Chapter XIV Clover’s Invitation
Those who wished to continue to point out the defects in Chicago and her Fair had ample opportunity through a large part of the month of May. It was indeed Chicago’s Fair then; no one else claimed it. The exhibits were not all in place, the electric effects were not complete, the weather was cold, Orientals had to wear American overcoats above their white gowns, and they sneezed lugubriously under their turbans. The pleasantest spots in the White City at that season were the open fires in the dignified or dainty club-houses known as State buildings. Only the Eskimos were really comfortable, and some of those poor women wished the incoming and outgoing visitor would not allow the northeast wind continuous entrance to their homes.
But the month was nearly out by the time Miss Berry arrived in Chicago. It was the beginning of that marvelous summer whose weather every Chicagoan will always proudly consider an exhibit worthy to be ranked with any wonder it shone upon. The natural elements, like the human ones, gradually admitted that the Columbian Exposition was not only a worthy but an overwhelming success, and in place of buffeting wind and destructive storm, sent week after week a warm blue sky and a cool east breeze to add the crowning charm to the White City’s bewildering loveliness.
Had the human element been as prompt in succumbing, thousands of those who strove in the madding crowd of October might have reveled instead in the fresh beauty of June; but the general confidence had not yet been gained. The same journal which had pictured the vulgar young city vociferating for the World’s Fair bouquet had not yet declared that it took off its hat to Chicago, adding that all other shows bore the relation to the Columbian Exposition which Jersey City did to Imperial Rome. A comparatively small army of explorers came from the East as yet, to spy out the land and carry back reassuring reports to their skeptical or timid friends.
Miss Berry, in her comfortable, novel quarters, was from the first charmed with her surroundings. The bright bracing air, the frequent tally-ho coaches that passed the door, their scarlet-coated buglers piping with cheerful unsteadiness, the expanse of tumbling blue-green water that constantly gladdened her eyes, all seemed as festive as the fine house which was her temporary home. She enjoyed the playing of the orchestra every morning on the piazza of an adjacent hotel, and was soon able to hum “After the Ball,” that unavoidable, omnipresent accompaniment of the World’s Fair summer.
Only one thing puzzled her for the first few days after her arrival, and this perplexity she set at rest one cool evening, by watching her opportunity and walking clandestinely to the sands at the back of the Chicago Beach Hotel. Here she stooped to the water’s edge, dipped her finger in an incoming wave and transferred it to her mouth. Tasting it critically, she looked thoughtful, and after a moment repeated the operation.
“I suppose I’ve got to believe it,” she murmured, rising. “’T ain’t salt.”
The more cultivated and traveled one was, the more wonderful and beautiful the White City seemed to him. Upon a woman of Miss Berry’s narrow worldly experience, its unique characteristics dawned but slowly. For some weeks it is quite certain that the housekeeping duties which Clover at once placed in her hands were more attractive to the good woman than the marvels which lay so near her. She was not insensible to the privilege of being within walking distance of Jackson Park, and now and then she made pilgrimages thither.
“It’s somethin’ like knowin’ there’s a big plum puddin’ standin’ near by, and that whenever I want to, I can go and pull out a plum;” she said; “but law! it would take a whole lifetime to see what they’ve got down there, and every time I go I realize it more.”
Clover carried out her hospitable intention as soon as Aunt Love was fairly domesticated; and one morning a letter from her was handed to Mrs. Page at her breakfast-table.
Her family had just been talking about the World’s Fair, and Jack had been answering questions concerning the best locality in which to secure accommodations.
“There is nothing like having an ardent Chicagoan in the house to make one attend to these matters in time,” remarked Mrs. Page.
“I am very much afraid you will find you are not in time,” returned Jack discouragingly. His advice, given a couple of months before, had not been heeded, and he now proceeded to state a series of facts and figures which were rather appalling.
“You will have to do something about it, Jack,” remarked Mrs. Page’s husband, who is not so designated on account of any inferiority. He was a stout, sandy-haired individual with a good digestion and disposition, who was accustomed to allow Hilda and Gorham to think for him in all matters not related to the wholesale dry-goods business in which he was engaged. “You say we ought to see the Exposition,” he went on placidly, “and it is your affair, in the interests of hospitality, to tell us where in—Chicago we can find the proper quarters.”
“I impressed upon you some time ago that you ought to attend to it,” returned Jack rather stiffly. The air of lightness and condescension with which his cousin always treated the subject of the Fair grated upon him.
“Yes, he did, you know, Robert,” declared Mrs. Page, always inclining, like most of Jack’s feminine friends, to side with him.
It was at this juncture that the arrival of the mail created a diversion, and Hilda opened Clover’s letter.
She glanced down its pages. “Why, how lovely! How kind!” she ejaculated from time to time. “Listen to this. You are all interested. It is from Mrs. Van Tassel.”
