When Witherspoon gathered up the lines and with the whip touched one of the horses, both jumped as though startled by the same impulse.
"There's grace for you," said Witherspoon. "Look how they plant their fore feet."
Henry did not answer. He was looking back at a palace, his home; and he, too, was touched with a whip—the thrilling whip of pride. It lasted but a moment. His memory threw up a home for the friendless, and upon a background of hunger, squalor and wretchedness his fancy flashed the picture of an Italian hag, crooning and toothless.
"We'll turn into Michigan here," said the merchant. "Isn't this a great thoroughfare? Yonder is where we lived before we built our new house. Just think what this will be when these elms are old." They sped along the smooth drive. "Ho, boys! Business is creeping out this way, and that is the reason I got over on Prairie. See, that man has turned his residence into a sort of store. A little farther along you will see fashionable humbuggery of all sorts. These are women fakes along here. Ho, boys, ho! There's where old man Colton lives. We'll meet him at the store. In the Colossus Company he is next to me. Smart old fellow, but he worked many years in the hammer-and-tongs way, and he probably never would have done much if he hadn't been shoved. Ho, boys, ho! People ought to be arrested for piling brick in the street this way. Colton was always afraid of venturing; shuddered at the thought of risking his money; wanted it where he could lay his hands on it at any time. Brooks, his son-in-law, is a sort of general manager over our entire establishment, and he is one of the most active and useful men I ever saw—bright, quick, characteristically American. I think you'll like him. That place over there"—cutting his whip toward an old frame house scalloped and corniced in fantastic flimsiness—"was sold the other day at about thirty per cent more than it would have brought a few years ago."
They turned into another street and were taken up, it seemed, by the swift trade currents that swirl at morning, rush through the noon, glide past the evening and rest for a time in the semi-calm of midnight. Chicago has begun to set the pace of a nervous nation's progress. It is a city whose growth has proved a fatal example to many an overweaning town. Materialistic, it holds no theory that points not to great results; adventurous, it has small patience with methods that slowness alone has stamped as legitimate. Worshiping a deification of real estate, and with a rude aristocracy building upon the blood of the sow and the tallow of the bull, its atmosphere discourages one artist while inviting another to rake up the showered rewards of a "boom" patronage. Feeling that naught but sleepiness and sloth should be censured, it resents even a kindly criticism. Quick to recognize the feasibility of a scheme; giving money, but holding time as a sacred inheritance. It is a re-gathering of the forces that peopled America and then made her great among nations; a mighty community with a growing literary force and with its culture and its real love for the beautiful largely confined to the poor in purse; grand in a thousand respects; with its history glaring upon the black sky of night; with the finest boulevards in America and the filthiest alleys—a giant in need of a bath.
The Colossus stood as a towering island with "a tide in the affairs of men" sweeping past. And it seemed to Henry that the buggy was cast ashore as a piece of driftwood that touches land and finds a lodgment. At an earlier day, and not so long ago either, the flaw of unconscious irony might have been picked in the name Colossus, but now the establishment, covering almost a block and rising story upon story, filled in the outlines of its pretentious christening.
"Tap, tap, tap—cash, 46; tap, tap—cash, 63," was the leading strain in this din of extensive barter and petty transaction. The Colossus boasted that it could meet every commercial demand; supply a sewing-machine needle or set up a saw-mill; receipt for gas bills and water rates or fit out a general store. Under one roof it held the resources of a city. Henry was startled by its immensity, and as he followed Witherspoon through labyrinths of bright gauzes and avenues of somber goods, he perceived that a change in the tone of the hum announced the approach of the master. And it appeared that, no matter what a girl might be doing, she began hurriedly to do something else the moment she spied Witherspoon coming toward her. The quick signs of flirtation, signals along the downward track of morality, subsided whenever this ruler came within sight; and the smirk bargain-counter miss would actually turn from the grinning idiocy of the bullet-headed fellow who had come in to admire her and would deign to wait on a poorly dressed woman who had failed to attract her attention.
The offices of the management were on the first floor, and Henry was conducted thither and shown into Witherspoon's private apartment—into the calico, bombazine, hardware and universal nick-nack holy of holies. The room was not fitted up for show, but for business. Its furniture consisted mainly of a roll-top desk, a stamp with its handle sticking up like the tail of an excited cat, a dingy carpet and several chairs of a shape so ungenial to the human form as to suggest that a hint at me desirability of a visitor's early withdrawal might have been incorporated in their construction.
"I will see if Colton has come down," Witherspoon remarked, glancing through a door into another room. "Yes, there he is. He's coming. Mr. Colton," said Witherspoon, with deep impressiveness, "this is my son Henry."
The old man bowed with a politeness in which there was a reminder of a slower and therefore a more courteous day, and taking the hand which Henry cordially offered him, said: "To meet you affects me profoundly, sir. Of course I am acquainted with your early history, and this adds to the interest I feel in you; but aside from this, to meet a son of George Witherspoon must necessarily give me great pleasure."