diff options
| author | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-02-04 23:57:15 -0800 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-02-04 23:57:15 -0800 |
| commit | b2a5d4af884c55b9bcd1bc449b7888b2677809b7 (patch) | |
| tree | a238afdb09ee50b025f5dc00f4565717908489b7 | |
| parent | 90c9792c2f97419901542bf719a7fbd08a587560 (diff) | |
| -rw-r--r-- | .gitattributes | 4 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | LICENSE.txt | 11 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | README.md | 2 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-0.txt | 6606 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-0.zip | bin | 122764 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-8.txt | 6605 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-8.zip | bin | 122214 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h.zip | bin | 2489463 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h/50269-h.htm | 8188 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h/images/0001.jpg | bin | 659226 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h/images/0010.jpg | bin | 781414 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h/images/0011.jpg | bin | 284852 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/50269-h/images/cover.jpg | bin | 659226 -> 0 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/old/50269-h.htm.2021-01-25 | 8187 |
14 files changed, 17 insertions, 29586 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3366d41 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #50269 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50269) diff --git a/old/50269-0.txt b/old/50269-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6457d9f..0000000 --- a/old/50269-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6606 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Port Argent - A Novel - -Author: Arthur Colton - -Illustrator: Eliot Keen - -Release Date: October 21, 2015 [EBook #50269] -Last Updated: March 12, 2018 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - - - -PORT ARGENT - -A Novel - -By Arthur Colton - -With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen - -New York - -Henry Holt And Company - -1904 - -[Ill 0001] - -[Ill 0010] - -[Ill 0011] - - -IN MEMORIAM - -C. W. WELLS - - -DEDICATED - -TO - -GEORGE COLTON - -863714 - -PORT ARGENT - - - - -CHAPTER I--PULSES - - -|PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it -a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, -instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and -better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, -and the city grew. - -In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive -Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no -“press galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences -have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on -its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its -sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills, -or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute? - -Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres -back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would -grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help -to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to -favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead -into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that -direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small -farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social -speculators “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a -session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile. - -Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back -of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge -of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the -bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But -people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed -of. - -There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney -with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was -born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, -late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new -generation. - -Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of -Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers -subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the -breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of -Port Argent. - -The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt -legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded -house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come -to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to -his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something -living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through -arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), -with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish -emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across -the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden -throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row -of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a -half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have -slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country, -after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest -streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would -seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or -order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures, -changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness. - -The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric -character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its -streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic -heart beat and brain conceive. - -One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and -found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street. - -Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down -the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything -fitted anything else. - -Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty -years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured -Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take -its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but -the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port -Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of -the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately -line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the -Champney place. - -A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since -the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the -city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the -city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked -a citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and -freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these -piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was -told: “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to -make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.” - -“Fixed him?” - -“Oh, they're a happy family now.” - -The citizens of Port Argent held singular language. - -“Who is Marve Wood?” - -“He's--there he is over there.” - -“Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?” - -“Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.” - -“And this Wood--is he an engineer and contractor?” - -“No--well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us.” - -The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases -of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of -school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club. - -The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with -a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, -grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He -produced the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated -and consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried -to and fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel -and bar and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The -elderly “Marve Wood,” stood beside him--thick-set, with a grey beard of -the cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the -faces that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He -had a comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow -Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat. - -Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a -huge, black-moustached Irishman. - -“Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to -work.” - -The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy -tucked in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The -sidewalk grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the -statue of a Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. -He appeared to be facing his country's enemies with determination, but -time and weather had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as -if he found no enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. -station and the workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street. - -Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw -Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out -there,” he said. - -“Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book. - -“Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney -went on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, -Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's -arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She -did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front -of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but -looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, -at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the -perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained -with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river, -when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged -with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were -energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats -had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery -energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them -away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry -them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed -basis, and the difference is important--important to the observer of the -signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla. - -Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were -more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the -spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny -clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves. - -Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted -a flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the -ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and -an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in -the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The -street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building -opposite were open. - -“Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion. - -“Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his -boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh--well--he's all right.” - -“He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry -banner if he wants to.” - -Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that -function. - -“But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't -stand any deadheads.” - -“Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.” - -Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the -shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the -man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles. - -“Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see -him,” he added. - -“All right, I'll do that.” - -“And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both -satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel -injured.” - -“Well, I'm glad to oblige him----” - -“That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but--you'd better -make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country -schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.” - -“That's all right.” - -Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and -added, “I see.” - -“I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,” - said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, -“except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It -was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started -in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the -landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest -rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all -right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, -like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same -arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others. -Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while -somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He -never was really comfortable.” - -Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke -with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at -an upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what -appeared dumb-show. - -“Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?” - -“The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It -means, if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's -because folks get so tired of the warlike.” - -“Oh!” - -“Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue----” - -“Aidee?” - -“Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine -man--fine man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks -got kind of tired of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. -Well--maybe so. Then I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes -along with a patent pill, and a new porous plaster, and claims his -plaster has the holes arranged in triangles, instead of squares like all -previous plasters; he has an air of candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my -soul! Your system's out of order.' Sounds interesting once in a while. -And then this world gets so tired of him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache -eleven thousand years. I wish to God you wouldn't keep giving it new -names.' Well,--a couple of years ago the _Chronicle_ was publishing -Aidee's speeches on Civic something or other every week. Aidee used -to shoot straight but scattering at that time. He'd got too much -responsibility for the details of the millennium. Why, when you come -right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an opinion of himself -as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If I could stand up -like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of natural gas on the -blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there ain't any real -democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any man. Guess -likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other gutter-man -hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. Aidee's a loose -comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for boiling potatoes. -Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent Reform and his -Assembly--oh, well--he wasn't doing any great harm then. He ain't now, -either. I told him one time, like this: “I says, 'Fire away anyhow that -suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think you'd like my job?'” - -“'What is your job?' says he. - -“'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little -stumped. 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.' - -“'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like -it.' - -“'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your -job?' - -“And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact. - -“'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says. - -“'Complicated?' - -“'Yes.' - -“'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it -wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail -last year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a -clergyman on the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I -can talk it. I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his -intellectuals are all right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got -the habit of meditation. So he starts in.” - -“Bill, you've been a bad lot.” - -“Yep.” - -“There ain't no hope for you, Bill.” - -“No,” says Bill, “there ain't.” - -“You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he -allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says -Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”' - -“Aidee laughed,--he did really,--and after that he looked thoughtful. -Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. 'Sweeney,' -I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline of it. But -I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, thinking anybody -could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of myself, sure.' - -“Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't -any of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable -since. That's what I wanted to tell you.” - -“What for?” - -“Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be -interested to find out what he's up to.” - -After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up. - -“All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's -got to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then -turned into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the -residence sections. - - - - -CHAPTER II--RICHARD THE SECOND - - -|WHEN Hennion reached his rooms the sunlight was slanting through the -maples outside. - -He sat down after supper by his windows. The twilight was thickening in -the foliage, the sparrows holding noisy caucuses there---- - -Hennion's father had been a contractor and engineer before him, and -before the great war had made the face of the nation more thoughtful -with the knowledge of what may happen in well-regulated families. - -Once the sun was a pillar of fire and cloud, the land of promise seemed -every day attained, and the stars were jubilant. Were ever such broad -green plains, strong brown rivers and blue lakes? There was oratory -then, and sublime foreheads were smitten against the stars. Such oratory -and such a forehead had Henry Champney, in those days. The subject -of oratory was the devotion of the forefathers, the promises and -attainments of the nation set forth in thrilling statistics. A thousand -audiences shuffled and grinned, and went their way to accomplish the -more immediate things which the orators had endeavoured to decorate. -The admiration of the orator and the public was mutual. There was a -difference in type,--and the submerged industrialist, who worked with -odd expedients, who jested with his lips, and toiled terribly with brain -and hand, admired the difference. - -The elder Hennion did not care about “the destinies of the nation.” He -dredged the channel of that brown river, the Muscadine, drove the piles -that held the docks of Port Argent, and dug the east section of the -Interstate Canal. The war came, and someone appointed him to something -connected with the transportation of commissary. He could not escape the -habit of seeing that things did what they were supposed to do. Hennion's -supplies were apt to reach the Army of the Cumberland regularly and on -scheduled time, it would be hard to tell why. - -He built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A -prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, -and did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, “wrecked” the -Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of -it for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and -philosophical. - -“Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. -That's a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told -his boys he hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did -making it, but they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed -him there, only he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and -I wish I had your luck. But I've had a good time.” Such was “Rick” - Hennion's philosophy. - -Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven -years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of -business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the -inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on -Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the -State, agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and -moreover some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw -and trowel. He recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, -white with the dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, -somewhat small at first; men of another class seemed to look to him as -naturally for jobs; his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile -country. Among the friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's. - -Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he -seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about -the continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, -one found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at -one time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one -of those personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but -certainly members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor -offices. Such a man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for -the growth, a process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a -function. If one wished to know anything intimate about the city, what -was doing, or about to be done, or how the Council would vote, or -any one thread in the tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood -appeared to have this information. His opinion was better--at least -better informed--than most opinions. For some reason it was difficult -not to be on good terms with him. - -Port Argent concluded one day that it had a “boss.” It was suggested in -a morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was -interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said, -“We're a humming town.” Real estate at auction went a shade higher that -morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted -for. The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said: - -“Wood, I hear you're a boss.” - -“That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the -window and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since.” - -“Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there -it ought to be spelled with a brick.” - -“Well--now--I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a shingle -mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his shingle on -my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, and now -every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the shingle, and -spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been better. Want -anything in particular?” - -The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, -and when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen -indestructible desks. - -The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were -quiet, because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The -issues of their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, -many a sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, -and in the morning the issues be different, and the victims find their -neighbours overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' -sins are not interesting forever, let alone their wrongs. - -Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank -Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick. - -The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise -than contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and -furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to -the people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. -Hennion was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla -ought to sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the -spirit of another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped -short years before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious -worth; the curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams -occupied gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads. - -Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white -head of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat -primly with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses. - -The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of -the flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, -or attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except -Camilla, seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity. - -Camilla said: “You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's -important!” - -Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the -importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and -yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, -and lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly -people recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity -and readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction -would wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a -notion of his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish -even the constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not -less apart from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their -antiquities. She belonged to a set of associations that should not be -mixed up with the street. In the street, in the clear light and grey -dust, men and ideas were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence -was to him a kind of vestal college. At least, it was the only presence -that ever suggested to his mind things of that nature, symbols and -sacred fires, and half-seen visions through drifting smoke. - -He was contented now to wait for the revelation. - -“Have you lots of influence really?” she said. “Isn't it fine! I want -you to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night.” - -The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow -suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the -dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent -ideals lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where -chants were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the -transparencies, so to speak--it was unpleasant. - -“I'd rather not see him here.” - -“But he's coming!” - -“All right. I shan't run away.” - -“And he has asked my father----” - -Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination. - -“Oh, Camilla!” he broke in, and then laughed. “Did he ask Miss Eunice to -come in, too?” - -The prospect had its humours--the guilelessness of the solemn -preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of -Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might -turn out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She -sometimes did; that is, she sometimes hovered over the comprehension -of a joke, as a bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy -absurdity jogging along the highway of this world, but she had so many -other emotions to take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around -her, that her humour could not always be depended on. - -The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, -as he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired, -black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air -of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit. -Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The -five sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead. - -Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big -white head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; -Camilla was breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her -gold-rimmed glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not -rotund, though his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his -feet, pacing the floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that -Aidee was a peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. -He swept together at first a number of general ideas which did not -interest Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in -particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing -circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but -disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned -to dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the -table. - -“Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of -ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You -put your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand -is mixed up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of -foundations. Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and -here they are bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share--in -both of these results?” - -Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face -was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick! - -Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him, -so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of -that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul -abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt -that Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of -a noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. -He felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact -candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind -of unreal, gaudy emotionalism. - -“I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to -business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to -have a certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain -amount of preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, -provided they're good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand -themselves to be voting for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I -contract with them to suit my business interests, but I never canvass. -Probably the ward leaders do. I suppose there's a point in all this -affair. I'd rather come to it, if you don't mind. You want me to do -personal wire-pulling, which I never do and don't like, in order to down -certain men I am under obligations to, which doesn't seem honourable, -and against my business interests, which doesn't seem reasonable.” - -“Wire-pulling? No.” - -“Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire -that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like -it, or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have -to.” - -Aidee hesitated. - -“Miss Champney----” - -Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment. - -“Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to -yours----” - -“Why not? Class! I have no class!” - -“I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone -even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them -this way.” - -“Why not?” - -“Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon.” - -“The apology seems in place,” rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating -thorough bass. - -“I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me.” - -“The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest”--Champney -heaved his wide frame out of the chair--“that he be released from his -situation.” - -“Do you like the situation, sir?” - -“I do not, sir,” with rising thunder. “I hope, if this discussion is -continued here, or elsewhere,”--appearing to imply a preference for -“elsewhere,”--“it will have no reference to my family.” - -Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of -meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee -stood still a moment. Then he said quietly: - -“I have made a mistake. Good-night,” and took his leave. He looked tired -and weighed down. - -Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding. - -Camilla wept with her head on the table. - -“I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row.” - -Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or -repentance. - -Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like -shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He -wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away -from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and -the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too -apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them -to suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not -altogether and solely for business men to do business in, else why such -men as Aidee, so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to -fill a practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he -would not? - -“Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do -not come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion -that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and -patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” - his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and -no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of -the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, -backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current -eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large -repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and -death,” and of these the first four make their reports in the street. - -Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not -Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven -celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more. - - - - -CHAPTER III--CAMILLA - - -|SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found -comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing -else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something -radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and -lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to -masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a -Camillus with - - “The fervent love Camillus bore - - His native land.” - -In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused. - -In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was -lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and -shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and -throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either. - -At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still -makes it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more -exhilarating than ever. - -Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic -beliefs and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to -interpret herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive -of swarming energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where -ran a swift river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She -barely remembered when the family lived in the national capital, and -Henry Champney was a noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental -picture of an invalid mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her -memories ran about Port Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, -the household rule of Miss Eunice. They included glimpses of her -father's friend, the elder Hennion, a broad-shouldered man, who always -had with him the slim youth, Dick; which slim youth was marvellously -condescending, and once reconstructed her doll with wires, so that when -you pulled a wire it would wave arms and legs in the manner in which -Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever waved her arms and legs. -He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He taught her carpentry and -carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer and saw, mallet and -chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards of the Champney -house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the tops of -the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's -hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with -Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges. - -He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge -the finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, -because they were not true. - -Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age -of twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, -but all hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit. - -On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window -knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and -underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal -and brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from -ship to car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad -bridge; beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long -roofs, and black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood -tenements of East Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because -one knew they were there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the -suburbs, a flat, prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, -highways, and trestle pyramids of the oil wells. - -Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river -and factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's -disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla -came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to -reminiscence. - -“We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college,” she said. - -Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully: - -“Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?” - -Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a -time she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, -and began running through the titlepages. - -“They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic -Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'” - -“Mr. Aidee lent you such books!” - -“Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' -'The Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!” She had slipped beyond the -titlepage of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked -in a new impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss -Eunice returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle. - -It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs -between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young -have not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to -their predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the -purport of the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we -might live, but were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had -her heartbeats and flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or -how. No matter what her romance was. It was a story of few events or -peculiarities. She had grown somewhat over-rigid with time. That -her melancholy--if melancholy it should be called, a certain dry -severity--that it gave most people a slight impression of comedy, -was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it. As to that long-past -phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not remember ever -having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled “Socialism and -Anarchy,” or “The Civic Disease,” or “The Inner Republic.” She was glad -to believe that Camilla was “a type,” because it was easier to condemn -a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and flushed cheeks -over matters so unsuitable. - -In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss -Eunice's flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social -emphasis on sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the -difference, and looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading. - -Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the -room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair -beside him. - -“Now! What do you think?” - -Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the -first. - -“I think your books will lose their backs,” Champney rumbled mildly. - -The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed -in at the tall side windows. - -“Think of what, my dear?” - -“Listen!” - -Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she -read from the grey volume, as follows: - -“'You have remarked too often “I am as good as you.” It is probable that -God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he -knows that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked -“You are as good as I,” it would have represented a more genial frame -of mind. It would have rendered your superiority more probable, since -whichever remark you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence -that it is not true. But indeed it is probable that neither your life -nor your ideas are admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not -to become convinced that no one is better than you, but to find someone -to whom you can honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not -back, nor away among the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am -asking you to search for your leader among your contemporaries, not -satisfied until you find him, not limited in your devotion when you have -found him, taking his cause to be yours. I am asking you to remember -that evil is not social, but human; that good is not social, but human. -You have heard that an honest man is the noblest work of God. You have -heard of no institution which merits that finality of praise. You have -heard that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Is it -then in shadows or by shadows that we live?'” - -Camilla paused. - -“I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle,” said -Champney. - -“Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!” - -Champney took the volume, read, “Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master -Went,” and turned back to the title page. “H'm--'The Inner Republic, by -Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?” he asked. “We discover America -every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!” - -Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy -surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures -most capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he -replied gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had -his happy surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for -the efforts Champ-ney had made--not altogether painless--to realise -the lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the -new,--that his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; -so that the two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk -friendly and long, without patronage or impatience. - -To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete, -that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an -old story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his -shelves had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had -connection through himself with the stir of existence. - -The Websterian periods had taken on a ghostly echo, and the slow ebbing -of the war issues had left him with a sense of being stranded on dry -sands. There seemed to be a flatness everywhere,--a silence, except for -the noisy rattle of the street. - -It is a pleasant saying, that “The evening of life comes bringing its -own lamp,” but it seemed to him it was a drearily false one. The great -men of a great time, he thought, were gone, or fast going. It was a -stagnation period in his life, pictured in his mind afterward as an -actual desert, dividing arable lands. Were the new men so small, so -unuplifted, or was it only his own mind grown dry and nerveless? He was -afraid it was the latter,--afraid life was dying away, or drying up in -his still comfortable body. - -He would prove to himself that it was not. - -This was the beginning of the effort he had made,--a defiant, -half-desperate rally. The struggle began at a definite date. One day -he put away his old books. He bought new ones, and new periodicals, and -determined to find the world still alive,--to find again that old sense -of the importance of things that were going on. It was an intimate fight -this time, unapplauded--against a shadow, a creeping numbness. He fought -on, and at length had almost begun to lose hope. - -When Camilla came back from college and Eastern friends she dawned upon -him in a series of minute surprises. She brought him his victory, and -the lamp for his evening. So it came about. The struggle was over, and -the longed-for hope and cheer came back to him. - -So it came that the relation between them was peculiar. New books had a -meaning when Camilla read them to him, as she read from Alcott Aidee's -book to-day, while the noise of the freight-yards, and the rattle of the -travelling crane unloading a docked ship, sounded dull and distant. The -sunlight came yellow and pleasant through tall windows, and the fire -snapped briskly, and Alcott Aidee spoke through the medium of Camilla -and the grey volume, making these singular remarks: - -“Incarnation of divinity! Surely you have been unfortunate, if in -going to and fro in this world you have nowhere observed any measure of -divinity incarnated in a man, apparent in ordering or in obedience, in -leading or in following, speaking from lips which said, 'Follow me,' as -well as from those which said, 'Thy will, not mine be done,' speaking, -for aught I know, as largely in one way as the other. I am not measuring -divinity. I am showing you where to look for it. I am trying to persuade -you that it does not speak from lips which say 'I am as good as you.'” - -New books, ran Champney's thoughts, new men, new times, new waves -foaming up the old slant shores. But only as they spoke with Camilla's -voice, did they seem to him now to make the numbed cords vibrate again, -or comfort his wintry age. - -“Isn't it interesting, daddy? If you're going to be frivolous, I shan't -read.” - -Champney was looking at the volume with a grim smile. - -“I was thinking that to read only in the middle of the gentleman's -book was perhaps not doing him justice. It was perhaps why I did not -understand where he began, or where he was going. It seems to be neither -old democracy nor new socialism, but more like the divine rights of some -kind of aristocracy. Shall we not read the book through in order, my -dear? Having become convinced that Mr. Aidee himself contains a measure -of this divinity, and having taken him for our leader, shall we not then -induce our recalcitrant friend Dick to join us, and in that way induce -him to become a politician?” - -This was the Champney manner in the stately vein of irony. - -“Oh!” Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, a Champney gesture, -“Dick was horrid about that.” - -“Recalcitrant, Hum! Horrid, horridus, bristling, Ha! Not inappropriate -to the attitude on that occasion of the said Dick. Not usual for him, I -should say. He is like his father, Camilla. A quiet man, but striking, -the latter. You don't remember him?” - -“Oh, yes! But you see, Dick didn't like it, because Mr. Aidee asked me -to help him. But it isn't like him to be fussy. Anyway, I liked it, -but Dick didn't. So!” Camilla pushed back her hair, another Champney -gesture--the defiant one. “Now, what made him act like hornets?” - -“I also took the liberty not to like it, Camilla,” with a rumble of -thorough bass. - -Camilla glanced up, half startled, and put a small warm hand into -her father's hand, which was large, bony, and wrinkled. The two hands -clasped instinctively hard, as if for assurance that no breach should -come between them, no distance over which the old and the young hand -could not clasp. - -Camilla turned back to Alcott Aidee's book, and read on. Champney found -himself now listening in a personal, or what he might have described -as a feminine, way; he found himself asking, not what meaning or truth -there was in this writer, but asking what meaning it might have toward -Camilla, at the Arcadian age when maids are fain of surprises. He -thought of Dick Hennion, of the Hennions, father and son. One always -wondered at them, their cross-lot logic, their brevities, their instinct -as to where the fulcrum of a thing rested. One believed in them without -asking reasons--character was a mysterious thing--a certain fibre or -quality. Ah! Rick Hennion was dead now, and Henry Champney's fighting -days were over. It was good to live, but a weariness to be too old. He -thought of Alcott Aidee, of his gifts and temperament, his theory of -devotion and divinity--an erratic star, a comet of a man, who had a -great church--by the way, it was not a church--a building at least, with -a tower full of clamouring bells, and a swarming congregation. It was -called “The Seton Avenue Assembly.” So Aidee had written this solid -volume on--something or other. One could see he was in earnest, but -that Camilla should be over-earnest in the wake of his argument seemed -a strong objection to the argument. A new man, an able writer--all very -interesting--but---- In fact, he might prove resident divinities, or -prove perpetual incarnations of the devil, if he chose, but what did -the fellow mean by asking Camilla to---- In fact, it was an unwarranted -liberty. Champney felt suddenly indignant. Camilla read on, and Champney -disliked the doctrine, whatever it was, in a manner defined even by -himself as “feminine.” - -“'Not in vain,' she read, 'have men sought in nature the assurance -of its large currents, of its calm and self-control, the knitting up -of “the ravelled sleave of care,” “the breathing balm of mute insensate -things,” “the sleep that is among the lonely hills.” It has been -written, - - “Into the woods my Master went - - Clean foresprent, - -and that “the little grey leaves were kind to him.” All these things -have I found, and known them. Was it there my Master went? I found the -balm, the slumber, and the peace. But I found no inspiration. This, -wherever I found it, always spoke with human lips, always looked out -of human eyes. The calm of nature is as the calm of the past. Green -battlefields lie brooding, because the issue is over; deep woods and -secluded valleys, because the issue is elsewhere. The apostle who met a -vision of his Master on the Appian Way, and asked, “Whither goest thou?” - was answered, “Into the city.” Do you ask again, whither he went? I -answer that he went on with the vanguard of the fight; which vanguard is -on the front wave and surf of these times; which front wave and surf -is in the minds and moods of persons; not in creeds, customs, formulas, -churches, governments, or anywhere else at all; for the key to all -cramped and rusted locks lies in humanity, not in nature; in cities, not -in solitudes; in sympathy, not in science; in men, not in institutions; -not in laws, but in persons.' - -“Aren't you interested, daddy?” - -“Yes, my dear. Why do you ask?” - -“You look so absent-minded. But it's a new chapter now, and it's called -'Constitutions.'” Camilla laughed triumphantly. - -“Constitutions! Then the gentleman will be political. Go on.” - -“'Chapter ninth,'” she read. “'Constitutions.' - -“'Most men govern themselves as monarchies; some as despotisms that -topple to anarchies, some as nearly absolute monarchies; but mainly, -and on the whole, they govern themselves as partially restricted or -constitutional monarchies; which constitutions are made up of customs, -precedents, and compromises, British Constitutions of opportunism and -common law. Indeed, they claim that the inner life _must_ be a monarchy -by its nature, and every man's soul his castle. They are wrong. It must -be a republic, and every man's soul an open house. - -“'Now, it is nowhere stated in any Declaration or Constitution put forth -of this Inner Republic that “all men are by nature free and equal.” If -such a declaration occurred to the framers of this Constitution, they -would seem to have thought it difficult to reconcile with observation, -and not very pertinent either. As a special qualification for -citizenship, it appears to be written there that a man must love his -neighbour as himself--meaning as nearly as he can, his citizenship -graded to his success; and as a general maxim of common law, it is -written that he shall treat other men as he would like them to treat -him, or words to that effect. However, although to apply and interpret -this Constitution there are courts enough, and bewildering litigation, -and counsel eager with their expert advice, yet the Supreme Court holds -in every man's heart its separate session.” - -To all of which Champney's thoughts made one singular comment. -“Camilla,” they insisted, “Camilla.” - - - - -CHAPTER IV--MUSCADINE STREET - - -|WHILE Camilla and Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over -Aidee's book, Miss Eunice in the parlour bent a grey head over her -knitting, and thought of Camilla, and disapproved of the type of girls -who neither knitted nor even embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over -such subjects, for instance, as “Richard,” but over such subjects as -“Problems of the Poor,” and “Civic Diseases.” - -Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the -window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered -roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and -disapproved of what she saw. - -There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent. -Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with -their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so. - -Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was -over the Maple Street bridge. - -The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the -bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first -corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was -unlikely, the sign would read “Muscadine Street.” - -Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories; -Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one -side and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or -brick, with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors -mainly shops for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun -with inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children -quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of -whom those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever -faces generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and -triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither -circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more -than endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's -disapproval, and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is -singular how many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and -neither be the better or worse on that account. - -On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a -flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street -leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the -stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that “James -Shays, Shoemaker,” was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do -so on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the -shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first -was the shop. - -A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a smoky-chimneyed -lamp thereon, some newspapers, and half of a book that had been ripped -savagely in two. A double shoemaker's bench stood next the window, a -cooking stove and a cupboard opposite. Clothes hung on wall-hooks, hides -lay on the floor. - -Shays sat on one end of the bench, a grey-haired, grey-moustached, -watery-eyed man, pegging a shoe vaguely. A black-haired little man with -a thin black beard sat on the other end, stitching a shoe fiercely. -A redlipped, red-cheeked, thick-nosed, thick-necked man with prominent -eyes, sat tilted back in one of the wooden chairs, stating his mind -deliberately. - -Most of these phases of Muscadine Street might be found so arranged, on -most mornings, by any visitor. Shays and the red-cheeked Coglan could -not be depended on; but the men on the sidewalk, the women in the -windows, the children in the street, the clamour and the smells would be -there; also the grocer, the butcher, and Hicks, the stitcher of vehement -stitches. If Coglan and Shays were there, Coglan would be found in the -process of stating his mind. - -Hicks' eyes were black, restless, and intense, his mouth a trifle on -one side, his forehead high with a deep line down the middle. It was a -painful line; when he smiled it seemed to point downward frowningly to -the fact that the smile was onesided. - -Coglan was Shays' associate in the pursuit of happiness. His value lay -in this: that upon a certain amount of hard liquor purchased by Shays, -and divided fairly and orderly between them, Shays became needy of help, -and Coglan generally remained in good condition and able to take him -home. Hicks was Shays' partner in the shop. His value lay in this: that -he did twice as much work as Shays, and was satisfied with half the -profits. Both men were valuable to Shays, and the shop supported the -three. - -The relations between them had grown settled with time. Nearly four -years earlier Hicks had entered Shays' shop. There he learned to cobble -footwear in some incredibly short time, and took his place in the -apprehension of Muscadine Street. Hicks he called himself and nothing -more. “Hicks” was a good enough name. It went some distance toward -describing the brooding and restless little man, with his shaking, -clawlike fingers, smouldering temper, and gift for fluent invective. -Some said he was an anarchist. He denied it, and went into fiery -definitions, at which the grocer and candy man shook their heads -vaguely, and the butcher said, “Says he ain't, an' if he ain't, he -ain't,” not as I see which seemed a conclusive piece of logic. At any -rate he was Hicks. - -The elderly Shays was a peaceful soul, a dusty mind, a ruined body. He -was travelling through his life now at a pace that would be apt to -bring him to the end of it at no distant date, enjoying himself, as he -understood enjoyment, or as enjoyment was interpreted to him by the -wise Coglan. Coglan maintained a solidly planted dislike of Hicks, whose -attacks threatened his dominance, whose acrid contempt and unlimited -vocabulary sometimes even threatened his complacence. Coglan's wisdom -saw that the situation was preferable to searching for jobs, and that -the situation depended on Hicks' acceptance of it. Hicks was a mystery -to him, as well as to Shays, and something of a fear, but Coglan was not -disturbed by the mystery. He could leave that alone and do very well. -But Hicks was a poisoned needle. Hicks knew where to find Coglan's -sensitive point and jab it. Coglan hated him solidly, but balancing -his dislike against his interest and ease, Coglan wisely found that the -latter were more solid still--beyond comparison solid. - -All this could be learned by any visitor inquiring in Muscadine Street. -The grocer underneath would add tersely that Shays was a soak, but -good-hearted; that Hicks was a fool, and ought to set up shop for -himself; that Coglan was a loafer, and had his bread buttered now about -to suit him. Disapproval of each other was current in Muscadine Street. -It was a part of their interest in life. - -The same morning sunlight that slanted through Henry Champney's tall -library and parlour widows was slanting through the small streaked -window of Shays, the shoe-mender. Coglan was stating his mind. - -“Jimmy Shays, yer a good man,” he was saying slowly; “an', Hicksy, yer -an' industhrious man; but nayther of ye is a wise man; but Jimmy is the -wisest man of ye two. For why? Ask that, an' I says this. For when Jimmy -wants a bit of thinkin' done for him, he gets a sensible man to do -it, an' a poor man, an' a workin' man like himself, an' a man that's a -friend, and that stands by him in throuble. But what does ye do, Hicksy? -Ye goes over the river. Ye goes up to Seton Avenue. Ye listens to a -chin-waggin' preacher. An' what's his name? Aidee! He ain't a workin' -man himself, but wears the clothes of the rich, an' ates his dinner -wid the rich, an' says hard words of the friends of the poor. An' yer -desaved, Hicksy.” - -Hicks stopped work and shook a thin fist at Coglan. “If you're talkin' -of him, you keep your manners.” - -“Oi, the Preacher! Oi, he might be meanin' well, Hicksy. I ain't sayin' -not.” - -“What are you saying then?” jabbing viciously with his needle. “Damn! -You're an Irishman, ain't you? Chin-wagging institution yourself. What! -Who's the working man? You! Ain't you got a description of you that's -vivider'n that?” breaking into a cackling laugh. “Then I'll ask you, -what friends of the poor you're talking about so glib, like a greased -wheel?” - -“Oi! Yer askin' what I mean by a friend, Hicksy? Ye are! An' yer right, -an' I'll show ye the point. I'll speak to ye of John Murphy, now, what -I've had many a drink on him, an' a helpin' hand. A friend is a friend -in need. That's him. Now, thin, Murphy's a friend of Wood's, for he says -so. Now, thin, I'll show you Dick Hennion. For if I wants a job, I says -the word to Murphy, an' he speaks the word maybe to Hennion an' he gets -me a job, for he done it onct, an' I know, don't I? if so be it happen -I wants a job. An' Hennion's a friend of Wood's, too, as anywan knows. -Now! A friend of me, I says, is a man that acts friendly to me. That's -him. So would ye say, Hicksy, if ye was a wise man an' a man of sense, -instead of chasin' afther a chin-waggin' preacher, like a schnare-drum -afther a thrombone. Haw, haw, haw! a brass throm-bone! But Wood's a -friend of the poor, an' I've proved it. For why? For I say it's the rich -that he bleeds, but the poor man he's friendly to. Now, thin! What does -Aidee do but say the bad word of Wood. In consequence, in consequence, I -says,”--and Coglan smote his knee,--“he ain't no friend of the poor.” - -Hicks' black eyes glittered and focussed themselves, a concentrated -stare at a minutely small spot between Coglan's eyes. His teeth clicked. -Coglan's laugh died away. He turned his eyes aside and rubbed his red -face uneasily. - -“Coglan,” said Hicks, “I warned you before. You shake your mouth at the -Preacher again and I'll stick a knife into your dirty throat. You hear -that!” - -Coglan's redness showed purple spots. - -“Think I'm afraid of ye!” - -“Yep, I think you are.” - -“I'll break your little chick bones!” - -“Yep. You're afraid, and you better stay so.” - -“Hicksy!” broke in Shays with quavering voice. “Tom! we're all friends, -ain't we? Now, then, Tom, Hicksy makes a point you leave out the -Preacher, don't he? He'll argue peaceful. Jus' leave out the Preacher. -Won't you, Hicksy? Hey? You'll argue peaceful.” - -“I said I would.” - -“Leave out the Preacher,” said Shays. “All friens'. Hey?” - -Coglan wiped his perspiring face. “I'm a sensible man,” he said. “When -Jimmy Shays asks a favour, I say, sure! I'm a sensible man.” He looked -resentfully and uneasily at Hicks, but seemed relieved to withdraw from -his aggressive position without losing his dominance. - -“Oi! I told ye what I meant by a friend. I said Marve Wood was a friend -of the poor, an' I proved it. I'll be fair an' square. I'll ask ye, -what's _your_ meanin'?” - -Hicks dropped his eyes, and fell to his jabbing needlework. - -“Friend!” he said. “You mean a man that's useful to you. _You_ say so! -_You_ say so! That's your meaning. Good's what's good for me. Sense is -what agrees with me. Nothing's got any value that ain't valuable to -that God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked 'me,' named Coglan, that's got no more -value than to fertilise a patch of potatoes. Friend! You get another -word. I got nothing to say to you. But I'll tell you this. I'll tell you -what I think of Wood. He's got a reckoning coming. What is Wood? I'll -tell you that he's the meeting point of two enemies--the corporations -and the people, the rich and the poor. His job's to keep in with -both. That's what his friendliness amounts to. His job's to sell the -corporations what belongs to the people. And he'll grin at the people on -one side, so! And he'll wink at the corporations on the other, so! And -he'll say: 'How do, Johnny, and Billy, and Sammy?' So! And he'll say to -the corporations, 'What'll you give for Johnny's hat?' So! Then he gives -Johnny half what he gets for the hat, so! Then he's got Sammy and Billy -to back the deal, so! Well, what's Wood! I've told you what he is. -Friend of the poor! What do you know about it?” He dropped the shoe, -shook his loose fingers in the air, and cried. “He's a cancer! Cut him -out! He's an obstruction! Blow him up! What, then? Then I say this, Tom -Coglan, and I say it's a good thing when damn rascals are afraid!” - -“Quotin' the Preacher?” said Coglan complacently. - -Hicks narrowed his black eyes again, and focussed them on Coglan, who -turned away uneasily. Hicks went on: - -“What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether -Wood ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in -his life, nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against -him, then, or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm -talking about?” - -“Oi!” said Coglan. “Yer right. I'll ask ye that.” - -“And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine”--tapping his narrow -chest--“ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going to -mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that -does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to -fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan.” - -“Oi! Quotin' the Preacher.” - -“Yes, I am, some of it.” - -He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each -other and then stealthily at Hicks. - -“I hear no talk against the Preacher,” Hicks went on, after a time; “I -won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor -the like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,--neither him, nor his -talk, nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent -but me that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my -thinking for me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about -him, or me? What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, -and then if you said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to -go crazy, and always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting -you on fire and then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; -and if you talked like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk -to you. I'd talk so, too, for his way ain't my way.” - -He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table. - -“See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of -it's not. That's my way.” - -His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and -savage that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a -startled way, as if he expected to see something ghastly. - -“But it ain't the Preacher's way. But I ain't the man to be held back,” - said Hicks, “and patted and cooed over. Not me. Show me a snake and I -stamp on it! Show me the spot and I hit it! Damn!” - -He twisted his mouth. His teeth clicked again, and his crooked fingers -drove the glittering needles swiftly back and forth through the leather. -Coglan stared at him with prominent eyeballs and mouth open. Shays wiped -his glasses, and then his red-lidded eyes with his coat sleeve. - -“All frien's, Hicksy! Ain't we?” he murmured uneasily. - -Coglan recovered. “An' that's right, too. Jimmy Shays is a kind man and -a peaceable man, an' I'm a sensible man, an' yer an industhrious man, -but yer not a wise man, Hicksy, an'”--with sudden severity--“I'll thank -ye not to stomp on Tom Coglan.” - -He got up. Shays rose, too, and put on his coat, and both went out of -the door. Hicks gave a cackling laugh, but did not look after them. - -Presently he finished the shoe, laid it down, rubbed his hands, and -straightened his back. Then he went and got the torn book, sat down, and -read in it half an hour or more, intent and motionless. - -The factory whistles blew for twelve o'clock. He rose and went to a side -cupboard, took out a leathern rifle case, put a handful of cartridges in -his pockets, and left the shop. - -The grocer's children in the side doorway fled inward to the darkness -of the hall as he passed. The grocer's wife also saw him, and drew back -behind the door. He did not notice any of them. - -The long eastward-leading street grew more and more dusty and unpaved. -He passed empty lots and then open fields, cornfields, clumps of woods, -and many trestles of the oil wells. He climbed a rail fence and entered -a large piece of woods, wet and cool. The new leaves were just starting -from their buds. - -It was a mild April day, with a silvery, misty atmosphere over the green -mass of the woods. A few of the oil wells were at work, thudding in the -distance. Cattle were feeding in the wet green fields. Birds, brown and -blue, red-breasted and grey-breasted, twittered and hopped in tree and -shrub. A ploughman in a far-off field shouted to his team. Crows flapped -slowly overhead, dropping now and then a dignified, contented croak. The -only other sound was the frequent and sharp crack of a rifle from deep -in the centre of the woods. - - - - -CHAPTER V--TECUMSEH STREET - - -|TECUMSEH STREET was the fourth street back from the river. Tradition -said that the father and Certain aunts of the man who laid out the -street had been scalped by Tecumseh, the Indian. It was the only -distinguished event in his family, and he wished to commemorate it. - -The street was paved with undressed Medina. The newspaper offices were -all there, and the smash and scream of undressed Medina under traffic -was in the columns. It was satisfactory to Port Argent. The proper -paving of streets in front of newspaper offices was never petitioned -in the Council. Opposite the offices was a half block of vacant lots, a -high board fence of advertisements around it. - -The space between was packed with a jostling crowd. A street lamp lit a -small section of it. Lights from the office windows fell in patches on -faces, hats, and shoulders. A round moon floated above the tower of -_The Chronicle_ Building with a look of mild speculation, like a -“Thrice Blessed Buddha,” leading in the sky his disciple stars, who -all endeavoured to look mildly speculative, and saying, “Yonder, oh, -mendicants! is a dense mass of foolish desires, which indeed squirm as -vermin in a pit, and are unpleasant to the eye of meditation. Because -the mind of each individual is there full of squirming desires, even -as the individual squirms in the mass.” No doubt it looks so when one -floats so far over it. - -Opposite the windows of _The Chronicle_ (Independent-Reform) and _The -Press_ (Republican) the advertising boards were covered with white -cloth, and two blinding circles shone there of rival stereopticons. -There was no board fence opposite _The Western Advocate_ (Democratic), -and no stereopticon in the windows. This was deplored. It showed a lack -of public spirit--a want of understanding of the people's needs. If -there could be no stereopticon without a board fence, there should be a -brass band. - -The proprietor of _The Advocate_ sent out for a bushel of Roman candles, -and discharged them from his windows by threes, of red, white, and blue. -This was poetic and sufficient. - -The stereopticons flashed on the white circles the figures of returns, -when there were any, pictures and slurs when there were no figures,--a -picture of a cage full of riotous monkeys on _The Chronicle_ circle, -underwritten, “The Council,”--a picture of an elderly lady with a -poke bonnet and lifted hands of reprehension, on the _Press_ circle, -underwritten, “Independent Reform.” - -“Auction of the City of Port Argent!” flashed _The Chronicle_. “Office -of M. Wood. Cash on Delivery of Goods.” - -“All citizens must go to Sunday School or be fined,” from _The Press_. - -“6th Ward. Rep. Plurality, 300.” - -“1st Ward. Ind. Ref. Plurality, 28.” - -Whish! a rocket from the windows of _The Western Advocate_. And the -crowd roared and shuffled. - -The last of _The Press_ windows to the left belonged to a little room -off the press-room, containing a desk, a board table, and several -chairs. The desk seemed only to be used as an object at which to throw -articles, in order that, they might roll to the floor. There were crude -piles of newspapers on it and about it, hats, a section of a stove pipe, -and a backgammon board. The table looked as if it sometimes might be -used to write on. - -The room was supposed to be the editor's, but no one in Port Argent -believed Charlie Carroll ever stayed in the same place long enough to -pre-empt it. He edited _The Press_ from all over the city, and wrote the -editorials wherever he stopped to catch breath. _The Press_ editorials -were sometimes single sentences, sometimes a paragraph. More than a -paragraph was supposed to mean that Carroll had ridden on a street car, -and relieved the tedium of his long imprisonment. - -A number of men stood at the window or stood grouped back, and watched -the canvas across the street. The only light came through the door from -the press-room. - -Carroll put his curly head through the door, shouted something and -vanished. _The Press_ stereopticon withdrew a view of Yosmite Valley and -threw on the canvas: - -“Recount in the 1st Ward announced.” - -_The Chronicle_ cleared its canvas promptly and flung across the street: - -“Fraud!” - -Only two men sat still by the window of the darkened room. The rest -rushed out. - -The street was in an uproar, hats crushed over heads, fists shaken in -the air to the instructive comment of the moon. - -“How foolish, oh, mendicants! How do men make for themselves troubles, -as though one should stir quiet waters with his hand, saying, 'It is a -storm. The gods have afflicted me.'” - -“How foolish!” said one of the men at the darkened window. “Those boys -are terribly anxious to carry that Ward, and no point in it, Dick!” - -“Suppose I'd been out canvassing for Reform, Wood? Think you'd have -lost?” - -Wood peered curiously at Hennion in the half-lit dusk. “Like enough! -Well--want anything in particular? I admit the bill, if it ain't too -big.” - -“I don't want anything.” - -Wood tilted his chair and was silent a moment. - -“Look what comes of making rows,” he went on. “I wouldn't have that -Ward now for a gift. _The Chronicle_'s red in the face with wrath and -happiness. Everybody's hair on end as it is. Disgusting, ain't it? -Well--down east, where the land's tilted up so you can turn a section -over bottom upwards by heaving one end with a rail, well--there was a -man there had a farm at the bottom of a long hill, and his neighbour's -punkins up above used to roll down on him. But he didn't make any row, -because his yard was littered with punkins, no. He ate the punkins. -Well, now, take the neighbour above, he might have gone down and called -somebody a thief for not returning strayed punkins, and two pillars of -the church might have disliked each other. But he didn't. He built a -board fence along the lower edge of his cornfield and caught his own -punkins. And there was mutual respect, mutual respect. Well--the -boys, they always want to fight. They go round saying, 'The old man's -level-headed,' but they ain't satisfied with building that fence to -catch those punkins without heaving a rock down an aggravating man's -chimney, or else it makes 'em mad to have punkins rolled at 'em, and -moreover they don't roll fast enough. Disgusting, ain't it?” - -“Wood! Wood! Wherein----” Carroll rushed in and turned up the electric -light impatiently. “Wh-what you going to do about the First Ward?” - -He had thin bright curly hair, the slimmest of bodies, and moved like a -restless insect. - -“Tell'em to count it twenty-eight Reform plurality, no more and no less! -And turn off that light! And clear out! Well--now--that Charlie Carroll, -he's a living fidget. Well--when they used to race steamboats on the -Mississippi, they'd put a nigger on the safety valve, so it wouldn't -get nervous. I've heard so. I've seen 'em tie it up with a string. -Well--winning the race depended some on the size and serenity of the -nigger, that'd see it wasn't his place to worry, for he'd get blown off -all right in the natural course of things. For sitting on a safety valve -you want a nigger that won't wriggle. Well--Charlie's a good man. Keeps -people thinking about odds and ends of things. If one thing out of forty -is going to happen, his mind's going to be a sort of composite picture -of the whole forty. Sees eight or ten dimensions to a straight line. -Yes--folks are pretty liberal. They'll allow there's another side to -'most anything, and a straight line's got no business to be so gone -particular. It's the liberal-mindedness of the public that lets us win -out, of course. But--you've got to sit still sometimes, and wait for the -earth to turn round.” - -“I suppose you have. It'll turn round.” - -“Yes, it'll turn round.” - -The tumult outside had subsided in a dull, unsettled rumble. The moon -went into retreat among silver-grey clouds. Tecumseh Street muttered in -the darkness of its pit. The stereopticons continued. - -“_The Chronicle_ suspects the U. S. Census,” from _The Press_. - -“Census O. K. Wood didn't make it,” from _The Chronicle_. - -“Port Argent stands by the G. O. P.” - -“Did Wood mention his Candidate's Name?” - -The _Press_ threw defiantly the portrait of its candidate for mayor. - -“Pull the String and See it Jump!” from _The Chronicle._ - -Behind _The Press_ stereopticon a telephone jingled, telegraph -instruments clicked, men wrote busily at a long table under a row of -pendent electric lights that swayed in the draught. - -A large man came in, panting. His short coat swung back under his -arm-pits, away from the vast curve of his waistcoat. He had a falling -moustache and a round face. - -“Vere iss Vood? So!” He peered curiously into the darker room. “Vere.” - -“Come along, Freiburger,” said Wood. “Pull up a chair. Well--how's your -Ward? All quiet?” - -Freiburger settled into a chair with the same caution. - -“Oh, yes, quviet. Not shtill, but quviet.” - -“What's the difference between 'still' and 'quiet'?” asked Hennion. - -“Veil, it vass drunk, und someone vass punch Cahn der barber's nose, but -not me.” - -“You call it quiet till somebody hits you?” - -“Vy should he hit me?” cried Freiburger indignantly. - -“He shouldn't,” said Hennion. - -“No! Veil, it vass not shtill, but quviet. Ach!” sadly, “ven a man iss -drunk, vy don't he shleep?” - -“He wants to stay awake and enjoy it.” - -Freiburger shook his head slowly and felt of his nose, as if to be quite -sure before taking the responsibility of repeating the statement. - -“It vass Cahn. It vass not me.” - -Wood sat silently, looking through the window to where the stereopticons -flashed over the crowd's changing emotions, half listening to the -conversation near him. Freiburger peered anxiously at him in the dusk. -His mind was trembling with the thrill and tumult of the day, longing -that Wood might say something, utter some sentence that it might -cling to, clasp about with comprehension, and be safe from wandering, -unguaranteed ideas. Hennion seemed interested in examining Freiburger's -soul. - -“Freiburger, you're as honest a man as I know.” - -“Veil, yes, I'm honest. I don't know who you know.” - -“You never owed a dollar you didn't pay.” - -“Oh, no, I don' do it.” - -“Business fair?” - -“Oh, yes.” - -“Well, what did you want to get on the Council for?” - -“Oh! Veil! It vass goot for business.” He seemed pleased to talk about -this, but expression was a matter of labour and excitement. “Veil! You -see! Die boys sie come at Freiburger's saloon, und I know 'em all on -Maple Street und der Fourt Vard. Und nights at Freiburger's I hear von -der shobs und der Union und der prices. Und sie tell me vy der carriage -factory strike. Und sie tell me Hennion iss a shquvare man, und Vood -vill do as he say he vill do, und Shamieson in der freight yards iss a -hog, und Ranald Cam iss make money, und Fater Harra iss teach lil' -boys fight mit gloves in St. Catherine's parochial school und bleed -der badness out of der kleine noses. Und sie say, 'I loss my shob, -Freiburger!' 'My lil' boy sick, Freiburger.' Ach, so! All dings in der -Vard iss tell me. Veil now, aber, look here! I am a Councilman. Der iss -no man so big on Maple Street as Fater Harra und me, und Freiburger's -iss head-quaverters of der Vard, und das iss goot for business.” - -“That's all right. I see your point. But the Council isn't supposed to -be an adjunct to the different councilmen's business, is it? I suppose -the Ward understood itself to be trusting its interests in your hands, -don't you? and you're a sort of guardian and trustee for the city, -aren't you? Seems as if that would take a good deal of time and worry, -because you'd want to be sure you were doing right by the city and the -Ward, and it's a complicated affair you have to look after, and a lot of -people's interests at stake.” - -Wood stirred slightly in his chair, partly with pleasure at the humour -of it, partly with uneasiness. It was all right for Hennion to examine -the Freiburger soul, if he liked, but to cast on its smooth seas such -wide-stirring, windy ideas seemed unkind to Freiburger. - -Freiburger puffed heavily in the darkness. - -The excitement of expressing himself subsided, and Hennion's idea opened -before him, a black gulf into which he could for a while only stare -dubiously. His mind reached out vaguely for something familiar to cling -to. - -“Veil--I don' know--die boys and Fater Harra und--Mein Gott! I ask -Vood!” He puffed heavily again after the struggle and triumph. - -“Couldn't do better. It's what your boys expect of you anyhow.” - -And Hennion returned to his silence. Freiburger's soul glowed peacefully -once more. - -“It iss Vood's business, hein?” - -He looked from one to the other of the impassive, self-controlled men. -He wanted Wood to say something that he could carry away for law and -wisdom and conviction, something to which other ideas might be fitted -and referred. He had the invertebrate instinct of a mollusk to cling to -something not itself, something rooted and undriven, in the sea. - -“You've done well, Freiburger,” said Wood, rousing himself. “Tell the -boys they've done well. Stay by your beer and don't worry till the keg's -dry.” - -Freiburger rolled away, murmuring his message loyally. “Stay by -mein--a--mein keg's dry.” - -“Freiburger won't cost you much,” Hen-nion murmured after a while. Wood -swung softly in his chair. - -“Got something on your mind, ain't you, Dick?” - -“Oh, yes. Of course. But I don't know what it is. I've fished for it -till I'm tired. I've analysed Freiburger, and didn't get much. Now I'd -like to examine your soul in a strong chemical solution. Maybe I'm a bit -embarrassed.” - -Wood chuckled. “Go ahead. Most men 'll lie, if you give 'em time to -rearrange their ideas. Well--it won't take me so long.” His manner -became genial. “You've got a good head, Dick. Well--I'll tell what I'm -thinking. It's this. The old man 'll have to drop his job one of these -days, and--if you're feeling for pointers--I don't say you are, but -supposing you are--I don't mind saying I shall back you to head the -organization. Maybe--well,--in fact, I don't suppose there's much money -in it you'd care to touch--maybe there ain't any--but there's a place -for the right man. I like you. I liked your father. He was built -something your way. The boys want somebody over 'em that won't wriggle -off the safety valve, and knows how to pick up punkins peacefully as -they come. This First Ward business--well, you've got a pretty good grip -through the crowd to begin with.” - -“Now there!” broke in Hennion. - -“You and Aidee are both trying to do the same thing. You want to get me -into politics. I don't care for your primaries and committees. I don't -see ten cents' difference to the city which party runs it. I dare say -whoever runs it expects to make a living out of it. Why do you both come -to me?” - -“I guess we've both got an idea you're useful.” - -Hennion thought a moment and then spoke more quietly. - -“Henry Champney used to boss this section. He did it from the platform -instead of the committee room. And my father handled bigger contracts -than I've touched yet. But Champney didn't ask him to run his canal into -the next caucus, or furnish stray batches of constituents with jobs. -Understand, I'm not grumbling about the last. Champney stayed on his -platform, and my father stayed in his big ditch and dug. The proper -thing now seems to be for everybody to get into the street and row -around together. Here's Aidee too thinks he's got to jump into it now, -and take with him--take with him everything he can' reach.” - -“That's straight,” murmured Wood. “So they do.” - -“Yes, and I call off, myself.” - -“All right. I was only guessing what you had in your mind. Well--it's -business sets the pace nowadays. 'Most everything else has to catch its -gait or be left. I remember Champney forty years gone. He was a fine -picture, when he got up and spread himself. He didn't do anything -that's here now, unless it's a volume of his speeches, congressional -and occasional. Not much. He kept us all whooping for Harry Clay. -Well--Clay's dead, Whig Party and Compromises and all burnt up. Your -father built sixty miles of canal. Canal stock's pretty dead now, but -that's not his fault. He laid a few thousand miles of railroad, went -around this place and that, cleaning up the country. Several million -people travel his railroads and walk his bridges. Anybody ever call him -a great man like Henry Champney? Gone little he cared if they did or -didn't. He and his like were a sight more important. Well--no; Champney -didn't ask favours of anybody in those days. And he didn't ask votes. -They shovelled 'em at him, and he went on telling 'em the Constitution -was the foundation of America, and Harry Clay the steeple. They weren't. -Rick Hennion and his like were the foundation, and there wasn't any -steeple. If you ask what they're all rowing round in the street for now, -why, I don't know. I guess they've all found out the point's got to be -fought out there or nowhere. Well--better think over what I was -telling you, Dick. You're Rick Hennion's son. Well--it's none of my -business--but--I'd gone like to see you old Champney's son-in-law--if -that's it. I believed in Champney once, and shouted for Clay, and -thought there was something in it. I did, that's a fact. I'd lock horns -with any other bull then, and swear my name was Righteouashess and his -was Sin.” - -“Well, but Champney----” - -“Yes--Champney!” - -“When he turned a vote, it meant he'd persuaded a man, didn't it?” - -“Yes--Champney! His best argument was a particular chest tone. If I tell -a man, 'Hullo, Jimmy!' and give him a cigar, it's as reasonable as a -chest tone.” - -“It's not in my line, Wood,” said Hen-nion after a silence. “What makes -you so down? You're not old.” - -“Going on seventy, Dick.” Wood's mood seemed more than usually frank -and talkative. He seemed to be smoothing out the creases in his mind, -hunting into corners that he hardly knew himself, showing a certain -wistfulness to explain his conception of things, complex and crumpled -by the wear and pressures of a long life, possibly taking Hennion to -represent some remembrance that he would like to be friends with after -long estrangement, and in that way pleading with his own youth to think -kindly of him. Or it might have been he was thinking of “Rick” Hennion, -who helped him forty years before, and stayed with him longest of -worn-out ideals. - -There was a rush of feet and clamour of voices in the press-room. - -“Wood! Wood!” - -“First Ward.” - -“Thrown out forty votes.” - -“Wouldn't do what you told 'em.” - -The little room was jammed with men, thinned out, and jammed again. The -electric light flashed up. - -“What's to pay now?” - -_The Chronicle_ flung its bold cone of light and glaring challenge -across the street. It seemed to strike the canvas with a slap. - -“Forty Reform votes thrown out in 1st Ward. Fraud!” - -A hush fell on Tecumseh Street. Then a roar went up that seemed to shake -the buildings. Tecumseh Street thundered below, monstrous and elemental, -and trembled above like a resonant drum. The mob rolled against the -brick front of the block like a surf that might be expected to splash -any moment up the flat perpendicular. Grey helmets of policemen tossed -on the surface. Faces were yellow and greenish-white in the mingled -electric-light and moonlight. Fists and spread hands were shaken at _The -Press_ windows. Five or six heads were in the window of the little room. -Wood's face was plain to make out by his grey shovel-beard. They shouted -comments in each other's ears. - -“It's a riot.” - -“No!” - -“Looks like the bottom of hell, don't it?” Then a little spit of smoke -and flame darted like a snake's tongue between the advertising boards, -seven feet above the sidewalk. There was a sharp crack that only the -nearest heard. - -Wood flung up his hand, pitched forward, and hung half over the window -sill. - -Someone directly beneath, looking up, saw a head hanging, felt a drop -splash on his face, and drew back wincing. - -The thrill and hush spread from the centre. It ran whisperingly over -the mass. The roar died away in the distance to right and left. Tecumseh -Street was still, except for the crash where a policeman tore a board -from the advertisements with a heave of burly shoulders, and plunged -through into the darkness of empty lots. - -The little room above was now crowded and silent, like the street. -They laid Wood on the table with a coat under his head. He coughed and -blinked his eyes at the familiar faces, leaning over him, strained and -staring. - -“You boys are foolish. Charlie Carroll--I want--take Hennion--Ranald -Cam, you hear me! Becket--Tuttle.” - -It was like a Roman emperor dispensing the succession, some worn -Augustus leaving historic counsel out of his experience of good and evil -and the cross-breeds of expediency--meaning by good, good for something, -and by evil, good for nothing. - -“Seems queer to be plugged at my time of life. Take Hennion. You ain't -got any heads. Dick!” - -Hennion stood over him. Wood looked up wistfully, as if there were -something he would like to explain. - -“The game's up to you, Dick. I played it the only way I knew how.” - -The moon floated clear above the street, and mild and speculative. Ten -minutes passed, twenty, thirty. The mass began to sway and murmur, then -caught sight of Carroll in the window, lifting his hand, and was quiet. - -“Gentlemen, Mr. Wood is dead.” - -For a moment there was hardly a motion. Then the crowd melted away, -shuffling and murmuring, into half a score of dim streets. - - - - -CHAPTER VI--ALCOTT AIDEE - - -|THE Sexton Avenue Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, -with wide windows and a tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the -Avenue in a block of bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house -from the corner. Aidee rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, -but his study was in the Assembly building. The house belonged to -one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote -articles for _The Chronicle_, and verses which were military at one -time, nay, even ferocious, which afterward reflected her pensioned -widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She hoped her drawing-room might -be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. She was tall, thin, -grey-haired, and impressive. - -The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a -kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, -but some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly -organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who -delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations -of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There -was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule. -Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and -rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had -fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. -There was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted -for excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large, -good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her -trail, Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling -mills. - -T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he -liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was -on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded -from his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission -into Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set -forever on higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room, and held conversation. - -Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by -means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature -by the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with -natural gas and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern, -intensely modern.” - -Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man -of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism -there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he -came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his -life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, -leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and -“Lolly,” on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on -the same small farm. - -The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and -then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in -that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by -the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions -objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school -commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left -it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, -the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud -of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period -followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed -himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces. -Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and -solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out. - -“Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!” - -“We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.” - -But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, -a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, -affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him -to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a -pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with -a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed -miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men. - -“You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric -youth,” said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!” - -There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level -horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in -astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in -an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart. - -“By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell, -do you? Got any idea where it is?” - -“Yes.” - -“Ho! You have!” - -“Some hot chunks of it in this town.” - -“You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, -and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof -off. What church are you, anyhow?” - -“I'm no church. I'm a freak.” - -“Ho! You don't say!” - -“I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, -strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.” - -But they did not find him. - -Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee. - -But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. -The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was -a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which -followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a -burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, -and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself -loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and -good may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,” - says the penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of -unuse, if they came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse -there was, and irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt. - -“The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that -title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become -a tyranny.” - -In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is -certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before -him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey -volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near -the beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have -mainly given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, -has known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker -becoming a larger glow,--the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better -moments than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The -other has seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and -brooding and pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. -Two lamps--the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.” - -So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting -multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated -thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and -died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier -and more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still. - -“Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an -elemental unit.” - -If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and -to care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, -Port Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing -the Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in -opposition next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth -and nail on local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the -mystery. - -“T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its -way. Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton -Avenue Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port -Argent concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid -man it found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for -rhetorical speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted -him a definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it -found him rather repellent. - -The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days -had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics -started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one -newspaper, _The Chronicle_, and sometimes elected a few councilmen, -sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the -Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by -over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and -disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied -to a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They -generally do. - -Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became -familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He -walked much about the city, watching faces--dingy and blurred faces, -hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no -equality among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew -to be a kind of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. -Personally, he was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about -other men by too much direct contact with them, they put him out. He -looked at them hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him -companionable. His solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his -conscience. - -Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her -aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring -bells for a place of residence. - -He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall -with its platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his -wide-windowed study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, -scatter his seed, and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could -do no more than throw his personality into the welter of things, and -leave the worth of it to other decisions than his own. Here his travels -were ended, except as one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and -timeless. - -In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by -two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and -overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of -the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner -Republic,” might be called signboards, or statements of condition. -Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” - crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations, -showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal -sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured -humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate -championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they -were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of -their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the -platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written -“Allen.” - -“Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you -sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, -violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and -my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does -not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For -though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp -this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's -desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but -human,--and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.” - -The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen, -present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his -speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse -drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the -next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had -ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was -no jest in that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly -into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern. - -The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street -and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll -glittered with malice. - -“Say, that man's name was Hicks.” - -“What of it?” - -“Why, he's one of your heelers.” - -“Don't know him.” - -“Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in -Muscadine Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way -back under your gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and -drinking eloquence like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.” - -“Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?” - -“Well, not exactly.” - -“Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?” - -Carroll shook his head. - -“Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never -saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular. -No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet.” - -Carroll laughed and flitted away. - -Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody -cared what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his -brother's keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business -to do his best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a -likeable man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee -had seen men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest. -If somebody from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's -paragraphs by applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business -of Carroll's either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with -seeing that they said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused -them to say. - -But the thing tasted badly. - -He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a -man translated “Down with the devil!” into “Go shoot Wood!” and became -ready to take another's life and give over his own in exchange. - -He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door, -followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping -Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and -giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's “brotherly -love” was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan -that his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played -dolls with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the “Standard Oil” by way -of relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with -thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident. -A lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no -opinions, except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was -better than these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And -who were the bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men -followed him now or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman -like the murderer, Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care -for him, Aidee. They liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew -of no one person in Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was -a collection of the half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated, -the drunken with a little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches, -and a percentage of socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch -plaids. What dedication was there in any of them? - -What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is -genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was -one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One -could not deny that. - -Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success, -when he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day -in Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on -the edge of his claim--which was paying at that time--and felt the same -mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis. - -Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning -stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why -at other times their voices were effortless and sweet. - -On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss -of Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was -final, and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest -percentage of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move -men had come, and brought with it the longing to move them to certain -ends, and he had thought: - -“All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is -afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but -neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of -the other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the -solitary issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my -message.” Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and -had faith. - -Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith -and doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them -bacteria. They passed from man to man--they floated in the air--one -caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera--they were -apt to be epidemic. - -And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them -disease. The one we must have, the other we must be rid of. - -So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out -gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown -by the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street -car, a headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent -people were talking of the Wood murder--some gabbling about it like Mrs. -Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated -me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!” - -The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his -life--harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in the -street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door, -and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the -house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an -hour he took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson -drawing-room. - - - - -CHAPTER VII--THE THIRD LAMP - - -|WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, -the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder. - -“Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will -put it in music, the schema thus--The wronged cry for justice! -They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! -Allegro-mezzoforte!” - -And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs. -Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.” - -And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying -sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring -herself either to countenance crime. - -“This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist -to Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People -will ask our position.” - -Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about -Wood and Hicks, really?” - -“My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked. - -“Scrumptious!” said Alberta. - -Mrs. Tillotson hesitated. - -“I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.” - -It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the -throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to -Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, a reference furnished her by Berry. - -“Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.” - -Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider. - -“Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't -countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.” - -“Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the -breach of necessary laws.” - -“Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself. -“But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by -nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, -and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of -technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An -unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent -crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, -inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.” - -“G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks----” - -“Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed -and smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.” - -“G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this -keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to -be erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here -than he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, -whose knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless -as possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson -scared him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, -and he knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson -posed, that Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive -pocket, and finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were -rather good. - -The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and -Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried: - -“Camilla Champney! She's coming in!” - -While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent -and familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, -and then nearly a year before. - -When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing -eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling -interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. -Tillotson appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of -rituals; they tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he -said, in the place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who -substituted ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence -followed anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, -therefore peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought -Mrs. Tillotson might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted -his scorn. Mrs. Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his -scorn. - -Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted -and Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large -houses and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin -Street. The crowds increased as they drew nearer the business -section--late afternoon crowds hurrying home. - -“I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said -stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's -your gift.” - -Camilla was radiant for a moment. - -“It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr. -Hennion was right.” - -“Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be -men's conventions.” - -“Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.” - -“Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He _couldn't!_” She was radiant -again. - -“Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room.” - -“But I like Alberta!” - -She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood. - -The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left -through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred -windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet -young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked -into its black secrecy. - -“Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't -matter, and besides--I don't know how to ask you--but there's something -I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The -Inner Republic'!” - -She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now. - -“I thought it was different--from the other books--that is--I thought -there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.” - -“The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?” - -“Not more, but besides.” - -“And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man -ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he -ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask -for are extensive.” - -Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently. - -They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a -few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden -and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, -weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between -the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent -once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither -they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of -Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great -red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was -surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy -trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a -steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space. - -Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted -as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in -asking for explanatory notes. - -A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse -began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman -at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some -quarrelling children. - -Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at -the rebuff. - -“I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell -me--because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life--because -I thought,--you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't -mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.” - -Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old -fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the -grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated -above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the -sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little -wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there -are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of -dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that -will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully -and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's -hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the -maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the -discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad -arteries throbbing faintly. - -Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her. - -“I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. -Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.” - -“I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if -she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to -believe. And perhaps she would understand.” - -“Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you -understand? This is what I mean.” - -“But you do understand now!” said Camilla. - -“Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood -murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder -would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You -asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. -Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like -two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty -years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I -dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. -Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead -or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man -than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore -me in two. - -“I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been -a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and -miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a -dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. -Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about -those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The -reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's -hysteric.” - -“I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank -admiration. - -The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying -softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty -unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and -folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps -and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street -grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the -fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them. - -“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come -you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the -genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me -to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a -schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every -day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old -disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in -the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it -is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till -we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are -wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a -debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered -and foolish as you like.” - -Camilla laughed happily. - -“Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what -you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.” - -He glowered a little. - -“Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I -think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like -thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like -Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I -suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him -in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is -illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be -legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the -two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I -think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't -care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified -habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better -laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality. -The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood -stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then -illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't -belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you, -because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems -better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin? -Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I -felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights -of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably -no less so. Wood was a likeable----” - -“The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt -politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the -classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? -I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks -confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that -he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they -would look apart.” - -Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or, -“confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance -of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him--a man new, at least, -and original--conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and -held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen, -poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about. -Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long -morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for -any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was -conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks -to flying signals of excitement. - -Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness -soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and -lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney! - -“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have -been a lyric poet.” - -He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now -rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla -choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, -with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the -surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked -up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street. - -“No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. -I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, -but she always thrashes him.” - -“How dreadful!” - -“Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of -things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she -can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom -Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a -foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the -qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room.” - -“He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested -in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things -found not altogether worshipful--egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, -weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond -most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in -getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man -walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, -restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the -moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother -whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than -doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close -love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each -seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other. - -The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age -of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, -into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland -Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where -everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, -what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window -and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation -as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a -balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person -then. - -Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every -book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in -the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed -to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and -longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes -spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it -seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship -carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and -impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with -the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it -seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The -impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring -haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia. - -Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German -and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street -seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, -cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail -of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges. - -“Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked. - -“I love it.” - -“Reason enough for its cheerfulness.” - -“I've loved it for ages.” - -“But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee. - -“You needn't insist on it.” - -“Not if I think it important?” - -“Oh, never at all!” - -“But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.” - -“Better owe it than pay it in small coin.” - -“Then I offer a promissory note.” - -“You mean--you will tell me more about----” Camilla paused and dropped -her voice. - -“Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.” - -It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in -the springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, -and small tinklings of wit are thought poetical. - -Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The -paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood -idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to -Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him. - -“Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.” - -“'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully. - -“Can't help it.” - -Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed. - -“I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.” - -He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the -Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions. - -“What is it, Dick? What have you done?” - -Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting. - -“Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder -with his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we -forget about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.” - -Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla -went up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the -gangs of workmen. - -“You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm -not quite clear how you were right, but you were.” - -“Right about the whole business?” - -“No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm -adopting your scruples.” - -Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on. - -“Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a -sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh. -“I'm a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. -Would it be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?” - -“Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.” - -“Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.” - -“Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?” - implying that he knew what the paragraphs would be. - -“Never saw him that I know of.” - -“Well--I don't see where you're concerned.” - -Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what -Aidee meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity -of dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself -liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious -scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were -not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else. - -Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the -bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within -him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the -disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about -the place. Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their -open window. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII--MECHANICS - - -|HENNION came back from seeing Wood laid away (where other men were -lying, who had been spoken of in their day, whom Port Argent had -forgotten or was in process of forgetting) and saw the last bricks laid -and rammed on Lower Bank Street. There was satisfaction in the pavement -of Lower Bank Street, in knowing what was in it and why. The qualities -of sand, crushed stone, and paving brick were the same yesterday and -to-day. Each brick was three inches and three-eighths thick, and not -one would be ambitious of four inches to-morrow. If it were broken, -and thrown away, there would be no altruistic compunctions. One built -effectively with such things. - -Charlie Carroll whispered to Hennion as they came out of the cemetery: - -“It's all right. The boys are satisfied.” - -“Why are they?” - -“They'd be scared not to do what Wood said now. It wouldn't go down.” - -“Go down where?” - -“Well, they seem to like the idea too. They will have it.” - -But why should he be congratulated over a prospective invitation from -“the boys” to labour in their interests? He was not sure why he had not -already refused, by what subconscious motive or scruple. Properly there -should be scruples about accepting. The leadership of the organisation -was an unsalaried position, with vague perquisites. Wood had taken -honorariums and contributions, spent what he chose on the organisation, -and kept what he chose. Apparently he had not kept much, if any. He had -seemed to care only for influence. He had liked the game. He had left -only a small estate. But whether he had kept or passed it on, the money -was called unclean. - -If one went into politics to effect something--and Hennion could not -imagine why one went into anything otherwise--the leadership of the -organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of -chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain -subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the -subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the -chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that -were needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be -dynamics and mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism -it seemed oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any -machine, turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. -Still these sets and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like -an interesting problem in engineering, that had been met rather -experimentally. As mechanics, it seemed to be all in an experimental -stage. Hennion wondered if there were any text-books on the subject, and -then pulled himself up with a protest. - -What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer -and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be -sure, but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's -time politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly -a class of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and -mechanic laws, they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it -seemed to succeed by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense. - -Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as -important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of -the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces. - -The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had -thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney. - -Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions -for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more -of its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. -Those who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less -about the matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called -him corrupt, which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, -the chartered machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation -to suit those who furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity -of Port Argent had always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a -complicated motive, half private, hardly confessed. - -Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, -and noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were -gathering their tools. - -“All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on -the east side next.” - -Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding -their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and -it occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men -like Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him. - -He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the -policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer -specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an -eccentric. - -Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no -conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a -runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way -of incident. “Everything goes,” was the phrase there, meaning it is -accepted and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it. - -Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room in _The Press_ -building. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him -a machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men -to drive it--what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the -enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the -mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances -and hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type -to run that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and -what “the boys” wanted, why, they wanted _their_ “jobs,” like everybody -else. Hennion wanted his own. - -Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that -moment, and nearly ran into him. - -“Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night.” - -“I don't want it.” - -“Come off! You can't help it.” - -Carroll flitted away in the direction of _The Press_ building. - -Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in -sleep all the great issues of their day. - -Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly -called “The Versailles,” and came out in the street. It was too early to -see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street -presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across -the street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the -Fourth Ward, church and state--Father Harra and Frei-burger. - -Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to -be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a -sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats -out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more -like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a -financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the -canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and -success, and that was the bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, -and for the symbol of his father's life and his own hope in the working -world. He liked to stand on it, to feel it beneath and around him, -knowing what each steel girder meant, and what in figures was the -strength of its grip and pull. There was no emotional human nature in -it, no need of compromise. Steel was steel, and stone stone, and not a -bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice or private folly. In a certain -way he seemed to find his father there, and to be able to go over with -him their old vivid talks. - -The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, -shattered fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in -his ear: “Got a light?” - -Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, -there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, -creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown -child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the -other. - -“Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd -float all right if you fell into the river.” - -“Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.” - -He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with -the pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the -basket girl. “Hi!” - -The child stopped and looked at him. - -“I gets one end. Tha'sh right.” - -She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away -over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them. -Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song. - -A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping -creatures like the basket girl! - -Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The -west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a -moving line of lit windows. - -Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and -solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The -west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran -as accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of -smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the -people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had--but mixed ideas -of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the -westbound train would have been a silly affair. - -Hennion came from the bridge and down Bank Street, which was brilliant -with lights. He turned up an outrunning street and came out on the -square, where stood Port Argent's city hall and court house and jail, -where there was a fountain that sometimes ran, and beds of trimmed -foliage plants arranged in misguided colour-designs. - -Several lights were burning in the barred windows of the old jail. He -stopped and looked at the lights, and wondered what varieties of human -beings were there. The jail was another structure which would have been -futile without people to go in, at least to dislike going in. The man -who shot Wood was there. Why did he shoot Wood? What was his futile idea -in that? - -The jail was old and dilapidated. Some of the bricks had crumbled under -the barred windows. - -Hennion walked into the entrance, and rang the bell. - -The jailor was middle-aged, bearded, and smoking a short pipe. - -“Can I see Hicks, Sweeney?” - -“Got a permit? Oh! Mr. Hennion! Well, it ain't regular, you know.” - -“You can stay by.” - -“Well, all right. No, but I'll have to lock you in. It's the rules.” - -They went up a flight of dark stairs, through a corridor, where a -watchman passed them. They stopped at a door, and the jailor turned the -key. - -“Hicks, gentleman to see you.” - - - - -CHAPTER IX--HICKS - - -|HICKS was sitting within by a plain board table, reading. It was a -whitewashed room and had a window with rusted bars. The door banged, and -the key again creaked in the lock. The jailor walked to and fro in the -corridor. - -Hicks looked up from his reading, and stared in a half-comprehending -way. - -“I have a selfish thirst for knowledge, Mr. Hicks,” said Hennion. - -He took the chair on the opposite side, and looked at the book on the -table. The feeble gas jet stood some six inches out from the wall, -directly over the table. - -“It's the Bible,” said the other. “It needs to be made modern, but -there's knowledge in it.” - -“I didn't mean that.” - -“Lazarus and Dives. That's fanciful justice. A trick to pacify Lazarus. -But there's knowledge. Notice what the dogs did. That's satire.” - -It seemed a trifle uncanny, the place, the little man with the absorbed -manner, metallic voice and strange language, black hair and beard, -intent black eyes. Hennion had never interviewed a criminal before. - -“I'm not a reporter, Mr. Hicks, nor a lawyer.” - -Hicks marked his place and closed the book. - -“I know who you are.” - -“I was a friend of Wood's, in a way, but I'm not here in malice. I -gathered you hadn't anything personal against him. It seemed to follow -you had some sort of a long-range motive in it. I wanted to ask you why -you shot Wood.” - -Hicks' gaze grew slowly in intentness as if his mind were gathering -behind it, concentrating its power on one point. The point seemed to be -midway between and above Hennion's eyes. Hennion had an impulse to -put his hand to the spot, as if it were burnt, but his habit of -impassiveness prevented. He thought the gaze might represent the way in -which Hicks' mind worked. A focussing mind was a good thing for anyone -who worked with his brains, but it might have extravagances. An analysis -concentrated and confined to an infinitely small point in the centre -of the forehead might make an infinitely small hole to the back of the -head, but it would not comprehend a whole character. A man's character -ran to the ends of his hands and feet. - -“I'm an engineer,” Hennion went on, “and in that way I have to know the -effectiveness of things I handle and apply. And in that way men too are -to me so much effectiveness.” - -“I know about you,” said Hicks sharply. “Your men like you. You've never -had a strike.” - -“Why--no.” - -Hicks' manner had changed. It was quick, excited, and angular. - -“You're wrong. They're something more to you, that you didn't count in. -Why do they like you?” - -“I don't know.” - -“Exactly. But it's something effective, ain't it?” - -Hennion paused and felt confused. A man of such sharp analysis and -warped performance as this, how was one to get to understand him? He -leaned back in his chair and crossed his knees. The sharp analysis -might be a trick Hicks had caught from listening to Aidee's speeches. It -sounded like Aidee. - -“Well, anyhow, Mr. Hicks, in the way of effectiveness, why did you shoot -Wood?” - -Hicks' eyes were little pin-points of concentration. - -“He sold the people to the corporations.” - -“Well. But suppose he did. Will the next man do any better? If not, -where's the effectiveness?” - -“He won't be so sharp.” - -“You thought Wood was too sharp to be downed Aidee's way?” - -“He was the devil's latest scheme. I sent him to the devil.” - -“And shoulder the consequences. I like that. But the next man. Suppose I -were the next man.” - -Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They -were thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said -softly: - -“Look out what you do.” - -“What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I -ask some of you?” - -Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something -unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain, -unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and -sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did -not feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by -thinking Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, -and would probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks -was that he was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense -convictions and repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his -purpose fixed on would become a white-hot point, blinding him to -circumstances. And this focussing nature, which acted like a lens to -contract general heat into a point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in -dynamics. It seemed a characteristic of better service for starting a -fire, and furnishing the first impulse of a social movement, than for -running steady machinery. Some people claimed that society was running -down and needed a new impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, -the trouble with Hicks might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at -the wrong time, a fire that had to be put out. - -“You ask me!” - -“Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and -satisfy you?” - -Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find -the centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the -attempt to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was -to break up the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails -scratching across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose. - -“I beg your pardon.” - -“You ask me!” - -“Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of -order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it -expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock. -But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about -it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea -was. I told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the -circumstances, I beg your pardon.” - -“Why do you ask me?” Hicks' fingers shook on the table. “There's a man -who can tell you. He can lead you. He led me, when I wasn't a fool.” - -“Who? You mean Aidee?” - -Hicks nodded, and fell to glowering at his nervous fingers, absent and -brooding. - -“He didn't tell you to shoot Wood. I know better than that.” - -“No, he didn't.” - -“Why, there's another thing I'd like to know. What did Aidee do?” - -“Do! He held me back! He was always holding me back! I couldn't stand -it!” he cried sharply, and a flash of anger and impatience went over his -face. “He shouldered me like a log of wood on his back. Maybe I liked -that papoose arrangement, with a smothered damn fire in the heart of me. -No, I didn't! I had to break loose or turn charcoal.” - -Hennion wondered. The man reminded him of Aidee, the same vivid phrase, -the figures of speech. But Aidee had said that he did not know him. It -appeared that he must know him. If Aidee had been lying about it, that -opened sinister suggestions. Hennion did not like Aidee, neither did he -like in himself this furtive sense of satisfaction in the suggestions. - -“Aidee told me he didn't know you. I hadn't thought he would lie about -it.” - -“By God, don't call him a liar to me!” Hicks jumped to his feet, and had -his wooden chair swung over his back in an instant. - -“I don't. I want it explained,” Hennion said coolly. “You can't do -anything with that. Sit down.” - -“He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds, -cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!” - -“Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an -explanation.” - -“Don't you call him a liar!” - -“Haven't. Sit down.” - -Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were -narrowed, glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put -his hands into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas -jet, and the ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed -ceiling. They were wild, disordered, and fugitive, as if reflections -from the spirit behind Hicks' eyes, instead of from the jet at the end -of a lead pipe. - -“I'll help you out with a suggestion,” Hennion said slowly. “You don't -mean to leave Aidee in that shape, since you feel about him in this way. -But you don't know whether your story would go down with me, or whether -it might not get Aidee into trouble. Now, if I'm forecasting that story, -it's something like this. You knew each other years ago, not in Port -Argent.” - -Hicks said nothing. - -“Carried you around papoose-fashion, did he? But there's some likeness -between you. It might happen to be a family likeness.” Still no comment. - -“If it so happened, you might be related. You might be twins. And then -again you might not. You might have been his first convert. Partners -maybe in Nevada. That: was where he came from,--silver mines and what -not. It's no business of mine.” - -He paused and meditated, looking at the pulsating light; then brought -his chair down and leaned forward. - -“I take the liberty to disagree with you. I'm no exception to the run -of men, and I'm neither a hound, nor a coward, nor a thief, nor yet a -liar.” - -“I know you're not.” - -“However, your story, or Aidee's, is no business of mine. I gave you -those inferences because they occurred to me. Naturally you'd suspect -they would. So they do. Gabbling them abroad might make some trouble for -Aidee, that's true. I shan't gabble them.” - -“I know you won't.” - -“I wanted your point of view in shooting Wood. If you don't see your -way to give it, all right. I judge it was the same way you were going to -club me with a chair. Simple enough and rather silly. Goodnight, then. -Is there anything I can do for you?” - -“Yes.” - -Hennion leaned back and studied the gaslight, and disliked himself. -Hicks clasped and unclasped his hands on the table. - -“It won't hurt him,” he said hoarsely, “between you and me. Besides, you -can do that for me. He's my brother, old Al. But I cut away from him. I -kept off. I kept away from him for a while, but I couldn't live without -seeing him. You see? I couldn't do it. Then he came here, and I followed -him, and I lived with a shoemaker across the river and cobbled shoes. -But I heard every speech he made in Port Argent, though he never saw me. -He thinks I'm dead, don't he? I dodged him pretty slick.” He flushed and -smiled--“I liked it,” he whispered, growing excited. “It was better'n -the old way, for we got along all right this way. You've heard of him! -Ain't he wonderful? Ain't he a great one, hey? That was Al. I liked it, -but he didn't know. You see? How'd he know when he thought I was dead, -didn't he? I watched him, old Al!” - -His face was lit up with the warm memory of it. He clicked his teeth, -and swayed to and fro, smiling. - -“We got along all right this way. All right. My idea. Wasn't Al's. I -kept the other side the river, mostly. Nobody can touch him when he's -fired up, can they? They didn't know Al like I knew him. They called him -the Preacher. He scared 'em like prairie fire. He's got his way. I've -heard him. I watched 'em, and I knew him, but they didn't, did they?” - -He focussed his excited eyes suddenly on Hennion. - -“You! I know you; I know your men that live on the east side. I heard -a man say you'd got a heart like a baked potato and don't know it. That -fat-headed foreman of yours, Kennedy, he can tell you more 'n you -ever thought of. Think you're a composite of steel and brick, set up -according to laws of mechanics, don't you? Oh, hell! Go and ask Al. He's -a wonder. Why do your men like you? Go and ask 'em. I've told you why. -Why'd I shoot Wood? Al wouldn't have let me, but it 'll do good. He -scares 'em his way, I scare 'em mine. You wait and see! It 'll do good.” - -Hennion studied the gas jet, until he could see nothing but an isolated -impish dancing flame, until it seemed as if either the little man across -the table were chattering far away in the distance and darkness, or else -he and the gas jet were one and the same. - -Aidee had been four years in Port Argent, and so Hicks had been -following and watching him, cobbling shoes, living a fanciful, excited -life, maniacal more or less. Hennion fancied that he had Hicks' point of -view now. - -“You wait and see! It'll do good.” - -“Well,” said Hennion, “I dare say you've answered the question. You -haven't told me yet what I can do for you.” - -Hicks' excitement died out as suddenly as it had risen. He reached a -trembling hand across the table, and whispered: - -“I thought---- What do you think they'll do to me?” - -“I can't help you there. You'll have counsel.” - -“No, no! It's this. I thought I'd write a letter to Al, and you'd give -it to him afterwards, a year afterwards--supposing--you see?” - -He hesitated pitifully. - -“All right, I'll do that.” - -“I won't write it now.” - -“I see.” - -“You'll keep it still? You won't tell? You won't get a grudge against -Al? If you do! No. I know about you. You won't tell.” - -“No, I won't. Well, good-night, then.” - -“Good-night.” - -His voice was husky and weak now. He put out his hand, hesitating. -Hennion took it promptly. It felt like a wet, withered leaf. - -Hennion went and knocked at the door, which Sweeney opened. Hicks sat -still by the table, looking down, straggling locks of his black hair -plastered wet against his white forehead, his finger nails scratching -the boards. - -The door clanged to, and the noise echoed in the corridor. - -“I heerd him gettin' some excited,” said the jailor. - -“Some.” - -“Think he's crazy?” - -“That's for the court to say.” - -“Ain't crazier'n this old jail. I need a new one bad, Mr. Hennion. Look -at them windows! I seen mighty clever boys here. A sharp one could dig -out here some night, if he had the tools.” - -“Then you'd better not suggest it to Hicks.” - -“Ho! He ain't thinkin' of it. He's a weakly man.” - -“No, probably not.” - -“He ain't got the tools, either. I know the business. Look at the -experience I've had! But I need a new jail, Mr. Hennion, bad, as I told -Mr. Wood.” - -“Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for -your trouble.” - -The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke -away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe. - -He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry -Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark -sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent. - -“Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?” Champney asked. - -“Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to -think it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had -a crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; -so he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary.” - - - - -CHAPTER X--MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE - - -|HENNION knew Wood's organisation intimately enough. He had been a part -of it on the outside. Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” - a body that had total charge of the party's municipal campaigns, -including admission to caucuses, and local charge in its general -campaigns. Local nominations were decided there. It was only less active -between elections than during them. It had an inner ring which met -by habit, socially, in Wood's office. Whatever was decided in Wood's -office, it was understood, would pass the Committee, and whatever passed -the Committee would pass the City Council, and be welcomed by a mayor -who had been socially at the birth of the said measure. Port Argent was -a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better ring than ordinary. -Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to something peculiar -in Wood. - -Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in -his office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. -Carroll was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long -neck and close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by -profession; Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, -devoid of grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some -reason unmatched in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, -saloon-keeper from East Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, -plastered, and gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, -small, thin, dry, of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent -speech, a lawyer, supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay -Tuttle, President of the School Board, white-moustached and pompous. - -Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers -who suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s. -Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew -them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of -them held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and -personal interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They -varied discussion with anecdotes of Wood. - -Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans -and estimates of competing architects. - -“Any preference, Major?” asked Hennion. - -“I have given it some consideration,” said the Major puffily, and stated -considerations. - -“Well,” Hennion suggested, “why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon, -and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up.” - -The circle laughed and nodded. - -The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new -bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. -Tait read a document signed “Wm. R. Macclesfield, President.” Hennion -suggested that they offer a counter-proposition. - -“We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him -expect his right of way for a gift?” - -“You know what they chipped in this spring?” said Tait, looking up. - -“Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?” He turned to -Ranald Cam. - -“Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet,” growled Cam, -“for all they gas about it.” Tait was silent. The others disputed -at length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy -influence of the “old man” was still so strong in the circle that no one -ventured to put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. -They only disputed points of fact. - -“He kept things solid,” said Carroll, “that's the point.” - -“I should say Macclesfield would have to come up,” said Hennion at last. -“I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week.” - -When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest. -Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together. - -“I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait,” said Beckett. “Suit me all -right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's -rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to -rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?” - Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood. - -“Possibly, possibly,” said the Major. - -Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him. -Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward -them. They did not like Tait. - -“Want to go over there with me, Hennion?” said Tait, puffing his black -cigar rather fast. “See Macclesfield?” - -“Not that I know of.” - -“Suppose I bring him over here?” Hennion stared at the top of his desk -for a full moment. “All right. Come in an hour.” - -Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring. - -William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal -courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal -courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at -first knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long -after. Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview -which here dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as -well unmade. Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it. - -“Should I congratulate or commiserate?” said Macclesfield, smiling and -shaking hands. - -“Commiserate, thank you.” - -Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly. - -“Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great -judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, -man. I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your -father and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his -profession. Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, -too, we young men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. -Port Argent has grown. There have been remarkable developments in -politics and engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a -manager in the background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is -needed, but it's a peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were -Wood's choice, and he was a very judicious man. You find it takes time -and labour. Yes, and it calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some -people seem to think one in that position ought not to get anything -for his trouble. I call that absurd. I always found in railroading that -time, labour, and ability had to be paid for. By the way, you learned -engineering from your father, I think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was -thinking coming over the street just now with Tait--I was thinking what -fine things he did in his profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. -Remarkable. And yet engineering was almost in its infancy then.” - -“Yes,” said Hennion, “the changes would have interested him.” - -“Indeed they would! So--the fact is--I was thinking that, if you cared -to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that bridge -of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son can -do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in -business.” - -Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in -the young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him. - -“I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment -needs any forgiveness from me?” - -“My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?” - -“If you continue to want them.” - -“Good! Now--oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think the -figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a -little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the -feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how -much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering -the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be -moderate?” - -“Moderate in its generosity.” - -“Ah--I don't know--I was thinking that we understood each other--that -is--the situation.” - -Hennion swung in his chair. - -“I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and -I was wondering what my father would have said about the situation. -Wouldn't he have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and -the representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two -transactions that had better not be mixed?” - -“My dear boy, who's mixing them?” - -“Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme. -Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford -to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there. -You'll have to come in by a subway.” - -Macclesfield shook his head smilingly. - -“We can't afford that, you see.” - -“Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect -to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?” - -“Oh, well--isn't this a little inquisitorial?” - -“Not necessary, anyway. I know, about.” - -He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised. - -Hennion went on slowly: - -“The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at -all. You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. -There'll be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well -suspect it now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose.” - -Macclesfield said nothing. - -“I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like.” - -“By all means!” - -“I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down, -below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't -know the holdings down there I'll give them to you.” - -He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed -figures, following the suggested line from point to point, massed the -figures of the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and -went on. - -“The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some -trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll -save about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably -more. You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the -P. and N. By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple -Street you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to -develop your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable -there, probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the -Boulevard, if the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have -a better curve, same connection with the P. and N., and this one here -with the L. and S. You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. -Here you get your site in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, -we'll take your approach on the east side.” More details massed and -ordered. Macclesfield listened intently. Tait half closed his eyes and -swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion concluded and paused a moment. - -“Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to -this--first, if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me -with anything.” - -“If I seemed to attempt it,” said Macclesfield, “I owe you an apology -for my awkwardness.” - -“None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings -this side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I -can make it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new -bridge can now be very properly withdrawn.” - -Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully. - -“I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the -subject very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a -report.” - -“All right.” - -“And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I--don't, in fact, -withdraw it.” - -He rose and shook hands with Hennion. - -“So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I -sometimes have them.” - -“Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man--for -God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.” - -“Is he going to bite or build?” - -“Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man--a--that won't lose his -temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!” - -Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, -to wonder what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. -Macclesfield, who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery -man, a little fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. -Perhaps that was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he -had left Hennion with a sense of having done him an injustice. - -He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then -pushed aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to -East Argent and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before -he had gone far he changed his mind. - -The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. -It might be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without -watching; it would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced -for blundering with his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around -acting like a desolate orphan about it. - -He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there -paced the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through -some miles of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and -warm in the distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a -street that had been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of -the city to tempt inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them -at wide intervals. The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of -built-up streets about them. He followed the line of the Boulevard -surveys, absorbed, often stopping and making notes. He came through a -stretch of cornfield and pasture. If the city bought it in here before -it began to develop the section, it would be shrewd investment. The -marshes would be crossed by an embankment. - -A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the -wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch -of three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some -years back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to -small boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted -through between banks of slippery clay. - -The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. -It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the -city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on -the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a -landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, -which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all -about the bottom lands and in the brush. - -To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should -be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to -accomplish something worth while, to make a name--it looked like a weedy -road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, -after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get -ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would -be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway. - -Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be -sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, -Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The -rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. -Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on -the subject. - -Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. -A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the -road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted -regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic -commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a -fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic -capers. - -Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy -neighbourhood--factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with -refuse--and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by -Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from -its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures -with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the -river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday -afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for -picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard -drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed -a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and -several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port -Argent on a Sunday afternoon. - -The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious -jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks -and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter -current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep -bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores. - -He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if -it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know -almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some -extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an -impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most -faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park. - -Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. -Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple -Street. They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the -rest of the flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men -getting on the trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! -He knew them too. One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine -Street, east side; the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another -time one of a batch of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped -John Murphy to get jobs for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays -lived in a house on Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, -who shot Wood, used to live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer -named Wilson. Names of Kottar's children, remembered to have once been -so stated by Kottar, Nina, Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and -Elizabeth. One appeared to remember things useful, like the price -per gross of three-inch screws at present quoting, as well as things -useless, like the price three years ago. Hennion thought such an -inveterate memory a nuisance. - -Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in -Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its -people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or -worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields--all people, -and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in. - -He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over -the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the -whole section but a few generations back. - -“Mighty good luck to be young, Dick,” the “Governor” had said, and died, -calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times -he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done. - -Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He -caught a car and went back to the centre of the town. - -When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was -there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about -to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he -did not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading -Charlie Carroll's sinister paragraphs on “a certain admired instigator -of crime.” She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone. - -“He says he doesn't care about it,” she cried, “but I do!” - -“Do you? Why?” - -“Why!” - -Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether -to say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about -them. - -“Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever -bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics. -Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to -take it.” - -“It's wicked!” cried Camilla passionately. - -Hennion laughed. - -“Well--he needn't have called Wood names--that's true.” - -“If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!” - -“'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity -they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they -can't.” - -Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him. - -“My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor -Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says. -Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of -it? I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing -visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going -to do anything in particular?” - -“He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks.” - -“What!” - -“To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that -nobody else will,” cried Camilla breathlessly, “and of course you'll say -he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will -talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs.” - -“You go too fast for me.” He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much -that he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He -was not quite clear why he disliked him at all. - -It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of -the grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's -situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be -confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more -comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations. - -He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine -with excitement,--but he did not seem to succeed,--over the subject of -a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a -lady's throat. - -“I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port -Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll -have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. -She's eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it -today. It struck me she needed washing and drying.” - -True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, “That's -tremendously nice, Dick,” and stared into the fire with absent wistful -eyes. - -He drew nearer her and spoke lower, “Milly.” - -“No, no! Don't begin on that!” - -Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his -disappointment. - -“Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But -I will, though!” - -He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up -under the trees at Hicks' barred window. - -“Aidee's getting a black eye too in there,” he thought. “That's too -bad.” - -When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's -bridge. - - - - -CHAPTER XI--THE BROTHERS - - -|MAY I see Hicks?” - -The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short -pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around -the gas jet over his head. - -“Ain't you the Preacher?” - -“So they call me.” - -The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked -into the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him. - -“Where is his cell?” - -“Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word,” said the jailor -thoughtfully. “Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it, -so he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's -som'p'n in it. But I seen in the _Press_ this mornin'--say, you ain't -goin' to instigate him again?” - -Aidee laughed, and said: - -“They have to be lively.” - -“That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their -heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?” - -“You're a philosopher.” - -“Oh, I do a pile of thinkin',” said the jailor complacently. - -He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked -it. - -“Hicks, gentleman to see you.” - -Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes. - -The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the -end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low -voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated. - -“Spiritual consolation! That's the word.” - -Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to -his side and grasped his arm and whispered, “Don't you yell out!” while -Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the -corridor. - -“What do you come here for? Keep quiet!” - -“Lolly!” - -“Who told you it was me?” - -He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across -and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his -head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs. - -“Lolly, boy!” - -“Did he tell you it was me?” - -“Who?” - -“Hennion!” - -“Nobody told me it was you.” - -“You came to see Hicks!” - -He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. “Hey! I know! You wanted to -ask me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know.” - -It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on -one side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of -a cornered animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer -smile--Lolly the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in -his small resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable -and clever! They used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his -twisted smile, and hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin, -straggling beard had changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six -years. Alcott thought he would hardly have recognised him at a little -distance. So--why, Hicks!--Carroll said Hicks used to drink down -Alcott's own speeches like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood! - -“What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet.” - -The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a -low, excited voice. - -“Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard -every speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they -do to me?” he whispered, turning to the window. “I wished I could get -out. Say, Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose -I was? Over the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near -spotting me once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on -the east side with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes -to his one. But sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how -Mummy looked, and I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd -you come for? Say, I cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd -never have caught me, if I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept -out of your way all right. I wasn't going to mess you again, and that -suited me all right, that way. I pegged shoes along with old Shays. -Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan. I'll knife him some day. No! No! I -won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I got something in me that burns me -up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em kill me. God, I was proud of you! -I used to go home like dynamite, and collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down -with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's matter?' says Shays. 'Where is -'t?' and goes hunting for justice at the bottom of a jug of forty-rod -whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story, you and I?” - -He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid -his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully. -The noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car -gongs, came in through the barred window. - -“I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been -happy sometimes.” - -“Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?” - -“Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al,” he pleaded, -“don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to -be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've -done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?” - -“I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man, -Wood, had a right to his life.” - -“He had _no_ right!” - -Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air. - -“Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why -didn't you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going -away to think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled -together again. I've said it, and you can quit talking.” - -Allen clung to his hand. - -“You're coming again, Al.” - -He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that -had always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always -intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott, -nor yet with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever -solution--not with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering -control, but seeing his face and hearing his voice. - -He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across -the table, and said little. - -Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image -of the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw -Allen going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky -step, exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's -enemies! How he had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy -paragraphs! How he had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a “disease”! How -he had lurked in the shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How -he had pegged shoes and poured his excitement, in vivid language, into -the ears of the east-side loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back -and forth over the Maple Street bridge, where the drays and trolley cars -jangled, where the Muscadine flowed, muddy and muttering, below! - -“You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I -wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.” - -“Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, -Al!” - -“I was always afraid of you.” - -“What for? You're coming again, Al!” - -“You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!” - -“I ain't going to mess you over again! No!” he whispered, twisting his -fingers. - -Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous -fingers. - -“Drop it, Lolly!” - -“What you going to do? You're coming again?” His voice was thin and -plaintive. - -“Yes.” - -“How soon?” - -“To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly.” - -He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly -down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door. - -“I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks.” - -Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin. - -“Pretty cool, ain't he?” said Sweeney presently. “I didn't hear -much noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here--look here, I told Mr. -Hennion--why, you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail.” - -“I see. Not very creditable.” - -“Why, no.” Sweeney argued in an injured tone. “Look at it!” - -“I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?” - -“Why, I guess so.” - -Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt -cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on -the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die. - -“Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the -brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and -wriggling fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet. - -Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before -him days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the -long doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, -not to be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front. - -The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him -here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help -him here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to -hang Lolly. - -At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The -air was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and -fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying: -“I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail--I who lied to -you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have -but one brother and one bond of blood,--to you who are my enemies. His -name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.” - -People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak -so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist -in a stifling room. - -He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces -from the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture -one more item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the -gallery. When he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the -picture. - -Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets -over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and -walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the -city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk -waggons clattered over the rough pavement. - -“Poor boy!” - -Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the -arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he -would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that -Allen was lurking near him. - -Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often -he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head -blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, -running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not -an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, -and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know. - -Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which -I tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional, -unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this -muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, -and the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all -interpretations of itself, in course of time. - -In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one -side of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, -on the other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with -shops in most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. -Already Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy -with cars and hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river -factories began to blow. - -The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a -street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He -stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, -and bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through -the narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his -head on the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he -hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly. - -One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, -cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil -wells. - -“Lolly! Lolly!” - -Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the -ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, -iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was -justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a -clamour and cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even -balance? There was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a -tooth? It was revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must -know that uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that -was justice. - -Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy -stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must -have him!” - -All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed -suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go -away. It seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue -Assembly, and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and -stone, and the iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple -thing. Their stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the -city. - -The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove -from without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds -flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights -where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new -leaves were growing. - - - - -CHAPTER XII--AIDEE AND CAMILLLA - - -|ALCOTT came back to the city in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was -on Lower Bank Street, knocking at Henry Champney's door. - -“Is Miss Camilla Champney in?” - -The startled maid stared at him and showed him into the library, where -Henry Champney's shelves of massive books covered the lower walls, and -over them hung the portraits of Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams with -solemn, shining foreheads. - -He walked up and down, twisting his fingers, stopping now and then to -listen for Camilla's steps. She came soon. - -“I'm so glad you're here! I want to ask----” She stopped, caught a quick -breath, and put her hand to her throat. - -“What is it?” - -Alcott's face was white and damp, and his black eyes stared at her. He -stood very still. - -“What is it?” she asked. - -“Do I look like that? Do I show what I am, gone blind and mad? Do I look -it? I could only think of this, of you--I must tell someone. There -must be some way. Help me!” He moved about jerkily, talking half -incoherently. “He's been here four years. Allen, you know! If I'd -known, I could have handled him somehow. But--he's--Hicks--he called -himself--Hicks. He killed Wood. I saw him last night, but he's changed, -but--my boy, Lolly! Four years he's been in Port Argent--watching me! -He called himself Hicks. Don't you see, Camilla! It's my boy! Don't you -see! Wait. I'll get buckled down. I can tell you better in a moment.” - -Camilla leaned back against Henry Champney's big desk, and stared with -wide grey eyes. Alcott walked away breathing heavily, and returned. He -sat down in the desk chair and dropped his head on his arm. - -“It's your brother!” - -“I must save him! Don't you understand? No one shall touch him! He's -mine!” He sprang up, walked away, and came again. - -Camilla thought of many confused things. The bluebird's note was gone -from her heart, but the current of the tumult that was there ran in one -direction. It poured into Alcott's passion and point of view. Her new -pillar of fire and cloud, the man with the halo of her own construction -was begging for help, a demigod suddenly become human and suffering, -stammering, calling himself blind and mad. - -“Why, we must get him out!” she cried. - -She thought of Dick. Another instinct warned her that he would not -understand. It was a case where Dick would be a rock in the way, instead -of one to anchor to. But thinking of him served to remind her of what he -had said the night before. - -“Listen!” She went on. “He must get out. Listen! Somebody told -Dick--what was it? Something about a crowbar or pair of--nonsense! He -said a prisoner might get out if he had a chisel. Now we must think -about it. Could he get out?” - -She sat down too. Alcott stared at her in a kind of dull confusion. - -“Now, this is what I'm thinking,” she hurried on. “What is the place -like?” - -“The place?” - -“When do you go to him again?” - -“When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought.” - -They leaned closer together across the desk. - -Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of -their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went -away. - -“There's a chest of tools in the storeroom,” Camilla said. “We'll go up -there.” - -They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows -looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes, -trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture. - -Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the -long rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and -ships, his artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, -while Camilla aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative -at ten years. She cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful -shapes--tombstone cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention--and -her solemn exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears -because Dick would not admire them. - -It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's -library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that -held her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's -blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window. - -She flung it open, making a great noise and business. - -“See! Will this do?” - -It was a heavy carpenter's chisel with a scroll design on one side of -the battered handle, and on the other the crude semblance or intention -of a woful face. “I don't know whether it's Dick's or mine. We both -used to make messes here.” She chattered on, and thought the while, “He -called me Camilla--I wish--I wonder if he will again.” - -He thrust it into an inner pocket, ripping through the lining of his -coat. She closed the lid, and turned about to the low-silled window, -clasped her hands about her knees, and stared away into the tree tops, -flushed and smiling. - -“You needn't go yet?” - -“It's three o'clock.” - -“You'll come and tell me to-morrow? When?”