1

DURING those first days Felix was trying hard—too hard!—to adjust himself to the world of reality: which after all has its kindly aspects.

The second day, Felix set out to explore Chicago. He had conned on the map and fixed in his mind the location of various streets; but as the points of the compass seemed, when once he had left Community House, to have got strangely twisted, these preliminary lessons were confusing rather than otherwise. After a brief survey of the loop district, he found himself looking from the steps of the public library, at Michigan Avenue, and beyond that the lake.

Summer had just turned into autumn; it was a cool day, and there was a light wind glancing over the surface of the water. Felix drew a long breath, and looked down the Avenue. Only a few people were on the sidewalk at that hour, but those few, with their air of infinite leisure, gave it the quality of a boulevard. Along the smooth roadway, still wet from a rain which had fallen during the night, a few motor cars skimmed by; and the people in them seemed to have that same air of careless light-hearted enjoyment of life. To the south, great clouds of white steam arose from beside a black shed which Felix guessed to be an Illinois Central station, and floated airily across to blur the outlines of the buildings that faced the Avenue. Felix stood still, wondering at himself. There was something odd about this: Chicago seemed beautiful! But doubtless that notion merely proved him to be what he was, a boy from the country.

Half ashamed of the thrill which he got out of this sight, he crossed to the building on the lake front which must be the Art Institute. But he found its pictures dull in comparison with the one he had left outside. He went back to the street, and sniffed eagerly at the wind from off the lake. He was experiencing a curious emotional release in the presence of its vastness. Not only himself, but Chicago, suddenly seemed small at its side. A city perched on the edge of a huge inland sea!

And then, convinced that his mood was an unrealistic one, he took the south side elevated to the stockyards.... In its gruesome realities he would find an antidote to this romanticism.

He was one of a long queue of visitors who were led from one building to another and lectured at and shown the sights. After an hour he had seen nothing sufficiently gruesome to be exciting, and he was becoming annoyed with his fellow-visitors. They stared at the workers with a kind of dull unimaginative pity. Felix resented those stares. He felt that he understood these workers; had he not been one of them himself in factory days at Port Royal! There was something indecent in this gaping and pointing. He dropped out of line and went away.

He had missed the great scene, still to come—the cattle-killing. But he reflected that he was a butcher’s son. This was merely a slaughter-house on a grand scale. He had nothing new to learn from the stockyards....

2

But he was inevitably depressed by his day of confused sight-seeing; the hugeness of the city had in the end made him feel useless and helpless. It was a relief to meet again at dinner the pleasant men and women residents of Community House who had been so gracious to him the evening before.

His shyness had lifted sufficiently the previous evening to let him engage in a lively argument. There had been something very gratifying to him in the way they listened to what he said—without agreement, to be sure, but on terms of interested equality. It had made him feel at home; and it was only afterward, in his room, that he had realized the duty of guarding himself against these easy reassurances. He told himself that these people were all engaged in trying to obscure the grim realities of life. But he must not let himself be deceived. Their friendliness was well-meant; but it had to be discounted.... It was all too well calculated to soothe a bruised egotism, to relax a mood of stern self-abasement—to make an impressionable young man forget that he was a mere unconsidered atom in a cruel chaos. This easy hospitality could not be the truth about Chicago. It was a mask, behind which the real Chicago hid its terrible, grim face....

The argument last night had been about literature and the way it was taught in the schools. Concerning school methods of dealing with poetry Felix had been particularly scornful. Tonight Blake took up the argument again, and Felix explained himself vigorously. Only those who could do a thing, he insisted, were capable of really understanding it; and it did not matter that they did it badly—so long as they thereby came to understand it creatively.

A red-haired young woman at the further end of the long table was the only one who appeared to take his arguments with any seriousness; at least he thought he saw approval in her eyes. The others, or so it seemed to him, were only politely amused at the intensity of his feelings on the subject. But when he had concluded his argument, the motherly-looking woman at the head of the table said, “Perhaps if Mr. Fay feels like that, he will be willing to undertake a class in English literature twice a week for us. Mr. Hays, who has had the class, is leaving town. You’ll have a chance, Mr. Fay, to try out your theories on twenty very interested young people—who I’m sure would be glad to learn to produce literature as well as to appreciate it. I think, myself, there’s something to your theory—though I don’t hold much by theories any more. I think a great deal depends on the enthusiasm with which they are carried out. I’m sure you will make an enthusiastic teacher—I only hope you won’t become too quickly discouraged. Do you think you’d like to try it?”

