to a school-teacher's job which she had no special equipment for, she put up only the weakest resistance to David March's determination that she should be his wife.

He was a skilled artisan, a stringer and chipper in a piano factory (chipping, if you care to be told, is the tuning a piano gets before its action is put in). One would hardly have predicted then, considering the man's energy and intelligence, that he would remain just that, go on working at the same bench for thirty-five years. But, as I have said, his energy found its main outlet in emotional religion.

Their first child, born in 1886, was a girl whom they named Sarah.

Anthony came two years later and for twelve years there were no more.

Then came the late baby, whom they appropriately named Benjamin and allowed a somewhat milder bringing up than the iron rule the elder ones had been subjected to.

It was the dearest wish of David's life to make a preacher of Anthony and he must have got by way of answers to his prayers, signs which reconciled him to the sheer impossibility of this project. The boy's pa.s.sion for music manifested itself very early and with this David compromised by training him for the higher reaches of his own craft. He got employment for Anthony in the piano factory for a year or two after his graduation from high school and then sent him on for a liberal two years in a school in Boston where the best possible instruction in piano tuning was to be had.

Sarah was half-way through high school when her brother Benjamin was born and for two years after she graduated, her mother's ill health, the familiar breakdown of the middle forties, kept her at home. Then she defied her father and took a job in a down-town office. What he objected to, of course, was not her going to work but the use she made of the independence with which self-support provided her. The quarrel never came to a real break though often enough it looked like doing so, and except for the brief period of her marriage Sarah always lived at home.

When Anthony came back from Boston, he revolted, too. He had not been a prodigal; indeed, during his second year in the East, he had in one way or another, earned his own living and he had learned even beyond his father's hopes to tune pianos. But he did it at an incredibly small expense in time and energy. What his heart went into during those two years was the study of musical theory and composition, and, thanks to a special apt.i.tude which rose to the pitch of genius, he managed to make the comparatively meager training he could get in so short a time, suffice to give him the technical equipment he needed.

He came home armed, too, with a discovery. The discovery that a man not enslaved by a possessive sense, a man whose self-respect is not dependent upon the number of things he owns, a man able therefore to thumb his nose at all the maxims of success, occupies really a very strong position.

He didn't like the factory, though he gave it what he considered a fair trial. He didn't like the way they tuned pianos in a factory. The dead level of mechanical perfection which they insisted upon was a stupid affront to his ear. And, of course, the strict regimentation of life at home, the, once more, dead level of the plateau upon which life was supposed to be lived, was distasteful to one with a streak of the nomad and the adventurer in him.

Thanks to his discovery he was able to construct an alternative to a life like that. A skillful piano tuner could earn what money he needed anywhere and could earn enough in a diligent week to set him free, his simple wants provided for, for the rest of the month.

But even a wanderer needs a base, a point of departure for his wanderings, and his father's house could not be made to serve that purpose, so Anthony domiciled himself, after a long quest, in the half story above a little grocery just off North LaSalle Street and not far from the river.

It happened when Anthony had been living there a year or more that the grocer, with whom he was on the friendliest of terms, got, temporarily, into straits at precisely the time that Anthony had three hundred dollars. He had won a prize of that amount offered by a society for the encouragement of literature for the minor orchestral instruments, with a concerto for the French horn. The grocer offered his note for it, but Anthony thought of something better. He bought his room. It was to be his to live in, rent free, for as long as time endured.

He took a childlike pleasure in this lair of his. It acc.u.mulated his miscellaneous treasures like a small boy's pocket. He made a mystery of it. He never gave it as his address. Not even his family knew where it was, nor, more than vaguely, of its existence. The address he had given Paula was the one he gave every one else, his father's house out on the northwest side, just off Fullerton Avenue. This room, in a sense seldom attained, was his own. When he came back from France, the day Lucile saw him sitting on the bench in the park, he found it exactly--save for a heavy coating of dust--as he had left it, in 1917, when he went down to Camp Grant.

A good philosophy, so John Wollaston with a touch of envy had admitted--if you can make it work. Where it breaks down with most young men who set out so valiantly with it, is the point where one sees the only girl in the world and recognizes the imperious necessity of winning her, of holding out lures for her, of surrounding her, once won, with the setting her superlative worth demands. That this did not happen to Anthony March was due to the fact that the young woman he--not so much saw as gradually perceived, was his sister Sarah's friend, Jennie MacArthur.