. - -Alcott did not seem to hear her. - -“I'm sure I could take care of him now,” he said. - -“But you'll remember that I helped!” - -“Does anyone ever forget you?” - -Both were silent, and then he started up nervously. - -“It isn't done yet. Lolly is clever. He lived here four years and kept -out of my sight. But, afterwards, granted he succeeds--but the law is -a great octopus. Its arms are everywhere. But he'll have me with him. I -suppose we must go out of the country.” - -“You! Do you mean--do you--you'll go too!” - -“Go! Could I stay?” - -“Oh! I don't know! I don't know!” - -She shivered and leaned against the friendly old chest. - -“But could I do it without that? How could I? I couldn't do less than -that.” - -He came and sat beside her again, clasping his knees in the same way, -looking off into the tree tops, talking slowly and sadly. - -“To be with him always, and give up my life to that, and see that he -doesn't do any more harm. That would be the debt I would owe to the rest -of the world. You see, I know him so well. I shall know how to manage -him better than I used to. I used to irritate him. Do you know, I think -he's better off in places where things are rough and simple. He has an -odd mind or temperament, not what people call balanced or healthy, but -it's hot and sensitive; oh, but loving and hating so suddenly, one never -knows! You understand. I don't know how you do, but you do understand, -somehow, about Lolly and me. You're wholly healthy, too, but Lolly and -I, we're morbid of course. Yes, we're morbid. I don't know that there's -any cure for us. We'll smash up altogether by and by.” - -“When will you go?” she asked only just audibly. - -“He ought to try it to-night. To-night or to-morrow night. He ought to -be away on one of the early freight trains, to St. Louis, and meet me -there. We know our bearings there.” - -Camilla sat very still. - -“I must be going,” he said. - -“Don't go! You'll come before--when?” - -“To-morrow we'll know. To-morrow then.” - -After he was gone, she lifted the window and peered over the mansards -to watch him going down the street. The tree tops were thick with busy -sparrows, the railroad yards clamorous, and there was the rattle of the -travelling crane, and the clug-chug of steamers on the river. - -She drew back, and leaned against the old chest, and sobbed with her -face against the hard, worn edge of it. - -“I didn't suppose it would be like this,” she thought. “I thought people -were happy.” - -Meanwhile Miss Eunice sat below in the parlour knitting. Hennion came -in later and found her there. She said that Camilla, she thought, was -upstairs, and added primly: - -“I think it will be as well if you talk with me.” - -He smothered his surprise. - -“Why, of course, Miss Eunice!” - -“I think you need advice.” - -He sat down beside her, and felt humble. - -“That's just what I need. But, Miss Eunice, do you like me well enough -to give it?” - -“I like you more than some people.” - -“You might do better than that.” - -“I like you well enough to give it,” she admitted. - -Tick, tick, tick, continued the knitting needles. - -“I'm stumped, you know, about Camilla,” Dick went on bluntly. “I don't -get ahead. She has changed lately. Hasn't she changed?” - -“She has changed.” - -“Well, then, she has! I thought so.” - -The knitting needles ticked on, and both Dick and Miss Eunice studied -their vibrating points, criss-crossing, clicking dry comments over the -mystery of the web. - -“It is my constant prayer that Camilla may be happy,” said Miss Eunice -at last. “I have felt--I have examined the feeling with great care--I -have felt, that, if she saw her happiness in your happiness, it would be -wise to believe her instinct had guided her well. My brother's thoughts, -his hopes, are all in Camilla. He could not live without her. He depends -upon her to such an extent,--as you know, of course.” - -“Of course, Miss Eunice.” - -“I have grieved that she seemed so wayward. I have wished to see this -anxious question settled. You have been almost of the family since she -was a child, and if she saw her happiness in--in you, I should feel -quite contented, quite secure--of her finding it there, and of my -brother's satisfaction, in the end. He must not be separated from her. -He could not--I think he could not outlive it. And in this way I should -feel secure that--that you would understand.” - -“I hope I should deserve your tribute. I'm more than glad to have it.” - -“Perhaps this long intimacy, which makes me feel secure, is, at the same -time, the trouble with her?” - -“But why, Miss Eunice? I don't understand that. It has struck me so. And -yet I love Camilla the more for all I know of her, and the better for -the time. How can it be so different with her?” - -“That is true. I don't doubt it, Richard.” - -“Well, then, is it because I don't wear well?” - -“No. It is true, I think, that we don't understand this difference -always--perhaps, not often. But I think,”--knitting a trifle more -slowly, speaking with a shade of embarrassment--“I think, with women, it -must be strange in order to be at all. It must not be customary. It must -always be strange.” - -Hennion looked puzzled and frowning. - -“Please go on.” - -“Lately then, very lately, I have grown more anxious still, seeing -an influence creeping into her life, against which I could not openly -object, and which yet gave me great uneasiness. It--he was here an hour -ago. I should not perhaps have spoken in this way, but I thought there -was something unusual between them, some secrecy or confusion. I was -distressed. I feared something might have occurred already. I wished to -take some step. You know to whom I refer?” - -“I think so.” - -“A gentleman, in appearance at least. One does not know anything about -his past. He is admired by some, by many, and disliked or distrusted by -others. He has great gifts, as my brother thinks. But he thinks him also -'heady,' 'fantastic.' He has used these words. My brother thinks that -this society called 'The Assembly' is a mere fashion in Port Argent, -depending for financial support, even now, on Mr. Secor, and he thinks -this gentleman, whom I am describing, is not likely to continue to be -successful in our society, in Port Argent, but more likely to have a -chequered career, probably unfortunate, unhappy. My brother regards--he -calls him--'a spasmodic phenomenon.' My own disapproval goes further -than my brother's in this respect. Yet he does not approve of this -influence on Camilla. It causes him uneasiness. I have not thought wise -to speak to her about it, for I am afraid of--of some mistake, but -I think my brother has spoken, has said something. This--this person -arouses my distrust, my dislike. I look at this subject with great -distress.” - -Tick, tick, tick, the knitting needles, and their prim, dry comment. - -Hennion said gravely: - -“I have nothing to say about the gentleman you've been speaking of. I -will win Camilla if I can, but I've come to the point of confessing that -I don't know how.” - -Tick, tick, the not uneloquent knitting needles. - -“Will you tell me, Miss Eunice? You said something about love as it -comes to women, as it seems to them. I had never thought about it, about -that side of it, from that side.” - -“I dare say not.” - -Tick, tick, tick. - -“You said it must always be strange. I suppose, that is, it's like a -discovery, as if nobody ever made it before. Well, but, Miss Eunice, -they never did make it before, not that one!” - -“Oh, indeed!” - -“Don't you think I'm coming on?” - -“You are progressing.” - -Miss Eunice's lips were compressed a little grimly, but there was a red -spot in either cheek. - -“I ought to act as if I didn't see how she was possible, ought I?” - -“You are progressing.” - -“Whether I did see, or didn't?” - -“Of course!” Miss Eunice was almost snappish. - -“Well, I don't think I do see.” - -“You'd better not.” - -Hennion went away without seeing Camilla. Going up Bank Street he -thought of Camilla. At the corner of Franklin Street he thought of Miss -Eunice. - -“There's another one I was off about. I don't see how she's possible, -either.” - - - - -CHAPTER XIII--IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY - - -|ALLEN AIDEE lay on his back across the bed in his whitewashed cell, and -smoked, swinging one foot swiftly, incessantly, like a pendulum, arguing -with Sol Sweeney, and gesticulating with loose fingers. The bed was a -wooden cot with a mattress on it. - -Sweeney sat at the table under the gas jet, and smoked too. He had a -large friendly acquaintance with jailbirds, and his placid philosophy -was composed out of his knowledge of them. - -“I seen folks like you, Hicks,” he said, “two or three. Trouble is you -gets hold of one end of a string. Any old string 'll do. All the same to -you. 'Hullo!' you says, 'this is a valyble string. Fact, there ain't any -other string, not any other real string. This the only genwine. Follow -it, and you gets wherever you like. It's that kind of a string,' says -you. 'God A'mighty, what a string!' says you. Then you rolls yourself up -in it, and there you are! Ball up! Ain't no more use! For you take a -solid man like me, and he talks to you and he shows you reason, but you -don't see it. Why? 'Cause you're balled up in the string, that's why.” - -Allen snapped out his answer. - -“I'll tell you the trouble with you.” - -“Ain't any trouble with me.” - -“Ain't! Well, I know this, I can stand your kind about half an hour at -a stretch. Give me two hours of you--damn! I'd drink rat poison to get -cooled down.” - -“That's the trouble with you,” said the complacent jailor. “Ain't me.” - -“Trouble! No! You ain't equal to that. You ain't capable of that! You've -got no more consistency or organisation than a barrel of oil. You're all -fat and hair. Solid! So's a brick solid. Damn! You're solid, but are you -alive? You'll be dead before anybody sees the difference. Ain't any real -difference!” - -Sweeney puffed his pipe contentedly, but thoughtfully, and shook his -heavy beard. - -“Well, well! But now, I'll say this for you, Hicks. You're an -entertainin' man. I'll say that to anybody that asks. I'll say, 'Hicks -is a man that's got language, if I know what's what.'” - -The jailor rose. Allen swung his foot swiftly. - -“I wish you'd do something for me, Sweeney.” - -“What's that?” - -“Let me have the gas at night. I don't sleep good. If I had the gas I -could get up and read. You heavy men, you sleep all night. You don't -know what it is.” - -“Why, I'll see, Hicks. I'll ask about that to-morrow.” - -“Oh, let me have it to-night!” he pleaded. - -“I ain't going to sleep good to-night. I can feel it. It'll be eternity -before morning. I swear I'll be dead before morning. I'll turn it low.” - -“Well--I don't see no harm in that. It ain't in me to rough a man.” - -He went out, locking the door noisily behind him. - -Allan lay still. His foot swung steadily, but more slowly. After a time -Sweeney came down the corridor, making his ten o'clock round. He went to -the end, and back again, and then downstairs. The corridor was quiet. - -Half an hour later Allen got up and filled his pipe, lit it at the gas -jet, turned the jet low, and lay down again across his mattress. He -smoked with quick, sharp puffs, but not fast. He swung his foot slowly, -and stared at a point on the blank wall over the gas jet. Eleven o'clock -struck. - -After the theatre crowds were gone past, the noise of the city grew -less. There were fewer cars, and only now and then footsteps on the -neighbouring pavement. Twelve o'clock struck. - -He got up again, slipped off his shoes, and went to his window. - -A maple tree grew directly in front, some twenty feet away. Its leaves -were thick, but he could see the glitter of the electric light through -them. The sidewalk was high as the lower windows of the jail, for the -Court House Square was on sunken land. The black shadow of the maple -covered the front of the jail down to the ground. - -The grating of the window had its bars set at both sides, and at the -top and bottom. There were two rows of bricks from the bars to the inner -edge of the window, and the wooden framework that held the panes of -glass was set close to the grating. The outside of the sill was stone. - -Allen went back and lifted his mattress. There was a rent in the seam -of the lower edge. He thrust in his hand, drew out a black cloth cap -and put it on his head. Then he drew out a heavy chisel with a battered -wooden handle, and returned to the window. - -The woodwork came away, cracking slightly as the nails drew out. He -leaned the boards and frame carefully against the wall. He tried one -crack after another between the bricks at the bottom of the window, -pushing and pressing. Presently one became loose, then another. He laid -them one by one in a neat row on the floor. - -The work at the sides and top was slower, because it was difficult to -get a purchase, and to prevent fragments from falling. He dug till he -got the purchase, and then held the brick up with one hand and pried -with the other. Once a fragment of cement fell with a smart slap on the -sill. He got down suddenly and sat on the floor, and listened, wiping -his wet hands and forehead with his cap. Either Sweeney or his assistant -was always around at night, and would have heard, if he had happened to -be in the upper corridor. - -He carried the mattress to the window and laid it underneath to catch -and deaden the noise, if anything more fell. - -It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished -stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars -were buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to -strip them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which -were opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the -end of the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three -o'clock. - -He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched -intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, -more noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and -except for that, only little rasps and clicks. - -When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating, -which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and -he rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars -caught in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In -lifting the blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. -They suggested an idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the -chisel, carried it to the window, and scratched it on the bricks until -its black enamel was rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. -Whether possible to do so or not, people would think he must have -loosened the bricks with the brace. He wasn't going to mess “old Al” - again, he thought, no, nor meet him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be -led around the rest of his life by a string. - -“Not me, like a damn squealing little pig” - -He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each -strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the -blanket through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it -reached the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side -coat pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest -for the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off -the gas jet, and climbed over the grating. - -He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the -window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the -cell, and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the -window below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the -blanket, and so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. -When his feet reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under -his hands. He stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself -to the ground, and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly -dropped window. The lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned -inside. - -The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and -furnished with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the -same place as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide -bed. A man lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and -in the air, his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. -The sleeper was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and -covered his face with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that -Sweeney slept underneath him. - -He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to -the sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath -him. The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here -and there. - -The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the -night wind against the wall. - -As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower -across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too -spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that -poured its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were -pealing, shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court -House Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low -down in the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping -blanket, jail of the sleeping Sweeney. - -He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of -the square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass -globes--one red, the other blue--the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous -long shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks -around seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and -stared down at him with their ghastly blank windows--nervous, startled -fronts of buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. -There were no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own -steps and their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner -drug store glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow -and whirl all over their glassy slopes. - -He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out -of Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; -and here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any -lights; so that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden -shanties were on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School -building. Still higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse -overhung the empty lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky -with its black wedge. In front of him were the buildings of the Beck -Carriage Factory, bigger than church and school together. The vacant -spaces between them, these buildings and shanties, were by day -overflowed with light, overrun by school children and factory hands, -over-roared by the tumult of the nearby thoroughfares of Bank and Maple -Streets. By night they were the darkest and stillest places in Port -Argent. One man might pass another, walking in the thick dust of the -cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too dark to see the rickety -fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small sickly maples. - -He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the -dim glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the -corner of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around -the angle of the building. - -A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging -his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest, -not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head. - -It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and -so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some -time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case. - -Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction. -Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the -corner where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All -walked unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third -between them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear. - -As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in -behind them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to -the three in front. - -“Hullo!” said the policeman calmly; “jagged?” - -“Say!” exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; “tha's mistake. -Smooth as silk. Ain't it?” - -“You're out late, anyhow,” said the policeman. - -“It's a weddin'. Ain't it? Wa'n't us. 'Nother feller did it.” - -“Well, get along, then.” - -“All ri'! All ri'!” - -He watched the five men as far as the next electric light, and then -dropped them as objects of interest. - -“Hoi' on!” exclaimed the man walking beside Allen, turning suddenly upon -him. “That ain't right. There's five of us. Two, three, four, five. Bet -your life! That ain't right.” - -They all stopped and looked at Allen. He started and his breath came -harsh in his throat. - -“'Nother weddin'?” said the middleman thickly. “Wa'n't him. 'Nother -feller did it. You didn', did you?” - -Allen shook his head “No.” - -“Tha's so! Well, tha's right. 'Sh good thing. If 'nother feller does it, -'sh good thing.” - -They shambled on amiably across the drawbridge. Allen fell behind, -stopped, and leaned against the guard rail. - -In a few moments he could hear their footsteps no more, but he could -hear the mutter of the river against the stone piers. Leaning over the -rail, he could see here and there a dull glint, though the night -was dark; and across the wide spaces over the river he could see -the buildings on each side, low, heavy masses, only saved from the -smothering night and made sullenly visible by the general glow of the -street lamps beyond them. There a few red lights along shore, some in -the freight yards, some belonging to anchored or moored vessels, small -sail-boats, and long black lumber and coal barges from the northern -lakes. He could remember looking down at other times in the night at -the dull glint of water, and being shaken as now by the jar of fighting -things in his own mind, angry things fighting furiously. At those times -it seemed as if some cord within him were strained almost to snapping, -but always some passing excitement, some new glittering idea, something -to happen on the morrow, had drawn him away. But those moments of -despair were associated mainly with the glinting and mutter of dusky -water. “I been a fool,” he muttered, and a little later, “What's the -use!” - -He decided to go to the shoe-shop and change his clothes, shave his -beard, and pick up a few things, and then hide himself on some outgoing -freight train, the other side of Muscadine Street, before the morning -came. The morning could not be far off now. Shays would keep quiet, -maybe, for a while. He would take Shays' razor. - -He roused himself and moved on. He began to have glimpses of schemes, -tricks, and plans. There were little spots of light in his brain, which -for a while had seemed numb, dull, and unstirring. But he carried away -with him the impression of the glints of the gloomy river and the mutter -of its hurrying. - -His feet dragged with his weariness. He turned into Muscadine Street and -crept along the sidewalk on the right. - -Suddenly a switch engine in the freight yards glared him in the face -with its one blinding eye, yelled and hissed through its steam whistle, -and came charging toward him. He leaped aside and fell into a doorway, -and lay there crouching. Then he sat up and whimpered, “I ain't fit. I'm -all gone away. I ain't fit.” - -He rubbed his face and hands, peered around the corner to see the -harmless engine withdrawing in the distance then got up and crossed the -street. The nearness of the familiar shop windows, as he passed them one -after another, comforted him not a little. On the next corner was the -grocer's, the butcher's shop this side of it, and the shoemaker's shop -was over the rear of the grocery. The mingled butcher-shop and grocery -smell pervaded the corner, comforting, too, with its associations. - -He turned the corner and climbed slowly the outside wooden stairway, -with the signboard at the top, “James Shays,” and leaning over the -railing, he saw a faint light in the windows of the shop. He entered the -hall, turned the knob of the door softly, opened the door part way, and -peered in. - -The table stood in its ordinary central place, on it were a bottle, a -tin cup, and a small lit lamp with a smoky chimney. The work bench was -unchanged in place. The door of the inner room beyond stood open, but -that room was dark. On the pile of hides in the corner some clothes, -taken from the hooks overhead, had been thrown, and on the clothes lay -Coglan, face downward and asleep. - -Allen thought, “He's sleeping on my clothes,” and stepped in, closing -the door softly behind him. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS REST - - -|HE stood a moment with his hands against the closed door behind him, -listening to Coglan's heavy breathing. Then he crossed noiselessly to -the table, took the lamp and went through to the inner room. - -There were two cot beds in it. Shays lay asleep on one in all his -clothes, except his shoes. The other bed was broken down, a wreck on -the floor. Evidently Coglan had been using it, and it was not built for -slumberers of his weight, so he had gone back to the hides that had -often furnished him with a bed before. - -Shays turned his face away from the light and raised one limp hand in -half-conscious protest. He opened his eyes and blinked stupidly. Then he -sat up. - -“Don't make a noise, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'm going pretty soon.” - -“G-goin'--wha' for?” stammered Shays. “Wha's that for?” - -“I've broke jail. I'm going to change clothes and shave, then I'll light -out. You won't see me again, Jimmy.” - -He sat down on the side of the bed and rocked to and fro, twisting his -fingers. - -“You're decent, Jimmy. When they get to posting notices and rewards, you -see, you don't do a thing. Nor you don't wake Coglan. He's a damn hound. -See?” - -Shays shook his head, indicating either a promise or his general -confusion and despondency. - -“Wha' for, Hicksy?” - -Allen was silent a moment. - -“Jim-jams, Jimmy,” he said at last. “You'll die of those all right, and -Coglan will squat on you. You ain't bright, but you've been white to -me.” - -“Tha's right! Tom don't like you. Hicksy, tha's right,” whispered Shays -with sudden trembling. “Maybe he'd--'sh! We won't wake him, Hicksy. Wha' -for?” - -“He's sleeping on my clothes, so I'll take yours. Get me your razor.” - -“Wha' for? Wha's that for? All right! I ain't going to wake Tom.” - -He stepped unsteadily on a shoe that lay sidewise, stumbled, and fell -noisily on the floor. - -There he lay a moment, and then scrambled back to his feet, shaking and -grumbling. - -“What's the matter?” Coglan cried, now awake in the shop. - -“Nothin', Tommy! I'm gettin' back, Tommy!” - -“What you doin' with thot light?” - -“Nothin', Tommy.” - -Allen stood still. When Coglan came stamping unevenly to the door, he -only made a quick shift of the lamp to his left hand, and thrust the -other inside his coat till he felt the wooden handle of the chisel. - -“Oi!” said Coglan. - -His eyes seemed more prominent than ever, his face and neck heavier -with the drink and sleep than was even natural. Allen looked at him with -narrowed eyes. - -“He's broke out,” Shays said, feebly deprecating. “He's goin' off,” and -sat on the bed to pull on his shoes. - -“Is he thot!” said Coglan. - -Coglan turned back slowly into the shop. Shays shuffled after. Allen -followed, too, with the lamp and said nothing, but put the lamp on -the table. Coglan sat down, drank from the black bottle, and wiped his -mouth. The first dim light of the morning was in the windows. - -“I'll be getting along, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'll take your razor.” - -Coglan wiped his mouth again. - -“An' ye'd be goin' widout takin' advice of a sinsible mon, Hicksy, an' -a friend in need! Sure, sure! Didn't I say ye weren't a wise mon? Nor -Jimmy here, he ain't a wise mon. An' ain't I proved it? Ain't it so? -Would ye be jailed if ye was a wise mon? No! Here ye are again, an' ye'd -be runnin' away this time of the mornin', an' be took by a polaceman on -the first corner. I do laugh an' I do wape over ye, Hicksy. I do laugh -an wape. An' all because ye won't take advice.” - -“What's your advice?” - -Coglan moved uneasily and cleared his throat. “'Tis this, for ye're -rasonable now, sure! Ye'll hide in the back room a day or two. Quiet, -aisy, safe! Jimmy an' me to watch. An' what happens to ye? Ye gets away -some night wid the night before ye.” - -He lowered his voice and gestured with closed fist. - -“Ye'll lie under Jimmy's bed. The polaceman comes. 'Hicks!' says Jimmy, -'we ain't seen Hicks.' 'Hicks!' says I, 'Hicks be dommed! If he's broke -jail he's left for Chiney maybe.' I ask ye, do they look under Jimmy's -bed? No! What do they do? Nothin'!” - -Allen drew a step back. - -“You're right about one thing,” he said. “That reward would be easy -picking for you.” - -“What's thot?” - -“I ain't a wise man. I know it. But I know you. That's what it is. I'm -going now.” - -“Ye're not!” - -“Hicksy!” cried Shays feebly. “Tom, don't ye do it!” - -Coglan plunged around the table and grasped at Allen's throat, at -Allen's hand, which had shot behind his head, gripping the heavy chisel. -Allen dodged him, and struck, and jumped after as Coglan staggered, -and struck again. The corner of the chisel seemed to sink into Coglan's -head. - -Allen stood and clicked his teeth over his fallen enemy, who sighed like -a heavy sleeper, and was still. It was a moment of tumult, and then all -still in the shop. Then Shays stumbled backward over the work bench, and -dropped on the hides. Allen turned and looked at him, putting the chisel -into one of the side pockets of his coat, where it hung half-way out. -The light was growing clearer in the windows. - -“That's the end of me,” he said. - -And Shays cried angrily, “Wha's that for?” and cowered with fear and -dislike in his red-lidded eyes. “Keep off me! You keep off me!” - -“I got to the end, Jimmy. Goodbye.” - -“Keep off me!” - -Allen hung his head and went out of the shop into the dark hall. - -Shays heard his steps go down the outside stairway. He scrambled up from -the pile of hides, and snatched his hat. He kept close to the wall, as -far as possible from where Coglan lay against the legs of the table. He -was afraid. He vaguely wanted to get even with the man who had killed -Coglan. He had loved Coglan, on the whole, best among living men. - -People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were -stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried -down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block -away, walking slowly. - -At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the -chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on, -with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he -came to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. -The two kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge. - -The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it -was nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons -to come in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had -been turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the -disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering -of the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder -than by day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red -glimmer of the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge -except Shays and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the -drawbridge house. - -Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, -too, and muttered, “Wha's that for? Wha' for?” and found his mind blank -of all opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began -to run forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped -on the guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the -river. - -When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled -surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He -leaned over limply, and stared at the water. - -“Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, -and rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the -rail, staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over -the water pointing downward. “Wha' for?” - -The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A -freight train went over the P. and N. bridge. - -Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost -to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car -in the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered -wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned -against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked -up, stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back -in his pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and -he went to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the -Muscadine, and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the -stamp of hoofs, and the shuffle of feet. - - - - -CHAPTER XV--HENNION AND SHAYS - - -|HENNION came to his office early that Saturday morning with his -mind full of Macclesfield's bridge, and of the question of how to get -Macclesfield interested in the Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how -Macclesfield would take to the part of a municipal patriot. He thought -that if he could only conquer some shining success, something marked, -public, and celebrated, then, perhaps, his success might succeed with -Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your eyes on the path where you -seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow that path, for so one -travelled ahead and found that success attracted success by a sort of -gravitation between them. All things came about to him who kept going. -This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and son, much as -it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise. Neither Henry -Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing something -to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder Hennion -nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making -something a little better than it had been. - -Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window. -“I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed,” he thought. - -The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay -reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the -clamour of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar -noises, now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of -telephone wires and the window panes across the street glittered in the -bright sunlight. - -The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. -The owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid, -unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered -on the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair. - -“Look here, Shays! You don't get nourishment enough! You've burnt holes -in your stomach till it won't hold any more than a fish net. Now, I'll -tell you what you'd better do.” - -“Misser Hennion--Misser Hennion--I want you to see me through!” - -He stretched out his hand with scattered fingers, appealingly. - -“I want you--Misser Hennion--you see me through!” - -“Oh, come in! Sit down.” - -Shays sat down, and Hennion looked him over. - -“Had any breakfast?” - -“I want you see me through!” - -“What's the matter?” - -Shays sat on the edge of the chair and told his story, waving a thin -hand with high blue veins. He hurried, stumbled, and came on through -confusion to the end. - -“Hicksy come about three o'clock,” he said. “I didn't do nothing, and -Tom he was asleep. Tha's right. We didn't want him, but he woke me up, -and he says, 'I'm off, Jimmy,' like that. 'I broke jail,' he says, 'an' -ye needn't wake Coglan,' he says, like that. Then I gets up and I falls -down, plunk! like that, and Tom woke up. Then he goes arguin' with -Hicksy, like they always done, and he says, 'You stay under Jimmy's -bed,' he says, friendly, like that. 'You get off when there ain't nobody -lookin',' he says. But Hicksy says, 'You're lookin' for the reward; -you're goin' to sell me out,' he says. Then he says he's off, but Tom -won't let him. Then they clinched, and Hicksy hit him with the chisel. -Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! You see me through! He dropped, plunk! -like that, plunk! Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! Jus' like that, plunk! He -clipped him dead. He did, too!” Shays paused and rubbed his lips. - -“What next?” - -“Then he says, 'Jimmy, that's the end of me,' like that, and he put that -thing what he done it with in his pocket. He goes creepin', scroochin' -out the door, like that, creepin', scroochin'. Oh, my God! Misser -Hennion! I ain't goin' to stay there alone! Not me! I goes after him. -And in Muscadine Street I see him, but it was dark, but I see him -creepin', scroochin' along to the bridge; I see the chisel fall out and -it clinked on the stones. Pretty soon I picks it up, and pretty soon I -see Hicksy out on the bridge. Then he stopped. Then I knowed he'd jump. -Then he jumped, plunk! jus' like that, plunk!” - -He had the chisel in his hand, and showed it to Hennion. - -“Let me see that.” - -Hennion swung away in his chair toward the light and examined the -battered handle with the straggling, ill-cut, and woe-begone face traced -there. - -He turned slowly and took a newspaper from his desk, rolled up the -chisel in the newspaper, thrust it into a drawer, locked the drawer and -turned back to the muttering Shays. - -“I see. What next?” - -“I says, 'Wha' for? Wha's that for?' Then I come to that place, and -there ain't nothin' there. He got under quick, he did. He stayed there. -He never come up. I watched. He never come up. Oh, my God! Misser -Hennion, I ain't goin' to stay there! Folks was comin' on the bridge. I -ain't goin' to stay there!” - -“I see. What next?” - -“Next?” - -“Where'd you go then?” - -“Misser Hennion! I went down under along the bridge, where there wa'n't -anybody.” - -“What next?” - -“Next?” - -“Did you meet anyone? Say anything?” - -“Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?” - -“What did you do between then and now?” - -“Me? Nothin'! I went to sleep by the bridge. Then I got breakfast at -Riley's 'All Night.' Then I come here. I ain't said a word, excep' to -Riley.” - -“What did you say to Riley?” - -“Me! I says, 'Give me some coffee and an egg sandwich,' and Riley says, -'Ye're a dom little gutter pig, Jimmy,' and tha's every word.” - -“I see.” - -“Misser Hennion! You see me through!” - -“All right. But you've got to mind this, or I get out from under you. -You leave out Hicks' dropping that chisel, or your picking it up. He -dropped nothing; you picked up nothing. Understand? He hit Coglan with -something he had in his hand. Whatever it was, never mind. He put it in -his pocket and carried it off. You followed. You saw him jump off the -bridge. That's all. Tell me the thing again, and leave that out. Begin -where Hicks waked you.” - -“Me! Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?” - -“I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!” - -While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing -chair. - -He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the -battered handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. -He knew the niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot -where the tool chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from -whose windows one looked through the upper branches of the trees out on -the Muscadine. There in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the -sunlight, and in winter through bare branches one could see the river. -There Milly used to sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red -ribbon, and chatter like a sweet-voiced canary bird. - -He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind, -between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in -a newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday -afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed -emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday -night Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed -Coglan, and went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; -Saturday morning comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling -through now, anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, -but--now as to Aidee--that was the second time he had been to Camilla -for help, and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better -than Hennion. It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the “little maid” - would be “game,” but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like -Aidee, who came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in -front and a cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. -A man ought to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; -that is to say, not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth -shut, and buy a respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a -respectable hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's “crisis,” - it looked as if Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, -instead of the condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard -luck. Still, his criminal family was out of the way now, which did not -seem a bad idea. Any chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have -to be smothered of course, which meant smothering the whole thing. - -“Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up.” - -But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the -responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and -have nightmares. That wouldn't do either. - -“Very good, Jimmy.” - -He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the -story now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside. - -“Plunk! jus' like that!” said Shays. “He went, plunk! I come up, and I -looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. -He stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks -was cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of -him, but Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not -him, nor I ain't goin' to stay there, not him.” - -“You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?” Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and -according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, -because women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the -subject. Humph! Well--Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and -in fact, that “continuity of surprise” was all right. Aidee preached a -kind of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with -the individual man against men organised, and against the structure of -things; and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, -or it might be that view of things natural to women, their gift and -function. What would Camilla do next? “God knows!” She would see that -the “continuity of surprise” was all right. What on earth was Jimmy -Shays talking about? - -“Tom he says to me, 'Hicksy's a dangerous man, Jimmy,' he says, 'and I -wouldn't trust him with me life or me property. Nor,' he says, 'I -don't agree with his vilyanous opinions,' he says. That was Tom's word, -'vilyanous,' and it's true and it's proved, Misser Hennion, ain't it? -Sure! Then he jumps into the river, plunk! like that, Misser Hennion! I -ain't done no harm.” - -Shays was harmless surely, and cobbled shoes besides for the benefit of -society. - -“Drop it, Jimmy. We'll go over to the police station.” - - - - -CHAPTER XVI--CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY HALL - - -|CAMILLA spent the morning in the store-room, staring through the window -at the tree tops and glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving -with her father. Henry Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's -plans for the new railroad bridge and station, the three parks and -moon-shaped boulevard. - -“His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!” - -In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. -He foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues. - -“Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the -moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous -city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!” - -He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the -small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings. - -Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached -herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was -this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might -come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She -must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. -He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was -going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it -matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it -must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what -her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry -Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts -were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans -seemed to occupy her father's mind of late. - -“A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled. - -So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla -wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud -came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel -it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage -through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was -through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her. - -She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the -afternoon papers. - -When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her -father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the -porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver -papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not -look at the paper till she reached the store-room. - -Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A -half hour slipped by. - -“That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that -superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical -ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! -Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to -read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!” - -Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to -be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see -Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that -he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was -of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for -young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important -advice--it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to -answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, -when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of -throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of. - -They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the -hall. Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the -front door. Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting. - -“Camilla is going out again!” - -Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla -could have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation -were thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not -injustice to Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her -father's newspaper, a thing so important to his happiness before tea? -Miss Eunice put aside her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy. - -She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed -the second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in -front of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice -gasped, took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla -have been so rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front -page proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents -of a Night.” - -“Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.” - -“Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.” - -“Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port -Argent.” - -“John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.” - -“Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a -Hearse are his Limit.” - -None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. -No headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any -bearing on Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that -Richard had not already told the family, about a railroad bridge -and station, park improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss -Eunice's impression, Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming. - -She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled -newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed -tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and -helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether -it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and -Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of -Miss Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool -chest, and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in -the library, forlorn of his afternoon paper. - -When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before -six. He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head -bent down drowsily, where he sat in his chair. - -Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him -into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper. - -“I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. -I found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't -understand, Richard!” - -Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment. - -“Well--you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to Mr. -Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it -might be just as well. He might be surprised.” - -He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the -corner by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar. - -He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of -which stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. -The voices came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the -Assembly Hall. He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to -the street door, out of hearing of the words. - -“It's the other man's innings,” he thought ruefully. But, he thought -too, that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood -when Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his -shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets, -stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII--AIDEE--CAMILLA--HENNION - - -|CAMILLA went up Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin -Street. It carried her past the Court House Square, and so on to the -little three-cornered park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, -and opposite the Hall the block of grey houses with bay windows, of -which the third from the corner was Mrs. Tillotson's. - -That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door. - -“My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little -drawing-room usually thronged! _Now_, we can have such a talk, such -an _earnest_ talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a -_position_.” - -She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand. - -“I--I don't quite understand,” said Camilla. - -“_Surely_, my dear, the two most important questions before the Assembly -are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion? -second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more -ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. -Ralbeck the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. -I have in particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have -examined thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have -offered Mr. Aidee _all_ my knowledge, _all_ my literary experience. But -he does not as yet take a _position!_” - -Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson -thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the -opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she -would insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in -insisting. - -Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led -into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. -The door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. -She knew the windows of the study from without. - -She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but -no one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. -The door yielded and opened, but the room was empty. - -In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, -half-furnished--some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered table, -a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the room -seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning as -to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was -even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows -seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest -were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was -empty. - -She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be -hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, -clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless -people outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming -and forever rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as -accidents! So pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should -be empty of Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, -pacing the yellow matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking. - -She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw -that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on -the street. Wherever it led, he might be there. - -She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly -to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way -along the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness -felt the panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet -or cellar stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, -glimmering space of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows -now turning grey from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its -pillars and curved galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its -ranged tiers of seats, its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high -bulk of gilded organ pipes. She had seen it before only when the -tiers of seats had been packed with people, when Aidee had filled the -remaining space with his presence, his purposes, and his torrent of -speech; when the organ had played before and after, ushering in and -following the Preacher with its rolling music; when great thoughts and -sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people had been there, -where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery dim bars of -light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the hall, and -the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric curves. Lines -of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the galleries; -shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the platform below -the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. Aidee had given -the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still haunted by his -voice, haunted by his phrases. - -Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the -Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started -forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her. - -“Camilla!” - -“Oh! Why didn't you come?” - -“Come?” - -“To me. I thought you would!” - -He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained. - -“When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This -morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them -talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but -there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came -back.” - -They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and -constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent -in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, -and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained -forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She -pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been -swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. -But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and -she seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to -expect some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; -and it stared up at her coldly and quietly. - -“I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would -help us both.” - -“Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. -I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.” - -“What do you mean?” - -They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped -her head, and wept with her face in her hands. - -“It's not your story,” said Aidee. - -“Yes, it is! It's mine!” - -Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the -dimness, and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went -through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to -resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not -like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated -and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting -from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry -fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish -face of “Lolly” by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in -the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, -the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he -studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street -and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling -and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment -with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms--“I ain't -mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly -imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling -mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he -had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished -audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had -seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met -the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success -in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on -Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and -praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. -“They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” he had -thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the -book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and -asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!” - -What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port -Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so -drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone -out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. -He would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again -with the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if -anywhere; and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact -loudest. No, rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say -nothing. But Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story -too! He began to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager. - -“How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They -were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human -being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger. -Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no -more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the -rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent -crust to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!” - -“Oh, no! no!” she cried. - -“For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You -will save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. -I will count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. -Come with me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!” - -“No, no!” - -His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his -face was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. -The future he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the -struggle in her own heart frightened her. - -“You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it -out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!” - -Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was -waiting and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing -over him, listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was -listening. - -“I can't!” she cried. “I can't!” - -“You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. -I'll find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. -Camilla, look at me!” She lifted her face and turned slowly toward -him, and a voice spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, -“Milly!”--and then hesitated, and Hennion came out. - -“I heard you crying,” he said quietly. “I didn't seem to be able to -stand that.” - -“Dick! Take care of me!” she cried, and ran to him, and put her face -against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment. - -Aidee said, “I'm answered.” - -“I think you gave me a close call,” said Hennion, and drew Camilla past -him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back, -thinking: - -“A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the -person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as -dense.” - -At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not -to be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified -himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, “It's hardly a square -game besides.” He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and -said slowly: - -“By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told -me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe -he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was.” - -Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly -resistant. - -“Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me -that chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it -behind him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact -is, it was mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else -for your hardware.” - -Still no sound. - -“However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river, -where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed -secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning -this to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no -great difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that -you're clear of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. -I think you can fill the place rather better--better than anyone else. -Will you stay?” - -“No.” - -“Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of -those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.” - -“I won't make it.” - -“It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the -highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me -honest. Will you?” - -“No.” - -“All right. Good-night.” - -The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were -shaded by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. -Hennion and Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half -sobbed, and clung to him. They talked very little at first. - -“Milly,” he said at last, “of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway. -You shall do as you like.” - -“I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me.” - -“Well--maybe I'm wrong--I've been that before--but it looks to me in -this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible somehow, -or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep places. It -stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know altogether--I -don't ask--but if you see anything that looks steep ahead, why, perhaps -it is, perhaps it is--but then, what of it? And that's the moral I've -been hedging around to, Milly.” - -After a silence she asked, “How did you know I was there?” - -“I thought it likely.” - -He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the -shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that -the chisel had been “used on Coglan.” Passing that point, he went on, -comfortably comforting. - -“You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what -they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, -and generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. -Hicks was a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the -river on his own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might -have had scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you -didn't arrange all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited -to your good luck, if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break -jail, which was natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if -anyone wants to debate it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He -shouldn't have come to you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do -something of the kind, same as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it -your part in it that troubles you? You'd better take my judgment on it.” - -“What is it?” she said, half audibly. - -“My judgment? Only that I want you for myself.” - -He went on quietly after a pause: “There are objections to interfering -with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think, -don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, -they're staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of -being right are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your -getting mixed with that kind of thing or people, is--would be, of -course, rather hard on us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was -good. Is that what you want my judgment on?” - -They turned up the path to the Champney house. - -“You knew all about it!” she said hurriedly. “But you don't understand. -It was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he -is! But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, -and it was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came -again. It frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off -everything here, and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it -because I was afraid. I'm a coward.” - -“Did, did he?” said Hennion comfortably. “That was good nerve, too.” - -“You don't understand,” she said with a small sob, and then another. - -“Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons.” - -They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney -sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white -head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: “There's some of this -business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs -to me that”--pointing toward the window--“that may have been a reason.” - -“You do understand that,” she said, and they went in together. - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII--T. M. SECOR--HENNION--CAMILLA - - -|PORT ARGENT had not reached such a stage of civic life that its wealthy -citizens went out into the neighbouring country by reason of warm -weather. Besides, the neighbouring country is flat, and the summer heats -seem to lie on it level and undisturbed. There straight roads meet at -right angles, one cornfield is like another, and one stumpy pasture -differs little from the next. It is fertile, and looks democratic, not -to say socialistic, in its monotonous similarity, but it does not look -like a landscape apt to draw out to it the civilian, as the hill country -draws out its civilians, with the thirst of the hill people for -their falling brooks and stormy mountains, the wood thrushes and the -columbine. An “observer of decades” might have remarked that Herbert -Avenue was the pleasantest spot he had seen within a hundred miles of -Port Argent, and that the civic life seemed to be peculiarly victorious -at that point. There was a village air about the Avenue, only on a -statelier scale, but with the same space and greenness and quiet. One of -the largest houses was T. M. Secor's. - -Secor sat on his broad verandah in the early twilight. He stirred -heavily in his chair, and stretched out a great hand thick and hard, as -Hennion came up the steps. - -“Glad to see you, sonny,” Secor said. “Stick up your feet and have a -drink.” - -“Just come from Nevada?” - -“One hour and one-half ago, during the which time Billy Macclesfield's -been here, greasy with some new virtues. I take it you had something to -do with greasing him. Next came Ted, who said he's going to get married. -Next came Aidee with a melodious melodrama of his own, and said he -was going to quit town. Why, things are humming here! How you feeling, -sonny?” - -A huge, hairy, iron-grey, talkative man, with a voice like an amiable -bison, was T. M. Secor. - -He continued: “Hold on! Why, Aidee said you knew about that screed -of his. I gathered you got it by a sort of fortuitous congregation of -atoms? I gathered that there brother of Aidee's was, by the nature of -him, a sort of fortuitous atom.” - -“About that.” - -“Just so! Well--you ain't got a melodious melodrama too?” - -“No,” said Hennion. “I want to take up the conversation you had with -Macclesfield.” - -“Oh, you do!” - -“I'm not feeling greasy with virtue myself, you know.” - -“Oh, you ain't!”--Secor was silent for some moments. - -“I guess I'm on to you, sonny,” he said at last. “I'll tell you my mind -about it. I think you handled Macclesfield all right, and that's a very -good job, and you may be solid now with the gang, for aught I know, but -my idea is, it'll be only a question of time before you get bucked off. -I'd give you a year, maybe two.” - -“I think so.” - -“You figure on two years?” - -“Next election. Tait's out with me now, and he'll get a knife in when -he can. Beckett, Freiburger, and Tuttle will probably be on edge before -next spring. That's too soon. Now--if I can get the parks and Boulevard -done, I'm willing to call off without a row. I want the Manual Training -School too. But Tuttle's going to get some rake off out of that. Can't -help it. Anyway Tuttle will see it's a good enough job. I don't mind -Cam, and John Murphy's indecent, but reasonable. But Freiburger's going -to be a holy terror. I don't see that I can run with that crowd, and I -don't see how it can be altered much at present. If I split it they'll -lose the election. Now--I think it'll split of itself, and I'd be of -more use without the responsibility of having split it. I think so. -Anyhow, I'm going to have something to show people for my innings.” - -“Just so.” - -After another silence Secor said: “What was Wood's idea? D'you know?” - -“He thought it would split of itself.” - -“Think so? Well, I've a notion he had a soft side to him, and you'd got -on it. Well--I don' know. Seemed to me that way. What then?” - -“Oh, I'll go out. I don't want it anyway. I want my father's job. Maybe -I'm a bit of a Puritan, Secor, and maybe not, but when the heelers get -restless to explosion, and the Reformers grimmer around the mouth -because the city isn't rosy and polite, and my general utility's gone, I -expect to thank God, and go back to pile-driving exclusive. But I want -time.” - -“Just so. I can keep Beckett and Tuttle from being too soon, maybe. That -what you want of me?” - -“Yes.” - -“You say 'Wood's machine,'” Hennion went on after a while. “It's a poor -metaphor, 'machine politics,' 'machine organisation.' Why, being an -engineer, I ought to know a machine when I see one. I've analysed Wood's -organisation, and I tell you you can't apply one bottom principle of -dynamics to it to fit. The machinery is full of ghosts.” - -The two smoked a while, and Hennion said: “How about Aidee?” - -“Ho! I don't see why he won't stay in Port Argent.” - -“He won't. I asked him.” - -“You don't say so! Why, there you are! I had a notion you two might team -it together, come along time enough.” - -“It won't work.” - -“Ho! Well! I dare say. Maybe you know why.” another silence. Secor said -at last: - -“Dick, I got only one real notion in business and philanthropy. I bank -on it in both trades. I keep gunning for men with coal in their engines -and a disposition to burn it, and go on till they bust up into scrap -iron, and when I find one, I give him a show. If I think he's got the -instinct to follow his nose like a setter pup, and not get nervous and -climb telegraph poles, I give him a show. Well--Aidee had the coal and -the disposition, and he burnt it all right, and I gave him his show. -Didn't I? He's got the idea now that he's run himself into the ditch and -turned scrap iron. Humph! Well! He lost his nerve anyway. Why, Hicks is -dead, and Wood's dead, and they can scrap it out in hell between 'em, -can't they? What business he got to lose his nerve? He used to have an -idea God Almighty was in politics, and no quitter, and meant to have a -shy at business. Interesting idea, that. Ho! He never proved it. What -the blazes he want to quit for now? Well! I was going to say, I'm -gambling on you now for a setter pup, sonny, without believing you can -ride Wood's machine. I'll give you a show, when you're good and through -with that. I've been buying Chickering R. R. stock. Want some of it? -Yes, sir, I'm going to own that line inside a year, and give you a job -there that'll make you grunt to reach around it. Ho! Ted says he's going -to take John Keys' girl and go to Nevada. Ain't so foolish as you'd -expect of him. Sounds cheerful. Ted's a drooling damn fool all right, -but he's no quitter. I hear you're going to marry Champney's daughter?” - -“I will if I can.” - -“You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry -Champney's petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall -in his time, near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better -outfit of brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt -coal all right. Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her -when I got to Port Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my -pocket, and she never understood how it happened--claimed she didn't, -anyhow--and that afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the -Court House steps that sounded like he was President of the Board of -Prophets, and I bet a man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all -right, and lost it, I did. I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half. -Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!' Ho! Well, why can't you?” - -The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion -presently took his leave. - -He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but -Camilla spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the -black shadows of the vines. - -“Do you want me, Dick?” - -“Yes.” - -From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid -moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and -arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made -little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on -the wall, little specks on the floor. - -“Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.” - -He bent over till her breath was warm on his face. - -“How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you -as a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't -stay still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor -upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't -remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal -expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the -beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought -that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so.” - -“I didn't know that.” - -“I know. I'm a poor, tongue-tied lover, Milly. I ought to fling myself -loose on the subject, and describe the gorgeous state of my heart, and -lie like a seaman ashore, if I had the gift of my calling. I'm no -poet or dreamer of dreams. I'm after realities. I don't expect to be a -burning and shining light to other people or reform anybody whatever, -but I expect to please one girl, if she'll let me try. Real things! What -do you suppose they are? One time I was born, and now I love you, and -sometime I'll die, and God knows what then. Are those realities? Can you -see the river there, where the moonlight is on it? It runs down to the -lake, and the force that draws it down is as real as the river itself. -Love is a real thing, more real than hands and feet. It pulls like -gravitation and drives like steam. When you came to me there at the -Hall, what was it brought you? An instinct? You asked me to take care -of you. I had an instinct that was what I was made for. I thought it was -all safe then, and I felt like the eleventh commandment and loved mine -enemy for a brother. I can't do anything without you! I've staked my -hopes on you, so far as I can see them. I've come to the end of my rope, -and there's something between us yet, but you must cross it. I can't -cross it.” - -From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot -at the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was -deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly -past the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had -turned and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion -glanced out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric -light. Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his -slow footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the -porch. - -“Can I cross it?” Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired -and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. “Can I? If love -were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this -way, as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought--but can I come? -If you tell me truly that I can come--I will believe what you tell me.” - -Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house, -or were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned -on Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply. -He expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose -meaning was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers -that grew on the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his -shoulders, and her head with its thick hair on the other. - -“You have come!” he said. - -Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement. - -“Yes. I have.” - -Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last -on the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware -that there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch -vines, with their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace -and went his way up Bank Street. - - - - -CHAPTER XIX--CONCLUSION - - -|HENNION and Camilla were married in the fall when the maple leaves were -turning yellow and red. It may be that Camilla thought of herself as -one consenting with humility to enter a quiet gateway, the shelter of -a garden whose walks and borders she knew; and it may be that she was -mistaken and found it a strange garden with many an herb of grace, and -many an old-fashioned perennial as fairly embroidered as any that grow -in Arcadia; for when one has found that the birth of one of the common -flowers and hardy perennials comes as wonderfully out of the deeps -as the birth of a new day, it may be that one understands heaven even -better than when floating in Arcadia among its morning islands. - -She could never truly have a working share in Dick's working life. She -could sympathise with its efforts and achievements, but never walk even -with him along that road. He would come to her tired, asking for home -and rest, but never sick of soul, asking for healing, nor troubled and -confused, asking for help. It was not his nature. One must take the -measure of one's destiny and find happiness therein. After all, -when that is found, it is found to be a quite measureless thing; and -therefore the place where it is found must be a spacious place after -all, a high-roofed and wide-walled habitation. - -Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars -rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented -with his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his -forelock for the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father -Time, has been given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of -his as of a good shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, -that curious untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that -solution of improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. But yet a -little while, and let the winds freshen the air and the waters go their -clean rounds again, and lo! he has shepherded us home from the desert, -and comforted us in new garments, and turned our minus into plus by a -judicious shifting across the equation. Shall we not give him his crook, -his medicine case and license to practise, his loom, his stylus and -tablets, and by oracle declare him “the Wisest,” and build him a temple, -and consult his auspices, and be no more petulant if he nurtures other -seeds than those of our planting, the slow, old-fashioned, silent -gardener? We know no oracle but Time, yet we are always harking after -another. He is a fluent, dusky, imperturbable person, resembling the -Muscadine River. He goes on forever, and yet remains. His answers are -Delphic and ambiguous. Alas! he tends to drown enthusiasm. Who is the -wisest? “The one who knows that he knows nothing,” quoth your cynic -oracle. What is justice? “A solemn lady, but with so bandaged eyes that -she cannot see the impish capers of her scales.” What is happiness? As -to that he answers more kindly. “In the main,” he says, “happiness is a -hardy perennial.” - -The “observer of decades,” who came to Port Argent some years later, -found it proud of its parks, its boulevard, and railroad stations, its -new court house, and jail, and manual training school; proud of its -rapid growth, and indignant at the inadequacy of the national census. -He was shown the new streets, and driven through suburbs where lately -pasture and cornfields had been. He found Port Argent still in the main -electric, ungainly, and full of growing pains, its problem of municipal -government still inaccurately solved, the system not so satisfactory -a structure as the railroad bridge below the boathouses, built by Dick -Hennion for the North Shore Railroad. In shop and street and office -the tide of its life was pouring on, and its citizens held singular -language. Its sparrows were twittering in the maples, bustling, -quarrelling, yet not permanently interested in either the sins or the -wrongs of their neighbours, but going tolerantly to sleep at night. -Here and there a bluebird was singing apart its plaintive, unfinished -“Lulu-lu.” - -He inquired of one of Port Argent's citizens for news, and heard that -the “Independent Reformers” had won an election sometime back; that they -were out again now, and inclined to be vituperative among themselves; -that Port Argent was again led by Marve Wood's ring, which was not such -a distressing ring as it might be. Hennion was not in it now. No, but -he was suspected of carrying weight still in the party councils, which -perhaps accounted for the “ring's” not being so distressing as it might -be. - -“He did more than he talked about,” said the garrulous citizen. “But -speaking of talkers, there was a man here once named Aidee. You've heard -of him. He's getting celebrated. Well, I'm a business man, and stick to -my times. But I read Aidee's books. It's a good thing to do that much.” - -The observer of decades left the garrulous citizen, and went down Lower -Bank Street. He noted the shapeless, indifferent mass and contour of the -buildings on the river-front, the litter of the wharves, the lounging -black barges beside them, the rumble of traffic on the bridge and in -distant streets, the dusky, gliding river lapping the stone piers and -wooden piles, and going on forever while men come and go. He thought how -the stone piers would sometime waste and fall, and the Muscadine would -still go on, turbid and unperturbed. - -“Adaptability seems the great test of permanence,” he thought. “Whatever -is rigid is fragile.” - -In front of the Champney house he stopped and looked up past the lawn -and saw old Henry Champney, sitting in a wicker chair that was planted -on the gravel walk. He was leaning forward, his chin on his cane, and -gazing absorbed at his two grandchildren at his feet, a brown-haired -child and a dark-haired baby. They were digging holes in the gravel with -iron spoons. - -What with the street, the railway, and the river, it might almost -be said that from the Champney lawns one watched the world go by, -clattering, rolling, puffing, travelling these its three concurrent -highways. But Henry Champney seemed to take no interest now in this -world's triple highways, nor to hear their clamour, but only cared now -to watch the dark-haired baby, and listen to the little cooing voices. - -THE END - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - -***** This file should be named 50269-0.txt or 50269-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/2/6/50269/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, -and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive -specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this -eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook -for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, -performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given -away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks -not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the -trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. - -START: FULL LICENSE - -THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE -PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK - -To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free -distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work -(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project -Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full -Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at -www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works - -1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to -and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property -(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all -the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or -destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your -possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a -Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound -by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the -person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph -1.E.8. - -1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be -used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who -agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few -things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See -paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this -agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. - -1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the -Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection -of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual -works in the collection are in the public domain in the United -States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the -United States and you are located in the United States, we do not -claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, -displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as -all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope -that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting -free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm -works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the -Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily -comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the -same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when -you share it without charge with others. - -1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern -what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are -in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, -check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this -agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, -distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any -other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no -representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any -country outside the United States. - -1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: - -1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other -immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear -prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work -on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the -phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, -performed, viewed, copied or distributed: - - This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and - most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no - restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it - under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this - eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the - United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you - are located before using this ebook. - -1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is -derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not -contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the -copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in -the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are -redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project -Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply -either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or -obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted -with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution -must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any -additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms -will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works -posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the -beginning of this work. - -1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm -License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this -work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. - -1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this -electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without -prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with -active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project -Gutenberg-tm License. - -1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, -compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including -any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access -to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format -other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official -version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site -(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense -to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means -of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain -Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the -full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. - -1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, -performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works -unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing -access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -provided that - -* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from - the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method - you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed - to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has - agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid - within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are - legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty - payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in - Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg - Literary Archive Foundation.” - -* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies - you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he - does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm - License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all - copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue - all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm - works. - -* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of - any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the - electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of - receipt of the work. - -* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free - distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. - -1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than -are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing -from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The -Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. - -1.F. - -1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable -effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread -works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project -Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may -contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate -or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other -intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or -other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or -cannot be read by your equipment. - -1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right -of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project -Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all -liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal -fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT -LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE -PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE -TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE -LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR -INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH -DAMAGE. - -1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a -defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can -receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a -written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you -received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium -with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you -with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in -lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person -or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second -opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If -the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing -without further opportunities to fix the problem. - -1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth -in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO -OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT -LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. - -1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied -warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of -damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement -violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the -agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or -limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or -unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the -remaining provisions. - -1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the -trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone -providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in -accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the -production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, -including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of -the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this -or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or -additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any -Defect you cause. - -Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm - -Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of -electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of -computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It -exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations -from people in all walks of life. - -Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the -assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's -goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will -remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure -and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future -generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see -Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at -www.gutenberg.org Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit -501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the -state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal -Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification -number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by -U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. - -The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the -mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its -volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous -locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt -Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to -date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and -official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact - -For additional contact information: - - Dr. Gregory B. Newby - Chief Executive and Director - gbnewby@pglaf.org - -Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide -spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of -increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be -freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest -array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations -($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt -status with the IRS. - -The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating -charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United -States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a -considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up -with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations -where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND -DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular -state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate - -While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we -have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition -against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who -approach us with offers to donate. - -International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make -any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from -outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. - -Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation -methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other -ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To -donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate - -Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. - -Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project -Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be -freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and -distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of -volunteer support. - -Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed -editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in -the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not -necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper -edition. - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search -facility: www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. - diff --git a/old/50269-0.zip b/old/50269-0.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 4d99472..0000000 --- a/old/50269-0.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-8.txt b/old/50269-8.