MY DEAR MRS. PAGE,—I have been wishing for some days to find the right moment in which to thank you for your kindness both to Aunt Love and me in rendering her so much assistance in coming to us. She seems happy and at home already. I am the more pleased to have secured her that it makes it easy for me, in the absence of my old housekeeper, to entertain guests during the coming eventful summer. I hope you and your husband have not already committed yourselves to another plan for seeing the Fair, for our house is most conveniently situated, and my sister and I would be pleased to have you come to us. Will you extend my invitation to your brother as well? As for Jack, it is not necessary, I am sure, for me to write a separate invitation to him. His room is ready for him, and I count upon his taking possession of it for as long a time as he can make it convenient. Indeed, I wish you all four to choose your own times and seasons for coming, for I have no plan to entertain any one else, and I beg you to consider the house always open to you, and a sincere welcome always ready.
Mildred wishes me to send you her love, and we both hope soon to receive favorable word of your plans. Cordially yours,
CLOVER B. VAN TASSEL.
Mrs. Page, upon finishing, let her pleased gaze rove from one to another of her three companions. Jack’s face was eager and happy, Gorham’s interested, but her husband was the first to speak.
“I foresee that I am going to fall in love with that woman,” he remarked, breaking open his third muffin and handing his cup to the maid for a second cup of coffee. “That is a charming letter.”
“Just an ordinary Chicago production,” said Jack exultantly. “What do you say, old Reliable?” he added, turning toward Gorham.
“We are in great luck,” returned the latter.
“Now, I will admit,” said Jack, “that I have been trying to provide for us all at the Chicago Beach; but I will cease my struggles gratefully.”
“When do you want to go, Hilda?” asked Robert Page.
“When can you go, is a more pertinent question,” she answered.
“July will, I suppose, be the best time. Would it be heresy, Jack, to inquire if the thermometer in Chicago rises above sixty-five degrees in July? I have understood that it does.”
“I know of no city in the country where there is no hot weather in summer,” returned Jack shortly. “Chicago is, however, a summer resort.”
“I suppose you mean a place where summer resorts. That is what I have heard.”
“Perhaps you would better not risk your life there.”
“Tut, tut, my boy. I am going to see the writer of that whole-souled letter.”
Jack, who had already excused himself from the table, here left the room without deigning a reply, and Mrs. Page immediately looked toward her brother.
“What do you think, Gorham? Of course this is a delightful invitation, but ought we to accept it?”
“I don’t quite see your objection,” he answered.
“It is charming of Mrs. Van Tassel, but it is so evidently a sense of duty which impels her to give such an invitation to a mere acquaintance like me, and a stranger like Robert.”
“Look here,” remarked the latter, looking up vaguely. “I don’t think I want any flaws picked in that invitation.”
“Now you keep still, Robert, like a dear. You don’t know her at all, and Gorham does. She is just doing this in Uncle Richard’s name; I know it, and I am not willing to impose upon her.”
“May I see the letter once again?” asked Gorham.
“Certainly;” Mrs. Page handed it to him with alacrity. He read it through from beginning to end. It sounded like Clover. He could hear her pleasant voice in every phrase.
“She is a thoughtful, deliberate sort of person,” he said as he handed the letter back. “Whatever her motive is, it is a sufficient one, and one thing that would influence me to advise you to accept is the effect on Jack. Their relations have been a little strained, and I think it would make things still pleasanter than they are now, if Mrs. Van Tassel and Miss Bryant were to become better acquainted with his people.”
“Yes, that is what I think,” remarked Mr. Page; but his wife frowned upon him.
“You, and Robert, and Jack, go,” continued Gorham. “I won’t. That would be rather too much of a good thing; but I can get a room at the Beach Hotel, and that is near by. I propose to spend a good deal of time at the Fair. I want to go through it with some degree of thoroughness. Of course no one will really see half of it. I understand that, giving one minute to each exhibit, it is estimated that it would take thirty-two years for a man to get around.”
His brother groaned. He was stout and not energetic save in the matter of wholesale dry-goods.
“Thank Heaven it won’t take thirty-two years to see Mrs. Van Tassel,” he remarked devoutly.
There were no doubts or scruples in Jack’s mind as to accepting his invitation, at least for the present. Indeed, this reconciliation between himself and the Bryants, as he still often found himself calling his old friends, altered the whole trend of his life. He felt a new satisfaction in living; a new desire for home; a willingness which amounted to necessity to shake the dust of Boston from his feet, and once more to make of Chicago a permanent abiding-place. His sense of loneliness, an aching one still at times, abated. His own place waited for him. The friendship of these cousins, kind and helpful in their way, could never be to him like that of those girls, the only sisters he had ever known, who had so long divided with him his father’s affection and care. He was going home. It was the first sensation of the sort that he had had for years.