Independence had been forced upon Jennie so early that she never was called upon to decide whether she liked it or not. She had an inquiring mind--perhaps experimental would be the better word for it--abundant self-confidence and a good stiff backbone. It was easy to make the mistake of thinking her hard. She was not a pretty woman, with her sandy hair and rather striking freckles, but she was well formed, she dressed always with that crisp cleanliness which is the extravagant standard of young women who work in good offices, and her voice had an attractive timbre.

To Sarah March (who, having fought for independence, was a little at a loss what to do with it) Jennie's experience and her rather interesting range of friends were a G.o.dsend. It was at one of Jennie's parties in the tiny pair of rooms where she lived alone that Sarah met Walter Davis, a mechanical draftsman by day and an ardent young Socialist by night, whom she afterward married.

On the other hand, the home which Sarah was sometimes rather dubious about the advantage of possessing, was to Jennie a delightful place to be a familiar visitor in. She liked old David, who was a surprisingly charming person when he had no authority over you, she liked Mrs. March, she adored little Ben--young Ben he was now rapidly growing up to be--and finally, she began taking an interest which eventually outweighed all the rest, in the family black sheep, Anthony.

The intimacy between them which began around the time of Sarah's marriage continued intermittently for nearly four years. It had not, indeed, been definitely broken off when he went into the army.

When the attraction faded as it had definitely begun to do some months before he went to Camp Grant, it left their friends.h.i.+p unimpaired, enriched on the contrary. He could talk to her more easily, confide his thoughts to her more freely than to any one else he knew.

This ability to be confided in and depended upon was one of her special talents. She had emerged, years before, from the crowded stenographers'

room in a big engineering concern into the private office of the chief.

He was an erratic genius, brilliant, irritable, exacting, tireless, all but impossible to maintain any consistent relation with but one of bitter enmity. He had about made up his mind that a fresh stenographer every morning was all he could hope for, when Jennie became his Scheherazade.

By the time the war broke out she was as indispensable to him as his hands. He had made her an officer of the company and paid her a salary of six thousand dollars a year, but she went on remembering his engagements, writing his letters and soothing the outraged feelings of his clients just as she had done in humbler days. She was, in the good, old-fas.h.i.+oned sense, his better half. Her amus.e.m.e.nt was the stock market and she played it cannily and with considerable success with his rather diabolic encouragement.

She was in New York when March got home, and he saw her for the first time since his return at his father's house on a Sunday morning more than a fortnight after the evening at the Wollastons' when Paula had sung his songs.

It was his first appearance anywhere since the afternoon in Novelli's studio when he had shown his opera to La Chaise and Paula. It had been agreed among them that with certain important changes, it would make an admirable vehicle for Paula's return to the operatic stage, and being a small affair from the producer's point of view, involving only one interior set, would be practicable for production during the summer at Ravinia in case the project for Paula's singing there went through. March had agreed to the changes and withdrawn into his stronghold over the grocery store with a determination not more than to come up for air until he had worried the thing into the shape they wanted.

He didn't know it was Sunday--having attributed the peacefulness he found pervading Fullerton Avenue to his own good conscience, a purely subjective phenomenon--until in the parlor of his father's house the sight of his brother Ben at the piano playing a soundless tune upon the tops of the keys, brought it home to him. When he inquired for the rest of the family, he learned that they were up-stairs getting ready for church.

"I hope," he said, with a grin at his younger brother, "that you aren't suffering from that old hebdomadal sore throat of yours."

"No, it's all right," Ben said, declining though to be amused. "I've got a gentleman's agreement with Sarah. Every other Sunday. Father's well enough satisfied now if he gets one of us. When they're all gone, I can slip out and buy a Sunday paper--jazz up the piano--have a regular orgy.

Every other Sunday! Gee, but it's fierce!"

"It's pathetic," March said. "Poor father! I don't suppose there's any help for it."

What struck him was the pitiful futility of his father's persistence in trying to impose his ways, his beliefs, his will, upon one so rapidly growing into full independence. The only sanction he had was a tradition daily becoming more fragile. He was in for the bitterness of another disappointment. That was what there was no help for.