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fc135a2..0000000 --- a/old/50269-8.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6605 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Port Argent - A Novel - -Author: Arthur Colton - -Illustrator: Eliot Keen - -Release Date: October 21, 2015 [EBook #50269] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - - - -PORT ARGENT - -A Novel - -By Arthur Colton - -With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen - -New York - -Henry Holt And Company - -1904 - -[Ill 0001] - -[Ill 0010] - -[Ill 0011] - - -IN MEMORIAM - -C. W. WELLS - - -DEDICATED - -TO - -GEORGE COLTON - -863714 - -PORT ARGENT - - - - -CHAPTER I--PULSES - - -|PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it -a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, -instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and -better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, -and the city grew. - -In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive -Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no -"press galleries," nor any that are "open to the public." Inferences -have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on -its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its -sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills, -or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute? - -Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres -back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would -grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help -to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to -favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead -into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that -direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small -farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social -speculators "unearned," implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a -session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile. - -Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back -of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge -of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the -bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But -people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed -of. - -There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney -with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was -born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, -late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new -generation. - -Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of -Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers -subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the -breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of -Port Argent. - -The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt -legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded -house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come -to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to -his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something -living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through -arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), -with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish -emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across -the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden -throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row -of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a -half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have -slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country, -after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest -streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would -seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or -order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures, -changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness. - -The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric -character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its -streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic -heart beat and brain conceive. - -One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and -found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street. - -Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down -the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything -fitted anything else. - -Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty -years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured -Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take -its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but -the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port -Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of -the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately -line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the -Champney place. - -A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since -the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the -city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the -city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked -a citizen on the sidewalk: "Why, before this long, grey station and -freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these -piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?" he was -told: "It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to -make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess." - -"Fixed him?" - -"Oh, they're a happy family now." - -The citizens of Port Argent held singular language. - -"Who is Marve Wood?" - -"He's--there he is over there." - -"Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?" - -"Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor." - -"And this Wood--is he an engineer and contractor?" - -"No--well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us." - -The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases -of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of -school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club. - -The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with -a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, -grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He -produced the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated -and consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried -to and fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel -and bar and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The -elderly "Marve Wood," stood beside him--thick-set, with a grey beard of -the cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the -faces that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He -had a comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow -Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat. - -Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a -huge, black-moustached Irishman. - -"Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to -work." - -The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy -tucked in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The -sidewalk grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the -statue of a Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. -He appeared to be facing his country's enemies with determination, but -time and weather had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as -if he found no enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. -station and the workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street. - -Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw -Hennion and Wood go up the street. "Dick must have a hundred men out -there," he said. - -"Has he?" Camilla looked up from her book. - -"Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon," Champney -went on. "Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, -Napoleonic in action." Camilla came to the window and took her father's -arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She -did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front -of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of "Dick," but -looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, -at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the -perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained -with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river, -when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged -with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were -energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats -had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery -energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them -away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry -them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed -basis, and the difference is important--important to the observer of the -signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla. - -Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were -more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the -spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny -clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves. - -Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted -a flight of stairs to an office where "Marvin Wood" was gilded on the -ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and -an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in -the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The -street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building -opposite were open. - -"Those were Freiburger's men, you say?" remarked Hennion. - -"Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his -boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh--well--he's all right." - -"He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry -banner if he wants to." - -Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that -function. - -"But you'd better tell Freiburger," continued Hennion, "that I won't -stand any deadheads." - -"Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing." - -Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the -shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the -man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles. - -"Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see -him," he added. - -"All right, I'll do that." - -"And take your time, of course," said Wood. "Hang on till you're both -satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel -injured." - -"Well, I'm glad to oblige him----" - -"That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but--you'd better -make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country -schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving." - -"That's all right." - -Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and -added, "I see." - -"I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself," -said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, -"except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It -was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started -in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the -landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest -rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all -right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, -like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same -arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others. -Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while -somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He -never was really comfortable." - -Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke -with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at -an upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what -appeared dumb-show. - -"Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?" - -"The parable," said Wood, "particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It -means, if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's -because folks get so tired of the warlike." - -"Oh!" - -"Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue----" - -"Aidee?" - -"Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine -man--fine man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks -got kind of tired of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. -Well--maybe so. Then I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes -along with a patent pill, and a new porous plaster, and claims his -plaster has the holes arranged in triangles, instead of squares like all -previous plasters; he has an air of candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my -soul! Your system's out of order.' Sounds interesting once in a while. -And then this world gets so tired of him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache -eleven thousand years. I wish to God you wouldn't keep giving it new -names.' Well,--a couple of years ago the _Chronicle_ was publishing -Aidee's speeches on Civic something or other every week. Aidee used -to shoot straight but scattering at that time. He'd got too much -responsibility for the details of the millennium. Why, when you come -right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an opinion of himself -as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If I could stand up -like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of natural gas on the -blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there ain't any real -democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any man. Guess -likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other gutter-man -hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. Aidee's a loose -comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for boiling potatoes. -Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent Reform and his -Assembly--oh, well--he wasn't doing any great harm then. He ain't now, -either. I told him one time, like this: "I says, 'Fire away anyhow that -suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think you'd like my job?'" - -"'What is your job?' says he. - -"'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little -stumped. 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.' - -"'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like -it.' - -"'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your -job?' - -"And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact. - -"'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says. - -"'Complicated?' - -"'Yes.' - -"'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it -wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail -last year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a -clergyman on the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, "I -can talk it. I've heard 'em." Well, Sweeney's got an idea his -intellectuals are all right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got -the habit of meditation. So he starts in." - -"Bill, you've been a bad lot." - -"Yep." - -"There ain't no hope for you, Bill." - -"No," says Bill, "there ain't." - -"You'll go to that there bad place, Bill." Bill was some bored, but he -allowed, "I guess that's right," speaking feeble. "Well, Bill," says -Sweeney, "you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to."' - -"Aidee laughed,--he did really,--and after that he looked thoughtful. -Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. 'Sweeney,' -I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline of it. But -I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, thinking anybody -could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of myself, sure.' - -"Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't -any of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable -since. That's what I wanted to tell you." - -"What for?" - -"Oh, well," said Wood balmily, "you might run across him. You might be -interested to find out what he's up to." - -After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up. - -"All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's -got to do with me," he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then -turned into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the -residence sections. - - - - -CHAPTER II--RICHARD THE SECOND - - -|WHEN Hennion reached his rooms the sunlight was slanting through the -maples outside. - -He sat down after supper by his windows. The twilight was thickening in -the foliage, the sparrows holding noisy caucuses there---- - -Hennion's father had been a contractor and engineer before him, and -before the great war had made the face of the nation more thoughtful -with the knowledge of what may happen in well-regulated families. - -Once the sun was a pillar of fire and cloud, the land of promise seemed -every day attained, and the stars were jubilant. Were ever such broad -green plains, strong brown rivers and blue lakes? There was oratory -then, and sublime foreheads were smitten against the stars. Such oratory -and such a forehead had Henry Champney, in those days. The subject -of oratory was the devotion of the forefathers, the promises and -attainments of the nation set forth in thrilling statistics. A thousand -audiences shuffled and grinned, and went their way to accomplish the -more immediate things which the orators had endeavoured to decorate. -The admiration of the orator and the public was mutual. There was a -difference in type,--and the submerged industrialist, who worked with -odd expedients, who jested with his lips, and toiled terribly with brain -and hand, admired the difference. - -The elder Hennion did not care about "the destinies of the nation." He -dredged the channel of that brown river, the Muscadine, drove the piles -that held the docks of Port Argent, and dug the east section of the -Interstate Canal. The war came, and someone appointed him to something -connected with the transportation of commissary. He could not escape the -habit of seeing that things did what they were supposed to do. Hennion's -supplies were apt to reach the Army of the Cumberland regularly and on -scheduled time, it would be hard to tell why. - -He built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A -prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, -and did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, "wrecked" the -Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of -it for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and -philosophical. - -"Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. -That's a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told -his boys he hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did -making it, but they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed -him there, only he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and -I wish I had your luck. But I've had a good time." Such was "Rick" -Hennion's philosophy. - -Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven -years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of -business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the -inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on -Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the -State, agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and -moreover some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw -and trowel. He recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, -white with the dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, -somewhat small at first; men of another class seemed to look to him as -naturally for jobs; his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile -country. Among the friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's. - -Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he -seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about -the continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, -one found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at -one time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one -of those personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but -certainly members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor -offices. Such a man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for -the growth, a process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a -function. If one wished to know anything intimate about the city, what -was doing, or about to be done, or how the Council would vote, or -any one thread in the tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood -appeared to have this information. His opinion was better--at least -better informed--than most opinions. For some reason it was difficult -not to be on good terms with him. - -Port Argent concluded one day that it had a "boss." It was suggested in -a morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was -interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said, -"We're a humming town." Real estate at auction went a shade higher that -morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted -for. The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said: - -"Wood, I hear you're a boss." - -"That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the -window and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since." - -"Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there -it ought to be spelled with a brick." - -"Well--now--I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a shingle -mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his shingle on -my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, and now -every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the shingle, and -spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been better. Want -anything in particular?" - -The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, -and when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen -indestructible desks. - -The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were -quiet, because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The -issues of their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, -many a sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, -and in the morning the issues be different, and the victims find their -neighbours overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' -sins are not interesting forever, let alone their wrongs. - -Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank -Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick. - -The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise -than contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and -furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to -the people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. -Hennion was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla -ought to sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the -spirit of another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped -short years before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious -worth; the curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams -occupied gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads. - -Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white -head of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat -primly with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses. - -The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of -the flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, -or attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except -Camilla, seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity. - -Camilla said: "You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's -important!" - -Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the -importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and -yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, -and lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly -people recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity -and readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction -would wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a -notion of his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish -even the constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not -less apart from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their -antiquities. She belonged to a set of associations that should not be -mixed up with the street. In the street, in the clear light and grey -dust, men and ideas were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence -was to him a kind of vestal college. At least, it was the only presence -that ever suggested to his mind things of that nature, symbols and -sacred fires, and half-seen visions through drifting smoke. - -He was contented now to wait for the revelation. - -"Have you lots of influence really?" she said. "Isn't it fine! I want -you to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night." - -The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow -suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the -dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent -ideals lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where -chants were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the -transparencies, so to speak--it was unpleasant. - -"I'd rather not see him here." - -"But he's coming!" - -"All right. I shan't run away." - -"And he has asked my father----" - -Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination. - -"Oh, Camilla!" he broke in, and then laughed. "Did he ask Miss Eunice to -come in, too?" - -The prospect had its humours--the guilelessness of the solemn -preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of -Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might -turn out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She -sometimes did; that is, she sometimes hovered over the comprehension -of a joke, as a bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy -absurdity jogging along the highway of this world, but she had so many -other emotions to take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around -her, that her humour could not always be depended on. - -The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, -as he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired, -black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air -of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit. -Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The -five sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead. - -Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big -white head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; -Camilla was breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her -gold-rimmed glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not -rotund, though his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his -feet, pacing the floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that -Aidee was a peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. -He swept together at first a number of general ideas which did not -interest Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in -particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing -circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but -disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned -to dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the -table. - -"Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of -ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You -put your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand -is mixed up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of -foundations. Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and -here they are bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share--in -both of these results?" - -Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face -was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick! - -Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him, -so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of -that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul -abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt -that Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of -a noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. -He felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact -candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind -of unreal, gaudy emotionalism. - -"I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to -business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to -have a certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain -amount of preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, -provided they're good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand -themselves to be voting for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I -contract with them to suit my business interests, but I never canvass. -Probably the ward leaders do. I suppose there's a point in all this -affair. I'd rather come to it, if you don't mind. You want me to do -personal wire-pulling, which I never do and don't like, in order to down -certain men I am under obligations to, which doesn't seem honourable, -and against my business interests, which doesn't seem reasonable." - -"Wire-pulling? No." - -"Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire -that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like -it, or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have -to." - -Aidee hesitated. - -"Miss Champney----" - -Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment. - -"Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to -yours----" - -"Why not? Class! I have no class!" - -"I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone -even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them -this way." - -"Why not?" - -"Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon." - -"The apology seems in place," rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating -thorough bass. - -"I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me." - -"The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest"--Champney -heaved his wide frame out of the chair--"that he be released from his -situation." - -"Do you like the situation, sir?" - -"I do not, sir," with rising thunder. "I hope, if this discussion is -continued here, or elsewhere,"--appearing to imply a preference for -"elsewhere,"--"it will have no reference to my family." - -Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of -meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee -stood still a moment. Then he said quietly: - -"I have made a mistake. Good-night," and took his leave. He looked tired -and weighed down. - -Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding. - -Camilla wept with her head on the table. - -"I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row." - -Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or -repentance. - -Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like -shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He -wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away -from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and -the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too -apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them -to suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not -altogether and solely for business men to do business in, else why such -men as Aidee, so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to -fill a practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he -would not? - -"Wisdom," says the man in the street, "is one of those things which do -not come to one who sits down and waits." There was once a persuasion -that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and -patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his "hustling" -his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and -no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of -the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, -backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current -eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large -repetitions of "hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and -death," and of these the first four make their reports in the street. - -Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not -Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven -celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more. - - - - -CHAPTER III--CAMILLA - - -|SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was "a type," and Miss Eunice found -comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing -else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something -radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and -lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to -masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a -Camillus with - - "The fervent love Camillus bore - - His native land." - -In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused. - -In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was -lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and -shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and -throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either. - -At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still -makes it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more -exhilarating than ever. - -Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic -beliefs and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to -interpret herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive -of swarming energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where -ran a swift river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She -barely remembered when the family lived in the national capital, and -Henry Champney was a noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental -picture of an invalid mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her -memories ran about Port Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, -the household rule of Miss Eunice. They included glimpses of her -father's friend, the elder Hennion, a broad-shouldered man, who always -had with him the slim youth, Dick; which slim youth was marvellously -condescending, and once reconstructed her doll with wires, so that when -you pulled a wire it would wave arms and legs in the manner in which -Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever waved her arms and legs. -He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He taught her carpentry and -carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer and saw, mallet and -chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards of the Champney -house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the tops of -the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's -hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with -Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges. - -He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge -the finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, -because they were not true. - -Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age -of twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, -but all hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit. - -On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window -knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and -underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal -and brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from -ship to car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad -bridge; beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long -roofs, and black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood -tenements of East Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because -one knew they were there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the -suburbs, a flat, prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, -highways, and trestle pyramids of the oil wells. - -Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river -and factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's -disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla -came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to -reminiscence. - -"We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college," she said. - -Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully: - -"Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?" - -Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a -time she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, -and began running through the titlepages. - -"They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic -Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'" - -"Mr. Aidee lent you such books!" - -"Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' -'The Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!" She had slipped beyond the -titlepage of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked -in a new impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss -Eunice returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle. - -It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs -between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young -have not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to -their predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the -purport of the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we -might live, but were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had -her heartbeats and flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or -how. No matter what her romance was. It was a story of few events or -peculiarities. She had grown somewhat over-rigid with time. That -her melancholy--if melancholy it should be called, a certain dry -severity--that it gave most people a slight impression of comedy, -was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it. As to that long-past -phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not remember ever -having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled "Socialism and -Anarchy," or "The Civic Disease," or "The Inner Republic." She was glad -to believe that Camilla was "a type," because it was easier to condemn -a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and flushed cheeks -over matters so unsuitable. - -In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss -Eunice's flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social -emphasis on sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the -difference, and looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading. - -Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the -room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair -beside him. - -"Now! What do you think?" - -Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the -first. - -"I think your books will lose their backs," Champney rumbled mildly. - -The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed -in at the tall side windows. - -"Think of what, my dear?" - -"Listen!" - -Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she -read from the grey volume, as follows: - -"'You have remarked too often "I am as good as you." It is probable that -God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he -knows that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked -"You are as good as I," it would have represented a more genial frame -of mind. It would have rendered your superiority more probable, since -whichever remark you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence -that it is not true. But indeed it is probable that neither your life -nor your ideas are admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not -to become convinced that no one is better than you, but to find someone -to whom you can honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not -back, nor away among the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am -asking you to search for your leader among your contemporaries, not -satisfied until you find him, not limited in your devotion when you have -found him, taking his cause to be yours. I am asking you to remember -that evil is not social, but human; that good is not social, but human. -You have heard that an honest man is the noblest work of God. You have -heard of no institution which merits that finality of praise. You have -heard that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Is it -then in shadows or by shadows that we live?'" - -Camilla paused. - -"I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle," said -Champney. - -"Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!" - -Champney took the volume, read, "Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master -Went," and turned back to the title page. "H'm--'The Inner Republic, by -Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?" he asked. "We discover America -every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!" - -Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy -surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures -most capable of receiving. She called him her "graduate course," and he -replied gallantly by calling her his "postponed education." He had had -his happy surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for -the efforts Champ-ney had made--not altogether painless--to realise -the lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the -new,--that his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; -so that the two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk -friendly and long, without patronage or impatience. - -To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete, -that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an -old story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his -shelves had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had -connection through himself with the stir of existence. - -The Websterian periods had taken on a ghostly echo, and the slow ebbing -of the war issues had left him with a sense of being stranded on dry -sands. There seemed to be a flatness everywhere,--a silence, except for -the noisy rattle of the street. - -It is a pleasant saying, that "The evening of life comes bringing its -own lamp," but it seemed to him it was a drearily false one. The great -men of a great time, he thought, were gone, or fast going. It was a -stagnation period in his life, pictured in his mind afterward as an -actual desert, dividing arable lands. Were the new men so small, so -unuplifted, or was it only his own mind grown dry and nerveless? He was -afraid it was the latter,--afraid life was dying away, or drying up in -his still comfortable body. - -He would prove to himself that it was not. - -This was the beginning of the effort he had made,--a defiant, -half-desperate rally. The struggle began at a definite date. One day -he put away his old books. He bought new ones, and new periodicals, and -determined to find the world still alive,--to find again that old sense -of the importance of things that were going on. It was an intimate fight -this time, unapplauded--against a shadow, a creeping numbness. He fought -on, and at length had almost begun to lose hope. - -When Camilla came back from college and Eastern friends she dawned upon -him in a series of minute surprises. She brought him his victory, and -the lamp for his evening. So it came about. The struggle was over, and -the longed-for hope and cheer came back to him. - -So it came that the relation between them was peculiar. New books had a -meaning when Camilla read them to him, as she read from Alcott Aidee's -book to-day, while the noise of the freight-yards, and the rattle of the -travelling crane unloading a docked ship, sounded dull and distant. The -sunlight came yellow and pleasant through tall windows, and the fire -snapped briskly, and Alcott Aidee spoke through the medium of Camilla -and the grey volume, making these singular remarks: - -"Incarnation of divinity! Surely you have been unfortunate, if in -going to and fro in this world you have nowhere observed any measure of -divinity incarnated in a man, apparent in ordering or in obedience, in -leading or in following, speaking from lips which said, 'Follow me,' as -well as from those which said, 'Thy will, not mine be done,' speaking, -for aught I know, as largely in one way as the other. I am not measuring -divinity. I am showing you where to look for it. I am trying to persuade -you that it does not speak from lips which say 'I am as good as you.'" - -New books, ran Champney's thoughts, new men, new times, new waves -foaming up the old slant shores. But only as they spoke with Camilla's -voice, did they seem to him now to make the numbed cords vibrate again, -or comfort his wintry age. - -"Isn't it interesting, daddy? If you're going to be frivolous, I shan't -read." - -Champney was looking at the volume with a grim smile. - -"I was thinking that to read only in the middle of the gentleman's -book was perhaps not doing him justice. It was perhaps why I did not -understand where he began, or where he was going. It seems to be neither -old democracy nor new socialism, but more like the divine rights of some -kind of aristocracy. Shall we not read the book through in order, my -dear? Having become convinced that Mr. Aidee himself contains a measure -of this divinity, and having taken him for our leader, shall we not then -induce our recalcitrant friend Dick to join us, and in that way induce -him to become a politician?" - -This was the Champney manner in the stately vein of irony. - -"Oh!" Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, a Champney gesture, -"Dick was horrid about that." - -"Recalcitrant, Hum! Horrid, horridus, bristling, Ha! Not inappropriate -to the attitude on that occasion of the said Dick. Not usual for him, I -should say. He is like his father, Camilla. A quiet man, but striking, -the latter. You don't remember him?" - -"Oh, yes! But you see, Dick didn't like it, because Mr. Aidee asked me -to help him. But it isn't like him to be fussy. Anyway, I liked it, -but Dick didn't. So!" Camilla pushed back her hair, another Champney -gesture--the defiant one. "Now, what made him act like hornets?" - -"I also took the liberty not to like it, Camilla," with a rumble of -thorough bass. - -Camilla glanced up, half startled, and put a small warm hand into -her father's hand, which was large, bony, and wrinkled. The two hands -clasped instinctively hard, as if for assurance that no breach should -come between them, no distance over which the old and the young hand -could not clasp. - -Camilla turned back to Alcott Aidee's book, and read on. Champney found -himself now listening in a personal, or what he might have described -as a feminine, way; he found himself asking, not what meaning or truth -there was in this writer, but asking what meaning it might have toward -Camilla, at the Arcadian age when maids are fain of surprises. He -thought of Dick Hennion, of the Hennions, father and son. One always -wondered at them, their cross-lot logic, their brevities, their instinct -as to where the fulcrum of a thing rested. One believed in them without -asking reasons--character was a mysterious thing--a certain fibre or -quality. Ah! Rick Hennion was dead now, and Henry Champney's fighting -days were over. It was good to live, but a weariness to be too old. He -thought of Alcott Aidee, of his gifts and temperament, his theory of -devotion and divinity--an erratic star, a comet of a man, who had a -great church--by the way, it was not a church--a building at least, with -a tower full of clamouring bells, and a swarming congregation. It was -called "The Seton Avenue Assembly." So Aidee had written this solid -volume on--something or other. One could see he was in earnest, but -that Camilla should be over-earnest in the wake of his argument seemed -a strong objection to the argument. A new man, an able writer--all very -interesting--but---- In fact, he might prove resident divinities, or -prove perpetual incarnations of the devil, if he chose, but what did -the fellow mean by asking Camilla to---- In fact, it was an unwarranted -liberty. Champney felt suddenly indignant. Camilla read on, and Champney -disliked the doctrine, whatever it was, in a manner defined even by -himself as "feminine." - -"'Not in vain,' she read, 'have men sought in nature the assurance -of its large currents, of its calm and self-control, the knitting up -of "the ravelled sleave of care," "the breathing balm of mute insensate -things," "the sleep that is among the lonely hills." It has been -written, - - "Into the woods my Master went - - Clean foresprent, - -and that "the little grey leaves were kind to him." All these things -have I found, and known them. Was it there my Master went? I found the -balm, the slumber, and the peace. But I found no inspiration. This, -wherever I found it, always spoke with human lips, always looked out -of human eyes. The calm of nature is as the calm of the past. Green -battlefields lie brooding, because the issue is over; deep woods and -secluded valleys, because the issue is elsewhere. The apostle who met a -vision of his Master on the Appian Way, and asked, "Whither goest thou?" -was answered, "Into the city." Do you ask again, whither he went? I -answer that he went on with the vanguard of the fight; which vanguard is -on the front wave and surf of these times; which front wave and surf -is in the minds and moods of persons; not in creeds, customs, formulas, -churches, governments, or anywhere else at all; for the key to all -cramped and rusted locks lies in humanity, not in nature; in cities, not -in solitudes; in sympathy, not in science; in men, not in institutions; -not in laws, but in persons.' - -"Aren't you interested, daddy?" - -"Yes, my dear. Why do you ask?" - -"You look so absent-minded. But it's a new chapter now, and it's called -'Constitutions.'" Camilla laughed triumphantly. - -"Constitutions! Then the gentleman will be political. Go on." - -"'Chapter ninth,'" she read. "'Constitutions.' - -"'Most men govern themselves as monarchies; some as despotisms that -topple to anarchies, some as nearly absolute monarchies; but mainly, -and on the whole, they govern themselves as partially restricted or -constitutional monarchies; which constitutions are made up of customs, -precedents, and compromises, British Constitutions of opportunism and -common law. Indeed, they claim that the inner life _must_ be a monarchy -by its nature, and every man's soul his castle. They are wrong. It must -be a republic, and every man's soul an open house. - -"'Now, it is nowhere stated in any Declaration or Constitution put forth -of this Inner Republic that "all men are by nature free and equal." If -such a declaration occurred to the framers of this Constitution, they -would seem to have thought it difficult to reconcile with observation, -and not very pertinent either. As a special qualification for -citizenship, it appears to be written there that a man must love his -neighbour as himself--meaning as nearly as he can, his citizenship -graded to his success; and as a general maxim of common law, it is -written that he shall treat other men as he would like them to treat -him, or words to that effect. However, although to apply and interpret -this Constitution there are courts enough, and bewildering litigation, -and counsel eager with their expert advice, yet the Supreme Court holds -in every man's heart its separate session." - -To all of which Champney's thoughts made one singular comment. -"Camilla," they insisted, "Camilla." - - - - -CHAPTER IV--MUSCADINE STREET - - -|WHILE Camilla and Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over -Aidee's book, Miss Eunice in the parlour bent a grey head over her -knitting, and thought of Camilla, and disapproved of the type of girls -who neither knitted nor even embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over -such subjects, for instance, as "Richard," but over such subjects as -"Problems of the Poor," and "Civic Diseases." - -Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the -window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered -roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and -disapproved of what she saw. - -There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent. -Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with -their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so. - -Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was -over the Maple Street bridge. - -The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the -bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first -corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was -unlikely, the sign would read "Muscadine Street." - -Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories; -Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one -side and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or -brick, with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors -mainly shops for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun -with inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children -quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of -whom those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever -faces generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and -triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither -circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more -than endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's -disapproval, and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is -singular how many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and -neither be the better or worse on that account. - -On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a -flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street -leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the -stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that "James -Shays, Shoemaker," was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do -so on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the -shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first -was the shop. - -A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a smoky-chimneyed -lamp thereon, some newspapers, and half of a book that had been ripped -savagely in two. A double shoemaker's bench stood next the window, a -cooking stove and a cupboard opposite. Clothes hung on wall-hooks, hides -lay on the floor. - -Shays sat on one end of the bench, a grey-haired, grey-moustached, -watery-eyed man, pegging a shoe vaguely. A black-haired little man with -a thin black beard sat on the other end, stitching a shoe fiercely. -A redlipped, red-cheeked, thick-nosed, thick-necked man with prominent -eyes, sat tilted back in one of the wooden chairs, stating his mind -deliberately. - -Most of these phases of Muscadine Street might be found so arranged, on -most mornings, by any visitor. Shays and the red-cheeked Coglan could -not be depended on; but the men on the sidewalk, the women in the -windows, the children in the street, the clamour and the smells would be -there; also the grocer, the butcher, and Hicks, the stitcher of vehement -stitches. If Coglan and Shays were there, Coglan would be found in the -process of stating his mind. - -Hicks' eyes were black, restless, and intense, his mouth a trifle on -one side, his forehead high with a deep line down the middle. It was a -painful line; when he smiled it seemed to point downward frowningly to -the fact that the smile was onesided. - -Coglan was Shays' associate in the pursuit of happiness. His value lay -in this: that upon a certain amount of hard liquor purchased by Shays, -and divided fairly and orderly between them, Shays became needy of help, -and Coglan generally remained in good condition and able to take him -home. Hicks was Shays' partner in the shop. His value lay in this: that -he did twice as much work as Shays, and was satisfied with half the -profits. Both men were valuable to Shays, and the shop supported the -three. - -The relations between them had grown settled with time. Nearly four -years earlier Hicks had entered Shays' shop. There he learned to cobble -footwear in some incredibly short time, and took his place in the -apprehension of Muscadine Street. Hicks he called himself and nothing -more. "Hicks" was a good enough name. It went some distance toward -describing the brooding and restless little man, with his shaking, -clawlike fingers, smouldering temper, and gift for fluent invective. -Some said he was an anarchist. He denied it, and went into fiery -definitions, at which the grocer and candy man shook their heads -vaguely, and the butcher said, "Says he ain't, an' if he ain't, he -ain't," not as I see which seemed a conclusive piece of logic. At any -rate he was Hicks. - -The elderly Shays was a peaceful soul, a dusty mind, a ruined body. He -was travelling through his life now at a pace that would be apt to -bring him to the end of it at no distant date, enjoying himself, as he -understood enjoyment, or as enjoyment was interpreted to him by the -wise Coglan. Coglan maintained a solidly planted dislike of Hicks, whose -attacks threatened his dominance, whose acrid contempt and unlimited -vocabulary sometimes even threatened his complacence. Coglan's wisdom -saw that the situation was preferable to searching for jobs, and that -the situation depended on Hicks' acceptance of it. Hicks was a mystery -to him, as well as to Shays, and something of a fear, but Coglan was not -disturbed by the mystery. He could leave that alone and do very well. -But Hicks was a poisoned needle. Hicks knew where to find Coglan's -sensitive point and jab it. Coglan hated him solidly, but balancing -his dislike against his interest and ease, Coglan wisely found that the -latter were more solid still--beyond comparison solid. - -All this could be learned by any visitor inquiring in Muscadine Street. -The grocer underneath would add tersely that Shays was a soak, but -good-hearted; that Hicks was a fool, and ought to set up shop for -himself; that Coglan was a loafer, and had his bread buttered now about -to suit him. Disapproval of each other was current in Muscadine Street. -It was a part of their interest in life. - -The same morning sunlight that slanted through Henry Champney's tall -library and parlour widows was slanting through the small streaked -window of Shays, the shoe-mender. Coglan was stating his mind. - -"Jimmy Shays, yer a good man," he was saying slowly; "an', Hicksy, yer -an' industhrious man; but nayther of ye is a wise man; but Jimmy is the -wisest man of ye two. For why? Ask that, an' I says this. For when Jimmy -wants a bit of thinkin' done for him, he gets a sensible man to do -it, an' a poor man, an' a workin' man like himself, an' a man that's a -friend, and that stands by him in throuble. But what does ye do, Hicksy? -Ye goes over the river. Ye goes up to Seton Avenue. Ye listens to a -chin-waggin' preacher. An' what's his name? Aidee! He ain't a workin' -man himself, but wears the clothes of the rich, an' ates his dinner -wid the rich, an' says hard words of the friends of the poor. An' yer -desaved, Hicksy." - -Hicks stopped work and shook a thin fist at Coglan. "If you're talkin' -of him, you keep your manners." - -"Oi, the Preacher! Oi, he might be meanin' well, Hicksy. I ain't sayin' -not." - -"What are you saying then?" jabbing viciously with his needle. "Damn! -You're an Irishman, ain't you? Chin-wagging institution yourself. What! -Who's the working man? You! Ain't you got a description of you that's -vivider'n that?" breaking into a cackling laugh. "Then I'll ask you, -what friends of the poor you're talking about so glib, like a greased -wheel?" - -"Oi! Yer askin' what I mean by a friend, Hicksy? Ye are! An' yer right, -an' I'll show ye the point. I'll speak to ye of John Murphy, now, what -I've had many a drink on him, an' a helpin' hand. A friend is a friend -in need. That's him. Now, thin, Murphy's a friend of Wood's, for he says -so. Now, thin, I'll show you Dick Hennion. For if I wants a job, I says -the word to Murphy, an' he speaks the word maybe to Hennion an' he gets -me a job, for he done it onct, an' I know, don't I? if so be it happen -I wants a job. An' Hennion's a friend of Wood's, too, as anywan knows. -Now! A friend of me, I says, is a man that acts friendly to me. That's -him. So would ye say, Hicksy, if ye was a wise man an' a man of sense, -instead of chasin' afther a chin-waggin' preacher, like a schnare-drum -afther a thrombone. Haw, haw, haw! a brass throm-bone! But Wood's a -friend of the poor, an' I've proved it. For why? For I say it's the rich -that he bleeds, but the poor man he's friendly to. Now, thin! What does -Aidee do but say the bad word of Wood. In consequence, in consequence, I -says,"--and Coglan smote his knee,--"he ain't no friend of the poor." - -Hicks' black eyes glittered and focussed themselves, a concentrated -stare at a minutely small spot between Coglan's eyes. His teeth clicked. -Coglan's laugh died away. He turned his eyes aside and rubbed his red -face uneasily. - -"Coglan," said Hicks, "I warned you before. You shake your mouth at the -Preacher again and I'll stick a knife into your dirty throat. You hear -that!" - -Coglan's redness showed purple spots. - -"Think I'm afraid of ye!" - -"Yep, I think you are." - -"I'll break your little chick bones!" - -"Yep. You're afraid, and you better stay so." - -"Hicksy!" broke in Shays with quavering voice. "Tom! we're all friends, -ain't we? Now, then, Tom, Hicksy makes a point you leave out the -Preacher, don't he? He'll argue peaceful. Jus' leave out the Preacher. -Won't you, Hicksy? Hey? You'll argue peaceful." - -"I said I would." - -"Leave out the Preacher," said Shays. "All friens'. Hey?" - -Coglan wiped his perspiring face. "I'm a sensible man," he said. "When -Jimmy Shays asks a favour, I say, sure! I'm a sensible man." He looked -resentfully and uneasily at Hicks, but seemed relieved to withdraw from -his aggressive position without losing his dominance. - -"Oi! I told ye what I meant by a friend. I said Marve Wood was a friend -of the poor, an' I proved it. I'll be fair an' square. I'll ask ye, -what's _your_ meanin'?" - -Hicks dropped his eyes, and fell to his jabbing needlework. - -"Friend!" he said. "You mean a man that's useful to you. _You_ say so! -_You_ say so! That's your meaning. Good's what's good for me. Sense is -what agrees with me. Nothing's got any value that ain't valuable to -that God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked 'me,' named Coglan, that's got no more -value than to fertilise a patch of potatoes. Friend! You get another -word. I got nothing to say to you. But I'll tell you this. I'll tell you -what I think of Wood. He's got a reckoning coming. What is Wood? I'll -tell you that he's the meeting point of two enemies--the corporations -and the people, the rich and the poor. His job's to keep in with -both. That's what his friendliness amounts to. His job's to sell the -corporations what belongs to the people. And he'll grin at the people on -one side, so! And he'll wink at the corporations on the other, so! And -he'll say: 'How do, Johnny, and Billy, and Sammy?' So! And he'll say to -the corporations, 'What'll you give for Johnny's hat?' So! Then he gives -Johnny half what he gets for the hat, so! Then he's got Sammy and Billy -to back the deal, so! Well, what's Wood! I've told you what he is. -Friend of the poor! What do you know about it?" He dropped the shoe, -shook his loose fingers in the air, and cried. "He's a cancer! Cut him -out! He's an obstruction! Blow him up! What, then? Then I say this, Tom -Coglan, and I say it's a good thing when damn rascals are afraid!" - -"Quotin' the Preacher?" said Coglan complacently. - -Hicks narrowed his black eyes again, and focussed them on Coglan, who -turned away uneasily. Hicks went on: - -"What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether -Wood ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in -his life, nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against -him, then, or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm -talking about?" - -"Oi!" said Coglan. "Yer right. I'll ask ye that." - -"And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine"--tapping his narrow -chest--"ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going to -mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that -does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to -fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan." - -"Oi! Quotin' the Preacher." - -"Yes, I am, some of it." - -He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each -other and then stealthily at Hicks. - -"I hear no talk against the Preacher," Hicks went on, after a time; "I -won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor -the like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,--neither him, nor his -talk, nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent -but me that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my -thinking for me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about -him, or me? What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, -and then if you said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to -go crazy, and always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting -you on fire and then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; -and if you talked like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk -to you. I'd talk so, too, for his way ain't my way." - -He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table. - -"See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of -it's not. That's my way." - -His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and -savage that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a -startled way, as if he expected to see something ghastly. - -"But it ain't the Preacher's way. But I ain't the man to be held back," -said Hicks, "and patted and cooed over. Not me. Show me a snake and I -stamp on it! Show me the spot and I hit it! Damn!" - -He twisted his mouth. His teeth clicked again, and his crooked fingers -drove the glittering needles swiftly back and forth through the leather. -Coglan stared at him with prominent eyeballs and mouth open. Shays wiped -his glasses, and then his red-lidded eyes with his coat sleeve. - -"All frien's, Hicksy! Ain't we?" he murmured uneasily. - -Coglan recovered. "An' that's right, too. Jimmy Shays is a kind man and -a peaceable man, an' I'm a sensible man, an' yer an industhrious man, -but yer not a wise man, Hicksy, an'"--with sudden severity--"I'll thank -ye not to stomp on Tom Coglan." - -He got up. Shays rose, too, and put on his coat, and both went out of -the door. Hicks gave a cackling laugh, but did not look after them. - -Presently he finished the shoe, laid it down, rubbed his hands, and -straightened his back. Then he went and got the torn book, sat down, and -read in it half an hour or more, intent and motionless. - -The factory whistles blew for twelve o'clock. He rose and went to a side -cupboard, took out a leathern rifle case, put a handful of cartridges in -his pockets, and left the shop. - -The grocer's children in the side doorway fled inward to the darkness -of the hall as he passed. The grocer's wife also saw him, and drew back -behind the door. He did not notice any of them. - -The long eastward-leading street grew more and more dusty and unpaved. -He passed empty lots and then open fields, cornfields, clumps of woods, -and many trestles of the oil wells. He climbed a rail fence and entered -a large piece of woods, wet and cool. The new leaves were just starting -from their buds. - -It was a mild April day, with a silvery, misty atmosphere over the green -mass of the woods. A few of the oil wells were at work, thudding in the -distance. Cattle were feeding in the wet green fields. Birds, brown and -blue, red-breasted and grey-breasted, twittered and hopped in tree and -shrub. A ploughman in a far-off field shouted to his team. Crows flapped -slowly overhead, dropping now and then a dignified, contented croak. The -only other sound was the frequent and sharp crack of a rifle from deep -in the centre of the woods. - - - - -CHAPTER V--TECUMSEH STREET - - -|TECUMSEH STREET was the fourth street back from the river. Tradition -said that the father and Certain aunts of the man who laid out the -street had been scalped by Tecumseh, the Indian. It was the only -distinguished event in his family, and he wished to commemorate it. - -The street was paved with undressed Medina. The newspaper offices were -all there, and the smash and scream of undressed Medina under traffic -was in the columns. It was satisfactory to Port Argent. The proper -paving of streets in front of newspaper offices was never petitioned -in the Council. Opposite the offices was a half block of vacant lots, a -high board fence of advertisements around it. - -The space between was packed with a jostling crowd. A street lamp lit a -small section of it. Lights from the office windows fell in patches on -faces, hats, and shoulders. A round moon floated above the tower of -_The Chronicle_ Building with a look of mild speculation, like a -"Thrice Blessed Buddha," leading in the sky his disciple stars, who -all endeavoured to look mildly speculative, and saying, "Yonder, oh, -mendicants! is a dense mass of foolish desires, which indeed squirm as -vermin in a pit, and are unpleasant to the eye of meditation. Because -the mind of each individual is there full of squirming desires, even -as the individual squirms in the mass." No doubt it looks so when one -floats so far over it. - -Opposite the windows of _The Chronicle_ (Independent-Reform) and _The -Press_ (Republican) the advertising boards were covered with white -cloth, and two blinding circles shone there of rival stereopticons. -There was no board fence opposite _The Western Advocate_ (Democratic), -and no stereopticon in the windows. This was deplored. It showed a lack -of public spirit--a want of understanding of the people's needs. If -there could be no stereopticon without a board fence, there should be a -brass band. - -The proprietor of _The Advocate_ sent out for a bushel of Roman candles, -and discharged them from his windows by threes, of red, white, and blue. -This was poetic and sufficient. - -The stereopticons flashed on the white circles the figures of returns, -when there were any, pictures and slurs when there were no figures,--a -picture of a cage full of riotous monkeys on _The Chronicle_ circle, -underwritten, "The Council,"--a picture of an elderly lady with a -poke bonnet and lifted hands of reprehension, on the _Press_ circle, -underwritten, "Independent Reform." - -"Auction of the City of Port Argent!" flashed _The Chronicle_. "Office -of M. Wood. Cash on Delivery of Goods." - -"All citizens must go to Sunday School or be fined," from _The Press_. - -"6th Ward. Rep. Plurality, 300." - -"1st Ward. Ind. Ref. Plurality, 28." - -Whish! a rocket from the windows of _The Western Advocate_. And the -crowd roared and shuffled. - -The last of _The Press_ windows to the left belonged to a little room -off the press-room, containing a desk, a board table, and several -chairs. The desk seemed only to be used as an object at which to throw -articles, in order that, they might roll to the floor. There were crude -piles of newspapers on it and about it, hats, a section of a stove pipe, -and a backgammon board. The table looked as if it sometimes might be -used to write on. - -The room was supposed to be the editor's, but no one in Port Argent -believed Charlie Carroll ever stayed in the same place long enough to -pre-empt it. He edited _The Press_ from all over the city, and wrote the -editorials wherever he stopped to catch breath. _The Press_ editorials -were sometimes single sentences, sometimes a paragraph. More than a -paragraph was supposed to mean that Carroll had ridden on a street car, -and relieved the tedium of his long imprisonment. - -A number of men stood at the window or stood grouped back, and watched -the canvas across the street. The only light came through the door from -the press-room. - -Carroll put his curly head through the door, shouted something and -vanished. _The Press_ stereopticon withdrew a view of Yosmite Valley and -threw on the canvas: - -"Recount in the 1st Ward announced." - -_The Chronicle_ cleared its canvas promptly and flung across the street: - -"Fraud!" - -Only two men sat still by the window of the darkened room. The rest -rushed out. - -The street was in an uproar, hats crushed over heads, fists shaken in -the air to the instructive comment of the moon. - -"How foolish, oh, mendicants! How do men make for themselves troubles, -as though one should stir quiet waters with his hand, saying, 'It is a -storm. The gods have afflicted me.'" - -"How foolish!" said one of the men at the darkened window. "Those boys -are terribly anxious to carry that Ward, and no point in it, Dick!" - -"Suppose I'd been out canvassing for Reform, Wood? Think you'd have -lost?" - -Wood peered curiously at Hennion in the half-lit dusk. "Like enough! -Well--want anything in particular? I admit the bill, if it ain't too -big." - -"I don't want anything." - -Wood tilted his chair and was silent a moment. - -"Look what comes of making rows," he went on. "I wouldn't have that -Ward now for a gift. _The Chronicle_'s red in the face with wrath and -happiness. Everybody's hair on end as it is. Disgusting, ain't it? -Well--down east, where the land's tilted up so you can turn a section -over bottom upwards by heaving one end with a rail, well--there was a -man there had a farm at the bottom of a long hill, and his neighbour's -punkins up above used to roll down on him. But he didn't make any row, -because his yard was littered with punkins, no. He ate the punkins. -Well, now, take the neighbour above, he might have gone down and called -somebody a thief for not returning strayed punkins, and two pillars of -the church might have disliked each other. But he didn't. He built a -board fence along the lower edge of his cornfield and caught his own -punkins. And there was mutual respect, mutual respect. Well--the -boys, they always want to fight. They go round saying, 'The old man's -level-headed,' but they ain't satisfied with building that fence to -catch those punkins without heaving a rock down an aggravating man's -chimney, or else it makes 'em mad to have punkins rolled at 'em, and -moreover they don't roll fast enough. Disgusting, ain't it?" - -"Wood! Wood! Wherein----" Carroll rushed in and turned up the electric -light impatiently. "Wh-what you going to do about the First Ward?" - -He had thin bright curly hair, the slimmest of bodies, and moved like a -restless insect. - -"Tell'em to count it twenty-eight Reform plurality, no more and no less! -And turn off that light! And clear out! Well--now--that Charlie Carroll, -he's a living fidget. Well--when they used to race steamboats on the -Mississippi, they'd put a nigger on the safety valve, so it wouldn't -get nervous. I've heard so. I've seen 'em tie it up with a string. -Well--winning the race depended some on the size and serenity of the -nigger, that'd see it wasn't his place to worry, for he'd get blown off -all right in the natural course of things. For sitting on a safety valve -you want a nigger that won't wriggle. Well--Charlie's a good man. Keeps -people thinking about odds and ends of things. If one thing out of forty -is going to happen, his mind's going to be a sort of composite picture -of the whole forty. Sees eight or ten dimensions to a straight line. -Yes--folks are pretty liberal. They'll allow there's another side to -'most anything, and a straight line's got no business to be so gone -particular. It's the liberal-mindedness of the public that lets us win -out, of course. But--you've got to sit still sometimes, and wait for the -earth to turn round." - -"I suppose you have. It'll turn round." - -"Yes, it'll turn round." - -The tumult outside had subsided in a dull, unsettled rumble. The moon -went into retreat among silver-grey clouds. Tecumseh Street muttered in -the darkness of its pit. The stereopticons continued. - -"_The Chronicle_ suspects the U. S. Census," from _The Press_. - -"Census O. K. Wood didn't make it," from _The Chronicle_. - -"Port Argent stands by the G. O. P." - -"Did Wood mention his Candidate's Name?" - -The _Press_ threw defiantly the portrait of its candidate for mayor. - -"Pull the String and See it Jump!" from _The Chronicle._ - -Behind _The Press_ stereopticon a telephone jingled, telegraph -instruments clicked, men wrote busily at a long table under a row of -pendent electric lights that swayed in the draught. - -A large man came in, panting. His short coat swung back under his -arm-pits, away from the vast curve of his waistcoat. He had a falling -moustache and a round face. - -"Vere iss Vood? So!" He peered curiously into the darker room. "Vere." - -"Come along, Freiburger," said Wood. "Pull up a chair. Well--how's your -Ward? All quiet?" - -Freiburger settled into a chair with the same caution. - -"Oh, yes, quviet. Not shtill, but quviet." - -"What's the difference between 'still' and 'quiet'?" asked Hennion. - -"Veil, it vass drunk, und someone vass punch Cahn der barber's nose, but -not me." - -"You call it quiet till somebody hits you?" - -"Vy should he hit me?" cried Freiburger indignantly. - -"He shouldn't," said Hennion. - -"No! Veil, it vass not shtill, but quviet. Ach!" sadly, "ven a man iss -drunk, vy don't he shleep?" - -"He wants to stay awake and enjoy it." - -Freiburger shook his head slowly and felt of his nose, as if to be quite -sure before taking the responsibility of repeating the statement. - -"It vass Cahn. It vass not me." - -Wood sat silently, looking through the window to where the stereopticons -flashed over the crowd's changing emotions, half listening to the -conversation near him. Freiburger peered anxiously at him in the dusk. -His mind was trembling with the thrill and tumult of the day, longing -that Wood might say something, utter some sentence that it might -cling to, clasp about with comprehension, and be safe from wandering, -unguaranteed ideas. Hennion seemed interested in examining Freiburger's -soul. - -"Freiburger, you're as honest a man as I know." - -"Veil, yes, I'm honest. I don't know who you know." - -"You never owed a dollar you didn't pay." - -"Oh, no, I don' do it." - -"Business fair?" - -"Oh, yes." - -"Well, what did you want to get on the Council for?" - -"Oh! Veil! It vass goot for business." He seemed pleased to talk about -this, but expression was a matter of labour and excitement. "Veil! You -see! Die boys sie come at Freiburger's saloon, und I know 'em all on -Maple Street und der Fourt Vard. Und nights at Freiburger's I hear von -der shobs und der Union und der prices. Und sie tell me vy der carriage -factory strike. Und sie tell me Hennion iss a shquvare man, und Vood -vill do as he say he vill do, und Shamieson in der freight yards iss a -hog, und Ranald Cam iss make money, und Fater Harra iss teach lil' -boys fight mit gloves in St. Catherine's parochial school und bleed -der badness out of der kleine noses. Und sie say, 'I loss my shob, -Freiburger!' 'My lil' boy sick, Freiburger.' Ach, so! All dings in der -Vard iss tell me. Veil now, aber, look here! I am a Councilman. Der iss -no man so big on Maple Street as Fater Harra und me, und Freiburger's -iss head-quaverters of der Vard, und das iss goot for business." - -"That's all right. I see your point. But the Council isn't supposed to -be an adjunct to the different councilmen's business, is it? I suppose -the Ward understood itself to be trusting its interests in your hands, -don't you? and you're a sort of guardian and trustee for the city, -aren't you? Seems as if that would take a good deal of time and worry, -because you'd want to be sure you were doing right by the city and the -Ward, and it's a complicated affair you have to look after, and a lot of -people's interests at stake." - -Wood stirred slightly in his chair, partly with pleasure at the humour -of it, partly with uneasiness. It was all right for Hennion to examine -the Freiburger soul, if he liked, but to cast on its smooth seas such -wide-stirring, windy ideas seemed unkind to Freiburger. - -Freiburger puffed heavily in the darkness. - -The excitement of expressing himself subsided, and Hennion's idea opened -before him, a black gulf into which he could for a while only stare -dubiously. His mind reached out vaguely for something familiar to cling -to. - -"Veil--I don' know--die boys and Fater Harra und--Mein Gott! I ask -Vood!" He puffed heavily again after the struggle and triumph. - -"Couldn't do better. It's what your boys expect of you anyhow." - -And Hennion returned to his silence. Freiburger's soul glowed peacefully -once more. - -"It iss Vood's business, hein?" - -He looked from one to the other of the impassive, self-controlled men. -He wanted Wood to say something that he could carry away for law and -wisdom and conviction, something to which other ideas might be fitted -and referred. He had the invertebrate instinct of a mollusk to cling to -something not itself, something rooted and undriven, in the sea. - -"You've done well, Freiburger," said Wood, rousing himself. "Tell the -boys they've done well. Stay by your beer and don't worry till the keg's -dry." - -Freiburger rolled away, murmuring his message loyally. "Stay by -mein--a--mein keg's dry." - -"Freiburger won't cost you much," Hen-nion murmured after a while. Wood -swung softly in his chair. - -"Got something on your mind, ain't you, Dick?" - -"Oh, yes. Of course. But I don't know what it is. I've fished for it -till I'm tired. I've analysed Freiburger, and didn't get much. Now I'd -like to examine your soul in a strong chemical solution. Maybe I'm a bit -embarrassed." - -Wood chuckled. "Go ahead. Most men 'll lie, if you give 'em time to -rearrange their ideas. Well--it won't take me so long." His manner -became genial. "You've got a good head, Dick. Well--I'll tell what I'm -thinking. It's this. The old man 'll have to drop his job one of these -days, and--if you're feeling for pointers--I don't say you are, but -supposing you are--I don't mind saying I shall back you to head the -organization. Maybe--well,--in fact, I don't suppose there's much money -in it you'd care to touch--maybe there ain't any--but there's a place -for the right man. I like you. I liked your father. He was built -something your way. The boys want somebody over 'em that won't wriggle -off the safety valve, and knows how to pick up punkins peacefully as -they come. This First Ward business--well, you've got a pretty good grip -through the crowd to begin with." - -"Now there!" broke in Hennion. - -"You and Aidee are both trying to do the same thing. You want to get me -into politics. I don't care for your primaries and committees. I don't -see ten cents' difference to the city which party runs it. I dare say -whoever runs it expects to make a living out of it. Why do you both come -to me?" - -"I guess we've both got an idea you're useful." - -Hennion thought a moment and then spoke more quietly. - -"Henry Champney used to boss this section. He did it from the platform -instead of the committee room. And my father handled bigger contracts -than I've touched yet. But Champney didn't ask him to run his canal into -the next caucus, or furnish stray batches of constituents with jobs. -Understand, I'm not grumbling about the last. Champney stayed on his -platform, and my father stayed in his big ditch and dug. The proper -thing now seems to be for everybody to get into the street and row -around together. Here's Aidee too thinks he's got to jump into it now, -and take with him--take with him everything he can' reach." - -"That's straight," murmured Wood. "So they do." - -"Yes, and I call off, myself." - -"All right. I was only guessing what you had in your mind. Well--it's -business sets the pace nowadays. 'Most everything else has to catch its -gait or be left. I remember Champney forty years gone. He was a fine -picture, when he got up and spread himself. He didn't do anything -that's here now, unless it's a volume of his speeches, congressional -and occasional. Not much. He kept us all whooping for Harry Clay. -Well--Clay's dead, Whig Party and Compromises and all burnt up. Your -father built sixty miles of canal. Canal stock's pretty dead now, but -that's not his fault. He laid a few thousand miles of railroad, went -around this place and that, cleaning up the country. Several million -people travel his railroads and walk his bridges. Anybody ever call him -a great man like Henry Champney? Gone little he cared if they did or -didn't. He and his like were a sight more important. Well--no; Champney -didn't ask favours of anybody in those days. And he didn't ask votes. -They shovelled 'em at him, and he went on telling 'em the Constitution -was the foundation of America, and Harry Clay the steeple. They weren't. -Rick Hennion and his like were the foundation, and there wasn't any -steeple. If you ask what they're all rowing round in the street for now, -why, I don't know. I guess they've all found out the point's got to be -fought out there or nowhere. Well--better think over what I was -telling you, Dick. You're Rick Hennion's son. Well--it's none of my -business--but--I'd gone like to see you old Champney's son-in-law--if -that's it. I believed in Champney once, and shouted for Clay, and -thought there was something in it. I did, that's a fact. I'd lock horns -with any other bull then, and swear my name was Righteouashess and his -was Sin." - -"Well, but Champney----" - -"Yes--Champney!" - -"When he turned a vote, it meant he'd persuaded a man, didn't it?" - -"Yes--Champney! His best argument was a particular chest tone. If I tell -a man, 'Hullo, Jimmy!' and give him a cigar, it's as reasonable as a -chest tone." - -"It's not in my line, Wood," said Hen-nion after a silence. "What makes -you so down? You're not old." - -"Going on seventy, Dick." Wood's mood seemed more than usually frank -and talkative. He seemed to be smoothing out the creases in his mind, -hunting into corners that he hardly knew himself, showing a certain -wistfulness to explain his conception of things, complex and crumpled -by the wear and pressures of a long life, possibly taking Hennion to -represent some remembrance that he would like to be friends with after -long estrangement, and in that way pleading with his own youth to think -kindly of him. Or it might have been he was thinking of "Rick" Hennion, -who helped him forty years before, and stayed with him longest of -worn-out ideals. - -There was a rush of feet and clamour of voices in the press-room. - -"Wood! Wood!" - -"First Ward." - -"Thrown out forty votes." - -"Wouldn't do what you told 'em." - -The little room was jammed with men, thinned out, and jammed again. The -electric light flashed up. - -"What's to pay now?" - -_The Chronicle_ flung its bold cone of light and glaring challenge -across the street. It seemed to strike the canvas with a slap. - -"Forty Reform votes thrown out in 1st Ward. Fraud!" - -A hush fell on Tecumseh Street. Then a roar went up that seemed to shake -the buildings. Tecumseh Street thundered below, monstrous and elemental, -and trembled above like a resonant drum. The mob rolled against the -brick front of the block like a surf that might be expected to splash -any moment up the flat perpendicular. Grey helmets of policemen tossed -on the surface. Faces were yellow and greenish-white in the mingled -electric-light and moonlight. Fists and spread hands were shaken at _The -Press_ windows. Five or six heads were in the window of the little room. -Wood's face was plain to make out by his grey shovel-beard. They shouted -comments in each other's ears. - -"It's a riot." - -"No!" - -"Looks like the bottom of hell, don't it?" Then a little spit of smoke -and flame darted like a snake's tongue between the advertising boards, -seven feet above the sidewalk. There was a sharp crack that only the -nearest heard. - -Wood flung up his hand, pitched forward, and hung half over the window -sill. - -Someone directly beneath, looking up, saw a head hanging, felt a drop -splash on his face, and drew back wincing. - -The thrill and hush spread from the centre. It ran whisperingly over -the mass. The roar died away in the distance to right and left. Tecumseh -Street was still, except for the crash where a policeman tore a board -from the advertisements with a heave of burly shoulders, and plunged -through into the darkness of empty lots. - -The little room above was now crowded and silent, like the street. -They laid Wood on the table with a coat under his head. He coughed and -blinked his eyes at the familiar faces, leaning over him, strained and -staring. - -"You boys are foolish. Charlie Carroll--I want--take Hennion--Ranald -Cam, you hear me! Becket--Tuttle." - -It was like a Roman emperor dispensing the succession, some worn -Augustus leaving historic counsel out of his experience of good and evil -and the cross-breeds of expediency--meaning by good, good for something, -and by evil, good for nothing. - -"Seems queer to be plugged at my time of life. Take Hennion. You ain't -got any heads. Dick!" - -Hennion stood over him. Wood looked up wistfully, as if there were -something he would like to explain. - -"The game's up to you, Dick. I played it the only way I knew how." - -The moon floated clear above the street, and mild and speculative. Ten -minutes passed, twenty, thirty. The mass began to sway and murmur, then -caught sight of Carroll in the window, lifting his hand, and was quiet. - -"Gentlemen, Mr. Wood is dead." - -For a moment there was hardly a motion. Then the crowd melted away, -shuffling and murmuring, into half a score of dim streets. - - - - -CHAPTER VI--ALCOTT AIDEE - - -|THE Sexton Avenue Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, -with wide windows and a tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the -Avenue in a block of bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house -from the corner. Aidee rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, -but his study was in the Assembly building. The house belonged to -one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote -articles for _The Chronicle_, and verses which were military at one -time, nay, even ferocious, which afterward reflected her pensioned -widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She hoped her drawing-room might -be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. She was tall, thin, -grey-haired, and impressive. - -The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a -kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, -but some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly -organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who -delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations -of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There -was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule. -Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and -rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him "Tom." He had -fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. -There was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted -for excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large, -good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her -trail, Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling -mills. - -T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he -liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was -on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded -from his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission -into Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set -forever on higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room, and held conversation. - -Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by -means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature -by the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with -natural gas and asbestos seemed to say, "With all this we are modern, -intensely modern." - -Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man -of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism -there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he -came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his -life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, -leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, "Al" and -"Lolly," on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on -the same small farm. - -The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and -then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in -that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by -the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions -objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school -commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left -it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, -the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud -of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period -followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed -himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces. -Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and -solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out. - -"Let me go! Oh, Al!" pleaded the younger, "Kick me out!" - -"We'll go west," said Alcott. "Come on, Lolly. Never mind." - -But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, -a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, -affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him -to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a -pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with -a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed -miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men. - -"You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric -youth," said the hard-riding bishop, "go ahead!" - -There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level -horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in -astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in -an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart. - -"By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!" said T. M. S. "Want to bombard hell, -do you? Got any idea where it is?" - -"Yes." - -"Ho! You have!" - -"Some hot chunks of it in this town." - -"You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, -and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof -off. What church are you, anyhow?" - -"I'm no church. I'm a freak." - -"Ho! You don't say!" - -"I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, -strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother." - -But they did not find him. - -Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee. - -But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. -The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was -a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which -followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a -burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, -and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself -loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? "Evil and -good may be better or worse," but the "mixture of each is a marvel," -says the penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of -unuse, if they came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse -there was, and irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt. - -"The Inner Republic," wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that -title, "has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become -a tyranny." - -In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is -certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before -him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey -volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near -the beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled "Light": "Two lamps have -mainly given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, -has known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker -becoming a larger glow,--the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better -moments than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The -other has seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and -brooding and pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. -Two lamps--the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow." - -So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting -multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated -thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and -died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier -and more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still. - -"Classifications of men are all false," declared Aidee. "Everyone is an -elemental unit." - -If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and -to care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, -Port Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing -the Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in -opposition next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth -and nail on local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the -mystery. - -"T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement," it remarked, and went its -way. Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton -Avenue Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port -Argent concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid -man it found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for -rhetorical speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted -him a definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it -found him rather repellent. - -The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days -had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics -started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one -newspaper, _The Chronicle_, and sometimes elected a few councilmen, -sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the -Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by -over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and -disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied -to a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They -generally do. - -Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became -familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He -walked much about the city, watching faces--dingy and blurred faces, -hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. "There's no -equality among men, but there's a family likeness," he said. It grew -to be a kind of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. -Personally, he was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about -other men by too much direct contact with them, they put him out. He -looked at them hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him -companionable. His solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his -conscience. - -Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her -aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring -bells for a place of residence. - -He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall -with its platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his -wide-windowed study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, -scatter his seed, and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could -do no more than throw his personality into the welter of things, and -leave the worth of it to other decisions than his own. Here his travels -were ended, except as one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and -timeless. - -In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by -two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and -overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked "Allen." Of -the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, "The Inner -Republic," might be called signboards, or statements of condition. -Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked "Allen," -crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations, -showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal -sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured -humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate -championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they -were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of -their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the -platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written -"Allen." - -"Why do you go apart from me?" he asks in the grey volume. "Are you -sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, -violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and -my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does -not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For -though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp -this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's -desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but -human,--and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart." - -The groove of the path marked "Allen" seems plain enough here. Allen, -present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his -speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse -drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the -next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had -ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was -no jest in that irony. The coloured thread "Allen" was woven so thickly -into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern. - -The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street -and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll -glittered with malice. - -"Say, that man's name was Hicks." - -"What of it?" - -"Why, he's one of your heelers." - -"Don't know him." - -"Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in -Muscadine Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way -back under your gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and -drinking eloquence like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it." - -"Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?" - -"Well, not exactly." - -"Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?" - -Carroll shook his head. - -"Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never -saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular. -No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet." - -Carroll laughed and flitted away. - -Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody -cared what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his -brother's keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business -to do his best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a -likeable man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee -had seen men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest. -If somebody from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's -paragraphs by applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business -of Carroll's either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with -seeing that they said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused -them to say. - -But the thing tasted badly. - -He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a -man translated "Down with the devil!" into "Go shoot Wood!" and became -ready to take another's life and give over his own in exchange. - -He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door, -followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping -Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and -giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's "brotherly -love" was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan -that his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played -dolls with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the "Standard Oil" by way -of relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with -thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident. -A lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no -opinions, except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was -better than these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And -who were the bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men -followed him now or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman -like the murderer, Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care -for him, Aidee. They liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew -of no one person in Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was -a collection of the half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated, -the drunken with a little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches, -and a percentage of socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch -plaids. What dedication was there in any of them? - -What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is -genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was -one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One -could not deny that. - -Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success, -when he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day -in Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on -the edge of his claim--which was paying at that time--and felt the same -mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis. - -Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning -stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why -at other times their voices were effortless and sweet. - -On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss -of Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was -final, and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest -percentage of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move -men had come, and brought with it the longing to move them to certain -ends, and he had thought: - -"All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is -afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but -neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of -the other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the -solitary issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my -message." Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and -had faith. - -Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith -and doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them -bacteria. They passed from man to man--they floated in the air--one -caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera--they were -apt to be epidemic. - -And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them -disease. The one we must have, the other we must be rid of. - -So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out -gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown -by the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street -car, a headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent -people were talking of the Wood murder--some gabbling about it like Mrs. -Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: "Wood always treated -me right," or, "Well, the old scamp's gone!" - -The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his -life--harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in the -street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door, -and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the -house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an -hour he took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson -drawing-room. - - - - -CHAPTER VII--THE THIRD LAMP - - -|WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, -the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder. - -"Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!" cried Ralbeck. "I will -put it in music, the schema thus--The wronged cry for justice! -They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! -Allegro-mezzoforte!" - -And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: "Peace and coffee at Mrs. -Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice." - -And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying -sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring -herself either to countenance crime. - -"This is important," she said. "We must take a position. We must insist -to Mr. Aidee on a position." She drew herself up and paused. "People -will ask our position." - -Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. "Will you write a poem about -Wood and Hicks, really?" - -"My dear, what is your opinion?" Mrs. Tillotson asked. - -"Scrumptious!" said Alberta. - -Mrs. Tillotson hesitated. - -"I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position." - -It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the -throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to -Chateaubriand and Madame Rcamier, a reference furnished her by Berry. - -"Countenance crime!" cried Ralbeck. "Everybody countenances crime." - -Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider. - -"Except crimes of technique," Berry murmured softly. "You don't -countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do." - -"Art has laws," declared Mrs. Tillotson. "Society has laws. Crime is the -breach of necessary laws." - -"Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point." Berry stirred himself. -"But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by -nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, -and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of -technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An -unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent -crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, -inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical." - -"G-gorry!" stammered Ted Secor. "Bu-but, you see, Hicks----" - -"Did Hicks love Wood?" said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed -and smiling stare. "He was wrong, Hicks was wrong." - -"G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!" Ted Secor found it hard work, this -keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to -be erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here -than he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, -whose knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless -as possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson -scared him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, -and he knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson -posed, that Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive -pocket, and finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were -rather good. - -The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and -Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried: - -"Camilla Champney! She's coming in!" - -While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent -and familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, -and then nearly a year before. - -When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing -eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling -interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. -Tillotson appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of -rituals; they tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he -said, in the place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who -substituted ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence -followed anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, -therefore peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought -Mrs. Tillotson might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted -his scorn. Mrs. Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his -scorn. - -Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted -and Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large -houses and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin -Street. The crowds increased as they drew nearer the business -section--late afternoon crowds hurrying home. - -"I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney," he said -stiffly, somewhat painfully. "I thought you could say anything. That's -your gift." - -Camilla was radiant for a moment. - -"It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr. -Hennion was right." - -"Oh!" For another moment she was disdainful. "Women don't want to be -men's conventions." - -"Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals." - -"Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He _couldn't!_" She was radiant -again. - -"Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room." - -"But I like Alberta!" - -She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood. - -The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left -through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred -windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet -young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked -into its black secrecy. - -"Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't -matter, and besides--I don't know how to ask you--but there's something -I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The -Inner Republic'!" - -She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now. - -"I thought it was different--from the other books--that is--I thought -there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove." - -"The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?" - -"Not more, but besides." - -"And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man -ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he -ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask -for are extensive." - -Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently. - -They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a -few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden -and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, -weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between -the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent -once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither -they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of -Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great -red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was -surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy -trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a -steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space. - -Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted -as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in -asking for explanatory notes. - -A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse -began to sing, "Lulu-lu," pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman -at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some -quarrelling children. - -Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at -the rebuff. - -"I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell -me--because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life--because -I thought,--you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't -mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry." - -Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old -fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the -grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated -above, "Lulu-lu," tender and unfinished, as if at that point the -sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little -wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there -are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of -dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that -will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully -and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's -hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the -maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the -discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad -arteries throbbing faintly. - -Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her. - -"I won't say that I didn't mean that," he said. "I did. I'm not sorry. -Otherwise I couldn't have understood you." - -"I shall make a circus of myself," he thought. "But she'll look as if -she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to -believe. And perhaps she would understand." - -"Lulu-lu," sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, "Don't you -understand? This is what I mean." - -"But you do understand now!" said Camilla. - -"Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood -murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder -would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You -asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. -Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like -two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty -years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I -dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. -Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead -or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man -than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore -me in two. - -"I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been -a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and -miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a -dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. -Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about -those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The -reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's -hysteric." - -"I think you're a wonderful man." She looked up with glowing and frank -admiration. - -The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying -softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty -unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and -folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps -and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street -grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the -fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them. - -"Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come -you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the -genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me -to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a -schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every -day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old -disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in -the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it -is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till -we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are -wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a -debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered -and foolish as you like." - -Camilla laughed happily. - -"Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what -you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood." - -He glowered a little. - -"Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I -think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like -thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like -Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I -suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him -in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is -illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be -legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the -two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I -think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't -care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified -habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better -laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality. -The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood -stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then -illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't -belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you, -because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems -better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin? -Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I -felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights -of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably -no less so. Wood was a likeable----" - -"The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt -politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the -classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? -I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks -confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that -he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they -would look apart." - -Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word "secret," perhaps, or, -"confession." Or more with the sense of being present at the performance -of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him--a man new, at least, -and original--conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and -held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen, -poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about. -Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long -morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for -any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was -conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks -to flying signals of excitement. - -Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness -soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and -lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney! - -"The man who first invented women," he went on more slowly, "must have -been a lyric poet." - -He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now -rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla -choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, -with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the -surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked -up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street. - -"No, she's not lyric," he said. "She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. -I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, -but she always thrashes him." - -"How dreadful!" - -"Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of -things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she -can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom -Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a -foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the -qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. -Tillotson's drawing-room." - -"He talks as he writes!" thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested -in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things -found not altogether worshipful--egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, -weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond -most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in -getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man -walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, -restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the -moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother -whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than -doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close -love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each -seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other. - -The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age -of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, -into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland -Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where -everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, -what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window -and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation -as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a -balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person -then. - -Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every -book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in -the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed -to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and -longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes -spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it -seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship -carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and -impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with -the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it -seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The -impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring -haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia. - -Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German -and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street -seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, -cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail -of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges. - -"Cheerful old river!" Aidee remarked. - -"I love it." - -"Reason enough for its cheerfulness." - -"I've loved it for ages." - -"But you needn't dodge a tribute," said Aidee. - -"You needn't insist on it." - -"Not if I think it important?" - -"Oh, never at all!" - -"But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt." - -"Better owe it than pay it in small coin." - -"Then I offer a promissory note." - -"You mean--you will tell me more about----" Camilla paused and dropped -her voice. - -"Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand." - -It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in -the springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, -and small tinklings of wit are thought poetical. - -Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The -paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood -idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to -Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him. - -"Rip it out again, Kennedy," he said. "Can't help it." - -"'Twill cost the best part of a day," said the big foreman ruefully. - -"Can't help it." - -Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed. - -"I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right." - -He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the -Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions. - -"What is it, Dick? What have you done?" - -Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting. - -"Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder -with his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we -forget about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work." - -Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla -went up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the -gangs of workmen. - -"You were right about that, the other night," said Aidee abruptly. "I'm -not quite clear how you were right, but you were." - -"Right about the whole business?" - -"No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm -adopting your scruples." - -Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on. - -"Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a -sacrifice in order to accept it." Then he stopped with a short laugh. -"I'm a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. -Would it be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?" - -"Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out." - -"Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow." - -"Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?" -implying that he knew what the paragraphs would be. - -"Never saw him that I know of." - -"Well--I don't see where you're concerned." - -Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what -Aidee meant by "adopting your scruples." Probably Aidee saw the enormity -of dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself -liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious -scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were -not things to be copied or "adopted" precisely by anyone else. - -Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the -bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within -him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the -disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about -the place. Mrs. Finney and her "man" were quarrelling noisily at their -open window. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII--MECHANICS - - -|HENNION came back from seeing Wood laid away (where other men were -lying, who had been spoken of in their day, whom Port Argent had -forgotten or was in process of forgetting) and saw the last bricks laid -and rammed on Lower Bank Street. There was satisfaction in the pavement -of Lower Bank Street, in knowing what was in it and why. The qualities -of sand, crushed stone, and paving brick were the same yesterday and -to-day. Each brick was three inches and three-eighths thick, and not -one would be ambitious of four inches to-morrow. If it were broken, -and thrown away, there would be no altruistic compunctions. One built -effectively with such things. - -Charlie Carroll whispered to Hennion as they came out of the cemetery: - -"It's all right. The boys are satisfied." - -"Why are they?" - -"They'd be scared not to do what Wood said now. It wouldn't go down." - -"Go down where?" - -"Well, they seem to like the idea too. They will have it." - -But why should he be congratulated over a prospective invitation from -"the boys" to labour in their interests? He was not sure why he had not -already refused, by what subconscious motive or scruple. Properly there -should be scruples about accepting. The leadership of the organisation -was an unsalaried position, with vague perquisites. Wood had taken -honorariums and contributions, spent what he chose on the organisation, -and kept what he chose. Apparently he had not kept much, if any. He had -seemed to care only for influence. He had liked the game. He had left -only a small estate. But whether he had kept or passed it on, the money -was called unclean. - -If one went into politics to effect something--and Hennion could not -imagine why one went into anything otherwise--the leadership of the -organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of -chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain -subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the -subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the -chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that -were needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be -dynamics and mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism -it seemed oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any -machine, turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. -Still these sets and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like -an interesting problem in engineering, that had been met rather -experimentally. As mechanics, it seemed to be all in an experimental -stage. Hennion wondered if there were any text-books on the subject, and -then pulled himself up with a protest. - -What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer -and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be -sure, but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's -time politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly -a class of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and -mechanic laws, they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it -seemed to succeed by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense. - -Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as -important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of -the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces. - -The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had -thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney. - -Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions -for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more -of its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. -Those who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less -about the matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called -him corrupt, which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, -the chartered machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation -to suit those who furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity -of Port Argent had always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a -complicated motive, half private, hardly confessed. - -Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, -and noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were -gathering their tools. - -"All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on -the east side next." - -Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding -their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and -it occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men -like Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him. - -He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the -policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer -specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an -eccentric. - -Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no -conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a -runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way -of incident. "Everything goes," was the phrase there, meaning it is -accepted and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it. - -Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room in _The Press_ -building. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him -a machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men -to drive it--what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the -enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the -mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances -and hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type -to run that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his "job," and -what "the boys" wanted, why, they wanted _their_ "jobs," like everybody -else. Hennion wanted his own. - -Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that -moment, and nearly ran into him. - -"Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night." - -"I don't want it." - -"Come off! You can't help it." - -Carroll flitted away in the direction of _The Press_ building. - -Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in -sleep all the great issues of their day. - -Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly -called "The Versailles," and came out in the street. It was too early to -see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street -presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across -the street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the -Fourth Ward, church and state--Father Harra and Frei-burger. - -Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to -be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a -sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats -out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more -like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a -financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the -canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and -success, and that was the bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, -and for the symbol of his father's life and his own hope in the working -world. He liked to stand on it, to feel it beneath and around him, -knowing what each steel girder meant, and what in figures was the -strength of its grip and pull. There was no emotional human nature in -it, no need of compromise. Steel was steel, and stone stone, and not a -bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice or private folly. In a certain -way he seemed to find his father there, and to be able to go over with -him their old vivid talks. - -The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, -shattered fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in -his ear: "Got a light?" - -Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, -there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, -creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown -child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the -other. - -"Pretty full, Jimmy Shays," Hennion said, giving him a match. "You'd -float all right if you fell into the river." - -"Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself." - -He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with -the pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the -basket girl. "Hi!" - -The child stopped and looked at him. - -"I gets one end. Tha'sh right." - -She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away -over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them. -Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song. - -A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping -creatures like the basket girl! - -Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The -west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a -moving line of lit windows. - -Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and -solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The -west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran -as accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of -smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the -people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had--but mixed ideas -of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the -westbound train would have been a silly affair. - -Hennion came from the bridge and down Bank Street, which was brilliant -with lights. He turned up an outrunning street and came out on the -square, where stood Port Argent's city hall and court house and jail, -where there was a fountain that sometimes ran, and beds of trimmed -foliage plants arranged in misguided colour-designs. - -Several lights were burning in the barred windows of the old jail. He -stopped and looked at the lights, and wondered what varieties of human -beings were there. The jail was another structure which would have been -futile without people to go in, at least to dislike going in. The man -who shot Wood was there. Why did he shoot Wood? What was his futile idea -in that? - -The jail was old and dilapidated. Some of the bricks had crumbled under -the barred windows. - -Hennion walked into the entrance, and rang the bell. - -The jailor was middle-aged, bearded, and smoking a short pipe. - -"Can I see Hicks, Sweeney?" - -"Got a permit? Oh! Mr. Hennion! Well, it ain't regular, you know." - -"You can stay by." - -"Well, all right. No, but I'll have to lock you in. It's the rules." - -They went up a flight of dark stairs, through a corridor, where a -watchman passed them. They stopped at a door, and the jailor turned the -key. - -"Hicks, gentleman to see you." - - - - -CHAPTER IX--HICKS - - -|HICKS was sitting within by a plain board table, reading. It was a -whitewashed room and had a window with rusted bars. The door banged, and -the key again creaked in the lock. The jailor walked to and fro in the -corridor. - -Hicks looked up from his reading, and stared in a half-comprehending -way. - -"I have a selfish thirst for knowledge, Mr. Hicks," said Hennion. - -He took the chair on the opposite side, and looked at the book on the -table. The feeble gas jet stood some six inches out from the wall, -directly over the table. - -"It's the Bible," said the other. "It needs to be made modern, but -there's knowledge in it." - -"I didn't mean that." - -"Lazarus and Dives. That's fanciful justice. A trick to pacify Lazarus. -But there's knowledge. Notice what the dogs did. That's satire." - -It seemed a trifle uncanny, the place, the little man with the absorbed -manner, metallic voice and strange language, black hair and beard, -intent black eyes. Hennion had never interviewed a criminal before. - -"I'm not a reporter, Mr. Hicks, nor a lawyer." - -Hicks marked his place and closed the book. - -"I know who you are." - -"I was a friend of Wood's, in a way, but I'm not here in malice. I -gathered you hadn't anything personal against him. It seemed to follow -you had some sort of a long-range motive in it. I wanted to ask you why -you shot Wood." - -Hicks' gaze grew slowly in intentness as if his mind were gathering -behind it, concentrating its power on one point. The point seemed to be -midway between and above Hennion's eyes. Hennion had an impulse to -put his hand to the spot, as if it were burnt, but his habit of -impassiveness prevented. He thought the gaze might represent the way in -which Hicks' mind worked. A focussing mind was a good thing for anyone -who worked with his brains, but it might have extravagances. An analysis -concentrated and confined to an infinitely small point in the centre -of the forehead might make an infinitely small hole to the back of the -head, but it would not comprehend a whole character. A man's character -ran to the ends of his hands and feet. - -"I'm an engineer," Hennion went on, "and in that way I have to know the -effectiveness of things I handle and apply. And in that way men too are -to me so much effectiveness." - -"I know about you," said Hicks sharply. "Your men like you. You've never -had a strike." - -"Why--no." - -Hicks' manner had changed. It was quick, excited, and angular. - -"You're wrong. They're something more to you, that you didn't count in. -Why do they like you?" - -"I don't know." - -"Exactly. But it's something effective, ain't it?" - -Hennion paused and felt confused. A man of such sharp analysis and -warped performance as this, how was one to get to understand him? He -leaned back in his chair and crossed his knees. The sharp analysis -might be a trick Hicks had caught from listening to Aidee's speeches. It -sounded like Aidee. - -"Well, anyhow, Mr. Hicks, in the way of effectiveness, why did you shoot -Wood?" - -Hicks' eyes were little pin-points of concentration. - -"He sold the people to the corporations." - -"Well. But suppose he did. Will the next man do any better? If not, -where's the effectiveness?" - -"He won't be so sharp." - -"You thought Wood was too sharp to be downed Aidee's way?" - -"He was the devil's latest scheme. I sent him to the devil." - -"And shoulder the consequences. I like that. But the next man. Suppose I -were the next man." - -Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They -were thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said -softly: - -"Look out what you do." - -"What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I -ask some of you?" - -Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something -unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain, -unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and -sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did -not feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by -thinking Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, -and would probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks -was that he was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense -convictions and repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his -purpose fixed on would become a white-hot point, blinding him to -circumstances. And this focussing nature, which acted like a lens to -contract general heat into a point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in -dynamics. It seemed a characteristic of better service for starting a -fire, and furnishing the first impulse of a social movement, than for -running steady machinery. Some people claimed that society was running -down and needed a new impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, -the trouble with Hicks might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at -the wrong time, a fire that had to be put out. - -"You ask me!" - -"Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and -satisfy you?" - -Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find -the centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the -attempt to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was -to break up the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails -scratching across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose. - -"I beg your pardon." - -"You ask me!" - -"Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of -order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it -expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock. -But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about -it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea -was. I told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the -circumstances, I beg your pardon." - -"Why do you ask me?" Hicks' fingers shook on the table. "There's a man -who can tell you. He can lead you. He led me, when I wasn't a fool." - -"Who? You mean Aidee?" - -Hicks nodded, and fell to glowering at his nervous fingers, absent and -brooding. - -"He didn't tell you to shoot Wood. I know better than that." - -"No, he didn't." - -"Why, there's another thing I'd like to know. What did Aidee do?" - -"Do! He held me back! He was always holding me back! I couldn't stand -it!" he cried sharply, and a flash of anger and impatience went over his -face. "He shouldered me like a log of wood on his back. Maybe I liked -that papoose arrangement, with a smothered damn fire in the heart of me. -No, I didn't! I had to break loose or turn charcoal." - -Hennion wondered. The man reminded him of Aidee, the same vivid phrase, -the figures of speech. But Aidee had said that he did not know him. It -appeared that he must know him. If Aidee had been lying about it, that -opened sinister suggestions. Hennion did not like Aidee, neither did he -like in himself this furtive sense of satisfaction in the suggestions. - -"Aidee told me he didn't know you. I hadn't thought he would lie about -it." - -"By God, don't call him a liar to me!" Hicks jumped to his feet, and had -his wooden chair swung over his back in an instant. - -"I don't. I want it explained," Hennion said coolly. "You can't do -anything with that. Sit down." - -"He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds, -cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!" - -"Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an -explanation." - -"Don't you call him a liar!" - -"Haven't. Sit down." - -Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were -narrowed, glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put -his hands into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas -jet, and the ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed -ceiling. They were wild, disordered, and fugitive, as if reflections -from the spirit behind Hicks' eyes, instead of from the jet at the end -of a lead pipe. - -"I'll help you out with a suggestion," Hennion said slowly. "You don't -mean to leave Aidee in that shape, since you feel about him in this way. -But you don't know whether your story would go down with me, or whether -it might not get Aidee into trouble. Now, if I'm forecasting that story, -it's something like this. You knew each other years ago, not in Port -Argent." - -Hicks said nothing. - -"Carried you around papoose-fashion, did he? But there's some likeness -between you. It might happen to be a family likeness." Still no comment. - -"If it so happened, you might be related. You might be twins. And then -again you might not. You might have been his first convert. Partners -maybe in Nevada. That: was where he came from,--silver mines and what -not. It's no business of mine." - -He paused and meditated, looking at the pulsating light; then brought -his chair down and leaned forward. - -"I take the liberty to disagree with you. I'm no exception to the run -of men, and I'm neither a hound, nor a coward, nor a thief, nor yet a -liar." - -"I know you're not." - -"However, your story, or Aidee's, is no business of mine. I gave you -those inferences because they occurred to me. Naturally you'd suspect -they would. So they do. Gabbling them abroad might make some trouble for -Aidee, that's true. I shan't gabble them." - -"I know you won't." - -"I wanted your point of view in shooting Wood. If you don't see your -way to give it, all right. I judge it was the same way you were going to -club me with a chair. Simple enough and rather silly. Goodnight, then. -Is there anything I can do for you?" - -"Yes." - -Hennion leaned back and studied the gaslight, and disliked himself. -Hicks clasped and unclasped his hands on the table. - -"It won't hurt him," he said hoarsely, "between you and me. Besides, you -can do that for me. He's my brother, old Al. But I cut away from him. I -kept off. I kept away from him for a while, but I couldn't live without -seeing him. You see? I couldn't do it. Then he came here, and I followed -him, and I lived with a shoemaker across the river and cobbled shoes. -But I heard every speech he made in Port Argent, though he never saw me. -He thinks I'm dead, don't he? I dodged him pretty slick." He flushed and -smiled--"I liked it," he whispered, growing excited. "It was better'n -the old way, for we got along all right this way. You've heard of him! -Ain't he wonderful? Ain't he a great one, hey? That was Al. I liked it, -but he didn't know. You see? How'd he know when he thought I was dead, -didn't he? I watched him, old Al!" - -His face was lit up with the warm memory of it. He clicked his teeth, -and swayed to and fro, smiling. - -"We got along all right this way. All right. My idea. Wasn't Al's. I -kept the other side the river, mostly. Nobody can touch him when he's -fired up, can they? They didn't know Al like I knew him. They called him -the Preacher. He scared 'em like prairie fire. He's got his way. I've -heard him. I watched 'em, and I knew him, but they didn't, did they?" - -He focussed his excited eyes suddenly on Hennion. - -"You! I know you; I know your men that live on the east side. I heard -a man say you'd got a heart like a baked potato and don't know it. That -fat-headed foreman of yours, Kennedy, he can tell you more 'n you -ever thought of. Think you're a composite of steel and brick, set up -according to laws of mechanics, don't you? Oh, hell! Go and ask Al. He's -a wonder. Why do your men like you? Go and ask 'em. I've told you why. -Why'd I shoot Wood? Al wouldn't have let me, but it 'll do good. He -scares 'em his way, I scare 'em mine. You wait and see! It 'll do good." - -Hennion studied the gas jet, until he could see nothing but an isolated -impish dancing flame, until it seemed as if either the little man across -the table were chattering far away in the distance and darkness, or else -he and the gas jet were one and the same. - -Aidee had been four years in Port Argent, and so Hicks had been -following and watching him, cobbling shoes, living a fanciful, excited -life, maniacal more or less. Hennion fancied that he had Hicks' point of -view now. - -"You wait and see! It'll do good." - -"Well," said Hennion, "I dare say you've answered the question. You -haven't told me yet what I can do for you." - -Hicks' excitement died out as suddenly as it had risen. He reached a -trembling hand across the table, and whispered: - -"I thought---- What do you think they'll do to me?" - -"I can't help you there. You'll have counsel." - -"No, no! It's this. I thought I'd write a letter to Al, and you'd give -it to him afterwards, a year afterwards--supposing--you see?" - -He hesitated pitifully. - -"All right, I'll do that." - -"I won't write it now." - -"I see." - -"You'll keep it still? You won't tell? You won't get a grudge against -Al? If you do! No. I know about you. You won't tell." - -"No, I won't. Well, good-night, then." - -"Good-night." - -His voice was husky and weak now. He put out his hand, hesitating. -Hennion took it promptly. It felt like a wet, withered leaf. - -Hennion went and knocked at the door, which Sweeney opened. Hicks sat -still by the table, looking down, straggling locks of his black hair -plastered wet against his white forehead, his finger nails scratching -the boards. - -The door clanged to, and the noise echoed in the corridor. - -"I heerd him gettin' some excited," said the jailor. - -"Some." - -"Think he's crazy?" - -"That's for the court to say." - -"Ain't crazier'n this old jail. I need a new one bad, Mr. Hennion. Look -at them windows! I seen mighty clever boys here. A sharp one could dig -out here some night, if he had the tools." - -"Then you'd better not suggest it to Hicks." - -"Ho! He ain't thinkin' of it. He's a weakly man." - -"No, probably not." - -"He ain't got the tools, either. I know the business. Look at the -experience I've had! But I need a new jail, Mr. Hennion, bad, as I told -Mr. Wood." - -"Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for -your trouble." - -The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke -away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe. - -He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry -Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark -sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent. - -"Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?" Champney asked. - -"Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to -think it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had -a crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; -so he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary." - - - - -CHAPTER X--MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE - - -|HENNION knew Wood's organisation intimately enough. He had been a part -of it on the outside. Wood had been chairman of the "General Committee," -a body that had total charge of the party's municipal campaigns, -including admission to caucuses, and local charge in its general -campaigns. Local nominations were decided there. It was only less active -between elections than during them. It had an inner ring which met -by habit, socially, in Wood's office. Whatever was decided in Wood's -office, it was understood, would pass the Committee, and whatever passed -the Committee would pass the City Council, and be welcomed by a mayor -who had been socially at the birth of the said measure. Port Argent was -a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better ring than ordinary. -Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to something peculiar -in Wood. - -Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in -his office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. -Carroll was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long -neck and close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by -profession; Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, -devoid of grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some -reason unmatched in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, -saloon-keeper from East Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, -plastered, and gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, -small, thin, dry, of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent -speech, a lawyer, supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay -Tuttle, President of the School Board, white-moustached and pompous. - -Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers -who suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s. -Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew -them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of -them held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and -personal interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They -varied discussion with anecdotes of Wood. - -Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans -and estimates of competing architects. - -"Any preference, Major?" asked Hennion. - -"I have given it some consideration," said the Major puffily, and stated -considerations. - -"Well," Hennion suggested, "why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon, -and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up." - -The circle laughed and nodded. - -The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new -bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. -Tait read a document signed "Wm. R. Macclesfield, President." Hennion -suggested that they offer a counter-proposition. - -"We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him -expect his right of way for a gift?" - -"You know what they chipped in this spring?" said Tait, looking up. - -"Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?" He turned to -Ranald Cam. - -"Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet," growled Cam, -"for all they gas about it." Tait was silent. The others disputed -at length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy -influence of the "old man" was still so strong in the circle that no one -ventured to put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. -They only disputed points of fact. - -"He kept things solid," said Carroll, "that's the point." - -"I should say Macclesfield would have to come up," said Hennion at last. -"I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week." - -When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest. -Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together. - -"I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait," said Beckett. "Suit me all -right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's -rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to -rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?" -Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood. - -"Possibly, possibly," said the Major. - -Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him. -Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward -them. They did not like Tait. - -"Want to go over there with me, Hennion?" said Tait, puffing his black -cigar rather fast. "See Macclesfield?" - -"Not that I know of." - -"Suppose I bring him over here?" Hennion stared at the top of his desk -for a full moment. "All right. Come in an hour." - -Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring. - -William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal -courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal -courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at -first knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long -after. Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview -which here dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as -well unmade. Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it. - -"Should I congratulate or commiserate?" said Macclesfield, smiling and -shaking hands. - -"Commiserate, thank you." - -Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly. - -"Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great -judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, -man. I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your -father and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his -profession. Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, -too, we young men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. -Port Argent has grown. There have been remarkable developments in -politics and engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a -manager in the background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is -needed, but it's a peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were -Wood's choice, and he was a very judicious man. You find it takes time -and labour. Yes, and it calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some -people seem to think one in that position ought not to get anything -for his trouble. I call that absurd. I always found in railroading that -time, labour, and ability had to be paid for. By the way, you learned -engineering from your father, I think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was -thinking coming over the street just now with Tait--I was thinking what -fine things he did in his profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. -Remarkable. And yet engineering was almost in its infancy then." - -"Yes," said Hennion, "the changes would have interested him." - -"Indeed they would! So--the fact is--I was thinking that, if you cared -to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that bridge -of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son can -do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in -business." - -Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in -the young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him. - -"I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment -needs any forgiveness from me?" - -"My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?" - -"If you continue to want them." - -"Good! Now--oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think the -figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a -little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the -feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how -much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering -the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be -moderate?" - -"Moderate in its generosity." - -"Ah--I don't know--I was thinking that we understood each other--that -is--the situation." - -Hennion swung in his chair. - -"I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and -I was wondering what my father would have said about the situation. -Wouldn't he have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and -the representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two -transactions that had better not be mixed?" - -"My dear boy, who's mixing them?" - -"Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme. -Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford -to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there. -You'll have to come in by a subway." - -Macclesfield shook his head smilingly. - -"We can't afford that, you see." - -"Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect -to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?" - -"Oh, well--isn't this a little inquisitorial?" - -"Not necessary, anyway. I know, about." - -He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised. - -Hennion went on slowly: - -"The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at -all. You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. -There'll be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well -suspect it now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose." - -Macclesfield said nothing. - -"I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like." - -"By all means!" - -"I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down, -below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't -know the holdings down there I'll give them to you." - -He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed -figures, following the suggested line from point to point, massed the -figures of the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and -went on. - -"The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some -trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll -save about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably -more. You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the -P. and N. By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple -Street you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to -develop your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable -there, probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the -Boulevard, if the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have -a better curve, same connection with the P. and N., and this one here -with the L. and S. You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. -Here you get your site in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, -we'll take your approach on the east side." More details massed and -ordered. Macclesfield listened intently. Tait half closed his eyes and -swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion concluded and paused a moment. - -"Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to -this--first, if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me -with anything." - -"If I seemed to attempt it," said Macclesfield, "I owe you an apology -for my awkwardness." - -"None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings -this side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I -can make it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new -bridge can now be very properly withdrawn." - -Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully. - -"I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the -subject very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a -report." - -"All right." - -"And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I--don't, in fact, -withdraw it." - -He rose and shook hands with Hennion. - -"So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I -sometimes have them." - -"Tait," he said, as they went down the stairs. "That young man--for -God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him." - -"Is he going to bite or build?" - -"Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man--a--that won't lose his -temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!" - -Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, -to wonder what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. -Macclesfield, who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery -man, a little fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. -Perhaps that was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he -had left Hennion with a sense of having done him an injustice. - -He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then -pushed aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to -East Argent and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before -he had gone far he changed his mind. - -The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. -It might be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without -watching; it would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced -for blundering with his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around -acting like a desolate orphan about it. - -He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there -paced the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through -some miles of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and -warm in the distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a -street that had been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of -the city to tempt inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them -at wide intervals. The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of -built-up streets about them. He followed the line of the Boulevard -surveys, absorbed, often stopping and making notes. He came through a -stretch of cornfield and pasture. If the city bought it in here before -it began to develop the section, it would be shrewd investment. The -marshes would be crossed by an embankment. - -A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the -wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch -of three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some -years back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to -small boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted -through between banks of slippery clay. - -The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. -It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the -city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on -the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a -landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, -which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all -about the bottom lands and in the brush. - -To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should -be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to -accomplish something worth while, to make a name--it looked like a weedy -road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, -after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get -ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would -be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway. - -Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be -sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, -Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The -rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. -Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on -the subject. - -Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. -A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the -road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted -regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic -commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a -fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic -capers. - -Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy -neighbourhood--factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with -refuse--and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by -Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from -its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures -with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the -river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday -afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for -picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard -drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed -a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and -several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port -Argent on a Sunday afternoon. - -The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious -jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks -and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter -current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep -bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores. - -He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if -it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know -almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some -extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an -impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most -faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park. - -Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. -Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple -Street. They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the -rest of the flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men -getting on the trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! -He knew them too. One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine -Street, east side; the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another -time one of a batch of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped -John Murphy to get jobs for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays -lived in a house on Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, -who shot Wood, used to live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer -named Wilson. Names of Kottar's children, remembered to have once been -so stated by Kottar, Nina, Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and -Elizabeth. One appeared to remember things useful, like the price -per gross of three-inch screws at present quoting, as well as things -useless, like the price three years ago. Hennion thought such an -inveterate memory a nuisance. - -Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in -Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its -people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or -worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields--all people, -and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in. - -He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over -the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the -whole section but a few generations back. - -"Mighty good luck to be young, Dick," the "Governor" had said, and died, -calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times -he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done. - -Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He -caught a car and went back to the centre of the town. - -When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was -there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about -to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he -did not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading -Charlie Carroll's sinister paragraphs on "a certain admired instigator -of crime." She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone. - -"He says he doesn't care about it," she cried, "but I do!" - -"Do you? Why?" - -"Why!" - -Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether -to say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about -them. - -"Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever -bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics. -Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to -take it." - -"It's wicked!" cried Camilla passionately. - -Hennion laughed. - -"Well--he needn't have called Wood names--that's true." - -"If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!" - -"'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity -they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they -can't." - -Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him. - -"My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor -Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says. -Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of -it? I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing -visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going -to do anything in particular?" - -"He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks." - -"What!" - -"To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that -nobody else will," cried Camilla breathlessly, "and of course you'll say -he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will -talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs." - -"You go too fast for me." He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much -that he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He -was not quite clear why he disliked him at all. - -It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of -the grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's -situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be -confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more -comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations. - -He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine -with excitement,--but he did not seem to succeed,--over the subject of -a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a -lady's throat. - -"I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port -Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll -have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. -She's eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it -today. It struck me she needed washing and drying." - -True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, "That's -tremendously nice, Dick," and stared into the fire with absent wistful -eyes. - -He drew nearer her and spoke lower, "Milly." - -"No, no! Don't begin on that!" - -Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his -disappointment. - -"Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But -I will, though!" - -He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up -under the trees at Hicks' barred window. - -"Aidee's getting a black eye too in there," he thought. "That's too -bad." - -When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's -bridge. - - - - -CHAPTER XI--THE BROTHERS - - -|MAY I see Hicks?" - -The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short -pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around -the gas jet over his head. - -"Ain't you the Preacher?" - -"So they call me." - -The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked -into the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him. - -"Where is his cell?" - -"Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word," said the jailor -thoughtfully. "Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it, -so he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's -som'p'n in it. But I seen in the _Press_ this mornin'--say, you ain't -goin' to instigate him again?" - -Aidee laughed, and said: - -"They have to be lively." - -"That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their -heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?" - -"You're a philosopher." - -"Oh, I do a pile of thinkin'," said the jailor complacently. - -He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked -it. - -"Hicks, gentleman to see you." - -Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes. - -The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the -end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low -voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated. - -"Spiritual consolation! That's the word." - -Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to -his side and grasped his arm and whispered, "Don't you yell out!" while -Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the -corridor. - -"What do you come here for? Keep quiet!" - -"Lolly!" - -"Who told you it was me?" - -He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across -and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his -head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs. - -"Lolly, boy!" - -"Did he tell you it was me?" - -"Who?" - -"Hennion!" - -"Nobody told me it was you." - -"You came to see Hicks!" - -He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. "Hey! I know! You wanted to -ask me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know." - -It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on -one side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of -a cornered animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer -smile--Lolly the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in -his small resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable -and clever! They used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his -twisted smile, and hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin, -straggling beard had changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six -years. Alcott thought he would hardly have recognised him at a little -distance. So--why, Hicks!--Carroll said Hicks used to drink down -Alcott's own speeches like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood! - -"What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet." - -The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a -low, excited voice. - -"Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard -every speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they -do to me?" he whispered, turning to the window. "I wished I could get -out. Say, Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose -I was? Over the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near -spotting me once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on -the east side with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes -to his one. But sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how -Mummy looked, and I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd -you come for? Say, I cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd -never have caught me, if I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept -out of your way all right. I wasn't going to mess you again, and that -suited me all right, that way. I pegged shoes along with old Shays. -Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan. I'll knife him some day. No! No! I -won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I got something in me that burns me -up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em kill me. God, I was proud of you! -I used to go home like dynamite, and collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down -with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's matter?' says Shays. 'Where is -'t?' and goes hunting for justice at the bottom of a jug of forty-rod -whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story, you and I?" - -He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid -his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully. -The noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car -gongs, came in through the barred window. - -"I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been -happy sometimes." - -"Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?" - -"Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al," he pleaded, -"don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to -be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've -done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?" - -"I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man, -Wood, had a right to his life." - -"He had _no_ right!" - -Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air. - -"Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why -didn't you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going -away to think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled -together again. I've said it, and you can quit talking." - -Allen clung to his hand. - -"You're coming again, Al." - -He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that -had always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always -intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott, -nor yet with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever -solution--not with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering -control, but seeing his face and hearing his voice. - -He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across -the table, and said little. - -Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image -of the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw -Allen going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky -step, exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's -enemies! How he had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy -paragraphs! How he had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a "disease"! How -he had lurked in the shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How -he had pegged shoes and poured his excitement, in vivid language, into -the ears of the east-side loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back -and forth over the Maple Street bridge, where the drays and trolley cars -jangled, where the Muscadine flowed, muddy and muttering, below! - -"You've been in Port Argent all this time!" Alcott said at last. "I -wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there." - -"Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, -Al!" - -"I was always afraid of you." - -"What for? You're coming again, Al!" - -"You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!" - -"I ain't going to mess you over again! No!" he whispered, twisting his -fingers. - -Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous -fingers. - -"Drop it, Lolly!" - -"What you going to do? You're coming again?" His voice was thin and -plaintive. - -"Yes." - -"How soon?" - -"To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly." - -He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly -down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door. - -"I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks." - -Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin. - -"Pretty cool, ain't he?" said Sweeney presently. "I didn't hear -much noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here--look here, I told Mr. -Hennion--why, you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail." - -"I see. Not very creditable." - -"Why, no." Sweeney argued in an injured tone. "Look at it!" - -"I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?" - -"Why, I guess so." - -Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt -cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on -the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die. - -"Brotherhood of man!" He had a brother, one whom the rest of the -brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and -wriggling fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet. - -Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before -him days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the -long doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, -not to be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front. - -The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him -here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help -him here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to -hang Lolly. - -At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The -air was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and -fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying: -"I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail--I who lied to -you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have -but one brother and one bond of blood,--to you who are my enemies. His -name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion." - -People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak -so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist -in a stifling room. - -He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces -from the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture -one more item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the -gallery. When he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the -picture. - -Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets -over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and -walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the -city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk -waggons clattered over the rough pavement. - -"Poor boy!" - -Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the -arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he -would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that -Allen was lurking near him. - -Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often -he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head -blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, -running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not -an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, -and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know. - -Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which -I tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional, -unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this -muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, -and the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all -interpretations of itself, in course of time. - -In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one -side of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, -on the other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with -shops in most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. -Already Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy -with cars and hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river -factories began to blow. - -The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a -street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He -stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, -and bore the sign "Night lunches," and went up the shaky step, through -the narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his -head on the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he -hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly. - -One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, -cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil -wells. - -"Lolly! Lolly!" - -Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the -ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, -iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was -justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a -clamour and cry, "He has done me wrong, a wrong!" But justice? An even -balance? There was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a -tooth? It was revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must -know that uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that -was justice. - -Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, "floating things on muddy -stream." They seemed to mean to him now only, "I must have Lolly! I must -have him!" - -All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed -suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go -away. It seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue -Assembly, and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and -stone, and the iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple -thing. Their stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the -city. - -The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove -from without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds -flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights -where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new -leaves were growing. - - - - -CHAPTER XII--AIDEE AND CAMILLLA - - -|ALCOTT came back to the city in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was -on Lower Bank Street, knocking at Henry Champney's door. - -"Is Miss Camilla Champney in?" - -The startled maid stared at him and showed him into the library, where -Henry Champney's shelves of massive books covered the lower walls, and -over them hung the portraits of Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams with -solemn, shining foreheads. - -He walked up and down, twisting his fingers, stopping now and then to -listen for Camilla's steps. She came soon. - -"I'm so glad you're here! I want to ask----" She stopped, caught a quick -breath, and put her hand to her throat. - -"What is it?" - -Alcott's face was white and damp, and his black eyes stared at her. He -stood very still. - -"What is it?" she asked. - -"Do I look like that? Do I show what I am, gone blind and mad? Do I look -it? I could only think of this, of you--I must tell someone. There -must be some way. Help me!" He moved about jerkily, talking half -incoherently. "He's been here four years. Allen, you know! If I'd -known, I could have handled him somehow. But--he's--Hicks--he called -himself--Hicks. He killed Wood. I saw him last night, but he's changed, -but--my boy, Lolly! Four years he's been in Port Argent--watching me! -He called himself Hicks. Don't you see, Camilla! It's my boy! Don't you -see! Wait. I'll get buckled down. I can tell you better in a moment." - -Camilla leaned back against Henry Champney's big desk, and stared with -wide grey eyes. Alcott walked away breathing heavily, and returned. He -sat down in the desk chair and dropped his head on his arm. - -"It's your brother!" - -"I must save him! Don't you understand? No one shall touch him! He's -mine!" He sprang up, walked away, and came again. - -Camilla thought of many confused things. The bluebird's note was gone -from her heart, but the current of the tumult that was there ran in one -direction. It poured into Alcott's passion and point of view. Her new -pillar of fire and cloud, the man with the halo of her own construction -was begging for help, a demigod suddenly become human and suffering, -stammering, calling himself blind and mad. - -"Why, we must get him out!" she cried. - -She thought of Dick. Another instinct warned her that he would not -understand. It was a case where Dick would be a rock in the way, instead -of one to anchor to. But thinking of him served to remind her of what he -had said the night before. - -"Listen!" She went on. "He must get out. Listen! Somebody told -Dick--what was it? Something about a crowbar or pair of--nonsense! He -said a prisoner might get out if he had a chisel. Now we must think -about it. Could he get out?" - -She sat down too. Alcott stared at her in a kind of dull confusion. - -"Now, this is what I'm thinking," she hurried on. "What is the place -like?" - -"The place?" - -"When do you go to him again?" - -"When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought." - -They leaned closer together across the desk. - -Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of -their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went -away. - -"There's a chest of tools in the storeroom," Camilla said. "We'll go up -there." - -They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows -looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes, -trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture. - -Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the -long rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and -ships, his artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, -while Camilla aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative -at ten years. She cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful -shapes--tombstone cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention--and -her solemn exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears -because Dick would not admire them. - -It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's -library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that -held her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's -blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window. - -She flung it open, making a great noise and business. - -"See! Will this do?" - -It was a heavy carpenter's chisel with a scroll design on one side of -the battered handle, and on the other the crude semblance or intention -of a woful face. "I don't know whether it's Dick's or mine. We both -used to make messes here." She chattered on, and thought the while, "He -called me Camilla--I wish--I wonder if he will again." - -He thrust it into an inner pocket, ripping through the lining of his -coat. She closed the lid, and turned about to the low-silled window, -clasped her hands about her knees, and stared away into the tree tops, -flushed and smiling. - -"You needn't go yet?" - -"It's three o'clock." - -"You'll come and tell me to-morrow? When?". - -Alcott did not seem to hear her. - -"I'm sure I could take care of him now," he said. - -"But you'll remember that I helped!" - -"Does anyone ever forget you?" - -Both were silent, and then he started up nervously. - -"It isn't done yet. Lolly is clever. He lived here four years and kept -out of my sight. But, afterwards, granted he succeeds--but the law is -a great octopus. Its arms are everywhere. But he'll have me with him. I -suppose we must go out of the country." - -"You! Do you mean--do you--you'll go too!" - -"Go! Could I stay?" - -"Oh! I don't know! I don't know!" - -She shivered and leaned against the friendly old chest. - -"But could I do it without that? How could I? I couldn't do less than -that." - -He came and sat beside her again, clasping his knees in the same way, -looking off into the tree tops, talking slowly and sadly. - -"To be with him always, and give up my life to that, and see that he -doesn't do any more harm. That would be the debt I would owe to the rest -of the world. You see, I know him so well. I shall know how to manage -him better than I used to. I used to irritate him. Do you know, I think -he's better off in places where things are rough and simple. He has an -odd mind or temperament, not what people call balanced or healthy, but -it's hot and sensitive; oh, but loving and hating so suddenly, one never -knows! You understand. I don't know how you do, but you do understand, -somehow, about Lolly and me. You're wholly healthy, too, but Lolly and -I, we're morbid of course. Yes, we're morbid. I don't know that there's -any cure for us. We'll smash up altogether by and by." - -"When will you go?" she asked only just audibly. - -"He ought to try it to-night. To-night or to-morrow night. He ought to -be away on one of the early freight trains, to St. Louis, and meet me -there. We know our bearings there." - -Camilla sat very still. - -"I must be going," he said. - -"Don't go! You'll come before--when?" - -"To-morrow we'll know. To-morrow then." - -After he was gone, she lifted the window and peered over the mansards -to watch him going down the street. The tree tops were thick with busy -sparrows, the railroad yards clamorous, and there was the rattle of the -travelling crane, and the clug-chug of steamers on the river. - -She drew back, and leaned against the old chest, and sobbed with her -face against the hard, worn edge of it. - -"I didn't suppose it would be like this," she thought. "I thought people -were happy." - -Meanwhile Miss Eunice sat below in the parlour knitting. Hennion came -in later and found her there. She said that Camilla, she thought, was -upstairs, and added primly: - -"I think it will be as well if you talk with me." - -He smothered his surprise. - -"Why, of course, Miss Eunice!" - -"I think you need advice." - -He sat down beside her, and felt humble. - -"That's just what I need. But, Miss Eunice, do you like me well enough -to give it?" - -"I like you more than some people." - -"You might do better than that." - -"I like you well enough to give it," she admitted. - -Tick, tick, tick, continued the knitting needles. - -"I'm stumped, you know, about Camilla," Dick went on bluntly. "I don't -get ahead. She has changed lately. Hasn't she changed?" - -"She has changed." - -"Well, then, she has! I thought so." - -The knitting needles ticked on, and both Dick and Miss Eunice studied -their vibrating points, criss-crossing, clicking dry comments over the -mystery of the web. - -"It is my constant prayer that Camilla may be happy," said Miss Eunice -at last. "I have felt--I have examined the feeling with great care--I -have felt, that, if she saw her happiness in your happiness, it would be -wise to believe her instinct had guided her well. My brother's thoughts, -his hopes, are all in Camilla. He could not live without her. He depends -upon her to such an extent,--as you know, of course." - -"Of course, Miss Eunice." - -"I have grieved that she seemed so wayward. I have wished to see this -anxious question settled. You have been almost of the family since she -was a child, and if she saw her happiness in--in you, I should feel -quite contented, quite secure--of her finding it there, and of my -brother's satisfaction, in the end. He must not be separated from her. -He could not--I think he could not outlive it. And in this way I should -feel secure that--that you would understand." - -"I hope I should deserve your tribute. I'm more than glad to have it." - -"Perhaps this long intimacy, which makes me feel secure, is, at the same -time, the trouble with her?" - -"But why, Miss Eunice? I don't understand that. It has struck me so. And -yet I love Camilla the more for all I know of her, and the better for -the time. How can it be so different with her?" - -"That is true. I don't doubt it, Richard." - -"Well, then, is it because I don't wear well?" - -"No. It is true, I think, that we don't understand this difference -always--perhaps, not often. But I think,"--knitting a trifle more -slowly, speaking with a shade of embarrassment--"I think, with women, it -must be strange in order to be at all. It must not be customary. It must -always be strange." - -Hennion looked puzzled and frowning. - -"Please go on." - -"Lately then, very lately, I have grown more anxious still, seeing -an influence creeping into her life, against which I could not openly -object, and which yet gave me great uneasiness. It--he was here an hour -ago. I should not perhaps have spoken in this way, but I thought there -was something unusual between them, some secrecy or confusion. I was -distressed. I feared something might have occurred already. I wished to -take some step. You know to whom I refer?" - -"I think so." - -"A gentleman, in appearance at least. One does not know anything about -his past. He is admired by some, by many, and disliked or distrusted by -others. He has great gifts, as my brother thinks. But he thinks him also -'heady,' 'fantastic.' He has used these words. My brother thinks that -this society called 'The Assembly' is a mere fashion in Port Argent, -depending for financial support, even now, on Mr. Secor, and he thinks -this gentleman, whom I am describing, is not likely to continue to be -successful in our society, in Port Argent, but more likely to have a -chequered career, probably unfortunate, unhappy. My brother regards--he -calls him--'a spasmodic phenomenon.' My own disapproval goes further -than my brother's in this respect. Yet he does not approve of this -influence on Camilla. It causes him uneasiness. I have not thought wise -to speak to her about it, for I am afraid of--of some mistake, but -I think my brother has spoken, has said something. This--this person -arouses my distrust, my dislike. I look at this subject with great -distress." - -Tick, tick, tick, the knitting needles, and their prim, dry comment. - -Hennion said gravely: - -"I have nothing to say about the gentleman you've been speaking of. I -will win Camilla if I can, but I've come to the point of confessing that -I don't know how." - -Tick, tick, the not uneloquent knitting needles. - -"Will you tell me, Miss Eunice? You said something about love as it -comes to women, as it seems to them. I had never thought about it, about -that side of it, from that side." - -"I dare say not." - -Tick, tick, tick. - -"You said it must always be strange. I suppose, that is, it's like a -discovery, as if nobody ever made it before. Well, but, Miss Eunice, -they never did make it before, not that one!" - -"Oh, indeed!" - -"Don't you think I'm coming on?" - -"You are progressing." - -Miss Eunice's lips were compressed a little grimly, but there was a red -spot in either cheek. - -"I ought to act as if I didn't see how she was possible, ought I?" - -"You are progressing." - -"Whether I did see, or didn't?" - -"Of course!" Miss Eunice was almost snappish. - -"Well, I don't think I do see." - -"You'd better not." - -Hennion went away without seeing Camilla. Going up Bank Street he -thought of Camilla. At the corner of Franklin Street he thought of Miss -Eunice. - -"There's another one I was off about. I don't see how she's possible, -either." - - - - -CHAPTER XIII--IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY - - -|ALLEN AIDEE lay on his back across the bed in his whitewashed cell, and -smoked, swinging one foot swiftly, incessantly, like a pendulum, arguing -with Sol Sweeney, and gesticulating with loose fingers. The bed was a -wooden cot with a mattress on it. - -Sweeney sat at the table under the gas jet, and smoked too. He had a -large friendly acquaintance with jailbirds, and his placid philosophy -was composed out of his knowledge of them. - -"I seen folks like you, Hicks," he said, "two or three. Trouble is you -gets hold of one end of a string. Any old string 'll do. All the same to -you. 