He did not try to conceal his satisfaction from Mrs. Page when he said to her his au revoir. He expressed sincere gratitude for her kindness and hospitality, but she saw that he was not sorry to have no plan for returning to Boston, and felt a little piqued despite Jack’s enthusiasm over the plan which would soon make them a reunited family party.
“I have not seen Jack so gay since Uncle Richard died,” she said that night to Gorham.
“No. His alienation from Mrs. Van Tassel and her sister has worried him a good deal, I know,” responded Page. “This final burial of the hatchet must be a great relief to a fellow so sensitive as Jack is.”
But this explanation was not sufficient to account to Mrs. Page for Van Tassel’s jubilant spirits. He had not sprung up three stairs at a time, and whistled and sung over his packing, just because of obtaining the forgiveness of two young women whose feelings he had outraged.
“Men are stupid,” she soliloquized. “I know that Jack is in love.”
With this truly feminine solution of her cousin’s conduct she was the better satisfied because she would so soon have opportunity of verifying her own perspicacity by ocular proof. But her diagnosis would have been a surprise to Jack. No lover-like haste mingled with the impatience he felt at the lateness of his train on the June afternoon when he reached Chicago; and when finally he found himself on the familiar home street, even its unfamiliarity seemed representative of the pleasant new state of things which had come into his life. His flying visit during the bad weather of six weeks before had not shown the old neighborhood in its present finished condition.
Van Tassel smiled as a coach and six rattled by him, the notes of its “mellow horn” breaking in impertinently upon the strains of an orchestra at the adjacent fashionable hotel. “Can this be quiet little Hyde Park?” he asked himself.
How the long June evenings of his boyhood came back to him as he sauntered down the changed street! How the thrushes used to sing here at this hour! How the boys and girls who could muster anything to navigate, from a scow to a trim canoe or sailboat, used to launch their craft, early in these long evenings, and sometimes lashing the boats together, a dozen in a row, would drift over the rocking waves and sing by the hour beneath a moon which electricity had not yet forced out of a long-established business!
The wild shore was changed, cultivated, and trimmed into order according to fashion now, like the young people who once disported over it in free country fashion.
Jack could not whistle the scrap from “Carmen” against the insistent rhythm of “After the Ball” which was being performed by a uniformed functionary from the hotel who passed him under the old familiar elms.
But Clover was on the piazza to meet him, a gracious genius of home in her blue gown, with the welcoming light in her eyes.
“I told you not to stay for me,” said Jack, coming up the steps, his hat in his hand.
“I know,” returned Clover, looking down into his happy, handsome face. “I stayed for my own sake as well as yours. I have been at the Fair all day, and did not feel like going down this evening. Mildred went from town with the Ogdens on their drag to take supper in Old Vienna. She wished me to give you an extra shake of the hand for her.”
“Thank you, Clover,” he answered, and he held her hand a moment as they interchanged a look that had in it reminiscence, but reminiscence from which all bitterness was gone. The sweet summer air seemed throbbing with their love for him with whom every part of this home was connected.
Miss Berry appeared at the house door. She started at the pretty tableau she saw, and the pure white Christmas when she pleaded for this woman with a heart-sore man passed like a vision across the fair June scene.
She would have withdrawn, but Van Tassel saw her. “How do you do, Aunt Love?” he said, and then she came forward to return his cordial greeting.
“Isn’t this a queer thing, for me to be in Chicago, Mr. Jack?”
“It is just as it should be,” he returned. “Now when we get Gorham and Mr. and Mrs. Page here, we shall be a complete party.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Page promise me July,” said Clover, “but your cousin Gorham seems to think he would better stay at the hotel. We won’t quarrel with him at this distance.” She smiled. “Well, Jack, will you go upstairs? Is it to be hammock or Fair this evening?”
“I can scarcely wait till to-morrow for the Fair, yet I don’t like to leave you at once.”
“Don’t mind that. I should enjoy seeing your first view, and should have saved myself for to-night except that I could not escape personally conducting a friend to-day who was very kind to us last year.”
“Come in and eat something first, Mr. Jack,” said Miss Berry, so anxiously that Van Tassel laughed.
“I am sure, Aunt Love, if I have the good luck to meet you in heaven, the first thing you will do will be to urge upon me some manna or angel’s food, or whatever may be on the bill of fare.”
“Hush, child. Come straight in, for daylight is precious.”
“Thank you, but I knew that, and so I took lunch in the train. I expected only to carom on the house as it were, and then make a bee-line for the great show. We did have the first view of it together, Clover, you know.”
The dimple dipped in Clover’s cheek just as of old. “It will seem different to you to-night,” she answered. “That was impressive and solemn; but now— No, I won’t be so foolish as to try to describe what is incomparable. I will only say, Go. You will be grateful for whatever feeble standards of comparison you have gained by travel.”