The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long, shabbily covered series of platforms sheds having only roofs and amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam, and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal Street and hailed a waiting cab one of a long line of vehicles that bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as the most important hotel the one with the most social significance and thither he asked to be driven. On the way he studied these streets as in the matter of art he would have studied a picture. The little yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at their throats, touched him. They were flimsy affairs, these cars, merely highly varnished kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and glass stuck about them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if the city grew. Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even more than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than stock-organization he loved the thought of streetcars and the vast manipulative life it suggested.
Chapter II
A Reconnoiter
The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.
From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California and the Rockies[7], his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here was already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him the Hun[8], the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian seeking his homely colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race.
Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the romantic adventurer par excellence[9]. A city with but a handful of the native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraff of a thousand towns. Flaring were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the banjos, zithers, mandolins of the so-called gin-mill; all the dreams and the brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (and rejoice they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West.
The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood sought out was the president of the Lake City National Bank, the largest financial organization in the city, with deposits of over fourteen million dollars. It was located in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or two from his hotel.
Find out who that man is, ordered Mr. Judah Addison, the president of the bank, on seeing him enter the presidents private waiting-room.
Mr. Addisons office was so arranged with glass windows that he could, by craning his neck, see all who entered his reception-room before they saw him, and he had been struck by Cowperwoods face and force. Long familiarity with the banking world and with great affairs generally had given a rich finish to the ease and force which the latter naturally possessed. He looked strangely replete for a man of thirty-six suave, steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome. They were wonderful eyes, soft and spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on the instant could harden and flash lightning. Deceptive eyes, unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and conditions of life.
The secretary addressed came back with Cowperwoods letter of introduction, and immediately Cowperwood followed.
Mr. Addison instinctively arose a thing he did not always do. Im pleased to meet you, Mr. Cowperwood, he said, politely. I saw you come in just now. You see how I keep my windows here, so as to spy out the country. Sit down. You wouldnt like an apple, would you? He opened a left-hand drawer, producing several polished red wine-saps, one of which he held out. I always eat one about this time in the morning.
Thank you, no, replied Cowperwood, pleasantly, estimating as he did so his hosts temperament and mental caliber. I never eat between meals, but I appreciate your kindness. I am just passing through Chicago, and I thought I would present this letter now rather than later. I thought you might tell me a little about the city from an investment point of view.
As Cowperwood talked, Addison, a short, heavy, rubicund man with grayish-brown sideburns extending to his ear-lobes and hard, bright, twinkling gray eyes a proud, happy, self-sufficient man munched his apple and contemplated Cowperwood. As is so often the case in life, he frequently liked or disliked people on sight, and he prided himself on his judgment of men. Almost foolishly, for one so conservative, he was taken with Cowperwood[10] a man immensely his superior not because of the Drexel letter, which spoke of the latters undoubted financial genius and the advantage it would be to Chicago to have him settle there, but because of the swimming wonder of his eyes. Cowperwoods personality, while maintaining an unbroken outward reserve, breathed a tremendous humanness which touched his fellow-banker. Both men were in their way walking enigmas, the Philadelphian far the subtler of the two. Addison was ostensibly a church-member, a model citizen; he represented a point of view to which Cowperwood would never have stooped. Both men were ruthless after their fashion, avid of a physical life; but Addison was the weaker in that he was still afraid very much afraid of what life might do to him. The man before him had no sense of fear. Addison contributed judiciously to charity, subscribed outwardly to a dull social routine, pretended to love his wife, of whom he was weary, and took his human pleasure secretly. The man before him subscribed to nothing, refused to talk save to intimates, whom he controlled spiritually, and did as he pleased.
Why, Ill tell you, Mr. Cowperwood, Addison replied. We people out here in Chicago think so well of ourselves that sometimes were afraid to say all we think for fear of appearing a little extravagant. Were like the youngest son in the family that knows he can lick all the others, but doesnt want to do it not just yet. Were not as handsome as we might be did you ever see a growing boy that was? but were absolutely sure that were going to be. Our pants and shoes and coat and hat get too small for us every six months, and so we dont look very fashionable, but there are big, strong, hard muscles and bones underneath, Mr. Cowperwood, as youll discover when you get to looking around. Then you wont mind the clothes so much.