Part 12 (1/2)

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.”