Gracious and even flattering as this offer was, yet the challenge in it rather staggered Felix. He had not expected to be called upon to prove the correctness of his theory in actual practice; he had never supposed that he would ever have the opportunity. Teaching was a province sacred to those who themselves had been elaborately taught—certainly not to be intruded upon by a youth who had never finished high school! Yet, if he believed in his own theory, he ought to be willing to put it to the test. He ought to take up this challenge. But did he dare risk a humiliating failure? And then his eyes met those of the red-haired girl down at the other end of the table; and he knew that she expected him to do it.

“Thank you for the chance,” he said. “I’ll be glad to.”

The talk swept on to other things, leaving him a little dazed. He had been quite casually accepted as one whose abilities might be of value; he had astonishingly become a part of this institution; and upon no false pretences—for in his argument he had candidly exposed the deficiencies of his formal schooling. These people were willing to try him out. And they went on talking as though nothing strange had occurred.... The loneliness and helplessness in which he had been submerged by his day of sight-seeing, ebbed away.

“Won’t you tell me something more about your idea? It’s very interesting to me, because I’m in charge of a group of children who are doing plays.”

The red-haired girl was speaking to him as they drifted out of the dining-room. She was a slender young person, of about twenty-five years, with an interestedly impersonal manner. She turned to a young man at her other side, an affected-looking young man, with a wide black ribbon depending from his nose-glasses, and said: “Paul, is your model set ready? Let us have a private view of it.”

“Charmed,” the young man replied, in a mincing accent. Felix disliked him at once.

“Paul,” the red-haired girl explained, turning back to Felix, “is our scenic genius. He makes the most wonderful little sets out of painted cardboard, and then we go and spoil them trying to carry them out in our theatre. He won’t even come and look at them when they’re finished—don’t you think that’s unkind?”

“Oh, please don’t say that, Miss Prentiss!” the young man protested, still in that tone which seemed to Felix unnatural and “prissy.” At the foot of the wide stairs he halted, and put a finger to his lips. “I don’t know really whether I ought to show you the set—just yet. It’s not quite—”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,” the girl said firmly, and proceeded up the stairs. To Felix she continued over her shoulder: “It’s a set for our ‘Prince and Pauper’. I’m mad to see what it’s like. Paul ought to do something quite stunning with it.”

“But I’ve only got one scene done, you know,” Paul objected. “And even that’s uncertain, you understand; the idea for the whole thing—” he waved his hands helplessly; Felix noted that they were graceful hands and beautifully manicured—“hasn’t quite come yet!”

He paused again, doubtfully, but the girl ran relentlessly up the stairs. On the top floor she stopped in front of a door. “Now don’t make any excuses, Paul, but just let us in.”

Paul obediently opened the door, snapped on the lights, and they entered a room of which the walls were covered with tattered Persian rugs, the shelves sprinkled with curious bronze figures, and the floor, along one wall, lined with a row of books. In the centre of the room was a drawing-table, littered with scraps of gold and silver paper, coloured crayons, and tiny bottles of coloured inks. In the corner with a wire running down from the electric fixture in the ceiling, was a pot of glue. Felix walked over to the wall, glanced down at the row of books on the floor, and noted a set of the Yellow Book and an odd volume of the Savoy.

Paul had taken up a small model of a stage-set and was looking at it anxiously.

“Oh,” the girl cried, “let me see!”

He put it into her hands, sat down at the drawing-table, jumped up and turned on the current under his pot of glue, and sat down again, intent upon a pasteboard figure which he had taken from the tiny stage.

“Dear me, this is all wrong,” he said in distress, stripping the tinsel from the figure. “How could I?”

“Look,” the girl said to Felix, beckoning him with her head. “This is the palace scene. See—”

“Do take it over to your room to explain it,” Paul said petulantly. “You distract me.”

“Come,” said the girl, and they entered the room on the other side of the hall. But in a moment Paul had followed them anxiously. “I must tell you that the colours here are not right,” he said, hovering over the model, which the girl had set down on her table. “No blues—no blues at all! blues go in the next scene. Nothing but red and gold and black. And this arch will be different—more sombre. The throne higher—dwarfing the human figures. Very high—twenty inches, an inch to the foot, twenty feet high!”

“But Paul,” said the girl, “you know our proscenium-arch is only twelve feet high!”

“I can’t help that, my dear young woman,” the young man replied with hauteur. “I know well enough that you’ll ruin my beautiful scene. But in my mind—Oh, pewter platter!” His voice, uttering this preposterous exclamation, had become shrill, and he dashed to the door. “My glue-pot!” he cried, and disappeared.

The girl sat down and began to laugh. “Isn’t he funny?” she said.

“Funny?” Felix echoed dubiously.