'Hullo!' you says, 'this is a valyble string. Fact, there ain't any -other string, not any other real string. This the only genwine. Follow -it, and you gets wherever you like. It's that kind of a string,' says -you. 'God A'mighty, what a string!' says you. Then you rolls yourself up -in it, and there you are! Ball up! Ain't no more use! For you take a -solid man like me, and he talks to you and he shows you reason, but you -don't see it. Why? 'Cause you're balled up in the string, that's why." - -Allen snapped out his answer. - -"I'll tell you the trouble with you." - -"Ain't any trouble with me." - -"Ain't! Well, I know this, I can stand your kind about half an hour at -a stretch. Give me two hours of you--damn! I'd drink rat poison to get -cooled down." - -"That's the trouble with you," said the complacent jailor. "Ain't me." - -"Trouble! No! You ain't equal to that. You ain't capable of that! You've -got no more consistency or organisation than a barrel of oil. You're all -fat and hair. Solid! So's a brick solid. Damn! You're solid, but are you -alive? You'll be dead before anybody sees the difference. Ain't any real -difference!" - -Sweeney puffed his pipe contentedly, but thoughtfully, and shook his -heavy beard. - -"Well, well! But now, I'll say this for you, Hicks. You're an -entertainin' man. I'll say that to anybody that asks. I'll say, 'Hicks -is a man that's got language, if I know what's what.'" - -The jailor rose. Allen swung his foot swiftly. - -"I wish you'd do something for me, Sweeney." - -"What's that?" - -"Let me have the gas at night. I don't sleep good. If I had the gas I -could get up and read. You heavy men, you sleep all night. You don't -know what it is." - -"Why, I'll see, Hicks. I'll ask about that to-morrow." - -"Oh, let me have it to-night!" he pleaded. - -"I ain't going to sleep good to-night. I can feel it. It'll be eternity -before morning. I swear I'll be dead before morning. I'll turn it low." - -"Well--I don't see no harm in that. It ain't in me to rough a man." - -He went out, locking the door noisily behind him. - -Allan lay still. His foot swung steadily, but more slowly. After a time -Sweeney came down the corridor, making his ten o'clock round. He went to -the end, and back again, and then downstairs. The corridor was quiet. - -Half an hour later Allen got up and filled his pipe, lit it at the gas -jet, turned the jet low, and lay down again across his mattress. He -smoked with quick, sharp puffs, but not fast. He swung his foot slowly, -and stared at a point on the blank wall over the gas jet. Eleven o'clock -struck. - -After the theatre crowds were gone past, the noise of the city grew -less. There were fewer cars, and only now and then footsteps on the -neighbouring pavement. Twelve o'clock struck. - -He got up again, slipped off his shoes, and went to his window. - -A maple tree grew directly in front, some twenty feet away. Its leaves -were thick, but he could see the glitter of the electric light through -them. The sidewalk was high as the lower windows of the jail, for the -Court House Square was on sunken land. The black shadow of the maple -covered the front of the jail down to the ground. - -The grating of the window had its bars set at both sides, and at the -top and bottom. There were two rows of bricks from the bars to the inner -edge of the window, and the wooden framework that held the panes of -glass was set close to the grating. The outside of the sill was stone. - -Allen went back and lifted his mattress. There was a rent in the seam -of the lower edge. He thrust in his hand, drew out a black cloth cap -and put it on his head. Then he drew out a heavy chisel with a battered -wooden handle, and returned to the window. - -The woodwork came away, cracking slightly as the nails drew out. He -leaned the boards and frame carefully against the wall. He tried one -crack after another between the bricks at the bottom of the window, -pushing and pressing. Presently one became loose, then another. He laid -them one by one in a neat row on the floor. - -The work at the sides and top was slower, because it was difficult to -get a purchase, and to prevent fragments from falling. He dug till he -got the purchase, and then held the brick up with one hand and pried -with the other. Once a fragment of cement fell with a smart slap on the -sill. He got down suddenly and sat on the floor, and listened, wiping -his wet hands and forehead with his cap. Either Sweeney or his assistant -was always around at night, and would have heard, if he had happened to -be in the upper corridor. - -He carried the mattress to the window and laid it underneath to catch -and deaden the noise, if anything more fell. - -It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished -stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars -were buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to -strip them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which -were opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the -end of the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three -o'clock. - -He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched -intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, -more noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and -except for that, only little rasps and clicks. - -When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating, -which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and -he rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars -caught in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In -lifting the blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. -They suggested an idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the -chisel, carried it to the window, and scratched it on the bricks until -its black enamel was rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. -Whether possible to do so or not, people would think he must have -loosened the bricks with the brace. He wasn't going to mess "old Al" -again, he thought, no, nor meet him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be -led around the rest of his life by a string. - -"Not me, like a damn squealing little pig" - -He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each -strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the -blanket through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it -reached the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side -coat pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest -for the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off -the gas jet, and climbed over the grating. - -He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the -window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the -cell, and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the -window below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the -blanket, and so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. -When his feet reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under -his hands. He stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself -to the ground, and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly -dropped window. The lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned -inside. - -The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and -furnished with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the -same place as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide -bed. A man lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and -in the air, his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. -The sleeper was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and -covered his face with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that -Sweeney slept underneath him. - -He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to -the sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath -him. The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here -and there. - -The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the -night wind against the wall. - -As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower -across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too -spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that -poured its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were -pealing, shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court -House Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low -down in the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping -blanket, jail of the sleeping Sweeney. - -He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of -the square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass -globes--one red, the other blue--the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous -long shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks -around seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and -stared down at him with their ghastly blank windows--nervous, startled -fronts of buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. -There were no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own -steps and their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner -drug store glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow -and whirl all over their glassy slopes. - -He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out -of Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; -and here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any -lights; so that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden -shanties were on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School -building. Still higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse -overhung the empty lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky -with its black wedge. In front of him were the buildings of the Beck -Carriage Factory, bigger than church and school together. The vacant -spaces between them, these buildings and shanties, were by day -overflowed with light, overrun by school children and factory hands, -over-roared by the tumult of the nearby thoroughfares of Bank and Maple -Streets. By night they were the darkest and stillest places in Port -Argent. One man might pass another, walking in the thick dust of the -cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too dark to see the rickety -fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small sickly maples. - -He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the -dim glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the -corner of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around -the angle of the building. - -A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging -his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest, -not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head. - -It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and -so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some -time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case. - -Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction. -Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the -corner where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All -walked unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third -between them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear. - -As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in -behind them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to -the three in front. - -"Hullo!" said the policeman calmly; "jagged?" - -"Say!" exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; "tha's mistake. -Smooth as silk. Ain't it?" - -"You're out late, anyhow," said the policeman. - -"It's a weddin'. Ain't it? Wa'n't us. 'Nother feller did it." - -"Well, get along, then." - -"All ri'! All ri'!" - -He watched the five men as far as the next electric light, and then -dropped them as objects of interest. - -"Hoi' on!" exclaimed the man walking beside Allen, turning suddenly upon -him. "That ain't right. There's five of us. Two, three, four, five. Bet -your life! That ain't right." - -They all stopped and looked at Allen. He started and his breath came -harsh in his throat. - -"'Nother weddin'?" said the middleman thickly. "Wa'n't him. 'Nother -feller did it. You didn', did you?" - -Allen shook his head "No." - -"Tha's so! Well, tha's right. 'Sh good thing. If 'nother feller does it, -'sh good thing." - -They shambled on amiably across the drawbridge. Allen fell behind, -stopped, and leaned against the guard rail. - -In a few moments he could hear their footsteps no more, but he could -hear the mutter of the river against the stone piers. Leaning over the -rail, he could see here and there a dull glint, though the night -was dark; and across the wide spaces over the river he could see -the buildings on each side, low, heavy masses, only saved from the -smothering night and made sullenly visible by the general glow of the -street lamps beyond them. There a few red lights along shore, some in -the freight yards, some belonging to anchored or moored vessels, small -sail-boats, and long black lumber and coal barges from the northern -lakes. He could remember looking down at other times in the night at -the dull glint of water, and being shaken as now by the jar of fighting -things in his own mind, angry things fighting furiously. At those times -it seemed as if some cord within him were strained almost to snapping, -but always some passing excitement, some new glittering idea, something -to happen on the morrow, had drawn him away. But those moments of -despair were associated mainly with the glinting and mutter of dusky -water. "I been a fool," he muttered, and a little later, "What's the -use!" - -He decided to go to the shoe-shop and change his clothes, shave his -beard, and pick up a few things, and then hide himself on some outgoing -freight train, the other side of Muscadine Street, before the morning -came. The morning could not be far off now. Shays would keep quiet, -maybe, for a while. He would take Shays' razor. - -He roused himself and moved on. He began to have glimpses of schemes, -tricks, and plans. There were little spots of light in his brain, which -for a while had seemed numb, dull, and unstirring. But he carried away -with him the impression of the glints of the gloomy river and the mutter -of its hurrying. - -His feet dragged with his weariness. He turned into Muscadine Street and -crept along the sidewalk on the right. - -Suddenly a switch engine in the freight yards glared him in the face -with its one blinding eye, yelled and hissed through its steam whistle, -and came charging toward him. He leaped aside and fell into a doorway, -and lay there crouching. Then he sat up and whimpered, "I ain't fit. I'm -all gone away. I ain't fit." - -He rubbed his face and hands, peered around the corner to see the -harmless engine withdrawing in the distance then got up and crossed the -street. The nearness of the familiar shop windows, as he passed them one -after another, comforted him not a little. On the next corner was the -grocer's, the butcher's shop this side of it, and the shoemaker's shop -was over the rear of the grocery. The mingled butcher-shop and grocery -smell pervaded the corner, comforting, too, with its associations. - -He turned the corner and climbed slowly the outside wooden stairway, -with the signboard at the top, "James Shays," and leaning over the -railing, he saw a faint light in the windows of the shop. He entered the -hall, turned the knob of the door softly, opened the door part way, and -peered in. - -The table stood in its ordinary central place, on it were a bottle, a -tin cup, and a small lit lamp with a smoky chimney. The work bench was -unchanged in place. The door of the inner room beyond stood open, but -that room was dark. On the pile of hides in the corner some clothes, -taken from the hooks overhead, had been thrown, and on the clothes lay -Coglan, face downward and asleep. - -Allen thought, "He's sleeping on my clothes," and stepped in, closing -the door softly behind him. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS REST - - -|HE stood a moment with his hands against the closed door behind him, -listening to Coglan's heavy breathing. Then he crossed noiselessly to -the table, took the lamp and went through to the inner room. - -There were two cot beds in it. Shays lay asleep on one in all his -clothes, except his shoes. The other bed was broken down, a wreck on -the floor. Evidently Coglan had been using it, and it was not built for -slumberers of his weight, so he had gone back to the hides that had -often furnished him with a bed before. - -Shays turned his face away from the light and raised one limp hand in -half-conscious protest. He opened his eyes and blinked stupidly. Then he -sat up. - -"Don't make a noise, Jimmy," said Allen. "I'm going pretty soon." - -"G-goin'--wha' for?" stammered Shays. "Wha's that for?" - -"I've broke jail. I'm going to change clothes and shave, then I'll light -out. You won't see me again, Jimmy." - -He sat down on the side of the bed and rocked to and fro, twisting his -fingers. - -"You're decent, Jimmy. When they get to posting notices and rewards, you -see, you don't do a thing. Nor you don't wake Coglan. He's a damn hound. -See?" - -Shays shook his head, indicating either a promise or his general -confusion and despondency. - -"Wha' for, Hicksy?" - -Allen was silent a moment. - -"Jim-jams, Jimmy," he said at last. "You'll die of those all right, and -Coglan will squat on you. You ain't bright, but you've been white to -me." - -"Tha's right! Tom don't like you. Hicksy, tha's right," whispered Shays -with sudden trembling. "Maybe he'd--'sh! We won't wake him, Hicksy. Wha' -for?" - -"He's sleeping on my clothes, so I'll take yours. Get me your razor." - -"Wha' for? Wha's that for? All right! I ain't going to wake Tom." - -He stepped unsteadily on a shoe that lay sidewise, stumbled, and fell -noisily on the floor. - -There he lay a moment, and then scrambled back to his feet, shaking and -grumbling. - -"What's the matter?" Coglan cried, now awake in the shop. - -"Nothin', Tommy! I'm gettin' back, Tommy!" - -"What you doin' with thot light?" - -"Nothin', Tommy." - -Allen stood still. When Coglan came stamping unevenly to the door, he -only made a quick shift of the lamp to his left hand, and thrust the -other inside his coat till he felt the wooden handle of the chisel. - -"Oi!" said Coglan. - -His eyes seemed more prominent than ever, his face and neck heavier -with the drink and sleep than was even natural. Allen looked at him with -narrowed eyes. - -"He's broke out," Shays said, feebly deprecating. "He's goin' off," and -sat on the bed to pull on his shoes. - -"Is he thot!" said Coglan. - -Coglan turned back slowly into the shop. Shays shuffled after. Allen -followed, too, with the lamp and said nothing, but put the lamp on -the table. Coglan sat down, drank from the black bottle, and wiped his -mouth. The first dim light of the morning was in the windows. - -"I'll be getting along, Jimmy," said Allen. "I'll take your razor." - -Coglan wiped his mouth again. - -"An' ye'd be goin' widout takin' advice of a sinsible mon, Hicksy, an' -a friend in need! Sure, sure! Didn't I say ye weren't a wise mon? Nor -Jimmy here, he ain't a wise mon. An' ain't I proved it? Ain't it so? -Would ye be jailed if ye was a wise mon? No! Here ye are again, an' ye'd -be runnin' away this time of the mornin', an' be took by a polaceman on -the first corner. I do laugh an' I do wape over ye, Hicksy. I do laugh -an wape. An' all because ye won't take advice." - -"What's your advice?" - -Coglan moved uneasily and cleared his throat. "'Tis this, for ye're -rasonable now, sure! Ye'll hide in the back room a day or two. Quiet, -aisy, safe! Jimmy an' me to watch. An' what happens to ye? Ye gets away -some night wid the night before ye." - -He lowered his voice and gestured with closed fist. - -"Ye'll lie under Jimmy's bed. The polaceman comes. 'Hicks!' says Jimmy, -'we ain't seen Hicks.' 'Hicks!' says I, 'Hicks be dommed! If he's broke -jail he's left for Chiney maybe.' I ask ye, do they look under Jimmy's -bed? No! What do they do? Nothin'!" - -Allen drew a step back. - -"You're right about one thing," he said. "That reward would be easy -picking for you." - -"What's thot?" - -"I ain't a wise man. I know it. But I know you. That's what it is. I'm -going now." - -"Ye're not!" - -"Hicksy!" cried Shays feebly. "Tom, don't ye do it!" - -Coglan plunged around the table and grasped at Allen's throat, at -Allen's hand, which had shot behind his head, gripping the heavy chisel. -Allen dodged him, and struck, and jumped after as Coglan staggered, -and struck again. The corner of the chisel seemed to sink into Coglan's -head. - -Allen stood and clicked his teeth over his fallen enemy, who sighed like -a heavy sleeper, and was still. It was a moment of tumult, and then all -still in the shop. Then Shays stumbled backward over the work bench, and -dropped on the hides. Allen turned and looked at him, putting the chisel -into one of the side pockets of his coat, where it hung half-way out. -The light was growing clearer in the windows. - -"That's the end of me," he said. - -And Shays cried angrily, "Wha's that for?" and cowered with fear and -dislike in his red-lidded eyes. "Keep off me! You keep off me!" - -"I got to the end, Jimmy. Goodbye." - -"Keep off me!" - -Allen hung his head and went out of the shop into the dark hall. - -Shays heard his steps go down the outside stairway. He scrambled up from -the pile of hides, and snatched his hat. He kept close to the wall, as -far as possible from where Coglan lay against the legs of the table. He -was afraid. He vaguely wanted to get even with the man who had killed -Coglan. He had loved Coglan, on the whole, best among living men. - -People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were -stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried -down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block -away, walking slowly. - -At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the -chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on, -with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he -came to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. -The two kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge. - -The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it -was nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons -to come in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had -been turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the -disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering -of the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder -than by day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red -glimmer of the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge -except Shays and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the -drawbridge house. - -Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, -too, and muttered, "Wha's that for? Wha' for?" and found his mind blank -of all opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began -to run forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped -on the guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the -river. - -When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled -surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He -leaned over limply, and stared at the water. - -"Wha' for?" he repeated persistently. "Wha's that for?" and whimpered, -and rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the -rail, staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over -the water pointing downward. "Wha' for?" - -The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A -freight train went over the P. and N. bridge. - -Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost -to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car -in the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered -wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned -against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked -up, stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back -in his pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and -he went to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the -Muscadine, and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the -stamp of hoofs, and the shuffle of feet. - - - - -CHAPTER XV--HENNION AND SHAYS - - -|HENNION came to his office early that Saturday morning with his -mind full of Macclesfield's bridge, and of the question of how to get -Macclesfield interested in the Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how -Macclesfield would take to the part of a municipal patriot. He thought -that if he could only conquer some shining success, something marked, -public, and celebrated, then, perhaps, his success might succeed with -Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your eyes on the path where you -seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow that path, for so one -travelled ahead and found that success attracted success by a sort of -gravitation between them. All things came about to him who kept going. -This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and son, much as -it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise. Neither Henry -Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing something -to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder Hennion -nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making -something a little better than it had been. - -Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window. -"I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed," he thought. - -The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay -reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the -clamour of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar -noises, now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of -telephone wires and the window panes across the street glittered in the -bright sunlight. - -The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. -The owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid, -unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered -on the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair. - -"Look here, Shays! You don't get nourishment enough! You've burnt holes -in your stomach till it won't hold any more than a fish net. Now, I'll -tell you what you'd better do." - -"Misser Hennion--Misser Hennion--I want you to see me through!" - -He stretched out his hand with scattered fingers, appealingly. - -"I want you--Misser Hennion--you see me through!" - -"Oh, come in! Sit down." - -Shays sat down, and Hennion looked him over. - -"Had any breakfast?" - -"I want you see me through!" - -"What's the matter?" - -Shays sat on the edge of the chair and told his story, waving a thin -hand with high blue veins. He hurried, stumbled, and came on through -confusion to the end. - -"Hicksy come about three o'clock," he said. "I didn't do nothing, and -Tom he was asleep. Tha's right. We didn't want him, but he woke me up, -and he says, 'I'm off, Jimmy,' like that. 'I broke jail,' he says, 'an' -ye needn't wake Coglan,' he says, like that. Then I gets up and I falls -down, plunk! like that, and Tom woke up. Then he goes arguin' with -Hicksy, like they always done, and he says, 'You stay under Jimmy's -bed,' he says, friendly, like that. 'You get off when there ain't nobody -lookin',' he says. But Hicksy says, 'You're lookin' for the reward; -you're goin' to sell me out,' he says. Then he says he's off, but Tom -won't let him. Then they clinched, and Hicksy hit him with the chisel. -Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! You see me through! He dropped, plunk! -like that, plunk! Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! Jus' like that, plunk! He -clipped him dead. He did, too!" Shays paused and rubbed his lips. - -"What next?" - -"Then he says, 'Jimmy, that's the end of me,' like that, and he put that -thing what he done it with in his pocket. He goes creepin', scroochin' -out the door, like that, creepin', scroochin'. Oh, my God! Misser -Hennion! I ain't goin' to stay there alone! Not me! I goes after him. -And in Muscadine Street I see him, but it was dark, but I see him -creepin', scroochin' along to the bridge; I see the chisel fall out and -it clinked on the stones. Pretty soon I picks it up, and pretty soon I -see Hicksy out on the bridge. Then he stopped. Then I knowed he'd jump. -Then he jumped, plunk! jus' like that, plunk!" - -He had the chisel in his hand, and showed it to Hennion. - -"Let me see that." - -Hennion swung away in his chair toward the light and examined the -battered handle with the straggling, ill-cut, and woe-begone face traced -there. - -He turned slowly and took a newspaper from his desk, rolled up the -chisel in the newspaper, thrust it into a drawer, locked the drawer and -turned back to the muttering Shays. - -"I see. What next?" - -"I says, 'Wha' for? Wha's that for?' Then I come to that place, and -there ain't nothin' there. He got under quick, he did. He stayed there. -He never come up. I watched. He never come up. Oh, my God! Misser -Hennion, I ain't goin' to stay there! Folks was comin' on the bridge. I -ain't goin' to stay there!" - -"I see. What next?" - -"Next?" - -"Where'd you go then?" - -"Misser Hennion! I went down under along the bridge, where there wa'n't -anybody." - -"What next?" - -"Next?" - -"Did you meet anyone? Say anything?" - -"Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?" - -"What did you do between then and now?" - -"Me? Nothin'! I went to sleep by the bridge. Then I got breakfast at -Riley's 'All Night.' Then I come here. I ain't said a word, excep' to -Riley." - -"What did you say to Riley?" - -"Me! I says, 'Give me some coffee and an egg sandwich,' and Riley says, -'Ye're a dom little gutter pig, Jimmy,' and tha's every word." - -"I see." - -"Misser Hennion! You see me through!" - -"All right. But you've got to mind this, or I get out from under you. -You leave out Hicks' dropping that chisel, or your picking it up. He -dropped nothing; you picked up nothing. Understand? He hit Coglan with -something he had in his hand. Whatever it was, never mind. He put it in -his pocket and carried it off. You followed. You saw him jump off the -bridge. That's all. Tell me the thing again, and leave that out. Begin -where Hicks waked you." - -"Me! Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?" - -"I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!" - -While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing -chair. - -He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the -battered handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. -He knew the niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot -where the tool chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from -whose windows one looked through the upper branches of the trees out on -the Muscadine. There in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the -sunlight, and in winter through bare branches one could see the river. -There Milly used to sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red -ribbon, and chatter like a sweet-voiced canary bird. - -He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind, -between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in -a newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday -afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed -emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday -night Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed -Coglan, and went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; -Saturday morning comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling -through now, anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, -but--now as to Aidee--that was the second time he had been to Camilla -for help, and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better -than Hennion. It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the "little maid" -would be "game," but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like -Aidee, who came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in -front and a cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. -A man ought to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; -that is to say, not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth -shut, and buy a respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a -respectable hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's "crisis," -it looked as if Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, -instead of the condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard -luck. Still, his criminal family was out of the way now, which did not -seem a bad idea. Any chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have -to be smothered of course, which meant smothering the whole thing. - -"Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up." - -But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the -responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and -have nightmares. That wouldn't do either. - -"Very good, Jimmy." - -He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the -story now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside. - -"Plunk! jus' like that!" said Shays. "He went, plunk! I come up, and I -looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. -He stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks -was cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of -him, but Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not -him, nor I ain't goin' to stay there, not him." - -"You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?" Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and -according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, -because women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the -subject. Humph! Well--Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and -in fact, that "continuity of surprise" was all right. Aidee preached a -kind of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with -the individual man against men organised, and against the structure of -things; and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, -or it might be that view of things natural to women, their gift and -function. What would Camilla do next? "God knows!" She would see that -the "continuity of surprise" was all right. What on earth was Jimmy -Shays talking about? - -"Tom he says to me, 'Hicksy's a dangerous man, Jimmy,' he says, 'and I -wouldn't trust him with me life or me property. Nor,' he says, 'I -don't agree with his vilyanous opinions,' he says. That was Tom's word, -'vilyanous,' and it's true and it's proved, Misser Hennion, ain't it? -Sure! Then he jumps into the river, plunk! like that, Misser Hennion! I -ain't done no harm." - -Shays was harmless surely, and cobbled shoes besides for the benefit of -society. - -"Drop it, Jimmy. We'll go over to the police station." - - - - -CHAPTER XVI--CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY HALL - - -|CAMILLA spent the morning in the store-room, staring through the window -at the tree tops and glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving -with her father. Henry Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's -plans for the new railroad bridge and station, the three parks and -moon-shaped boulevard. - -"His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!" - -In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. -He foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues. - -"Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the -moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous -city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!" - -He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the -small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings. - -Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached -herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was -this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might -come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She -must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. -He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was -going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it -matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it -must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what -her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry -Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts -were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans -seemed to occupy her father's mind of late. - -"A noble thought, a worthy ambition," Champney rumbled. - -So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla -wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud -came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel -it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage -through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was -through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her. - -She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the -afternoon papers. - -When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her -father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the -porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver -papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not -look at the paper till she reached the store-room. - -Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A -half hour slipped by. - -"That boy!" rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; "that -superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical -ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! -Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to -read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!" - -Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to -be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see -Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that -he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was -of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for -young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important -advice--it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to -answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, -when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of -throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of. - -They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the -hall. Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the -front door. Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting. - -"Camilla is going out again!" - -Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla -could have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation -were thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not -injustice to Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her -father's newspaper, a thing so important to his happiness before tea? -Miss Eunice put aside her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy. - -She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed -the second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in -front of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice -gasped, took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla -have been so rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front -page proclaimed: "Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents -of a Night." - -"Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement." - -"Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania." - -"Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port -Argent." - -"John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan." - -"Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a -Hearse are his Limit." - -None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. -No headline, except "Hennion and Macclesfield," seemed to have any -bearing on Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that -Richard had not already told the family, about a railroad bridge -and station, park improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss -Eunice's impression, Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming. - -She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled -newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed -tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and -helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether -it applied to "John Murphy" or "the deceased Coglan," or "Hennion and -Macclesfield," or the "Cabinet officer," was beyond her. This sign of -Miss Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool -chest, and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in -the library, forlorn of his afternoon paper. - -When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before -six. He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head -bent down drowsily, where he sat in his chair. - -Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him -into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper. - -"I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. -I found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't -understand, Richard!" - -Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment. - -"Well--you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to Mr. -Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it -might be just as well. He might be surprised." - -He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the -corner by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar. - -He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of -which stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. -The voices came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the -Assembly Hall. He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to -the street door, out of hearing of the words. - -"It's the other man's innings," he thought ruefully. But, he thought -too, that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood -when Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his -shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets, -stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII--AIDEE--CAMILLA--HENNION - - -|CAMILLA went up Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin -Street. It carried her past the Court House Square, and so on to the -little three-cornered park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, -and opposite the Hall the block of grey houses with bay windows, of -which the third from the corner was Mrs. Tillotson's. - -That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door. - -"My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little -drawing-room usually thronged! _Now_, we can have such a talk, such -an _earnest_ talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a -_position_." - -She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand. - -"I--I don't quite understand," said Camilla. - -"_Surely_, my dear, the two most important questions before the Assembly -are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion? -second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more -ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. -Ralbeck the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. -I have in particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have -examined thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have -offered Mr. Aidee _all_ my knowledge, _all_ my literary experience. But -he does not as yet take a _position!_" - -Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson -thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the -opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she -would insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in -insisting. - -Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led -into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. -The door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. -She knew the windows of the study from without. - -She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but -no one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. -The door yielded and opened, but the room was empty. - -In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, -half-furnished--some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered table, -a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the room -seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning as -to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was -even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows -seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest -were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was -empty. - -She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be -hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, -clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless -people outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming -and forever rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as -accidents! So pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should -be empty of Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, -pacing the yellow matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking. - -She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw -that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on -the street. Wherever it led, he might be there. - -She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly -to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way -along the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness -felt the panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet -or cellar stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, -glimmering space of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows -now turning grey from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its -pillars and curved galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its -ranged tiers of seats, its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high -bulk of gilded organ pipes. She had seen it before only when the -tiers of seats had been packed with people, when Aidee had filled the -remaining space with his presence, his purposes, and his torrent of -speech; when the organ had played before and after, ushering in and -following the Preacher with its rolling music; when great thoughts and -sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people had been there, -where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery dim bars of -light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the hall, and -the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric curves. Lines -of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the galleries; -shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the platform below -the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. Aidee had given -the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still haunted by his -voice, haunted by his phrases. - -Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the -Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started -forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her. - -"Camilla!" - -"Oh! Why didn't you come?" - -"Come?" - -"To me. I thought you would!" - -He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained. - -"When did you know?" she asked, and he answered mechanically, "This -morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them -talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but -there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came -back." - -They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and -constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent -in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, -and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained -forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She -pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been -swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. -But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and -she seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to -expect some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; -and it stared up at her coldly and quietly. - -"I came, because I thought I could help," she said. "I thought it would -help us both." - -"Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. -I've fought it out now. I'm free of it." - -"What do you mean?" - -They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped -her head, and wept with her face in her hands. - -"It's not your story," said Aidee. - -"Yes, it is! It's mine!" - -Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the -dimness, and she said: "Teach me what it means." And a dull shock went -through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to -resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not -like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated -and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting -from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry -fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish -face of "Lolly" by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in -the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, -the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he -studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street -and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling -and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment -with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms--"I ain't -mad now, Al." Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly -imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling -mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he -had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished -audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had -seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met -the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success -in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on -Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and -praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. -"They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy," he had -thought bitterly, and he had written "The Inner Republic," and the -book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and -asking, "What does it mean? It is my story too!" - -What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port -Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so -drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone -out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. -He would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again -with the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if -anywhere; and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact -loudest. No, rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say -nothing. But Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story -too! He began to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager. - -"How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They -were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human -being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger. -Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no -more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the -rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent -crust to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!" - -"Oh, no! no!" she cried. - -"For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You -will save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. -I will count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. -Come with me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!" - -"No, no!" - -His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his -face was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. -The future he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the -struggle in her own heart frightened her. - -"You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it -out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!" - -Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was -waiting and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing -over him, listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was -listening. - -"I can't!" she cried. "I can't!" - -"You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. -I'll find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. -Camilla, look at me!" She lifted her face and turned slowly toward -him, and a voice spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, -"Milly!"--and then hesitated, and Hennion came out. - -"I heard you crying," he said quietly. "I didn't seem to be able to -stand that." - -"Dick! Take care of me!" she cried, and ran to him, and put her face -against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment. - -Aidee said, "I'm answered." - -"I think you gave me a close call," said Hennion, and drew Camilla past -him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back, -thinking: - -"A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the -person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as -dense." - -At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not -to be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified -himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, "It's hardly a square -game besides." He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and -said slowly: - -"By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told -me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe -he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was." - -Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly -resistant. - -"Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me -that chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it -behind him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact -is, it was mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else -for your hardware." - -Still no sound. - -"However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river, -where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed -secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning -this to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no -great difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that -you're clear of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. -I think you can fill the place rather better--better than anyone else. -Will you stay?" - -"No." - -"Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of -those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it." - -"I won't make it." - -"It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the -highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me -honest. Will you?" - -"No." - -"All right. Good-night." - -The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were -shaded by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. -Hennion and Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half -sobbed, and clung to him. They talked very little at first. - -"Milly," he said at last, "of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway. -You shall do as you like." - -"I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me." - -"Well--maybe I'm wrong--I've been that before--but it looks to me in -this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible somehow, -or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep places. It -stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know altogether--I -don't ask--but if you see anything that looks steep ahead, why, perhaps -it is, perhaps it is--but then, what of it? And that's the moral I've -been hedging around to, Milly." - -After a silence she asked, "How did you know I was there?" - -"I thought it likely." - -He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the -shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that -the chisel had been "used on Coglan." Passing that point, he went on, -comfortably comforting. - -"You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what -they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, -and generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. -Hicks was a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the -river on his own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might -have had scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you -didn't arrange all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited -to your good luck, if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break -jail, which was natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if -anyone wants to debate it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He -shouldn't have come to you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do -something of the kind, same as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it -your part in it that troubles you? You'd better take my judgment on it." - -"What is it?" she said, half audibly. - -"My judgment? Only that I want you for myself." - -He went on quietly after a pause: "There are objections to interfering -with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think, -don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, -they're staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of -being right are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your -getting mixed with that kind of thing or people, is--would be, of -course, rather hard on us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was -good. Is that what you want my judgment on?" - -They turned up the path to the Champney house. - -"You knew all about it!" she said hurriedly. "But you don't understand. -It was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he -is! But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, -and it was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came -again. It frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off -everything here, and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it -because I was afraid. I'm a coward." - -"Did, did he?" said Hennion comfortably. "That was good nerve, too." - -"You don't understand," she said with a small sob, and then another. - -"Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons." - -They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney -sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white -head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: "There's some of this -business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs -to me that"--pointing toward the window--"that may have been a reason." - -"You do understand that," she said, and they went in together. - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII--T. M. SECOR--HENNION--CAMILLA - - -|PORT ARGENT had not reached such a stage of civic life that its wealthy -citizens went out into the neighbouring country by reason of warm -weather. Besides, the neighbouring country is flat, and the summer heats -seem to lie on it level and undisturbed. There straight roads meet at -right angles, one cornfield is like another, and one stumpy pasture -differs little from the next. It is fertile, and looks democratic, not -to say socialistic, in its monotonous similarity, but it does not look -like a landscape apt to draw out to it the civilian, as the hill country -draws out its civilians, with the thirst of the hill people for -their falling brooks and stormy mountains, the wood thrushes and the -columbine. An "observer of decades" might have remarked that Herbert -Avenue was the pleasantest spot he had seen within a hundred miles of -Port Argent, and that the civic life seemed to be peculiarly victorious -at that point. There was a village air about the Avenue, only on a -statelier scale, but with the same space and greenness and quiet. One of -the largest houses was T. M. Secor's. - -Secor sat on his broad verandah in the early twilight. He stirred -heavily in his chair, and stretched out a great hand thick and hard, as -Hennion came up the steps. - -"Glad to see you, sonny," Secor said. "Stick up your feet and have a -drink." - -"Just come from Nevada?" - -"One hour and one-half ago, during the which time Billy Macclesfield's -been here, greasy with some new virtues. I take it you had something to -do with greasing him. Next came Ted, who said he's going to get married. -Next came Aidee with a melodious melodrama of his own, and said he -was going to quit town. Why, things are humming here! How you feeling, -sonny?" - -A huge, hairy, iron-grey, talkative man, with a voice like an amiable -bison, was T. M. Secor. - -He continued: "Hold on! Why, Aidee said you knew about that screed -of his. I gathered you got it by a sort of fortuitous congregation of -atoms? I gathered that there brother of Aidee's was, by the nature of -him, a sort of fortuitous atom." - -"About that." - -"Just so! Well--you ain't got a melodious melodrama too?" - -"No," said Hennion. "I want to take up the conversation you had with -Macclesfield." - -"Oh, you do!" - -"I'm not feeling greasy with virtue myself, you know." - -"Oh, you ain't!"--Secor was silent for some moments. - -"I guess I'm on to you, sonny," he said at last. "I'll tell you my mind -about it. I think you handled Macclesfield all right, and that's a very -good job, and you may be solid now with the gang, for aught I know, but -my idea is, it'll be only a question of time before you get bucked off. -I'd give you a year, maybe two." - -"I think so." - -"You figure on two years?" - -"Next election. Tait's out with me now, and he'll get a knife in when -he can. Beckett, Freiburger, and Tuttle will probably be on edge before -next spring. That's too soon. Now--if I can get the parks and Boulevard -done, I'm willing to call off without a row. I want the Manual Training -School too. But Tuttle's going to get some rake off out of that. Can't -help it. Anyway Tuttle will see it's a good enough job. I don't mind -Cam, and John Murphy's indecent, but reasonable. But Freiburger's going -to be a holy terror. I don't see that I can run with that crowd, and I -don't see how it can be altered much at present. If I split it they'll -lose the election. Now--I think it'll split of itself, and I'd be of -more use without the responsibility of having split it. I think so. -Anyhow, I'm going to have something to show people for my innings." - -"Just so." - -After another silence Secor said: "What was Wood's idea? D'you know?" - -"He thought it would split of itself." - -"Think so? Well, I've a notion he had a soft side to him, and you'd got -on it. Well--I don' know. Seemed to me that way. What then?" - -"Oh, I'll go out. I don't want it anyway. I want my father's job. Maybe -I'm a bit of a Puritan, Secor, and maybe not, but when the heelers get -restless to explosion, and the Reformers grimmer around the mouth -because the city isn't rosy and polite, and my general utility's gone, I -expect to thank God, and go back to pile-driving exclusive. But I want -time." - -"Just so. I can keep Beckett and Tuttle from being too soon, maybe. That -what you want of me?" - -"Yes." - -"You say 'Wood's machine,'" Hennion went on after a while. "It's a poor -metaphor, 'machine politics,' 'machine organisation.' Why, being an -engineer, I ought to know a machine when I see one. I've analysed Wood's -organisation, and I tell you you can't apply one bottom principle of -dynamics to it to fit. The machinery is full of ghosts." - -The two smoked a while, and Hennion said: "How about Aidee?" - -"Ho! I don't see why he won't stay in Port Argent." - -"He won't. I asked him." - -"You don't say so! Why, there you are! I had a notion you two might team -it together, come along time enough." - -"It won't work." - -"Ho! Well! I dare say. Maybe you know why." another silence. Secor said -at last: - -"Dick, I got only one real notion in business and philanthropy. I bank -on it in both trades. I keep gunning for men with coal in their engines -and a disposition to burn it, and go on till they bust up into scrap -iron, and when I find one, I give him a show. If I think he's got the -instinct to follow his nose like a setter pup, and not get nervous and -climb telegraph poles, I give him a show. Well--Aidee had the coal and -the disposition, and he burnt it all right, and I gave him his show. -Didn't I? He's got the idea now that he's run himself into the ditch and -turned scrap iron. Humph! Well! He lost his nerve anyway. Why, Hicks is -dead, and Wood's dead, and they can scrap it out in hell between 'em, -can't they? What business he got to lose his nerve? He used to have an -idea God Almighty was in politics, and no quitter, and meant to have a -shy at business. Interesting idea, that. Ho! He never proved it. What -the blazes he want to quit for now? Well! I was going to say, I'm -gambling on you now for a setter pup, sonny, without believing you can -ride Wood's machine. I'll give you a show, when you're good and through -with that. I've been buying Chickering R. R. stock. Want some of it? -Yes, sir, I'm going to own that line inside a year, and give you a job -there that'll make you grunt to reach around it. Ho! Ted says he's going -to take John Keys' girl and go to Nevada. Ain't so foolish as you'd -expect of him. Sounds cheerful. Ted's a drooling damn fool all right, -but he's no quitter. I hear you're going to marry Champney's daughter?" - -"I will if I can." - -"You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry -Champney's petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall -in his time, near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better -outfit of brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt -coal all right. Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her -when I got to Port Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my -pocket, and she never understood how it happened--claimed she didn't, -anyhow--and that afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the -Court House steps that sounded like he was President of the Board of -Prophets, and I bet a man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all -right, and lost it, I did. I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half. -Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!' Ho! Well, why can't you?" - -The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion -presently took his leave. - -He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but -Camilla spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the -black shadows of the vines. - -"Do you want me, Dick?" - -"Yes." - -From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid -moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and -arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made -little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on -the wall, little specks on the floor. - -"Want you!" Hennion said. "I always want you." - -He bent over till her breath was warm on his face. - -"How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you -as a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't -stay still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor -upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't -remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal -expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the -beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought -that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so." - -"I didn't know that." - -"I know. I'm a poor, tongue-tied lover, Milly. I ought to fling myself -loose on the subject, and describe the gorgeous state of my heart, and -lie like a seaman ashore, if I had the gift of my calling. I'm no -poet or dreamer of dreams. I'm after realities. I don't expect to be a -burning and shining light to other people or reform anybody whatever, -but I expect to please one girl, if she'll let me try. Real things! What -do you suppose they are? One time I was born, and now I love you, and -sometime I'll die, and God knows what then. Are those realities? Can you -see the river there, where the moonlight is on it? It runs down to the -lake, and the force that draws it down is as real as the river itself. -Love is a real thing, more real than hands and feet. It pulls like -gravitation and drives like steam. When you came to me there at the -Hall, what was it brought you? An instinct? You asked me to take care -of you. I had an instinct that was what I was made for. I thought it was -all safe then, and I felt like the eleventh commandment and loved mine -enemy for a brother. I can't do anything without you! I've staked my -hopes on you, so far as I can see them. I've come to the end of my rope, -and there's something between us yet, but you must cross it. I can't -cross it." - -From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot -at the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was -deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly -past the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had -turned and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion -glanced out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric -light. Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his -slow footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the -porch. - -"Can I cross it?" Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired -and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. "Can I? If love -were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this -way, as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought--but can I come? -If you tell me truly that I can come--I will believe what you tell me." - -Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house, -or were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned -on Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply. -He expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose -meaning was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers -that grew on the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his -shoulders, and her head with its thick hair on the other. - -"You have come!" he said. - -Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement. - -"Yes. I have." - -Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last -on the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware -that there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch -vines, with their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace -and went his way up Bank Street. - - - - -CHAPTER XIX--CONCLUSION - - -|HENNION and Camilla were married in the fall when the maple leaves were -turning yellow and red. It may be that Camilla thought of herself as -one consenting with humility to enter a quiet gateway, the shelter of -a garden whose walks and borders she knew; and it may be that she was -mistaken and found it a strange garden with many an herb of grace, and -many an old-fashioned perennial as fairly embroidered as any that grow -in Arcadia; for when one has found that the birth of one of the common -flowers and hardy perennials comes as wonderfully out of the deeps -as the birth of a new day, it may be that one understands heaven even -better than when floating in Arcadia among its morning islands. - -She could never truly have a working share in Dick's working life. She -could sympathise with its efforts and achievements, but never walk even -with him along that road. He would come to her tired, asking for home -and rest, but never sick of soul, asking for healing, nor troubled and -confused, asking for help. It was not his nature. One must take the -measure of one's destiny and find happiness therein. After all, -when that is found, it is found to be a quite measureless thing; and -therefore the place where it is found must be a spacious place after -all, a high-roofed and wide-walled habitation. - -Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars -rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented -with his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his -forelock for the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father -Time, has been given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of -his as of a good shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, -that curious untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that -solution of improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. But yet a -little while, and let the winds freshen the air and the waters go their -clean rounds again, and lo! he has shepherded us home from the desert, -and comforted us in new garments, and turned our minus into plus by a -judicious shifting across the equation. Shall we not give him his crook, -his medicine case and license to practise, his loom, his stylus and -tablets, and by oracle declare him "the Wisest," and build him a temple, -and consult his auspices, and be no more petulant if he nurtures other -seeds than those of our planting, the slow, old-fashioned, silent -gardener? We know no oracle but Time, yet we are always harking after -another. He is a fluent, dusky, imperturbable person, resembling the -Muscadine River. He goes on forever, and yet remains. His answers are -Delphic and ambiguous. Alas! he tends to drown enthusiasm. Who is the -wisest? "The one who knows that he knows nothing," quoth your cynic -oracle. What is justice? "A solemn lady, but with so bandaged eyes that -she cannot see the impish capers of her scales." What is happiness? As -to that he answers more kindly. "In the main," he says, "happiness is a -hardy perennial." - -The "observer of decades," who came to Port Argent some years later, -found it proud of its parks, its boulevard, and railroad stations, its -new court house, and jail, and manual training school; proud of its -rapid growth, and indignant at the inadequacy of the national census. -He was shown the new streets, and driven through suburbs where lately -pasture and cornfields had been. He found Port Argent still in the main -electric, ungainly, and full of growing pains, its problem of municipal -government still inaccurately solved, the system not so satisfactory -a structure as the railroad bridge below the boathouses, built by Dick -Hennion for the North Shore Railroad. In shop and street and office -the tide of its life was pouring on, and its citizens held singular -language. Its sparrows were twittering in the maples, bustling, -quarrelling, yet not permanently interested in either the sins or the -wrongs of their neighbours, but going tolerantly to sleep at night. -Here and there a bluebird was singing apart its plaintive, unfinished -"Lulu-lu." - -He inquired of one of Port Argent's citizens for news, and heard that -the "Independent Reformers" had won an election sometime back; that they -were out again now, and inclined to be vituperative among themselves; -that Port Argent was again led by Marve Wood's ring, which was not such -a distressing ring as it might be. Hennion was not in it now. No, but -he was suspected of carrying weight still in the party councils, which -perhaps accounted for the "ring's" not being so distressing as it might -be. - -"He did more than he talked about," said the garrulous citizen. "But -speaking of talkers, there was a man here once named Aidee. You've heard -of him. He's getting celebrated. Well, I'm a business man, and stick to -my times. But I read Aidee's books. It's a good thing to do that much." - -The observer of decades left the garrulous citizen, and went down Lower -Bank Street. He noted the shapeless, indifferent mass and contour of the -buildings on the river-front, the litter of the wharves, the lounging -black barges beside them, the rumble of traffic on the bridge and in -distant streets, the dusky, gliding river lapping the stone piers and -wooden piles, and going on forever while men come and go. He thought how -the stone piers would sometime waste and fall, and the Muscadine would -still go on, turbid and unperturbed. - -"Adaptability seems the great test of permanence," he thought. "Whatever -is rigid is fragile." - -In front of the Champney house he stopped and looked up past the lawn -and saw old Henry Champney, sitting in a wicker chair that was planted -on the gravel walk. He was leaning forward, his chin on his cane, and -gazing absorbed at his two grandchildren at his feet, a brown-haired -child and a dark-haired baby. They were digging holes in the gravel with -iron spoons. - -What with the street, the railway, and the river, it might almost -be said that from the Champney lawns one watched the world go by, -clattering, rolling, puffing, travelling these its three concurrent -highways. But Henry Champney seemed to take no interest now in this -world's triple highways, nor to hear their clamour, but only cared now -to watch the dark-haired baby, and listen to the little cooing voices. - -THE END - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - -***** This file should be named 50269-8.txt or 50269-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/2/6/50269/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, -and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive -specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this -eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook -for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, -performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given -away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks -not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the -trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. - -START: FULL LICENSE - -THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE -PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK - -To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free -distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work -(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project -Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full -Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at -www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works - -1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to -and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property -(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all -the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or -destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your -possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a -Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound -by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the -person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph -1.E.8. - -1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be -used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who -agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few -things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See -paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this -agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. - -1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the -Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection -of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual -works in the collection are in the public domain in the United -States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the -United States and you are located in the United States, we do not -claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, -displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as -all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope -that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting -free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm -works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the -Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily -comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the -same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when -you share it without charge with others. - -1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern -what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are -in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, -check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this -agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, -distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any -other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no -representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any -country outside the United States. - -1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: - -1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other -immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear -prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work -on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the -phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, -performed, viewed, copied or distributed: - - This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and - most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no - restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it - under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this - eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the - United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you - are located before using this ebook. - -1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is -derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not -contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the -copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in -the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are -redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project -Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply -either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or -obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted -with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution -must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any -additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms -will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works -posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the -beginning of this work. - -1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm -License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this -work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. - -1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this -electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without -prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with -active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project -Gutenberg-tm License. - -1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, -compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including -any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access -to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format -other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official -version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site -(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense -to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means -of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain -Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the -full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. - -1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, -performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works -unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing -access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -provided that - -* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from - the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method - you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed - to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has - agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid - within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are - legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty - payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in - Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg - Literary Archive Foundation." - -* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies - you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he - does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm - License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all - copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue - all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm - works. - -* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of - any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the - electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of - receipt of the work. - -* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free - distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. - -1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than -are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing -from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The -Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. - -1.F. - -1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable -effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread -works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project -Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may -contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate -or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other -intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or -other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or -cannot be read by your equipment. - -1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right -of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project -Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all -liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal -fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT -LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE -PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE -TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE -LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR -INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH -DAMAGE. - -1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a -defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can -receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a -written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you -received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium -with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you -with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in -lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person -or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second -opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If -the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing -without further opportunities to fix the problem. - -1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth -in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO -OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT -LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. - -1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied -warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of -damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement -violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the -agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or -limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or -unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the -remaining provisions. - -1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the -trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone -providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in -accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the -production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, -including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of -the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this -or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or -additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any -Defect you cause. - -Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm - -Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of -electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of -computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It -exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations -from people in all walks of life. - -Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the -assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's -goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will -remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure -and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future -generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see -Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at -www.gutenberg.org Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit -501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the -state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal -Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification -number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by -U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. - -The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the -mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its -volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous -locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt -Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to -date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and -official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact - -For additional contact information: - - Dr. Gregory B. Newby - Chief Executive and Director - gbnewby@pglaf.org - -Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide -spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of -increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be -freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest -array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations -($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt -status with the IRS. - -The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating -charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United -States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a -considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up -with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations -where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND -DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular -state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate - -While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we -have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition -against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who -approach us with offers to donate. - -International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make -any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from -outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. - -Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation -methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other -ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To -donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate - -Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. - -Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project -Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be -freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and -distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of -volunteer support. - -Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed -editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in -the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not -necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper -edition. - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search -facility: www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. - diff --git a/old/50269-8.zip b/old/50269-8.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 145d2eb..0000000 --- a/old/50269-8.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-h.zip b/old/50269-h.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 57c07c3..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-h/50269-h.htm b/old/50269-h/50269-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index dd02e45..