The Second Generation. David Graham Phillips
Schulze reappeared, disposed instruments and tubes upon a table. "I never ask my patients questions," he said, as he began to examine Hiram's chest. "I lay 'em out here and go over 'em inch by inch. I find all the weak spots, both those that are crying out and those worse ones that don't. I never ask a man what's the matter; I tell him. And my patients, and all the fools in this town, think I'm in league with the devil. A doctor who finds out what's the matter with a man Providence is trying to lay in the grave—what can it be but the devil?"
He had reached his subject; as he worked he talked it—religion, its folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmanship. As the physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel better—not physically better, but that mental relief which a courageous man feels when the peril he is facing is stripped of the mystery that made it a terror. After perhaps three quarters of an hour, Schulze withdrew to the laboratory, saying: "That's all. You may dress."
Hiram dressed, seated himself. By chance he was opposite a huge image from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X.
"There!" said Schulze, looking up. "That's the best I can do for you."
"What's the matter with me?"
"You wouldn't know if I told you."
"Is it serious?"
"In this world everything is serious—and nothing."
"Will I die?"
Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin—an ensemble of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal.
"Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us."
"Tell me!" Hiram commanded. "Will I die soon?"
Schulze reflected, rubbing his red-button nose with his stubby fingers.
When he spoke, his voice had a sad gentleness. "You can bear hearing it.
You have the right to know." He leaned back, paused, said in a low tone:
"Put your house in order, Mr. Ranger."
Hiram's steadfast gray eyes met bravely the eyes of the man who had just read him his death warrant. A long pause; then Hiram said "Thank you," in his quiet, calm way.
He took the prescriptions, went out into the street. It looked strange to him; he felt like a stranger in that town where he had spent half a century—felt like a temporary tenant of that vast, strong body of his which until now had seemed himself. And he—or was it the stranger within him?—kept repeating: "Put your house in order. Put your house in order."
CHAPTER II
OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES
At the second turning Arthur rounded the tandem out of Jefferson Street into Willow with a skill that delighted both him and his sister. "But why go that way?" said she. "Why not through Monroe street? I'm sure the horses would behave."
"Better not risk it," replied Arthur, showing that he, too, had had, but had rejected, the temptation to parade the crowded part of town. "Even if the horses didn't act up, the people might, they're such jays."
Adelaide's estimate of what she and her brother had acquired in the East was as high as was his, and she had the same unflattering opinion of those who lacked it. But it ruffled her to hear him call the home folks jays—just as it would have ruffled him had she been the one to make the slighting remark. "If you invite people's opinion," said she, "you've no right to sneer at them because they don't say what you wanted."
"But I'm not driving for show if you are," he retorted, with a testiness that was confession.
"Don't be silly," was her answer. "You know you wouldn't take all this trouble on a desert island."
"Of course not," he admitted, "but I don't care for the opinion of any but those capable of appreciating."
"And those capable of appreciating are only those who approve," teased
Adelaide. "Why drive tandem among these 'jays?'"
"To keep my hand in," replied he; and his adroit escape restored his good humor.
"I wish I were as free from vanity as you are, Arthur, dear," said she.
"You're just as fond of making a sensation as I am," replied he. "And, my eye, Del! but you do know how." This with an admiring glance at her most becoming hat with its great, gracefully draped chiffon veil, and at her dazzling white dust-coat with its deep blue facings that matched her eyes.
She laughed. "Just wait till you see my new dresses—and hats."
"Another shock for your poor father."
"Shock of joy."
"Yes," assented Arthur, rather glumly; "he'll take anything off you.
But when I—"
"It's no compliment to me," she cut in, the prompter to admit the truth because it would make him feel better. "He thinks I'm 'only a woman,' fit for nothing but to look pretty as long as I'm a girl, and then to devote myself to a husband and children, without any life or even ideas of my own."
"Mother always seems cheerful enough," said Arthur. His content with the changed conditions which the prosperity and easy-going generosity of the elder generation were making for the younger generation ended at his own sex. The new woman—idle and frivolous, ignorant of all useful things, fit only for the show side of life and caring only for it, discontented with everybody but her own selfish self—Arthur had a reputation among his friends for his gloomy view of the American woman and for his courage in expressing it.
"You are so narrow-minded, Artie!" his sister exclaimed impatiently. "Mother was brought up very differently from the way she and father have brought me up—"
"Have let you bring yourself up."
"No matter; I am different."
"But what would you do? What can a woman do?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "But I do know I hate a humdrum life." There was the glint of the Ranger will in her eyes as she added: "Furthermore, I shan't stand for it."
He looked at her enviously. "You'll be free in another year," he said. "You and Ross Whitney will marry, and you'll have a big house in Chicago and can do what you please and go where you please."
"Not if Ross should turn out to be the sort of man you are."
He laughed. "I can see Ross—or any man—trying to manage you! You've got too much of father in you."
"But I'll be dependent until—" Adelaide paused, then added a satisfactorily vague, "for a long time. Father won't give me anything. How furious he'd be at the very suggestion of dowry. Parents out here don't appreciate that conditions have changed and that it's necessary nowadays for a woman to be independent of her husband."
Arthur compressed his lips, to help him refrain from comment. But he felt so strongly on the subject