“But he does make nice stage-pictures anyway,” she said.

Felix looked at the model. “But are these airs natural to him, or is he just putting them on to impress people? Where is he from?”

“Guess!”

Felix thought he saw a light. “London?”

The girl laughed again. “Arkansas,” she said.

“What!”

“Yes, just as he is now, from Arkansas—glasses, accent, Yellow Book and everything. I’ve a kind of notion why it is, if you’d like to hear it.”

“I would.”

“Then make yourself comfortable.” She motioned toward the couch, which with its pillows was the only suggestion of ease in her rather bare and workmanlike room; a writing-table, a typewriter on its stand, and a long shelf of books, gave it an air quite different from the room across the hall. She drew over a chair for herself in front of the couch.

“Don’t blame him,” she said. “We’re all a little like that—I mean, queer. I’m sure I seem quite as queer as that to my family down in Springfield. If you live in Arkansas, and want to make lovely stage-pictures, you are a freak; or you become one trying to keep from being dull like everybody else. It’s inevitable.”

“You frighten me,” Felix said soberly. “Am I a freak? I suppose I am—but somehow I don’t like the idea.”

“Do you want to make a million dollars?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then of course you’re a freak.” She laughed cheerfully.

“And what does Chicago think of—of us?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s all right. Chicago is beginning to realize that it needs us. Chicago wants to be a metropolis. And all the stockyards in the world won’t make a metropolis. Enough of us, given a free-hand—can. And Chicago knows it. Just now we are at a premium here. We can be as crazy as we like!”

“I wonder?”

“You ought to have known the scenic genius who preceded Paul. Dick Bernitz, his name was. He was a wild one. Gloom—despair—and, as it turned out, drugs. He came from Nevada. He affected evening clothes—wanted to wear them all day long, in fact! Baudelaire was his god. We were too tame for him. He left us, and starved and froze somewhere in the slums—still in his evening clothes; and got pneumonia and died. And Dick was—just a nice boy who wanted to do beautiful pictures and poems. Nevada did that to him.”

“But—why blame Nevada?”

“His father was in real-estate. He wanted Dick to sell real-estate.”

“Well, and after all, why not? One must do something ordinary—to make a living.”

“Why didn’t you do something ordinary? Why did you come to Chicago?”

Felix was silent.

“I’ve kind of got you bothered, haven’t I?” said the girl maliciously.

“You’ve given me something to think about.” He rose.

“But I haven’t asked you yet what I was going to. Will you do a play for us?”

“I can’t do plays!”

“Oh, yes, you can. You write poetry and stories and things, don’t you?”

“Do I give myself away as plainly as that?”

The girl laughed. “You ought to know that an institution like this is a gathering place for idealists of all sorts and kinds. I know the chief varieties, and you aren’t any of the sociological sorts, so you must be one of the artist kind. Besides, didn’t I hear you talk at dinner?”

Felix grinned shamefacedly. “I didn’t disguise myself very well,” he admitted. “But anyway—”

He walked impatiently across the little room. His mind was in a state of strange upheaval. All his ideas about Chicago and himself were being upset. He ought not to listen to this girl. He must not let her confuse his plans. In particular he must not become interested in writing. He had put all that aside for the present.

His lips twisted in an uneasy grimace. Why, at this moment, when his mind must be braced to meet the impact of realities, should he let himself be drugged with the opium of dreams?

Already, at her mere word, the old numbing desire had come in a new guise—a vague, feverish yearning toward the puppet-world of the stage: fascinating half-formed ideas for plays rose like bubbles in his mind.

It was a feeling like home-sickness.

He must not indulge it. Of course, it would be fun to write a play for this girl, and help invent scenery and costumes for it. But that was not what he had come to Chicago for. He must put aside all enthusiasms which had no relation to the world of work-a-day reality. The very fact that he was so much interested in the idea proved that it was wrong....

He saw now that it was foolish to have ever come to this place—this refuge for idealists and dreamers. The thought of hunting up a new lodging that night suggested itself; but of course it would be hard to find another place half so comfortable—and he must consider his very limited finances....

“Anyway,” he said, pausing in front of the girl, “I won’t write you a play!”

“Oh, yes you will!” she said.

A knock, and the door burst open, and Paul rushed in with a new-made cardboard figure, dressed in gold tinsel. “At last!” he cried, holding it up. “This will be the key-note of the play!”

“Splendid!” cried the girl, glancing at it. “And now I’m going to take Mr. Fay down and show him our theatre.”

As they went out, Felix noted on her door a card which revealed that her first name was Rose-Ann. It seemed a singularly fitting name for her, somehow.