Naturally young Ben didn't interpret it this way. "You're a nice one to talk like that," he said resentfully. "You've always done whatever you pleased."

"There's nothing to prevent you from doing the same thing if you look at it that way," Anthony observed. "You've got a job a man could live on, haven't you?"

"Live on? Fifteen dollars a week?"

And it may be admitted that Ben's sense of outrage had some foundation.

Years ago he had made up his small young mind that he would never work in the factory and he settled the question by getting himself a job in one of the piano salesrooms on Wabash Avenue. He wasn't precisely a salesman yet, he might perhaps have been spoken of by an unkind person as an office boy. But it was essential that he look like a salesman and act like a salesman, even in the matter of going to lunch. Some day soon, he was going to succeed in completing a sale before some one else came around and took it out of his hands, and he could then strike for a regular commission.

In the meantime with shoes and socks and s.h.i.+rts and neckties costing what they did, the suggestion that his salary was adequate to provide a bachelor's independence was fantastic and infuriating.

"Yes," he grumbled, "if I wanted to live in a rat hole and look like a tramp."

"My rat hole isn't so bad to live in," Anthony said, "but I'd be sorry to think I looked like a tramp. Do I, for a fact? I haven't had this suit on since I went into the army but I thought it looked all right."

"Oh, there's a big rip in the back of the shoulder where the padding is sticking through and your cuffs are frayed and your necktie's got a hole worn plumb through it where the wing of your collar rubs. You don't look like a tramp, of course, because you look clean and decent. It would be all right if you had to be like that. Only it's all so darned unnecessary. You could make good money if you'd only live like a regular person. Every day or two, somebody telephones to know if you aren't home and if there isn't some way we can get word to you, and it's kind of humiliating to have to say there isn't;--that we don't know where you are, haven't seen you for a week,--things like that. Of course, it's none of my business, but _I'm_ trying to pull out of this. I'd like to _be_ somebody someday and it would be a darn sight easier if you were trying to pull the same way instead of queering us all the time."

"Yes, I know," Anthony said thoughtfully. "But then there's Sarah on the other hand who can't forgive me for not putting on a red necktie and going Bolshevik. She'd have me put in my time trying to upset the bourgeois applecart altogether."

Ben grinned. "You ought to have heard her go on about the limousine that came and left a note for you the other day. Lady inside, chauffeur in a big fur coat. He came up to the door and asked whether you were home and left the note when Sarah said you weren't. Last Thursday, I think that was, just before supper. It's over there on the mantel, I guess. Sarah's afraid you're going to turn into a little brother of the rich."

"You tell Sarah," Anthony said off the top of his mind, the rest of it obviously engaged with the note,--"you tell Sarah there's nothing capitalistic about this. This is from her Doctor Wollaston's wife.

Certainly he earns his living if anybody does."

"Do they want their piano tuned again?" Ben asked.

"They don't mention it. They want to know if I'll come to lunch to-day.

I'm going to telephone to see if the invitation has expired."

"Good lord!" said Ben, "what have you got to wear? You can't go looking like that!" He meant to go into particulars when his brother came back from the telephone. But by that time he had something of nearer concern to himself to think about. Anthony found him staring out the window with an expression of the liveliest dismay.

"Oh, look who's here!" he said. "Can you beat it?"

Anthony looked and saw a little Ford coupe pulling up to the curb in front of the house; looked more closely at the person at the wheel and blinked.

"Jennie MacArthur! I thought she was still in New York. But what's she doing in that car?"

"Oh, she bought it last fall," Ben said. "She's getting rich. But can't you see what it means? She's coming around to see Sarah and that'll give Sarah an excuse for staying home from church. And that means that _I'll_ have to go."

"Don't worry about that," Anthony said, catching up his hat. "I'll head her off. Tell mother I'll be around to-night."

He intercepted Jennie at the car door, caught both her hands and pressed them tight, pushed her back into her seat as he did so, climbed in and sat down beside her. "I'm supposed to be saving Ben from the horrible fate of getting dragged to church when it's really Sarah's Sunday," he said. "If you'll just drive me around the corner, I'll explain."