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h/50269-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8188 +0,0 @@ -<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> - -<!DOCTYPE html - PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" - "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" > - -<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"> - <head> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> - <title> - Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - </title> - <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" /> - <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve"> - - body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify} - P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; } - H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; } - hr { width: 50%; text-align: center;} - .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;} - blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;} - .mynote {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;} - .toc { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;} - .toc2 { margin-left: 20%;} - .indent5 { margin-left: 5%;} - .indent10 { margin-left: 10%;} - .indent15 { margin-left: 15%;} - .indent20 { margin-left: 20%;} - .indent30 { margin-left: 30%;} - .indent40 { margin-left: 40%;} - div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; } - div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; } - .figleft {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;} - .figright {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;} - .pagenum {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em; - font-variant: normal; font-style: normal; - text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD; - border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;} - .side { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 15%; padding-left: 0.8em; - border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left; - text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; - font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;} - .head { float: left; font-size: 90%; width: 98%; padding-left: 0.8em; - border-left: dashed thin; text-align: center; - text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; - font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;} - p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0} - span.dropcap { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 } - pre { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;} - -</style> - </head> - <body> - - -<pre> - -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Port Argent - A Novel - -Author: Arthur Colton - -Illustrator: Eliot Keen - -Release Date: October 21, 2015 [EBook #50269] -Last Updated: March 12, 2018 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - -</pre> - - <div style="height: 8em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h1> - PORT ARGENT - </h1> - <h3> - A Novel - </h3> - <h2> - By Arthur Colton - </h2> - <h3> - With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen - </h3> - <h4> - New York - </h4> - <h4> - Henry Holt And Company - </h4> - <h3> - 1904 - </h3> - <div class="fig" style="width:50%"> - <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0000 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0001.jpg"><i>Original</i></a> - </h5> - <div class="fig" style="width:50%"> - <img src="images/0010.jpg" alt="0010 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0010.jpg"><i>Original</i></a> - </h5> - <div class="fig" style="width:50%"> - <img src="images/0011.jpg" alt="0011 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0011.jpg"><i>Original</i></a> - </h5> - <p> - <br /> <br /> - </p> - <h3> - IN MEMORIAM - </h3> - <h3> - C. W. WELLS - </h3> - <p> - <br /> <br /> - </p> - <h3> - DEDICATED - </h3> - <h3> - TO - </h3> - <h3> - GEORGE COLTON - </h3> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - <b>CONTENTS</b> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—PULSES </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—CAMILLA </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—TECUMSEH STREET </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—ALCOTT AIDEE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE THIRD LAMP </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—MECHANICS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—HICKS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—THE BROTHERS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—AIDEE AND CAMILLLA </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS - REST </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV—HENNION AND SHAYS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI—CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY - HALL </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII—AIDEE—CAMILLA—HENNION - </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII—T. M. SECOR—HENNION—CAMILLA - </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX—CONCLUSION </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER I—PULSES - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ORT ARGENT is a - city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it a waterway to the - trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, instead of elsewhere - on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and better convenience. - One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, and the city grew. - </p> - <p> - In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive - Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no “press - galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences have been - drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on its issues, and - lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its sub-committees? Does an - administrative providence ever veto its bills, or effectively pardon the - transgressors of any statute? - </p> - <p> - Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres back - of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would grow - in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help to - maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to - favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead - into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that - direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small farmers - and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social speculators - “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a session of - accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile. - </p> - <p> - Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back of - a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge of - the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the - bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But - people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed - of. - </p> - <p> - There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney - with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was born - to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, late in - his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new generation. - </p> - <p> - Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of - Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers - subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the - breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of Port - Argent. - </p> - <p> - The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt - legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded house, - according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come to it - once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to his mind - not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something living and - personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through arteries and veins - (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), with brains working in a - thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish emotions. He would note at one - decade how it had thrown bridges across the river, steeples and - elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden throbs of energy; had - gathered a bundle of railroads and a row of factories under one arm, and - was imitating speech through a half-articulate daily press; at another - decade, it would seem to have slept; at another, it had run asphalt - pavements out into the country, after whose enticing the houses had not - followed, and along its busiest streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On - the whole, Port Argent would seem masculine rather than feminine, - reckless, knowing not form or order, given to growing pains, boyish - notions, ungainly gestures, changes of energy and sloth, high hope and - sudden moodiness. - </p> - <p> - The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric - character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its - streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic - heart beat and brain conceive. - </p> - <p> - One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and - found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street. - </p> - <p> - Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down the - river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything fitted - anything else. - </p> - <p> - Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty - years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured - Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take its - pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but the - improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port Argent's - one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of the - buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately line of - square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the Champney - place. - </p> - <p> - A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since - the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the - city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the - city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked a - citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and - freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these piles - of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was told: - “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to make - them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.” - </p> - <p> - “Fixed him?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, they're a happy family now.” - </p> - <p> - The citizens of Port Argent held singular language. - </p> - <p> - “Who is Marve Wood?” - </p> - <p> - “He's—there he is over there.” - </p> - <p> - “Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.” - </p> - <p> - “And this Wood—is he an engineer and contractor?” - </p> - <p> - “No—well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of - us.” - </p> - <p> - The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases of - the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of - school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club. - </p> - <p> - The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with a - pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, - grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He produced - the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated and - consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried to and - fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel and bar - and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The elderly - “Marve Wood,” stood beside him—thick-set, with a grey beard of the - cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the faces - that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He had a - comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow - Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat. - </p> - <p> - Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a - huge, black-moustached Irishman. - </p> - <p> - “Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to - work.” - </p> - <p> - The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy tucked - in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The sidewalk - grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the statue of a - Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. He appeared to - be facing his country's enemies with determination, but time and weather - had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as if he found no - enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. station and the - workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street. - </p> - <p> - Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw - Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out - there,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book. - </p> - <p> - “Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney went - on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, - Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's - arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She did - not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front of the - P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but looked away at - the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, at the hurrying, - glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the perfect blue. The - lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained with the reek of the - factory chimneys across the river; and the river, when you came to - consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged with impetuous - tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were energetic, too, - concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats had no poise or - repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery energies had solid - bases, and the powers within them did not carry them away. There are men, - as well as steam engines, whose energies carry them bodily, and there are - others who are equally energetic from a fixed basis, and the difference is - important—important to the observer of the signs of the times; - possibly even important to Camilla. - </p> - <p> - Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were - more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the - spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny - clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves. - </p> - <p> - Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted a - flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the ground - glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and an - extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in the - next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The street - outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building opposite - were open. - </p> - <p> - “Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his - boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh—well—he's all - right.” - </p> - <p> - “He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry - banner if he wants to.” - </p> - <p> - Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that function. - </p> - <p> - “But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't stand - any deadheads.” - </p> - <p> - “Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.” - </p> - <p> - Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the - shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the - man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles. - </p> - <p> - “Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see - him,” he added. - </p> - <p> - “All right, I'll do that.” - </p> - <p> - “And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both - satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel - injured.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, I'm glad to oblige him——” - </p> - <p> - “That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but—you'd - better make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a - cross-country schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.” - </p> - <p> - “That's all right.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and - added, “I see.” - </p> - <p> - “I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,” - said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, “except - one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It was a man - named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started in to fight - the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the landlord was full - of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest rheumatism woke up, - and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all right, supposing - Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, like enough, he hadn't. But - he went round town then making the same arrangement with other folks, a - lawyer and a liveryman and others. Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he - didn't, but after a while somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph - buried him with a sigh. He never was really comfortable.” - </p> - <p> - Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke - with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at an - upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what - appeared dumb-show. - </p> - <p> - “Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?” - </p> - <p> - “The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It means, - if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's because folks - get so tired of the warlike.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh!” - </p> - <p> - “Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue——” - </p> - <p> - “Aidee?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine man—fine - man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks got kind of tired - of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. Well—maybe so. Then - I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes along with a patent pill, - and a new porous plaster, and claims his plaster has the holes arranged in - triangles, instead of squares like all previous plasters; he has an air of - candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my soul! Your system's out of order.' - Sounds interesting once in a while. And then this world gets so tired of - him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache eleven thousand years. I wish to God you - wouldn't keep giving it new names.' Well,—a couple of years ago the - <i>Chronicle</i> was publishing Aidee's speeches on Civic something or - other every week. Aidee used to shoot straight but scattering at that - time. He'd got too much responsibility for the details of the millennium. - Why, when you come right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an - opinion of himself as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If - I could stand up like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of - natural gas on the blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there - ain't any real democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any - man. Guess likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other - gutter-man hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. - Aidee's a loose comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for - boiling potatoes. Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent - Reform and his Assembly—oh, well—he wasn't doing any great - harm then. He ain't now, either. I told him one time, like this: “I says, - 'Fire away anyhow that suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think - you'd like my job?'” - </p> - <p> - “'What is your job?' says he. - </p> - <p> - “'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little stumped. - 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.' - </p> - <p> - “'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like - it.' - </p> - <p> - “'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your - job?' - </p> - <p> - “And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact. - </p> - <p> - “'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says. - </p> - <p> - “'Complicated?' - </p> - <p> - “'Yes.' - </p> - <p> - “'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it - wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail last - year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a clergyman on - the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I can talk it. - I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his intellectuals are all - right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got the habit of meditation. - So he starts in.” - </p> - <p> - “Bill, you've been a bad lot.” - </p> - <p> - “Yep.” - </p> - <p> - “There ain't no hope for you, Bill.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” says Bill, “there ain't.” - </p> - <p> - “You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he - allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says - Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”' - </p> - <p> - “Aidee laughed,—he did really,—and after that he looked - thoughtful. Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. - 'Sweeney,' I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline - of it. But I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, - thinking anybody could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of - myself, sure.' - </p> - <p> - “Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't any - of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable since. - That's what I wanted to tell you.” - </p> - <p> - “What for?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be - interested to find out what he's up to.” - </p> - <p> - After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up. - </p> - <p> - “All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's got - to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then turned - into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the residence - sections. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN Hennion - reached his rooms the sunlight was slanting through the maples outside. - </p> - <p> - He sat down after supper by his windows. The twilight was thickening in - the foliage, the sparrows holding noisy caucuses there—— - </p> - <p> - Hennion's father had been a contractor and engineer before him, and before - the great war had made the face of the nation more thoughtful with the - knowledge of what may happen in well-regulated families. - </p> - <p> - Once the sun was a pillar of fire and cloud, the land of promise seemed - every day attained, and the stars were jubilant. Were ever such broad - green plains, strong brown rivers and blue lakes? There was oratory then, - and sublime foreheads were smitten against the stars. Such oratory and - such a forehead had Henry Champney, in those days. The subject of oratory - was the devotion of the forefathers, the promises and attainments of the - nation set forth in thrilling statistics. A thousand audiences shuffled - and grinned, and went their way to accomplish the more immediate things - which the orators had endeavoured to decorate. The admiration of the - orator and the public was mutual. There was a difference in type,—and - the submerged industrialist, who worked with odd expedients, who jested - with his lips, and toiled terribly with brain and hand, admired the - difference. - </p> - <p> - The elder Hennion did not care about “the destinies of the nation.” He - dredged the channel of that brown river, the Muscadine, drove the piles - that held the docks of Port Argent, and dug the east section of the - Interstate Canal. The war came, and someone appointed him to something - connected with the transportation of commissary. He could not escape the - habit of seeing that things did what they were supposed to do. Hennion's - supplies were apt to reach the Army of the Cumberland regularly and on - scheduled time, it would be hard to tell why. - </p> - <p> - He built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A - prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, and - did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, “wrecked” the - Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of it - for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and - philosophical. - </p> - <p> - “Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. That's - a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told his boys he - hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did making it, but - they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed him there, only - he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and I wish I had your - luck. But I've had a good time.” Such was “Rick” Hennion's philosophy. - </p> - <p> - Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven - years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of - business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the - inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on - Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the State, - agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and moreover - some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw and trowel. He - recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, white with the - dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, somewhat small at - first; men of another class seemed to look to him as naturally for jobs; - his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile country. Among the - friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's. - </p> - <p> - Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he - seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about the - continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, one - found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at one - time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one of those - personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but certainly - members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor offices. Such a - man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for the growth, a - process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a function. If one - wished to know anything intimate about the city, what was doing, or about - to be done, or how the Council would vote, or any one thread in the - tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood appeared to have this - information. His opinion was better—at least better informed—than - most opinions. For some reason it was difficult not to be on good terms - with him. - </p> - <p> - Port Argent concluded one day that it had a “boss.” It was suggested in a - morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was - interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said, - “We're a humming town.” Real estate at auction went a shade higher that - morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted for. - The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said: - </p> - <p> - “Wood, I hear you're a boss.” - </p> - <p> - “That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the window - and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there - it ought to be spelled with a brick.” - </p> - <p> - “Well—now—I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a - shingle mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his - shingle on my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, - and now every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the - shingle, and spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been - better. Want anything in particular?” - </p> - <p> - The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, and - when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen - indestructible desks. - </p> - <p> - The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were quiet, - because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The issues of - their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, many a - sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, and in the - morning the issues be different, and the victims find their neighbours - overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' sins are not - interesting forever, let alone their wrongs. - </p> - <p> - Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank - Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick. - </p> - <p> - The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise than - contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and - furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to the - people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. Hennion - was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla ought to - sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the spirit of - another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped short years - before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious worth; the - curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams occupied - gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads. - </p> - <p> - Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white head - of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat primly - with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses. - </p> - <p> - The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of the - flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, or - attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except Camilla, - seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity. - </p> - <p> - Camilla said: “You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's - important!” - </p> - <p> - Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the - importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and - yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, and - lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly people - recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity and - readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction would - wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a notion of - his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish even the - constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not less apart - from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their antiquities. - She belonged to a set of associations that should not be mixed up with the - street. In the street, in the clear light and grey dust, men and ideas - were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence was to him a kind of - vestal college. At least, it was the only presence that ever suggested to - his mind things of that nature, symbols and sacred fires, and half-seen - visions through drifting smoke. - </p> - <p> - He was contented now to wait for the revelation. - </p> - <p> - “Have you lots of influence really?” she said. “Isn't it fine! I want you - to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night.” - </p> - <p> - The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow - suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the - dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent ideals - lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where chants - were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the - transparencies, so to speak—it was unpleasant. - </p> - <p> - “I'd rather not see him here.” - </p> - <p> - “But he's coming!” - </p> - <p> - “All right. I shan't run away.” - </p> - <p> - “And he has asked my father——” - </p> - <p> - Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, Camilla!” he broke in, and then laughed. “Did he ask Miss Eunice to - come in, too?” - </p> - <p> - The prospect had its humours—the guilelessness of the solemn - preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of - Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might turn - out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She sometimes - did; that is, she sometimes hovered over the comprehension of a joke, as a - bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy absurdity jogging - along the highway of this world, but she had so many other emotions to - take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around her, that her humour - could not always be depended on. - </p> - <p> - The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, as - he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired, - black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air - of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit. - Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The five - sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead. - </p> - <p> - Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big white - head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; Camilla was - breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her gold-rimmed - glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not rotund, though - his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his feet, pacing the - floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that Aidee was a - peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. He swept - together at first a number of general ideas which did not interest - Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in - particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing - circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but - disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned to - dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the - table. - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of - ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You put - your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand is mixed - up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of foundations. - Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and here they are - bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share—in both of - these results?” - </p> - <p> - Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face - was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick! - </p> - <p> - Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him, - so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of - that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul - abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt that - Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of a - noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. He - felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact - candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind of - unreal, gaudy emotionalism. - </p> - <p> - “I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to - business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to have a - certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain amount of - preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, provided they're - good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand themselves to be voting - for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I contract with them to suit my - business interests, but I never canvass. Probably the ward leaders do. I - suppose there's a point in all this affair. I'd rather come to it, if you - don't mind. You want me to do personal wire-pulling, which I never do and - don't like, in order to down certain men I am under obligations to, which - doesn't seem honourable, and against my business interests, which doesn't - seem reasonable.” - </p> - <p> - “Wire-pulling? No.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire - that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like it, - or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have to.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee hesitated. - </p> - <p> - “Miss Champney——” - </p> - <p> - Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to yours——” - </p> - <p> - “Why not? Class! I have no class!” - </p> - <p> - “I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone - even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them this - way.” - </p> - <p> - “Why not?” - </p> - <p> - “Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon.” - </p> - <p> - “The apology seems in place,” rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating - thorough bass. - </p> - <p> - “I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me.” - </p> - <p> - “The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest”—Champney - heaved his wide frame out of the chair—“that he be released from his - situation.” - </p> - <p> - “Do you like the situation, sir?” - </p> - <p> - “I do not, sir,” with rising thunder. “I hope, if this discussion is - continued here, or elsewhere,”—appearing to imply a preference for - “elsewhere,”—“it will have no reference to my family.” - </p> - <p> - Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of - meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee - stood still a moment. Then he said quietly: - </p> - <p> - “I have made a mistake. Good-night,” and took his leave. He looked tired - and weighed down. - </p> - <p> - Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding. - </p> - <p> - Camilla wept with her head on the table. - </p> - <p> - “I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or - repentance. - </p> - <p> - Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like - shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He - wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away - from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and - the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too - apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them to - suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not altogether - and solely for business men to do business in, else why such men as Aidee, - so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to fill a - practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he would not? - </p> - <p> - “Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do not - come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion that - wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient - attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” his - philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no - longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the - wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, - backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current - eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large - repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death,” - and of these the first four make their reports in the street. - </p> - <p> - Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not - Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven - celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER III—CAMILLA - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OMEONE once - suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found comfort in the - suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a - term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising, - valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going. - They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would - have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent20"> - “The fervent love Camillus bore - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - His native land.” - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused. - </p> - <p> - In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was - lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and - shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and - throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either. - </p> - <p> - At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still makes - it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more exhilarating - than ever. - </p> - <p> - Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic beliefs - and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to interpret - herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive of swarming - energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where ran a swift - river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She barely remembered - when the family lived in the national capital, and Henry Champney was a - noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental picture of an invalid - mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her memories ran about Port - Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, the household rule of Miss - Eunice. They included glimpses of her father's friend, the elder Hennion, - a broad-shouldered man, who always had with him the slim youth, Dick; - which slim youth was marvellously condescending, and once reconstructed - her doll with wires, so that when you pulled a wire it would wave arms and - legs in the manner in which Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever - waved her arms and legs. He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He - taught her carpentry and carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer - and saw, mallet and chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards - of the Champney house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the - tops of the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's - hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with - Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges. - </p> - <p> - He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge the - finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, because - they were not true. - </p> - <p> - Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age of - twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, but all - hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit. - </p> - <p> - On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window - knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and - underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal and - brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from ship to - car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad bridge; - beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long roofs, and - black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood tenements of East - Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because one knew they were - there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the suburbs, a flat, - prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, highways, and - trestle pyramids of the oil wells. - </p> - <p> - Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river and - factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's - disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla - came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to - reminiscence. - </p> - <p> - “We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college,” she said. - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully: - </p> - <p> - “Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?” - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a time - she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, and - began running through the titlepages. - </p> - <p> - “They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic - Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'” - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Aidee lent you such books!” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' 'The - Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!” She had slipped beyond the titlepage - of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked in a new - impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss Eunice - returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle. - </p> - <p> - It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs - between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young have - not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to their - predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the purport of - the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we might live, but - were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had her heartbeats and - flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or how. No matter what her - romance was. It was a story of few events or peculiarities. She had grown - somewhat over-rigid with time. That her melancholy—if melancholy it - should be called, a certain dry severity—that it gave most people a - slight impression of comedy, was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it. - As to that long-past phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not - remember ever having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled - “Socialism and Anarchy,” or “The Civic Disease,” or “The Inner Republic.” - She was glad to believe that Camilla was “a type,” because it was easier - to condemn a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and - flushed cheeks over matters so unsuitable. - </p> - <p> - In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss Eunice's - flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social emphasis on - sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the difference, and - looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading. - </p> - <p> - Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the - room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair - beside him. - </p> - <p> - “Now! What do you think?” - </p> - <p> - Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the - first. - </p> - <p> - “I think your books will lose their backs,” Champney rumbled mildly. - </p> - <p> - The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed in - at the tall side windows. - </p> - <p> - “Think of what, my dear?” - </p> - <p> - “Listen!” - </p> - <p> - Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she - read from the grey volume, as follows: - </p> - <p> - “'You have remarked too often “I am as good as you.” It is probable that - God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he knows - that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked “You are - as good as I,” it would have represented a more genial frame of mind. It - would have rendered your superiority more probable, since whichever remark - you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence that it is not true. - But indeed it is probable that neither your life nor your ideas are - admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not to become convinced - that no one is better than you, but to find someone to whom you can - honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not back, nor away among - the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am asking you to search for - your leader among your contemporaries, not satisfied until you find him, - not limited in your devotion when you have found him, taking his cause to - be yours. I am asking you to remember that evil is not social, but human; - that good is not social, but human. You have heard that an honest man is - the noblest work of God. You have heard of no institution which merits - that finality of praise. You have heard that every institution is the - lengthened shadow of a man. Is it then in shadows or by shadows that we - live?'” - </p> - <p> - Camilla paused. - </p> - <p> - “I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle,” said - Champney. - </p> - <p> - “Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!” - </p> - <p> - Champney took the volume, read, “Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master Went,” - and turned back to the title page. “H'm—'The Inner Republic, by - Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?” he asked. “We discover America - every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!” - </p> - <p> - Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy - surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures most - capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he replied - gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had his happy - surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for the efforts - Champ-ney had made—not altogether painless—to realise the - lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the new,—that - his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; so that the - two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk friendly and long, - without patronage or impatience. - </p> - <p> - To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete, - that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an old - story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his shelves - had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had - connection through himself with the stir of existence. - </p> - <p> - The Websterian periods had taken on a ghostly echo, and the slow ebbing of - the war issues had left him with a sense of being stranded on dry sands. - There seemed to be a flatness everywhere,—a silence, except for the - noisy rattle of the street. - </p> - <p> - It is a pleasant saying, that “The evening of life comes bringing its own - lamp,” but it seemed to him it was a drearily false one. The great men of - a great time, he thought, were gone, or fast going. It was a stagnation - period in his life, pictured in his mind afterward as an actual desert, - dividing arable lands. Were the new men so small, so unuplifted, or was it - only his own mind grown dry and nerveless? He was afraid it was the - latter,—afraid life was dying away, or drying up in his still - comfortable body. - </p> - <p> - He would prove to himself that it was not. - </p> - <p> - This was the beginning of the effort he had made,—a defiant, - half-desperate rally. The struggle began at a definite date. One day he - put away his old books. He bought new ones, and new periodicals, and - determined to find the world still alive,—to find again that old - sense of the importance of things that were going on. It was an intimate - fight this time, unapplauded—against a shadow, a creeping numbness. - He fought on, and at length had almost begun to lose hope. - </p> - <p> - When Camilla came back from college and Eastern friends she dawned upon - him in a series of minute surprises. She brought him his victory, and the - lamp for his evening. So it came about. The struggle was over, and the - longed-for hope and cheer came back to him. - </p> - <p> - So it came that the relation between them was peculiar. New books had a - meaning when Camilla read them to him, as she read from Alcott Aidee's - book to-day, while the noise of the freight-yards, and the rattle of the - travelling crane unloading a docked ship, sounded dull and distant. The - sunlight came yellow and pleasant through tall windows, and the fire - snapped briskly, and Alcott Aidee spoke through the medium of Camilla and - the grey volume, making these singular remarks: - </p> - <p> - “Incarnation of divinity! Surely you have been unfortunate, if in going to - and fro in this world you have nowhere observed any measure of divinity - incarnated in a man, apparent in ordering or in obedience, in leading or - in following, speaking from lips which said, 'Follow me,' as well as from - those which said, 'Thy will, not mine be done,' speaking, for aught I - know, as largely in one way as the other. I am not measuring divinity. I - am showing you where to look for it. I am trying to persuade you that it - does not speak from lips which say 'I am as good as you.'” - </p> - <p> - New books, ran Champney's thoughts, new men, new times, new waves foaming - up the old slant shores. But only as they spoke with Camilla's voice, did - they seem to him now to make the numbed cords vibrate again, or comfort - his wintry age. - </p> - <p> - “Isn't it interesting, daddy? If you're going to be frivolous, I shan't - read.” - </p> - <p> - Champney was looking at the volume with a grim smile. - </p> - <p> - “I was thinking that to read only in the middle of the gentleman's book - was perhaps not doing him justice. It was perhaps why I did not understand - where he began, or where he was going. It seems to be neither old - democracy nor new socialism, but more like the divine rights of some kind - of aristocracy. Shall we not read the book through in order, my dear? - Having become convinced that Mr. Aidee himself contains a measure of this - divinity, and having taken him for our leader, shall we not then induce - our recalcitrant friend Dick to join us, and in that way induce him to - become a politician?” - </p> - <p> - This was the Champney manner in the stately vein of irony. - </p> - <p> - “Oh!” Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, a Champney gesture, “Dick - was horrid about that.” - </p> - <p> - “Recalcitrant, Hum! Horrid, horridus, bristling, Ha! Not inappropriate to - the attitude on that occasion of the said Dick. Not usual for him, I - should say. He is like his father, Camilla. A quiet man, but striking, the - latter. You don't remember him?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes! But you see, Dick didn't like it, because Mr. Aidee asked me to - help him. But it isn't like him to be fussy. Anyway, I liked it, but Dick - didn't. So!” Camilla pushed back her hair, another Champney gesture—the - defiant one. “Now, what made him act like hornets?” - </p> - <p> - “I also took the liberty not to like it, Camilla,” with a rumble of - thorough bass. - </p> - <p> - Camilla glanced up, half startled, and put a small warm hand into her - father's hand, which was large, bony, and wrinkled. The two hands clasped - instinctively hard, as if for assurance that no breach should come between - them, no distance over which the old and the young hand could not clasp. - </p> - <p> - Camilla turned back to Alcott Aidee's book, and read on. Champney found - himself now listening in a personal, or what he might have described as a - feminine, way; he found himself asking, not what meaning or truth there - was in this writer, but asking what meaning it might have toward Camilla, - at the Arcadian age when maids are fain of surprises. He thought of Dick - Hennion, of the Hennions, father and son. One always wondered at them, - their cross-lot logic, their brevities, their instinct as to where the - fulcrum of a thing rested. One believed in them without asking reasons—character - was a mysterious thing—a certain fibre or quality. Ah! Rick Hennion - was dead now, and Henry Champney's fighting days were over. It was good to - live, but a weariness to be too old. He thought of Alcott Aidee, of his - gifts and temperament, his theory of devotion and divinity—an - erratic star, a comet of a man, who had a great church—by the way, - it was not a church—a building at least, with a tower full of - clamouring bells, and a swarming congregation. It was called “The Seton - Avenue Assembly.” So Aidee had written this solid volume on—something - or other. One could see he was in earnest, but that Camilla should be - over-earnest in the wake of his argument seemed a strong objection to the - argument. A new man, an able writer—all very interesting—but—— - In fact, he might prove resident divinities, or prove perpetual - incarnations of the devil, if he chose, but what did the fellow mean by - asking Camilla to—— In fact, it was an unwarranted liberty. - Champney felt suddenly indignant. Camilla read on, and Champney disliked - the doctrine, whatever it was, in a manner defined even by himself as - “feminine.” - </p> - <p> - “'Not in vain,' she read, 'have men sought in nature the assurance of its - large currents, of its calm and self-control, the knitting up of “the - ravelled sleave of care,” “the breathing balm of mute insensate things,” - “the sleep that is among the lonely hills.” It has been written, - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent20"> - “Into the woods my Master went - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - Clean foresprent, - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - and that “the little grey leaves were kind to him.” All these things have - I found, and known them. Was it there my Master went? I found the balm, - the slumber, and the peace. But I found no inspiration. This, wherever I - found it, always spoke with human lips, always looked out of human eyes. - The calm of nature is as the calm of the past. Green battlefields lie - brooding, because the issue is over; deep woods and secluded valleys, - because the issue is elsewhere. The apostle who met a vision of his Master - on the Appian Way, and asked, “Whither goest thou?” was answered, “Into - the city.” Do you ask again, whither he went? I answer that he went on - with the vanguard of the fight; which vanguard is on the front wave and - surf of these times; which front wave and surf is in the minds and moods - of persons; not in creeds, customs, formulas, churches, governments, or - anywhere else at all; for the key to all cramped and rusted locks lies in - humanity, not in nature; in cities, not in solitudes; in sympathy, not in - science; in men, not in institutions; not in laws, but in persons.' - </p> - <p> - “Aren't you interested, daddy?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, my dear. Why do you ask?” - </p> - <p> - “You look so absent-minded. But it's a new chapter now, and it's called - 'Constitutions.'” Camilla laughed triumphantly. - </p> - <p> - “Constitutions! Then the gentleman will be political. Go on.” - </p> - <p> - “'Chapter ninth,'” she read. “'Constitutions.' - </p> - <p> - “'Most men govern themselves as monarchies; some as despotisms that topple - to anarchies, some as nearly absolute monarchies; but mainly, and on the - whole, they govern themselves as partially restricted or constitutional - monarchies; which constitutions are made up of customs, precedents, and - compromises, British Constitutions of opportunism and common law. Indeed, - they claim that the inner life <i>must</i> be a monarchy by its nature, - and every man's soul his castle. They are wrong. It must be a republic, - and every man's soul an open house. - </p> - <p> - “'Now, it is nowhere stated in any Declaration or Constitution put forth - of this Inner Republic that “all men are by nature free and equal.” If - such a declaration occurred to the framers of this Constitution, they - would seem to have thought it difficult to reconcile with observation, and - not very pertinent either. As a special qualification for citizenship, it - appears to be written there that a man must love his neighbour as himself—meaning - as nearly as he can, his citizenship graded to his success; and as a - general maxim of common law, it is written that he shall treat other men - as he would like them to treat him, or words to that effect. However, - although to apply and interpret this Constitution there are courts enough, - and bewildering litigation, and counsel eager with their expert advice, - yet the Supreme Court holds in every man's heart its separate session.” - </p> - <p> - To all of which Champney's thoughts made one singular comment. “Camilla,” - they insisted, “Camilla.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HILE Camilla and - Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over Aidee's book, Miss Eunice - in the parlour bent a grey head over her knitting, and thought of Camilla, - and disapproved of the type of girls who neither knitted nor even - embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over such subjects, for instance, as - “Richard,” but over such subjects as “Problems of the Poor,” and “Civic - Diseases.” - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the - window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered - roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and - disapproved of what she saw. - </p> - <p> - There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent. - Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with - their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so. - </p> - <p> - Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was - over the Maple Street bridge. - </p> - <p> - The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the - bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first - corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was - unlikely, the sign would read “Muscadine Street.” - </p> - <p> - Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories; - Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one side - and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or brick, - with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors mainly shops - for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun with - inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children - quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of whom - those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever faces - generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and - triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither - circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more than - endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's disapproval, - and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is singular how - many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and neither be the - better or worse on that account. - </p> - <p> - On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a - flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street - leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the - stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that “James - Shays, Shoemaker,” was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do so - on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the - shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first was - the shop. - </p> - <p> - A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a smoky-chimneyed - lamp thereon, some newspapers, and half of a book that had been ripped - savagely in two. A double shoemaker's bench stood next the window, a - cooking stove and a cupboard opposite. Clothes hung on wall-hooks, hides - lay on the floor. - </p> - <p> - Shays sat on one end of the bench, a grey-haired, grey-moustached, - watery-eyed man, pegging a shoe vaguely. A black-haired little man with a - thin black beard sat on the other end, stitching a shoe fiercely. A - redlipped, red-cheeked, thick-nosed, thick-necked man with prominent eyes, - sat tilted back in one of the wooden chairs, stating his mind - deliberately. - </p> - <p> - Most of these phases of Muscadine Street might be found so arranged, on - most mornings, by any visitor. Shays and the red-cheeked Coglan could not - be depended on; but the men on the sidewalk, the women in the windows, the - children in the street, the clamour and the smells would be there; also - the grocer, the butcher, and Hicks, the stitcher of vehement stitches. If - Coglan and Shays were there, Coglan would be found in the process of - stating his mind. - </p> - <p> - Hicks' eyes were black, restless, and intense, his mouth a trifle on one - side, his forehead high with a deep line down the middle. It was a painful - line; when he smiled it seemed to point downward frowningly to the fact - that the smile was onesided. - </p> - <p> - Coglan was Shays' associate in the pursuit of happiness. His value lay in - this: that upon a certain amount of hard liquor purchased by Shays, and - divided fairly and orderly between them, Shays became needy of help, and - Coglan generally remained in good condition and able to take him home. - Hicks was Shays' partner in the shop. His value lay in this: that he did - twice as much work as Shays, and was satisfied with half the profits. Both - men were valuable to Shays, and the shop supported the three. - </p> - <p> - The relations between them had grown settled with time. Nearly four years - earlier Hicks had entered Shays' shop. There he learned to cobble footwear - in some incredibly short time, and took his place in the apprehension of - Muscadine Street. Hicks he called himself and nothing more. “Hicks” was a - good enough name. It went some distance toward describing the brooding and - restless little man, with his shaking, clawlike fingers, smouldering - temper, and gift for fluent invective. Some said he was an anarchist. He - denied it, and went into fiery definitions, at which the grocer and candy - man shook their heads vaguely, and the butcher said, “Says he ain't, an' - if he ain't, he ain't,” not as I see which seemed a conclusive piece of - logic. At any rate he was Hicks. - </p> - <p> - The elderly Shays was a peaceful soul, a dusty mind, a ruined body. He was - travelling through his life now at a pace that would be apt to bring him - to the end of it at no distant date, enjoying himself, as he understood - enjoyment, or as enjoyment was interpreted to him by the wise Coglan. - Coglan maintained a solidly planted dislike of Hicks, whose attacks - threatened his dominance, whose acrid contempt and unlimited vocabulary - sometimes even threatened his complacence. Coglan's wisdom saw that the - situation was preferable to searching for jobs, and that the situation - depended on Hicks' acceptance of it. Hicks was a mystery to him, as well - as to Shays, and something of a fear, but Coglan was not disturbed by the - mystery. He could leave that alone and do very well. But Hicks was a - poisoned needle. Hicks knew where to find Coglan's sensitive point and jab - it. Coglan hated him solidly, but balancing his dislike against his - interest and ease, Coglan wisely found that the latter were more solid - still—beyond comparison solid. - </p> - <p> - All this could be learned by any visitor inquiring in Muscadine Street. - The grocer underneath would add tersely that Shays was a soak, but - good-hearted; that Hicks was a fool, and ought to set up shop for himself; - that Coglan was a loafer, and had his bread buttered now about to suit - him. Disapproval of each other was current in Muscadine Street. It was a - part of their interest in life. - </p> - <p> - The same morning sunlight that slanted through Henry Champney's tall - library and parlour widows was slanting through the small streaked window - of Shays, the shoe-mender. Coglan was stating his mind. - </p> - <p> - “Jimmy Shays, yer a good man,” he was saying slowly; “an', Hicksy, yer an' - industhrious man; but nayther of ye is a wise man; but Jimmy is the wisest - man of ye two. For why? Ask that, an' I says this. For when Jimmy wants a - bit of thinkin' done for him, he gets a sensible man to do it, an' a poor - man, an' a workin' man like himself, an' a man that's a friend, and that - stands by him in throuble. But what does ye do, Hicksy? Ye goes over the - river. Ye goes up to Seton Avenue. Ye listens to a chin-waggin' preacher. - An' what's his name? Aidee! He ain't a workin' man himself, but wears the - clothes of the rich, an' ates his dinner wid the rich, an' says hard words - of the friends of the poor. An' yer desaved, Hicksy.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks stopped work and shook a thin fist at Coglan. “If you're talkin' of - him, you keep your manners.” - </p> - <p> - “Oi, the Preacher! Oi, he might be meanin' well, Hicksy. I ain't sayin' - not.” - </p> - <p> - “What are you saying then?” jabbing viciously with his needle. “Damn! - You're an Irishman, ain't you? Chin-wagging institution yourself. What! - Who's the working man? You! Ain't you got a description of you that's - vivider'n that?” breaking into a cackling laugh. “Then I'll ask you, what - friends of the poor you're talking about so glib, like a greased wheel?” - </p> - <p> - “Oi! Yer askin' what I mean by a friend, Hicksy? Ye are! An' yer right, - an' I'll show ye the point. I'll speak to ye of John Murphy, now, what - I've had many a drink on him, an' a helpin' hand. A friend is a friend in - need. That's him. Now, thin, Murphy's a friend of Wood's, for he says so. - Now, thin, I'll show you Dick Hennion. For if I wants a job, I says the - word to Murphy, an' he speaks the word maybe to Hennion an' he gets me a - job, for he done it onct, an' I know, don't I? if so be it happen I wants - a job. An' Hennion's a friend of Wood's, too, as anywan knows. Now! A - friend of me, I says, is a man that acts friendly to me. That's him. So - would ye say, Hicksy, if ye was a wise man an' a man of sense, instead of - chasin' afther a chin-waggin' preacher, like a schnare-drum afther a - thrombone. Haw, haw, haw! a brass throm-bone! But Wood's a friend of the - poor, an' I've proved it. For why? For I say it's the rich that he bleeds, - but the poor man he's friendly to. Now, thin! What does Aidee do but say - the bad word of Wood. In consequence, in consequence, I says,”—and - Coglan smote his knee,—“he ain't no friend of the poor.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' black eyes glittered and focussed themselves, a concentrated stare - at a minutely small spot between Coglan's eyes. His teeth clicked. - Coglan's laugh died away. He turned his eyes aside and rubbed his red face - uneasily. - </p> - <p> - “Coglan,” said Hicks, “I warned you before. You shake your mouth at the - Preacher again and I'll stick a knife into your dirty throat. You hear - that!” - </p> - <p> - Coglan's redness showed purple spots. - </p> - <p> - “Think I'm afraid of ye!” - </p> - <p> - “Yep, I think you are.” - </p> - <p> - “I'll break your little chick bones!” - </p> - <p> - “Yep. You're afraid, and you better stay so.” - </p> - <p> - “Hicksy!” broke in Shays with quavering voice. “Tom! we're all friends, - ain't we? Now, then, Tom, Hicksy makes a point you leave out the Preacher, - don't he? He'll argue peaceful. Jus' leave out the Preacher. Won't you, - Hicksy? Hey? You'll argue peaceful.” - </p> - <p> - “I said I would.” - </p> - <p> - “Leave out the Preacher,” said Shays. “All friens'. Hey?” - </p> - <p> - Coglan wiped his perspiring face. “I'm a sensible man,” he said. “When - Jimmy Shays asks a favour, I say, sure! I'm a sensible man.” He looked - resentfully and uneasily at Hicks, but seemed relieved to withdraw from - his aggressive position without losing his dominance. - </p> - <p> - “Oi! I told ye what I meant by a friend. I said Marve Wood was a friend of - the poor, an' I proved it. I'll be fair an' square. I'll ask ye, what's <i>your</i> - meanin'?” - </p> - <p> - Hicks dropped his eyes, and fell to his jabbing needlework. - </p> - <p> - “Friend!” he said. “You mean a man that's useful to you. <i>You</i> say - so! <i>You</i> say so! That's your meaning. Good's what's good for me. - Sense is what agrees with me. Nothing's got any value that ain't valuable - to that God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked 'me,' named Coglan, that's got no - more value than to fertilise a patch of potatoes. Friend! You get another - word. I got nothing to say to you. But I'll tell you this. I'll tell you - what I think of Wood. He's got a reckoning coming. What is Wood? I'll tell - you that he's the meeting point of two enemies—the corporations and - the people, the rich and the poor. His job's to keep in with both. That's - what his friendliness amounts to. His job's to sell the corporations what - belongs to the people. And he'll grin at the people on one side, so! And - he'll wink at the corporations on the other, so! And he'll say: 'How do, - Johnny, and Billy, and Sammy?' So! And he'll say to the corporations, - 'What'll you give for Johnny's hat?' So! Then he gives Johnny half what he - gets for the hat, so! Then he's got Sammy and Billy to back the deal, so! - Well, what's Wood! I've told you what he is. Friend of the poor! What do - you know about it?” He dropped the shoe, shook his loose fingers in the - air, and cried. “He's a cancer! Cut him out! He's an obstruction! Blow him - up! What, then? Then I say this, Tom Coglan, and I say it's a good thing - when damn rascals are afraid!” - </p> - <p> - “Quotin' the Preacher?” said Coglan complacently. - </p> - <p> - Hicks narrowed his black eyes again, and focussed them on Coglan, who - turned away uneasily. Hicks went on: - </p> - <p> - “What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether Wood - ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in his life, - nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against him, then, - or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm talking about?” - </p> - <p> - “Oi!” said Coglan. “Yer right. I'll ask ye that.” - </p> - <p> - “And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine”—tapping his narrow - chest—“ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going - to mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that - does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to - fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan.” - </p> - <p> - “Oi! Quotin' the Preacher.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I am, some of it.” - </p> - <p> - He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each - other and then stealthily at Hicks. - </p> - <p> - “I hear no talk against the Preacher,” Hicks went on, after a time; “I - won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor the - like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,—neither him, nor his talk, - nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent but me - that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my thinking for - me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about him, or me? - What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, and then if you - said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to go crazy, and - always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting you on fire and - then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; and if you talked - like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk to you. I'd talk - so, too, for his way ain't my way.” - </p> - <p> - He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table. - </p> - <p> - “See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of - it's not. That's my way.” - </p> - <p> - His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and savage - that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a startled - way, as if he expected to see something ghastly. - </p> - <p> - “But it ain't the Preacher's way. But I ain't the man to be held back,” - said Hicks, “and patted and cooed over. Not me. Show me a snake and I - stamp on it! Show me the spot and I hit it! Damn!” - </p> - <p> - He twisted his mouth. His teeth clicked again, and his crooked fingers - drove the glittering needles swiftly back and forth through the leather. - Coglan stared at him with prominent eyeballs and mouth open. Shays wiped - his glasses, and then his red-lidded eyes with his coat sleeve. - </p> - <p> - “All frien's, Hicksy! Ain't we?” he murmured uneasily. - </p> - <p> - Coglan recovered. “An' that's right, too. Jimmy Shays is a kind man and a - peaceable man, an' I'm a sensible man, an' yer an industhrious man, but - yer not a wise man, Hicksy, an'”—with sudden severity—“I'll - thank ye not to stomp on Tom Coglan.” - </p> - <p> - He got up. Shays rose, too, and put on his coat, and both went out of the - door. Hicks gave a cackling laugh, but did not look after them. - </p> - <p> - Presently he finished the shoe, laid it down, rubbed his hands, and - straightened his back. Then he went and got the torn book, sat down, and - read in it half an hour or more, intent and motionless. - </p> - <p> - The factory whistles blew for twelve o'clock. He rose and went to a side - cupboard, took out a leathern rifle case, put a handful of cartridges in - his pockets, and left the shop. - </p> - <p> - The grocer's children in the side doorway fled inward to the darkness of - the hall as he passed. The grocer's wife also saw him, and drew back - behind the door. He did not notice any of them. - </p> - <p> - The long eastward-leading street grew more and more dusty and unpaved. He - passed empty lots and then open fields, cornfields, clumps of woods, and - many trestles of the oil wells. He climbed a rail fence and entered a - large piece of woods, wet and cool. The new leaves were just starting from - their buds. - </p> - <p> - It was a mild April day, with a silvery, misty atmosphere over the green - mass of the woods. A few of the oil wells were at work, thudding in the - distance. Cattle were feeding in the wet green fields. Birds, brown and - blue, red-breasted and grey-breasted, twittered and hopped in tree and - shrub. A ploughman in a far-off field shouted to his team. Crows flapped - slowly overhead, dropping now and then a dignified, contented croak. The - only other sound was the frequent and sharp crack of a rifle from deep in - the centre of the woods. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER V—TECUMSEH STREET - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>ECUMSEH STREET was - the fourth street back from the river. Tradition said that the father and - Certain aunts of the man who laid out the street had been scalped by - Tecumseh, the Indian. It was the only distinguished event in his family, - and he wished to commemorate it. - </p> - <p> - The street was paved with undressed Medina. The newspaper offices were all - there, and the smash and scream of undressed Medina under traffic was in - the columns. It was satisfactory to Port Argent. The proper paving of - streets in front of newspaper offices was never petitioned in the Council. - Opposite the offices was a half block of vacant lots, a high board fence - of advertisements around it. - </p> - <p> - The space between was packed with a jostling crowd. A street lamp lit a - small section of it. Lights from the office windows fell in patches on - faces, hats, and shoulders. A round moon floated above the tower of <i>The - Chronicle</i> Building with a look of mild speculation, like a “Thrice - Blessed Buddha,” leading in the sky his disciple stars, who all - endeavoured to look mildly speculative, and saying, “Yonder, oh, - mendicants! is a dense mass of foolish desires, which indeed squirm as - vermin in a pit, and are unpleasant to the eye of meditation. Because the - mind of each individual is there full of squirming desires, even as the - individual squirms in the mass.” No doubt it looks so when one floats so - far over it. - </p> - <p> - Opposite the windows of <i>The Chronicle</i> (Independent-Reform) and <i>The - Press</i> (Republican) the advertising boards were covered with white - cloth, and two blinding circles shone there of rival stereopticons. There - was no board fence opposite <i>The Western Advocate</i> (Democratic), and - no stereopticon in the windows. This was deplored. It showed a lack of - public spirit—a want of understanding of the people's needs. If - there could be no stereopticon without a board fence, there should be a - brass band. - </p> - <p> - The proprietor of <i>The Advocate</i> sent out for a bushel of Roman - candles, and discharged them from his windows by threes, of red, white, - and blue. This was poetic and sufficient. - </p> - <p> - The stereopticons flashed on the white circles the figures of returns, - when there were any, pictures and slurs when there were no figures,—a - picture of a cage full of riotous monkeys on <i>The Chronicle</i> circle, - underwritten, “The Council,”—a picture of an elderly lady with a - poke bonnet and lifted hands of reprehension, on the <i>Press</i> circle, - underwritten, “Independent Reform.” - </p> - <p> - “Auction of the City of Port Argent!” flashed <i>The Chronicle</i>. - “Office of M. Wood. Cash on Delivery of Goods.” - </p> - <p> - “All citizens must go to Sunday School or be fined,” from <i>The Press</i>. - </p> - <p> - “6th Ward. Rep. Plurality, 300.” - </p> - <p> - “1st Ward. Ind. Ref. Plurality, 28.” - </p> - <p> - Whish! a rocket from the windows of <i>The Western Advocate</i>. And the - crowd roared and shuffled. - </p> - <p> - The last of <i>The Press</i> windows to the left belonged to a little room - off the press-room, containing a desk, a board table, and several chairs. - The desk seemed only to be used as an object at which to throw articles, - in order that, they might roll to the floor. There were crude piles of - newspapers on it and about it, hats, a section of a stove pipe, and a - backgammon board. The table looked as if it sometimes might be used to - write on. - </p> - <p> - The room was supposed to be the editor's, but no one in Port Argent - believed Charlie Carroll ever stayed in the same place long enough to - pre-empt it. He edited <i>The Press</i> from all over the city, and wrote - the editorials wherever he stopped to catch breath. <i>The Press</i> - editorials were sometimes single sentences, sometimes a paragraph. More - than a paragraph was supposed to mean that Carroll had ridden on a street - car, and relieved the tedium of his long imprisonment. - </p> - <p> - A number of men stood at the window or stood grouped back, and watched the - canvas across the street. The only light came through the door from the - press-room. - </p> - <p> - Carroll put his curly head through the door, shouted something and - vanished. <i>The Press</i> stereopticon withdrew a view of Yosmite Valley - and threw on the canvas: - </p> - <p> - “Recount in the 1st Ward announced.” - </p> - <p> - <i>The Chronicle</i> cleared its canvas promptly and flung across the - street: - </p> - <p> - “Fraud!” - </p> - <p> - Only two men sat still by the window of the darkened room. The rest rushed - out. - </p> - <p> - The street was in an uproar, hats crushed over heads, fists shaken in the - air to the instructive comment of the moon. - </p> - <p> - “How foolish, oh, mendicants! How do men make for themselves troubles, as - though one should stir quiet waters with his hand, saying, 'It is a storm. - The gods have afflicted me.'” - </p> - <p> - “How foolish!” said one of the men at the darkened window. “Those boys are - terribly anxious to carry that Ward, and no point in it, Dick!” - </p> - <p> - “Suppose I'd been out canvassing for Reform, Wood? Think you'd have lost?” - </p> - <p> - Wood peered curiously at Hennion in the half-lit dusk. “Like enough! Well—want - anything in particular? I admit the bill, if it ain't too big.” - </p> - <p> - “I don't want anything.” - </p> - <p> - Wood tilted his chair and was silent a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Look what comes of making rows,” he went on. “I wouldn't have that Ward - now for a gift. <i>The Chronicle</i>'s red in the face with wrath and - happiness. Everybody's hair on end as it is. Disgusting, ain't it? Well—down - east, where the land's tilted up so you can turn a section over bottom - upwards by heaving one end with a rail, well—there was a man there - had a farm at the bottom of a long hill, and his neighbour's punkins up - above used to roll down on him. But he didn't make any row, because his - yard was littered with punkins, no. He ate the punkins. Well, now, take - the neighbour above, he might have gone down and called somebody a thief - for not returning strayed punkins, and two pillars of the church might - have disliked each other. But he didn't. He built a board fence along the - lower edge of his cornfield and caught his own punkins. And there was - mutual respect, mutual respect. Well—the boys, they always want to - fight. They go round saying, 'The old man's level-headed,' but they ain't - satisfied with building that fence to catch those punkins without heaving - a rock down an aggravating man's chimney, or else it makes 'em mad to have - punkins rolled at 'em, and moreover they don't roll fast enough. - Disgusting, ain't it?” - </p> - <p> - “Wood! Wood! Wherein——” Carroll rushed in and turned up the - electric light impatiently. “Wh-what you going to do about the First - Ward?” - </p> - <p> - He had thin bright curly hair, the slimmest of bodies, and moved like a - restless insect. - </p> - <p> - “Tell'em to count it twenty-eight Reform plurality, no more and no less! - And turn off that light! And clear out! Well—now—that Charlie - Carroll, he's a living fidget. Well—when they used to race - steamboats on the Mississippi, they'd put a nigger on the safety valve, so - it wouldn't get nervous. I've heard so. I've seen 'em tie it up with a - string. Well—winning the race depended some on the size and serenity - of the nigger, that'd see it wasn't his place to worry, for he'd get blown - off all right in the natural course of things. For sitting on a safety - valve you want a nigger that won't wriggle. Well—Charlie's a good - man. Keeps people thinking about odds and ends of things. If one thing out - of forty is going to happen, his mind's going to be a sort of composite - picture of the whole forty. Sees eight or ten dimensions to a straight - line. Yes—folks are pretty liberal. They'll allow there's another - side to 'most anything, and a straight line's got no business to be so - gone particular. It's the liberal-mindedness of the public that lets us - win out, of course. But—you've got to sit still sometimes, and wait - for the earth to turn round.” - </p> - <p> - “I suppose you have. It'll turn round.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, it'll turn round.” - </p> - <p> - The tumult outside had subsided in a dull, unsettled rumble. The moon went - into retreat among silver-grey clouds. Tecumseh Street muttered in the - darkness of its pit. The stereopticons continued. - </p> - <p> - “<i>The Chronicle</i> suspects the U. S. Census,” from <i>The Press</i>. - </p> - <p> - “Census O. K. Wood didn't make it,” from <i>The Chronicle</i>. - </p> - <p> - “Port Argent stands by the G. O. P.” - </p> - <p> - “Did Wood mention his Candidate's Name?” - </p> - <p> - The <i>Press</i> threw defiantly the portrait of its candidate for mayor. - </p> - <p> - “Pull the String and See it Jump!” from <i>The Chronicle.</i> - </p> - <p> - Behind <i>The Press</i> stereopticon a telephone jingled, telegraph - instruments clicked, men wrote busily at a long table under a row of - pendent electric lights that swayed in the draught. - </p> - <p> - A large man came in, panting. His short coat swung back under his - arm-pits, away from the vast curve of his waistcoat. He had a falling - moustache and a round face. - </p> - <p> - “Vere iss Vood? So!” He peered curiously into the darker room. “Vere.” - </p> - <p> - “Come along, Freiburger,” said Wood. “Pull up a chair. Well—how's - your Ward? All quiet?” - </p> - <p> - Freiburger settled into a chair with the same caution. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes, quviet. Not shtill, but quviet.” - </p> - <p> - “What's the difference between 'still' and 'quiet'?” asked Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “Veil, it vass drunk, und someone vass punch Cahn der barber's nose, but - not me.” - </p> - <p> - “You call it quiet till somebody hits you?” - </p> - <p> - “Vy should he hit me?” cried Freiburger indignantly. - </p> - <p> - “He shouldn't,” said Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “No! Veil, it vass not shtill, but quviet. Ach!” sadly, “ven a man iss - drunk, vy don't he shleep?” - </p> - <p> - “He wants to stay awake and enjoy it.” - </p> - <p> - Freiburger shook his head slowly and felt of his nose, as if to be quite - sure before taking the responsibility of repeating the statement. - </p> - <p> - “It vass Cahn. It vass not me.” - </p> - <p> - Wood sat silently, looking through the window to where the stereopticons - flashed over the crowd's changing emotions, half listening to the - conversation near him. Freiburger peered anxiously at him in the dusk. His - mind was trembling with the thrill and tumult of the day, longing that - Wood might say something, utter some sentence that it might cling to, - clasp about with comprehension, and be safe from wandering, unguaranteed - ideas. Hennion seemed interested in examining Freiburger's soul. - </p> - <p> - “Freiburger, you're as honest a man as I know.” - </p> - <p> - “Veil, yes, I'm honest. I don't know who you know.” - </p> - <p> - “You never owed a dollar you didn't pay.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, no, I don' do it.” - </p> - <p> - “Business fair?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, what did you want to get on the Council for?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh! Veil! It vass goot for business.” He seemed pleased to talk about - this, but expression was a matter of labour and excitement. “Veil! You - see! Die boys sie come at Freiburger's saloon, und I know 'em all on Maple - Street und der Fourt Vard. Und nights at Freiburger's I hear von der shobs - und der Union und der prices. Und sie tell me vy der carriage factory - strike. Und sie tell me Hennion iss a shquvare man, und Vood vill do as he - say he vill do, und Shamieson in der freight yards iss a hog, und Ranald - Cam iss make money, und Fater Harra iss teach lil' boys fight mit gloves - in St. Catherine's parochial school und bleed der badness out of der - kleine noses. Und sie say, 'I loss my shob, Freiburger!' 'My lil' boy - sick, Freiburger.' Ach, so! All dings in der Vard iss tell me. Veil now, - aber, look here! I am a Councilman. Der iss no man so big on Maple Street - as Fater Harra und me, und Freiburger's iss head-quaverters of der Vard, - und das iss goot for business.” - </p> - <p> - “That's all right. I see your point. But the Council isn't supposed to be - an adjunct to the different councilmen's business, is it? I suppose the - Ward understood itself to be trusting its interests in your hands, don't - you? and you're a sort of guardian and trustee for the city, aren't you? - Seems as if that would take a good deal of time and worry, because you'd - want to be sure you were doing right by the city and the Ward, and it's a - complicated affair you have to look after, and a lot of people's interests - at stake.” - </p> - <p> - Wood stirred slightly in his chair, partly with pleasure at the humour of - it, partly with uneasiness. It was all right for Hennion to examine the - Freiburger soul, if he liked, but to cast on its smooth seas such - wide-stirring, windy ideas seemed unkind to Freiburger. - </p> - <p> - Freiburger puffed heavily in the darkness. - </p> - <p> - The excitement of expressing himself subsided, and Hennion's idea opened - before him, a black gulf into which he could for a while only stare - dubiously. His mind reached out vaguely for something familiar to cling - to. - </p> - <p> - “Veil—I don' know—die boys and Fater Harra und—Mein - Gott! I ask Vood!” He puffed heavily again after the struggle and triumph. - </p> - <p> - “Couldn't do better. It's what your boys expect of you anyhow.” - </p> - <p> - And Hennion returned to his silence. Freiburger's soul glowed peacefully - once more. - </p> - <p> - “It iss Vood's business, hein?” - </p> - <p> - He looked from one to the other of the impassive, self-controlled men. He - wanted Wood to say something that he could carry away for law and wisdom - and conviction, something to which other ideas might be fitted and - referred. He had the invertebrate instinct of a mollusk to cling to - something not itself, something rooted and undriven, in the sea. - </p> - <p> - “You've done well, Freiburger,” said Wood, rousing himself. “Tell the boys - they've done well. Stay by your beer and don't worry till the keg's dry.” - </p> - <p> - Freiburger rolled away, murmuring his message loyally. “Stay by mein—a—mein - keg's dry.” - </p> - <p> - “Freiburger won't cost you much,” Hen-nion murmured after a while. Wood - swung softly in his chair. - </p> - <p> - “Got something on your mind, ain't you, Dick?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes. Of course. But I don't know what it is. I've fished for it till - I'm tired. I've analysed Freiburger, and didn't get much. Now I'd like to - examine your soul in a strong chemical solution. Maybe I'm a bit - embarrassed.” - </p> - <p> - Wood chuckled. “Go ahead. Most men 'll lie, if you give 'em time to - rearrange their ideas. Well—it won't take me so long.” His manner - became genial. “You've got a good head, Dick. Well—I'll tell what - I'm thinking. It's this. The old man 'll have to drop his job one of these - days, and—if you're feeling for pointers—I don't say you are, - but supposing you are—I don't mind saying I shall back you to head - the organization. Maybe—well,—in fact, I don't suppose there's - much money in it you'd care to touch—maybe there ain't any—but - there's a place for the right man. I like you. I liked your father. He was - built something your way. The boys want somebody over 'em that won't - wriggle off the safety valve, and knows how to pick up punkins peacefully - as they come. This First Ward business—well, you've got a pretty - good grip through the crowd to begin with.” - </p> - <p> - “Now there!” broke in Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “You and Aidee are both trying to do the same thing. You want to get me - into politics. I don't care for your primaries and committees. I don't see - ten cents' difference to the city which party runs it. I dare say whoever - runs it expects to make a living out of it. Why do you both come to me?” - </p> - <p> - “I guess we've both got an idea you're useful.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion thought a moment and then spoke more quietly. - </p> - <p> - “Henry Champney used to boss this section. He did it from the platform - instead of the committee room. And my father handled bigger contracts than - I've touched yet. But Champney didn't ask him to run his canal into the - next caucus, or furnish stray batches of constituents with jobs. - Understand, I'm not grumbling about the last. Champney stayed on his - platform, and my father stayed in his big ditch and dug. The proper thing - now seems to be for everybody to get into the street and row around - together. Here's Aidee too thinks he's got to jump into it now, and take - with him—take with him everything he can' reach.” - </p> - <p> - “That's straight,” murmured Wood. “So they do.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, and I call off, myself.” - </p> - <p> - “All right. I was only guessing what you had in your mind. Well—it's - business sets the pace nowadays. 'Most everything else has to catch its - gait or be left. I remember Champney forty years gone. He was a fine - picture, when he got up and spread himself. He didn't do anything that's - here now, unless it's a volume of his speeches, congressional and - occasional. Not much. He kept us all whooping for Harry Clay. Well—Clay's - dead, Whig Party and Compromises and all burnt up. Your father built sixty - miles of canal. Canal stock's pretty dead now, but that's not his fault. - He laid a few thousand miles of railroad, went around this place and that, - cleaning up the country. Several million people travel his railroads and - walk his bridges. Anybody ever call him a great man like Henry Champney? - Gone little he cared if they did or didn't. He and his like were a sight - more important. Well—no; Champney didn't ask favours of anybody in - those days. And he didn't ask votes. They shovelled 'em at him, and he - went on telling 'em the Constitution was the foundation of America, and - Harry Clay the steeple. They weren't. Rick Hennion and his like were the - foundation, and there wasn't any steeple. If you ask what they're all - rowing round in the street for now, why, I don't know. I guess they've all - found out the point's got to be fought out there or nowhere. Well—better - think over what I was telling you, Dick. You're Rick Hennion's son. Well—it's - none of my business—but—I'd gone like to see you old - Champney's son-in-law—if that's it. I believed in Champney once, and - shouted for Clay, and thought there was something in it. I did, that's a - fact. I'd lock horns with any other bull then, and swear my name was - Righteouashess and his was Sin.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, but Champney——” - </p> - <p> - “Yes—Champney!” - </p> - <p> - “When he turned a vote, it meant he'd persuaded a man, didn't it?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes—Champney! His best argument was a particular chest tone. If I - tell a man, 'Hullo, Jimmy!' and give him a cigar, it's as reasonable as a - chest tone.” - </p> - <p> - “It's not in my line, Wood,” said Hen-nion after a silence. “What makes - you so down? You're not old.” - </p> - <p> - “Going on seventy, Dick.” Wood's mood seemed more than usually frank and - talkative. He seemed to be smoothing out the creases in his mind, hunting - into corners that he hardly knew himself, showing a certain wistfulness to - explain his conception of things, complex and crumpled by the wear and - pressures of a long life, possibly taking Hennion to represent some - remembrance that he would like to be friends with after long estrangement, - and in that way pleading with his own youth to think kindly of him. Or it - might have been he was thinking of “Rick” Hennion, who helped him forty - years before, and stayed with him longest of worn-out ideals. - </p> - <p> - There was a rush of feet and clamour of voices in the press-room. - </p> - <p> - “Wood! Wood!” - </p> - <p> - “First Ward.” - </p> - <p> - “Thrown out forty votes.” - </p> - <p> - “Wouldn't do what you told 'em.” - </p> - <p> - The little room was jammed with men, thinned out, and jammed again. The - electric light flashed up. - </p> - <p> - “What's to pay now?” - </p> - <p> - <i>The Chronicle</i> flung its bold cone of light and glaring challenge - across the street. It seemed to strike the canvas with a slap. - </p> - <p> - “Forty Reform votes thrown out in 1st Ward. Fraud!” - </p> - <p> - A hush fell on Tecumseh Street. Then a roar went up that seemed to shake - the buildings. Tecumseh Street thundered below, monstrous and elemental, - and trembled above like a resonant drum. The mob rolled against the brick - front of the block like a surf that might be expected to splash any moment - up the flat perpendicular. Grey helmets of policemen tossed on the - surface. Faces were yellow and greenish-white in the mingled - electric-light and moonlight. Fists and spread hands were shaken at <i>The - Press</i> windows. Five or six heads were in the window of the little - room. Wood's face was plain to make out by his grey shovel-beard. They - shouted comments in each other's ears. - </p> - <p> - “It's a riot.” - </p> - <p> - “No!” - </p> - <p> - “Looks like the bottom of hell, don't it?” Then a little spit of smoke and - flame darted like a snake's tongue between the advertising boards, seven - feet above the sidewalk. There was a sharp crack that only the nearest - heard. - </p> - <p> - Wood flung up his hand, pitched forward, and hung half over the window - sill. - </p> - <p> - Someone directly beneath, looking up, saw a head hanging, felt a drop - splash on his face, and drew back wincing. - </p> - <p> - The thrill and hush spread from the centre. It ran whisperingly over the - mass. The roar died away in the distance to right and left. Tecumseh - Street was still, except for the crash where a policeman tore a board from - the advertisements with a heave of burly shoulders, and plunged through - into the darkness of empty lots. - </p> - <p> - The little room above was now crowded and silent, like the street. They - laid Wood on the table with a coat under his head. He coughed and blinked - his eyes at the familiar faces, leaning over him, strained and staring. - </p> - <p> - “You boys are foolish. Charlie Carroll—I want—take Hennion—Ranald - Cam, you hear me! Becket—Tuttle.” - </p> - <p> - It was like a Roman emperor dispensing the succession, some worn Augustus - leaving historic counsel out of his experience of good and evil and the - cross-breeds of expediency—meaning by good, good for something, and - by evil, good for nothing. - </p> - <p> - “Seems queer to be plugged at my time of life. Take Hennion. You ain't got - any heads. Dick!” - </p> - <p> - Hennion stood over him. Wood looked up wistfully, as if there were - something he would like to explain. - </p> - <p> - “The game's up to you, Dick. I played it the only way I knew how.” - </p> - <p> - The moon floated clear above the street, and mild and speculative. Ten - minutes passed, twenty, thirty. The mass began to sway and murmur, then - caught sight of Carroll in the window, lifting his hand, and was quiet. - </p> - <p> - “Gentlemen, Mr. Wood is dead.” - </p> - <p> - For a moment there was hardly a motion. Then the crowd melted away, - shuffling and murmuring, into half a score of dim streets. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VI—ALCOTT AIDEE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Sexton Avenue - Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, with wide windows and a - tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the Avenue in a block of - bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house from the corner. Aidee - rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, but his study was in the - Assembly building. The house belonged to one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife - of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote articles for <i>The Chronicle</i>, and - verses which were military at one time, nay, even ferocious, which - afterward reflected her pensioned widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She - hoped her drawing-room might be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. - She was tall, thin, grey-haired, and impressive. - </p> - <p> - The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a - kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, but - some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly - organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who - delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations - of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There - was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule. - Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and - rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had - fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. There - was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted for - excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large, - good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her trail, - Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling mills. - </p> - <p> - T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he - liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was - on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded from - his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission into - Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set forever on - higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. Tillotson's - drawing-room, and held conversation. - </p> - <p> - Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by - means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature by - the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with natural gas - and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern, intensely - modern.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man of - radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism there - had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he came to - the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his life in - the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, leaving two - sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and “Lolly,” on a - small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on the same small - farm. - </p> - <p> - The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and - then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in - that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by - the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions objected to - by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school commissioner was - fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left it all suddenly, - their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, the corn lot, the - muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud of its two stories - and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period followed in a disorderly - city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed himself prodigally, and the - finances of the brothers went to pieces. Allen's endeavour to improve - their finances led him to a barred and solitary cell. Alcott was at the - door of the prison when he came out. - </p> - <p> - “Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!” - </p> - <p> - “We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.” - </p> - <p> - But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, a - weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, - affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him to - Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a pit, like - other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with a - circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed miners. - There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men. - </p> - <p> - “You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric youth,” - said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!” - </p> - <p> - There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level - horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in - astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in - an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart. - </p> - <p> - “By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell, - do you? Got any idea where it is?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - “Ho! You have!” - </p> - <p> - “Some hot chunks of it in this town.” - </p> - <p> - “You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, and - I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof off. - What church are you, anyhow?” - </p> - <p> - “I'm no church. I'm a freak.” - </p> - <p> - “Ho! You don't say!” - </p> - <p> - “I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, - strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.” - </p> - <p> - But they did not find him. - </p> - <p> - Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee. - </p> - <p> - But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. - The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was a - love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which - followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a - burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, - and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself - loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and good - may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,” says the - penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of unuse, if they - came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse there was, and - irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt. - </p> - <p> - “The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that - title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become a - tyranny.” - </p> - <p> - In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is - certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before - him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey - volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near the - beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have mainly - given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, has - known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker becoming - a larger glow,—the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better moments - than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The other has - seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and brooding and - pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. Two lamps—the - Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.” - </p> - <p> - So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting - multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated - thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and - died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier and - more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still. - </p> - <p> - “Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an - elemental unit.” - </p> - <p> - If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and to - care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, Port - Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing the - Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in opposition - next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth and nail on - local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the mystery. - </p> - <p> - “T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its way. - Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton Avenue - Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port Argent - concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid man it - found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for rhetorical - speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted him a - definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it found him - rather repellent. - </p> - <p> - The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days - had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics - started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one - newspaper, <i>The Chronicle</i>, and sometimes elected a few councilmen, - sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the - Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by - over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and - disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied to - a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They - generally do. - </p> - <p> - Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became - familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He - walked much about the city, watching faces—dingy and blurred faces, - hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no equality - among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew to be a kind - of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. Personally, he - was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about other men by too - much direct contact with them, they put him out. He looked at them - hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him companionable. His - solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his conscience. - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her - aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring - bells for a place of residence. - </p> - <p> - He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall with its - platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his wide-windowed - study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, scatter his seed, - and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could do no more than - throw his personality into the welter of things, and leave the worth of it - to other decisions than his own. Here his travels were ended, except as - one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and timeless. - </p> - <p> - In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by two - concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and overlapping - each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of the other, the - Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner Republic,” might be - called signboards, or statements of condition. Even there might be noted - the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” crossing and following the - path of his convictions and interpretations, showing itself here and there - in some touch of bitterness, some personal sense of the confusion and - mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured humanity as if it were a - personal dishonour, and so in a passionate championship of wrecked and - aimless people. He spoke of them as if they were private and near. One - champions kindred with little question of their deserts. This was part of - the secret of Alcott's power on the platform. Over his success, as well as - his failures, was written “Allen.” - </p> - <p> - “Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you - sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, - violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and my - books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does not - matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For though I - know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp this sorry - scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's desire, yet I am no - socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but human,—and I know - not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.” - </p> - <p> - The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen, - present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his speech - the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse drove Allen - to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the next wave. - Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had ruined his - career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was no jest in - that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly into the woof - of his life that it tinged the whole pattern. - </p> - <p> - The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street and met - Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll glittered - with malice. - </p> - <p> - “Say, that man's name was Hicks.” - </p> - <p> - “What of it?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, he's one of your heelers.” - </p> - <p> - “Don't know him.” - </p> - <p> - “Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in Muscadine - Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way back under your - gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and drinking eloquence - like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.” - </p> - <p> - “Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?” - </p> - <p> - “Well, not exactly.” - </p> - <p> - “Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?” - </p> - <p> - Carroll shook his head. - </p> - <p> - “Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never - saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular. - No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet.” - </p> - <p> - Carroll laughed and flitted away. - </p> - <p> - Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody cared - what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his brother's - keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business to do his - best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a likeable - man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee had seen - men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest. If somebody - from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's paragraphs by - applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business of Carroll's - either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with seeing that they - said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused them to say. - </p> - <p> - But the thing tasted badly. - </p> - <p> - He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a man - translated “Down with the devil!” into “Go shoot Wood!” and became ready - to take another's life and give over his own in exchange. - </p> - <p> - He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door, - followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping - Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and - giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's “brotherly - love” was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan that - his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played dolls - with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the “Standard Oil” by way of - relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with - thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident. A - lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no opinions, - except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was better than - these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And who were the - bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men followed him now - or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman like the murderer, - Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care for him, Aidee. They - liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew of no one person in - Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was a collection of the - half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated, the drunken with a - little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches, and a percentage of - socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch plaids. What - dedication was there in any of them? - </p> - <p> - What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is - genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was - one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One - could not deny that. - </p> - <p> - Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success, when - he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day in - Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on the - edge of his claim—which was paying at that time—and felt the - same mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis. - </p> - <p> - Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning - stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why at - other times their voices were effortless and sweet. - </p> - <p> - On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss of - Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was final, - and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest percentage - of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move men had come, - and brought with it the longing to move them to certain ends, and he had - thought: - </p> - <p> - “All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is - afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but - neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of the - other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the solitary - issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my message.” - Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and had faith. - </p> - <p> - Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith and - doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them - bacteria. They passed from man to man—they floated in the air—one - caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera—they - were apt to be epidemic. - </p> - <p> - And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them disease. - The one we must have, the other we must be rid of. - </p> - <p> - So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out - gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown by - the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street car, a - headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent people - were talking of the Wood murder—some gabbling about it like Mrs. - Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated - me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!” - </p> - <p> - The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his - life—harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in - the street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door, - and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the - house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an hour he - took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson drawing-room. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VII—THE THIRD LAMP - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HILE Aidee was - looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, the Tillotson - coterie were discussing the Wood murder. - </p> - <p> - “Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will put - it in music, the schema thus—The wronged cry for justice! They rise! - Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! Allegro-mezzoforte!” - </p> - <p> - And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs. - Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.” - </p> - <p> - And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying - sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring - herself either to countenance crime. - </p> - <p> - “This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist to - Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People will ask - our position.” - </p> - <p> - Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about - Wood and Hicks, really?” - </p> - <p> - “My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked. - </p> - <p> - “Scrumptious!” said Alberta. - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Tillotson hesitated. - </p> - <p> - “I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.” - </p> - <p> - It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the - throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to - Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, a reference furnished her by Berry. - </p> - <p> - “Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.” - </p> - <p> - Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider. - </p> - <p> - “Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't - countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.” - </p> - <p> - “Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the - breach of necessary laws.” - </p> - <p> - “Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself. - “But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by - nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, and - not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of - technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An - unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent - crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, - inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.” - </p> - <p> - “G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks——” - </p> - <p> - “Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed and - smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.” - </p> - <p> - “G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this - keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to be - erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here than - he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, whose - knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless as - possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson scared - him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, and he - knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson posed, that - Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive pocket, and - finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were rather good. - </p> - <p> - The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and - Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried: - </p> - <p> - “Camilla Champney! She's coming in!” - </p> - <p> - While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent and - familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, and - then nearly a year before. - </p> - <p> - When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing - eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling - interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. Tillotson - appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of rituals; they - tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he said, in the - place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who substituted - ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence followed - anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, therefore - peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought Mrs. Tillotson - might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted his scorn. Mrs. - Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his scorn. - </p> - <p> - Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted and - Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large houses - and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin Street. The - crowds increased as they drew nearer the business section—late - afternoon crowds hurrying home. - </p> - <p> - “I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said - stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's - your gift.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla was radiant for a moment. - </p> - <p> - “It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr. - Hennion was right.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be men's - conventions.” - </p> - <p> - “Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.” - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He <i>couldn't!</i>” She was radiant - again. - </p> - <p> - “Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs. - Tillotson's drawing-room.” - </p> - <p> - “But I like Alberta!” - </p> - <p> - She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood. - </p> - <p> - The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left - through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred - windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet - young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked into - its black secrecy. - </p> - <p> - “Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't - matter, and besides—I don't know how to ask you—but there's - something I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about - 'The Inner Republic'!” - </p> - <p> - She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now. - </p> - <p> - “I thought it was different—from the other books—that is—I - thought there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.” - </p> - <p> - “The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?” - </p> - <p> - “Not more, but besides.” - </p> - <p> - “And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man ought - not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he ought to - add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask for are - extensive.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently. - </p> - <p> - They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a few - saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden and specked - vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, weed-grown, and - unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between the Lower Bank - Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent once builded - their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither they had - capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of Bank Street - and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great red-brick ward - schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was surrounded with a - rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy trees were putting forth - pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a steepleless church thrust - out its apse toward the same empty space. - </p> - <p> - Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted as - unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in asking for - explanatory notes. - </p> - <p> - A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse - began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman at - the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some - quarrelling children. - </p> - <p> - Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the - rebuff. - </p> - <p> - “I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me—because - you seemed to know, to understand about one's life—because I - thought,—you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't - mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence - with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless - space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above, - “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and - pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence - to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties - of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the - songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the - same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about - the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens - every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into - smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the - earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly. - </p> - <p> - Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her. - </p> - <p> - “I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. - Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.” - </p> - <p> - “I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if she - thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to - believe. And perhaps she would understand.” - </p> - <p> - “Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you - understand? This is what I mean.” - </p> - <p> - “But you do understand now!” said Camilla. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood - murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder - would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You - asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. - Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like two - rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty years, - and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I dragged him out - of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. Then he left me - and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead or alive. He was a - thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man than I in several ways, - and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore me in two. - </p> - <p> - “I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been a - schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and miner. - Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a dray horse - all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. Sometimes I've - had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about those explanatory - notes? Do you think they would help you any? The reviews say my book is - morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's hysteric.” - </p> - <p> - “I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank - admiration. - </p> - <p> - The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying - softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty - unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and - folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps and - grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street grew - noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the fence and - looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them. - </p> - <p> - “Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come - you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the - genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me to be - happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a schoolhouse - where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every day. Tell me - your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old disease. Old! - Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in the spring, or - because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it is impossible - not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till we've outdreamed the - wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are wonderful. The hope of - the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a debt. I owe it to tell you - whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered and foolish as you like.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla laughed happily. - </p> - <p> - “Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what you - think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.” - </p> - <p> - He glowered a little. - </p> - <p> - “Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I think a - man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like thievery - of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like Wood were - disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I suppose Hicks - is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him in the disguise of - a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is illegal killing. - They'll probably put him to death, and that will be legal killing. They'll - think their motive is good. The motives of the two killings are not so - different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I think no man has a right - to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't care for the laws. I'd as - lief break them as not. They are codified habits, some of them bad habits. - Half the laws are crimes against better laws. You can break all the Ten - Commandments with perfect legality. The laws allow you to kill and steal - under prescribed conditions. Wood stole, and Hicks killed, and most men - lie, though only now and then illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. - Taking life that doesn't belong to you is worse than taking money that - doesn't belong to you, because it's the breach of a better ownership. But - Hicks' motive seems better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and - breadth of sin? Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in - jail, because I felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as - to the rights of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks - is probably no less so. Wood was a likeable——” - </p> - <p> - “The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt politician - class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the classification - hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? I'm not a - systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks confidently - about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that he never saw - them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they would look - apart.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or, - “confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance - of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him—a man new, at - least, and original—conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before - her, and held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the - statesmen, poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read - about. Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long - morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for any - deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was - conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks - to flying signals of excitement. - </p> - <p> - Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness - soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and - lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney! - </p> - <p> - “The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have - been a lyric poet.” - </p> - <p> - He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose - and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a - laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a - bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the - surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked - up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street. - </p> - <p> - “No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've - forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but - she always thrashes him.” - </p> - <p> - “How dreadful!” - </p> - <p> - “Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of - things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can - do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to - admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone - conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and - benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's - drawing-room.” - </p> - <p> - “He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested in - marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things found - not altogether worshipful—egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, - weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond - most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in getting - the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man walking - beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, restless - eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the moment met - them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother whom he was - describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than doubtfully. But - Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both - were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the - more beautiful for the other. - </p> - <p> - The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age - of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, - into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland - Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone - has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent - anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window and kissed us at - night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation as ever came to - Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a balloon, and was - iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person then. - </p> - <p> - Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every - book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in the - grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed to reason - so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and longing - petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes spoke - humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it seemed to - her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship carrying a - mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and impressions - of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with the - restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed - that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish - children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in - the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia. - </p> - <p> - Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German - and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street - seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, - cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail - of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges. - </p> - <p> - “Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked. - </p> - <p> - “I love it.” - </p> - <p> - “Reason enough for its cheerfulness.” - </p> - <p> - “I've loved it for ages.” - </p> - <p> - “But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee. - </p> - <p> - “You needn't insist on it.” - </p> - <p> - “Not if I think it important?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, never at all!” - </p> - <p> - “But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.” - </p> - <p> - “Better owe it than pay it in small coin.” - </p> - <p> - “Then I offer a promissory note.” - </p> - <p> - “You mean—you will tell me more about——” Camilla paused - and dropped her voice. - </p> - <p> - “Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.” - </p> - <p> - It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in the - springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, and - small tinklings of wit are thought poetical. - </p> - <p> - Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The - paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood - idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to - Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him. - </p> - <p> - “Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.” - </p> - <p> - “'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully. - </p> - <p> - “Can't help it.” - </p> - <p> - Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed. - </p> - <p> - “I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.” - </p> - <p> - He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the - Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions. - </p> - <p> - “What is it, Dick? What have you done?” - </p> - <p> - Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder with - his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we forget - about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla went - up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the gangs of - workmen. - </p> - <p> - “You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm - not quite clear how you were right, but you were.” - </p> - <p> - “Right about the whole business?” - </p> - <p> - “No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm adopting - your scruples.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on. - </p> - <p> - “Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a - sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh. “I'm - a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. Would it - be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.” - </p> - <p> - “Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.” - </p> - <p> - “Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?” implying - that he knew what the paragraphs would be. - </p> - <p> - “Never saw him that I know of.” - </p> - <p> - “Well—I don't see where you're concerned.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what Aidee - meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity of - dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself - liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious - scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were - not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else. - </p> - <p> - Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the - bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within him - had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the disease, - but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about the place. - Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their open window. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VIII—MECHANICS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION came back - from seeing Wood laid away (where other men were lying, who had been - spoken of in their day, whom Port Argent had forgotten or was in process - of forgetting) and saw the last bricks laid and rammed on Lower Bank - Street. There was satisfaction in the pavement of Lower Bank Street, in - knowing what was in it and why. The qualities of sand, crushed stone, and - paving brick were the same yesterday and to-day. Each brick was three - inches and three-eighths thick, and not one would be ambitious of four - inches to-morrow. If it were broken, and thrown away, there would be no - altruistic compunctions. One built effectively with such things. - </p> - <p> - Charlie Carroll whispered to Hennion as they came out of the cemetery: - </p> - <p> - “It's all right. The boys are satisfied.” - </p> - <p> - “Why are they?” - </p> - <p> - “They'd be scared not to do what Wood said now. It wouldn't go down.” - </p> - <p> - “Go down where?” - </p> - <p> - “Well, they seem to like the idea too. They will have it.” - </p> - <p> - But why should he be congratulated over a prospective invitation from “the - boys” to labour in their interests? He was not sure why he had not already - refused, by what subconscious motive or scruple. Properly there should be - scruples about accepting. The leadership of the organisation was an - unsalaried position, with vague perquisites. Wood had taken honorariums - and contributions, spent what he chose on the organisation, and kept what - he chose. Apparently he had not kept much, if any. He had seemed to care - only for influence. He had liked the game. He had left only a small - estate. But whether he had kept or passed it on, the money was called - unclean. - </p> - <p> - If one went into politics to effect something—and Hennion could not - imagine why one went into anything otherwise—the leadership of the - organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of - chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain - subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the - subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the - chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that were - needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be dynamics and - mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism it seemed - oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any machine, - turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. Still these sets - and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like an interesting problem - in engineering, that had been met rather experimentally. As mechanics, it - seemed to be all in an experimental stage. Hennion wondered if there were - any text-books on the subject, and then pulled himself up with a protest. - </p> - <p> - What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer - and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be sure, - but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's time - politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly a class - of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and mechanic laws, - they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it seemed to succeed - by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense. - </p> - <p> - Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as - important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of - the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces. - </p> - <p> - The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had - thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney. - </p> - <p> - Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions - for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more of - its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. Those - who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less about the - matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called him corrupt, - which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, the chartered - machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation to suit those who - furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity of Port Argent had - always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a complicated motive, half - private, hardly confessed. - </p> - <p> - Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, and - noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were - gathering their tools. - </p> - <p> - “All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on the - east side next.” - </p> - <p> - Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding - their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and it - occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men like - Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him. - </p> - <p> - He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the - policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer - specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an - eccentric. - </p> - <p> - Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no - conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a - runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way of - incident. “Everything goes,” was the phrase there, meaning it is accepted - and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it. - </p> - <p> - Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room in <i>The Press</i> - building. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him a - machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men to - drive it—what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the - enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the - mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances and - hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type to run - that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and what “the - boys” wanted, why, they wanted <i>their</i> “jobs,” like everybody else. - Hennion wanted his own. - </p> - <p> - Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that moment, - and nearly ran into him. - </p> - <p> - “Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night.” - </p> - <p> - “I don't want it.” - </p> - <p> - “Come off! You can't help it.” - </p> - <p> - Carroll flitted away in the direction of <i>The Press</i> building. - </p> - <p> - Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in - sleep all the great issues of their day. - </p> - <p> - Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly - called “The Versailles,” and came out in the street. It was too early to - see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street - presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across the - street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the - Fourth Ward, church and state—Father Harra and Frei-burger. - </p> - <p> - Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be - chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense - of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over - the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father - than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple - now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The - elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the - bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, and for the symbol of his - father's life and his own hope in the working world. He liked to stand on - it, to feel it beneath and around him, knowing what each steel girder - meant, and what in figures was the strength of its grip and pull. There - was no emotional human nature in it, no need of compromise. Steel was - steel, and stone stone, and not a bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice - or private folly. In a certain way he seemed to find his father there, and - to be able to go over with him their old vivid talks. - </p> - <p> - The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, shattered - fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in his ear: “Got - a light?” - </p> - <p> - Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, - there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, - creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown - child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the - other. - </p> - <p> - “Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd float - all right if you fell into the river.” - </p> - <p> - “Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.” - </p> - <p> - He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with the - pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the basket - girl. “Hi!” - </p> - <p> - The child stopped and looked at him. - </p> - <p> - “I gets one end. Tha'sh right.” - </p> - <p> - She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away - over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them. - Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song. - </p> - <p> - A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping - creatures like the basket girl! - </p> - <p> - Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The - west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a - moving line of lit windows. - </p> - <p> - Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and - solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The - west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran as - accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of - smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the - people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had—but mixed ideas - of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the - westbound train would have been a silly affair. - </p> - <p> - Hennion came from the bridge and down Bank Street, which was brilliant - with lights. He turned up an outrunning street and came out on the square, - where stood Port Argent's city hall and court house and jail, where there - was a fountain that sometimes ran, and beds of trimmed foliage plants - arranged in misguided colour-designs. - </p> - <p> - Several lights were burning in the barred windows of the old jail. He - stopped and looked at the lights, and wondered what varieties of human - beings were there. The jail was another structure which would have been - futile without people to go in, at least to dislike going in. The man who - shot Wood was there. Why did he shoot Wood? What was his futile idea in - that? - </p> - <p> - The jail was old and dilapidated. Some of the bricks had crumbled under - the barred windows. - </p> - <p> - Hennion walked into the entrance, and rang the bell. - </p> - <p> - The jailor was middle-aged, bearded, and smoking a short pipe. - </p> - <p> - “Can I see Hicks, Sweeney?” - </p> - <p> - “Got a permit? Oh! Mr. Hennion! Well, it ain't regular, you know.” - </p> - <p> - “You can stay by.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, all right. No, but I'll have to lock you in. It's the rules.” - </p> - <p> - They went up a flight of dark stairs, through a corridor, where a watchman - passed them. They stopped at a door, and the jailor turned the key. - </p> - <p> - “Hicks, gentleman to see you.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IX—HICKS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ICKS was sitting - within by a plain board table, reading. It was a whitewashed room and had - a window with rusted bars. The door banged, and the key again creaked in - the lock. The jailor walked to and fro in the corridor. - </p> - <p> - Hicks looked up from his reading, and stared in a half-comprehending way. - </p> - <p> - “I have a selfish thirst for knowledge, Mr. Hicks,” said Hennion. - </p> - <p> - He took the chair on the opposite side, and looked at the book on the - table. The feeble gas jet stood some six inches out from the wall, - directly over the table. - </p> - <p> - “It's the Bible,” said the other. “It needs to be made modern, but there's - knowledge in it.” - </p> - <p> - “I didn't mean that.” - </p> - <p> - “Lazarus and Dives. That's fanciful justice. A trick to pacify Lazarus. - But there's knowledge. Notice what the dogs did. That's satire.” - </p> - <p> - It seemed a trifle uncanny, the place, the little man with the absorbed - manner, metallic voice and strange language, black hair and beard, intent - black eyes. Hennion had never interviewed a criminal before. - </p> - <p> - “I'm not a reporter, Mr. Hicks, nor a lawyer.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks marked his place and closed the book. - </p> - <p> - “I know who you are.” - </p> - <p> - “I was a friend of Wood's, in a way, but I'm not here in malice. I - gathered you hadn't anything personal against him. It seemed to follow you - had some sort of a long-range motive in it. I wanted to ask you why you - shot Wood.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' gaze grew slowly in intentness as if his mind were gathering behind - it, concentrating its power on one point. The point seemed to be midway - between and above Hennion's eyes. Hennion had an impulse to put his hand - to the spot, as if it were burnt, but his habit of impassiveness - prevented. He thought the gaze might represent the way in which Hicks' - mind worked. A focussing mind was a good thing for anyone who worked with - his brains, but it might have extravagances. An analysis concentrated and - confined to an infinitely small point in the centre of the forehead might - make an infinitely small hole to the back of the head, but it would not - comprehend a whole character. A man's character ran to the ends of his - hands and feet. - </p> - <p> - “I'm an engineer,” Hennion went on, “and in that way I have to know the - effectiveness of things I handle and apply. And in that way men too are to - me so much effectiveness.” - </p> - <p> - “I know about you,” said Hicks sharply. “Your men like you. You've never - had a strike.” - </p> - <p> - “Why—no.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' manner had changed. It was quick, excited, and angular. - </p> - <p> - “You're wrong. They're something more to you, that you didn't count in. - Why do they like you?” - </p> - <p> - “I don't know.” - </p> - <p> - “Exactly. But it's something effective, ain't it?” - </p> - <p> - Hennion paused and felt confused. A man of such sharp analysis and warped - performance as this, how was one to get to understand him? He leaned back - in his chair and crossed his knees. The sharp analysis might be a trick - Hicks had caught from listening to Aidee's speeches. It sounded like - Aidee. - </p> - <p> - “Well, anyhow, Mr. Hicks, in the way of effectiveness, why did you shoot - Wood?” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' eyes were little pin-points of concentration. - </p> - <p> - “He sold the people to the corporations.” - </p> - <p> - “Well. But suppose he did. Will the next man do any better? If not, - where's the effectiveness?” - </p> - <p> - “He won't be so sharp.” - </p> - <p> - “You thought Wood was too sharp to be downed Aidee's way?” - </p> - <p> - “He was the devil's latest scheme. I sent him to the devil.” - </p> - <p> - “And shoulder the consequences. I like that. But the next man. Suppose I - were the next man.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They were - thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said softly: - </p> - <p> - “Look out what you do.” - </p> - <p> - “What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I - ask some of you?” - </p> - <p> - Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something - unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain, - unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and - sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did not - feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by thinking - Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, and would - probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks was that he - was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense convictions and - repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his purpose fixed on would - become a white-hot point, blinding him to circumstances. And this - focussing nature, which acted like a lens to contract general heat into a - point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in dynamics. It seemed a - characteristic of better service for starting a fire, and furnishing the - first impulse of a social movement, than for running steady machinery. - Some people claimed that society was running down and needed a new - impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, the trouble with Hicks - might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at the wrong time, a fire that - had to be put out. - </p> - <p> - “You ask me!” - </p> - <p> - “Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and - satisfy you?” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find the - centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the attempt - to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was to break up - the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails scratching - across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose. - </p> - <p> - “I beg your pardon.” - </p> - <p> - “You ask me!” - </p> - <p> - “Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of - order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it - expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock. - But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about - it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea was. I - told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the circumstances, I - beg your pardon.” - </p> - <p> - “Why do you ask me?” Hicks' fingers shook on the table. “There's a man who - can tell you. He can lead you. He led me, when I wasn't a fool.” - </p> - <p> - “Who? You mean Aidee?” - </p> - <p> - Hicks nodded, and fell to glowering at his nervous fingers, absent and - brooding. - </p> - <p> - “He didn't tell you to shoot Wood. I know better than that.” - </p> - <p> - “No, he didn't.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, there's another thing I'd like to know. What did Aidee do?” - </p> - <p> - “Do! He held me back! He was always holding me back! I couldn't stand it!” - he cried sharply, and a flash of anger and impatience went over his face. - “He shouldered me like a log of wood on his back. Maybe I liked that - papoose arrangement, with a smothered damn fire in the heart of me. No, I - didn't! I had to break loose or turn charcoal.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion wondered. The man reminded him of Aidee, the same vivid phrase, - the figures of speech. But Aidee had said that he did not know him. It - appeared that he must know him. If Aidee had been lying about it, that - opened sinister suggestions. Hennion did not like Aidee, neither did he - like in himself this furtive sense of satisfaction in the suggestions. - </p> - <p> - “Aidee told me he didn't know you. I hadn't thought he would lie about - it.” - </p> - <p> - “By God, don't call him a liar to me!” Hicks jumped to his feet, and had - his wooden chair swung over his back in an instant. - </p> - <p> - “I don't. I want it explained,” Hennion said coolly. “You can't do - anything with that. Sit down.” - </p> - <p> - “He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds, - cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!” - </p> - <p> - “Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an - explanation.” - </p> - <p> - “Don't you call him a liar!” - </p> - <p> - “Haven't. Sit down.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were narrowed, - glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put his hands - into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas jet, and the - ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. They - were wild, disordered, and fugitive, as if reflections from the spirit - behind Hicks' eyes, instead of from the jet at the end of a lead pipe. - </p> - <p> - “I'll help you out with a suggestion,” Hennion said slowly. “You don't - mean to leave Aidee in that shape, since you feel about him in this way. - But you don't know whether your story would go down with me, or whether it - might not get Aidee into trouble. Now, if I'm forecasting that story, it's - something like this. You knew each other years ago, not in Port Argent.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks said nothing. - </p> - <p> - “Carried you around papoose-fashion, did he? But there's some likeness - between you. It might happen to be a family likeness.” Still no comment. - </p> - <p> - “If it so happened, you might be related. You might be twins. And then - again you might not. You might have been his first convert. Partners maybe - in Nevada. That: was where he came from,—silver mines and what not. - It's no business of mine.” - </p> - <p> - He paused and meditated, looking at the pulsating light; then brought his - chair down and leaned forward. - </p> - <p> - “I take the liberty to disagree with you. I'm no exception to the run of - men, and I'm neither a hound, nor a coward, nor a thief, nor yet a liar.” - </p> - <p> - “I know you're not.” - </p> - <p> - “However, your story, or Aidee's, is no business of mine. I gave you those - inferences because they occurred to me. Naturally you'd suspect they - would. So they do. Gabbling them abroad might make some trouble for Aidee, - that's true. I shan't gabble them.” - </p> - <p> - “I know you won't.” - </p> - <p> - “I wanted your point of view in shooting Wood. If you don't see your way - to give it, all right. I judge it was the same way you were going to club - me with a chair. Simple enough and rather silly. Goodnight, then. Is there - anything I can do for you?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion leaned back and studied the gaslight, and disliked himself. Hicks - clasped and unclasped his hands on the table. - </p> - <p> - “It won't hurt him,” he said hoarsely, “between you and me. Besides, you - can do that for me. He's my brother, old Al. But I cut away from him. I - kept off. I kept away from him for a while, but I couldn't live without - seeing him. You see? I couldn't do it. Then he came here, and I followed - him, and I lived with a shoemaker across the river and cobbled shoes. But - I heard every speech he made in Port Argent, though he never saw me. He - thinks I'm dead, don't he? I dodged him pretty slick.” He flushed and - smiled—“I liked it,” he whispered, growing excited. “It was better'n - the old way, for we got along all right this way. You've heard of him! - Ain't he wonderful? Ain't he a great one, hey? That was Al. I liked it, - but he didn't know. You see? How'd he know when he thought I was dead, - didn't he? I watched him, old Al!” - </p> - <p> - His face was lit up with the warm memory of it. He clicked his teeth, and - swayed to and fro, smiling. - </p> - <p> - “We got along all right this way. All right. My idea. Wasn't Al's. I kept - the other side the river, mostly. Nobody can touch him when he's fired up, - can they? They didn't know Al like I knew him. They called him the - Preacher. He scared 'em like prairie fire. He's got his way. I've heard - him. I watched 'em, and I knew him, but they didn't, did they?” - </p> - <p> - He focussed his excited eyes suddenly on Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “You! I know you; I know your men that live on the east side. I heard a - man say you'd got a heart like a baked potato and don't know it. That - fat-headed foreman of yours, Kennedy, he can tell you more 'n you ever - thought of. Think you're a composite of steel and brick, set up according - to laws of mechanics, don't you? Oh, hell! Go and ask Al. He's a wonder. - Why do your men like you? Go and ask 'em. I've told you why. Why'd I shoot - Wood? Al wouldn't have let me, but it 'll do good. He scares 'em his way, - I scare 'em mine. You wait and see! It 'll do good.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion studied the gas jet, until he could see nothing but an isolated - impish dancing flame, until it seemed as if either the little man across - the table were chattering far away in the distance and darkness, or else - he and the gas jet were one and the same. - </p> - <p> - Aidee had been four years in Port Argent, and so Hicks had been following - and watching him, cobbling shoes, living a fanciful, excited life, - maniacal more or less. Hennion fancied that he had Hicks' point of view - now. - </p> - <p> - “You wait and see! It'll do good.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Hennion, “I dare say you've answered the question. You - haven't told me yet what I can do for you.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks' excitement died out as suddenly as it had risen. He reached a - trembling hand across the table, and whispered: - </p> - <p> - “I thought—— What do you think they'll do to me?” - </p> - <p> - “I can't help you there. You'll have counsel.” - </p> - <p> - “No, no! It's this. I thought I'd write a letter to Al, and you'd give it - to him afterwards, a year afterwards—supposing—you see?” - </p> - <p> - He hesitated pitifully. - </p> - <p> - “All right, I'll do that.” - </p> - <p> - “I won't write it now.” - </p> - <p> - “I see.” - </p> - <p> - “You'll keep it still? You won't tell? You won't get a grudge against Al? - If you do! No. I know about you. You won't tell.” - </p> - <p> - “No, I won't. Well, good-night, then.” - </p> - <p> - “Good-night.” - </p> - <p> - His voice was husky and weak now. He put out his hand, hesitating. Hennion - took it promptly. It felt like a wet, withered leaf. - </p> - <p> - Hennion went and knocked at the door, which Sweeney opened. Hicks sat - still by the table, looking down, straggling locks of his black hair - plastered wet against his white forehead, his finger nails scratching the - boards. - </p> - <p> - The door clanged to, and the noise echoed in the corridor. - </p> - <p> - “I heerd him gettin' some excited,” said the jailor. - </p> - <p> - “Some.” - </p> - <p> - “Think he's crazy?” - </p> - <p> - “That's for the court to say.” - </p> - <p> - “Ain't crazier'n this old jail. I need a new one bad, Mr. Hennion. Look at - them windows! I seen mighty clever boys here. A sharp one could dig out - here some night, if he had the tools.” - </p> - <p> - “Then you'd better not suggest it to Hicks.” - </p> - <p> - “Ho! He ain't thinkin' of it. He's a weakly man.” - </p> - <p> - “No, probably not.” - </p> - <p> - “He ain't got the tools, either. I know the business. Look at the - experience I've had! But I need a new jail, Mr. Hennion, bad, as I told - Mr. Wood.” - </p> - <p> - “Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for - your trouble.” - </p> - <p> - The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke - away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe. - </p> - <p> - He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry - Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark - sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent. - </p> - <p> - “Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?” Champney asked. - </p> - <p> - “Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to think - it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had a - crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; so - he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION knew Wood's - organisation intimately enough. He had been a part of it on the outside. - Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” a body that had total - charge of the party's municipal campaigns, including admission to - caucuses, and local charge in its general campaigns. Local nominations - were decided there. It was only less active between elections than during - them. It had an inner ring which met by habit, socially, in Wood's office. - Whatever was decided in Wood's office, it was understood, would pass the - Committee, and whatever passed the Committee would pass the City Council, - and be welcomed by a mayor who had been socially at the birth of the said - measure. Port Argent was a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better - ring than ordinary. Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to - something peculiar in Wood. - </p> - <p> - Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in his - office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. Carroll - was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long neck and - close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by profession; - Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, devoid of - grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some reason unmatched - in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, saloon-keeper from East - Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, plastered, and - gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, small, thin, dry, - of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent speech, a lawyer, - supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay Tuttle, President of - the School Board, white-moustached and pompous. - </p> - <p> - Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers who - suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s. - Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew - them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of them - held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and personal - interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They varied - discussion with anecdotes of Wood. - </p> - <p> - Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans - and estimates of competing architects. - </p> - <p> - “Any preference, Major?” asked Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “I have given it some consideration,” said the Major puffily, and stated - considerations. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” Hennion suggested, “why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon, - and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up.” - </p> - <p> - The circle laughed and nodded. - </p> - <p> - The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new - bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. Tait read - a document signed “Wm. R. Macclesfield, President.” Hennion suggested that - they offer a counter-proposition. - </p> - <p> - “We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him expect - his right of way for a gift?” - </p> - <p> - “You know what they chipped in this spring?” said Tait, looking up. - </p> - <p> - “Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?” He turned to - Ranald Cam. - </p> - <p> - “Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet,” growled Cam, - “for all they gas about it.” Tait was silent. The others disputed at - length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy influence - of the “old man” was still so strong in the circle that no one ventured to - put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. They only - disputed points of fact. - </p> - <p> - “He kept things solid,” said Carroll, “that's the point.” - </p> - <p> - “I should say Macclesfield would have to come up,” said Hennion at last. - “I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week.” - </p> - <p> - When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest. - Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together. - </p> - <p> - “I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait,” said Beckett. “Suit me all - right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's - rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to - rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?” - Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood. - </p> - <p> - “Possibly, possibly,” said the Major. - </p> - <p> - Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him. - Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward them. - They did not like Tait. - </p> - <p> - “Want to go over there with me, Hennion?” said Tait, puffing his black - cigar rather fast. “See Macclesfield?” - </p> - <p> - “Not that I know of.” - </p> - <p> - “Suppose I bring him over here?” Hennion stared at the top of his desk for - a full moment. “All right. Come in an hour.” - </p> - <p> - Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring. - </p> - <p> - William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal - courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal - courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at first - knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long after. - Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview which here - dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as well unmade. - Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it. - </p> - <p> - “Should I congratulate or commiserate?” said Macclesfield, smiling and - shaking hands. - </p> - <p> - “Commiserate, thank you.” - </p> - <p> - Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great - judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, man. - I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your father - and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his profession. - Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, too, we young - men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. Port Argent has - grown. There have been remarkable developments in politics and - engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a manager in the - background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is needed, but it's a - peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were Wood's choice, and he - was a very judicious man. You find it takes time and labour. Yes, and it - calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some people seem to think one - in that position ought not to get anything for his trouble. I call that - absurd. I always found in railroading that time, labour, and ability had - to be paid for. By the way, you learned engineering from your father, I - think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was thinking coming over the street - just now with Tait—I was thinking what fine things he did in his - profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. Remarkable. And yet engineering - was almost in its infancy then.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” said Hennion, “the changes would have interested him.” - </p> - <p> - “Indeed they would! So—the fact is—I was thinking that, if you - cared to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that - bridge of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son - can do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in - business.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in the - young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him. - </p> - <p> - “I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment - needs any forgiveness from me?” - </p> - <p> - “My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?” - </p> - <p> - “If you continue to want them.” - </p> - <p> - “Good! Now—oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think - the figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a - little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the - feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how - much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering - the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be moderate?” - </p> - <p> - “Moderate in its generosity.” - </p> - <p> - “Ah—I don't know—I was thinking that we understood each other—that - is—the situation.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion swung in his chair. - </p> - <p> - “I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and I was - wondering what my father would have said about the situation. Wouldn't he - have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and the - representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two - transactions that had better not be mixed?” - </p> - <p> - “My dear boy, who's mixing them?” - </p> - <p> - “Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme. - Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford - to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there. - You'll have to come in by a subway.” - </p> - <p> - Macclesfield shook his head smilingly. - </p> - <p> - “We can't afford that, you see.” - </p> - <p> - “Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect - to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, well—isn't this a little inquisitorial?” - </p> - <p> - “Not necessary, anyway. I know, about.” - </p> - <p> - He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised. - </p> - <p> - Hennion went on slowly: - </p> - <p> - “The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at all. - You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. There'll - be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well suspect it - now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose.” - </p> - <p> - Macclesfield said nothing. - </p> - <p> - “I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like.” - </p> - <p> - “By all means!” - </p> - <p> - “I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down, - below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't know - the holdings down there I'll give them to you.” - </p> - <p> - He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed figures, - following the suggested line from point to point, massed the figures of - the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and went on. - </p> - <p> - “The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some - trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll save - about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably more. - You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the P. and N. - By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple Street - you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to develop - your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable there, - probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the Boulevard, if - the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have a better curve, - same connection with the P. and N., and this one here with the L. and S. - You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. Here you get your site - in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, we'll take your approach on - the east side.” More details massed and ordered. Macclesfield listened - intently. Tait half closed his eyes and swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion - concluded and paused a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to this—first, - if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me with anything.” - </p> - <p> - “If I seemed to attempt it,” said Macclesfield, “I owe you an apology for - my awkwardness.” - </p> - <p> - “None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings this - side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I can make - it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new bridge can - now be very properly withdrawn.” - </p> - <p> - Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully. - </p> - <p> - “I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the subject - very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a report.” - </p> - <p> - “All right.” - </p> - <p> - “And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I—don't, in - fact, withdraw it.” - </p> - <p> - He rose and shook hands with Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I - sometimes have them.” - </p> - <p> - “Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man—for - God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.” - </p> - <p> - “Is he going to bite or build?” - </p> - <p> - “Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man—a—that won't - lose his temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!” - </p> - <p> - Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, to wonder - what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. Macclesfield, - who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery man, a little - fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. Perhaps that - was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he had left Hennion - with a sense of having done him an injustice. - </p> - <p> - He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then pushed - aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to East Argent - and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before he had gone - far he changed his mind. - </p> - <p> - The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. It might - be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without watching; it - would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced for blundering with - his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around acting like a desolate - orphan about it. - </p> - <p> - He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there paced - the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through some miles - of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and warm in the - distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a street that had - been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of the city to tempt - inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them at wide intervals. - The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of built-up streets about - them. He followed the line of the Boulevard surveys, absorbed, often - stopping and making notes. He came through a stretch of cornfield and - pasture. If the city bought it in here before it began to develop the - section, it would be shrewd investment. The marshes would be crossed by an - embankment. - </p> - <p> - A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the - wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch of - three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some years - back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to small - boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted through - between banks of slippery clay. - </p> - <p> - The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It - was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the - city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the - south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape - gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was - brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the - bottom lands and in the brush. - </p> - <p> - To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be - shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to - accomplish something worth while, to make a name—it looked like a - weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, - after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get - ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be - blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway. - </p> - <p> - Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent - after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, - Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The - rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. - Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the - subject. - </p> - <p> - Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A - wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road - and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted - regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic - commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a - fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic - capers. - </p> - <p> - Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy - neighbourhood—factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with - refuse—and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by - Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its - lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with - cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river - bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday - afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for - picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard - drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a - band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and - several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port - Argent on a Sunday afternoon. - </p> - <p> - The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious - jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks - and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current - here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on - either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores. - </p> - <p> - He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it - were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know - almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent. - But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an - impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most - faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park. - </p> - <p> - Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. - Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple Street. - They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the rest of the - flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men getting on the - trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! He knew them too. - One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine Street, east side; - the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another time one of a batch - of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped John Murphy to get jobs - for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays lived in a house on - Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, who shot Wood, used to - live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer named Wilson. Names of - Kottar's children, remembered to have once been so stated by Kottar, Nina, - Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and Elizabeth. One appeared to - remember things useful, like the price per gross of three-inch screws at - present quoting, as well as things useless, like the price three years - ago. Hennion thought such an inveterate memory a nuisance. - </p> - <p> - Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in - Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its - people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or - worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields—all - people, and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in. - </p> - <p> - He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over - the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the - whole section but a few generations back. - </p> - <p> - “Mighty good luck to be young, Dick,” the “Governor” had said, and died, - calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times - he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done. - </p> - <p> - Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He - caught a car and went back to the centre of the town. - </p> - <p> - When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was - there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about - to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he did - not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading Charlie - Carroll's sinister paragraphs on “a certain admired instigator of crime.” - She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone. - </p> - <p> - “He says he doesn't care about it,” she cried, “but I do!” - </p> - <p> - “Do you? Why?” - </p> - <p> - “Why!” - </p> - <p> - Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether to - say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about them. - </p> - <p> - “Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever - bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics. - Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to take - it.” - </p> - <p> - “It's wicked!” cried Camilla passionately. - </p> - <p> - Hennion laughed. - </p> - <p> - “Well—he needn't have called Wood names—that's true.” - </p> - <p> - “If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!” - </p> - <p> - “'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity - they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they - can't.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him. - </p> - <p> - “My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor - Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says. - Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of it? - I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing - visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going to - do anything in particular?” - </p> - <p> - “He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks.” - </p> - <p> - “What!” - </p> - <p> - “To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that - nobody else will,” cried Camilla breathlessly, “and of course you'll say - he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will - talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs.” - </p> - <p> - “You go too fast for me.” He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much that - he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He was not - quite clear why he disliked him at all. - </p> - <p> - It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of the - grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's - situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be - confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more - comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations. - </p> - <p> - He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine with - excitement,—but he did not seem to succeed,—over the subject - of a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a - lady's throat. - </p> - <p> - “I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port - Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll - have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. She's - eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it today. It - struck me she needed washing and drying.” - </p> - <p> - True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, “That's - tremendously nice, Dick,” and stared into the fire with absent wistful - eyes. - </p> - <p> - He drew nearer her and spoke lower, “Milly.” - </p> - <p> - “No, no! Don't begin on that!” - </p> - <p> - Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his - disappointment. - </p> - <p> - “Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But I - will, though!” - </p> - <p> - He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up under - the trees at Hicks' barred window. - </p> - <p> - “Aidee's getting a black eye too in there,” he thought. “That's too bad.” - </p> - <p> - When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's - bridge. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XI—THE BROTHERS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>AY I see Hicks?” - </p> - <p> - The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short - pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around - the gas jet over his head. - </p> - <p> - “Ain't you the Preacher?” - </p> - <p> - “So they call me.” - </p> - <p> - The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked into - the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him. - </p> - <p> - “Where is his cell?” - </p> - <p> - “Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word,” said the jailor - thoughtfully. “Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it, so - he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's som'p'n in - it. But I seen in the <i>Press</i> this mornin'—say, you ain't goin' - to instigate him again?” - </p> - <p> - Aidee laughed, and said: - </p> - <p> - “They have to be lively.” - </p> - <p> - “That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their - heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?” - </p> - <p> - “You're a philosopher.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I do a pile of thinkin',” said the jailor complacently. - </p> - <p> - He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked - it. - </p> - <p> - “Hicks, gentleman to see you.” - </p> - <p> - Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes. - </p> - <p> - The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the - end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low - voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated. - </p> - <p> - “Spiritual consolation! That's the word.” - </p> - <p> - Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to - his side and grasped his arm and whispered, “Don't you yell out!” while - Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the - corridor. - </p> - <p> - “What do you come here for? Keep quiet!” - </p> - <p> - “Lolly!” - </p> - <p> - “Who told you it was me?” - </p> - <p> - He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across - and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his - head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs. - </p> - <p> - “Lolly, boy!” - </p> - <p> - “Did he tell you it was me?” - </p> - <p> - “Who?” - </p> - <p> - “Hennion!” - </p> - <p> - “Nobody told me it was you.” - </p> - <p> - “You came to see Hicks!” - </p> - <p> - He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. “Hey! I know! You wanted to ask - me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know.” - </p> - <p> - It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on one - side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of a cornered - animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer smile—Lolly - the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in his small - resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable and clever! They - used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his twisted smile, and - hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin, straggling beard had - changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six years. Alcott thought he - would hardly have recognised him at a little distance. So—why, - Hicks!—Carroll said Hicks used to drink down Alcott's own speeches - like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood! - </p> - <p> - “What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet.” - </p> - <p> - The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a - low, excited voice. - </p> - <p> - “Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard every - speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they do to - me?” he whispered, turning to the window. “I wished I could get out. Say, - Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose I was? Over - the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near spotting me - once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on the east side - with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes to his one. But - sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how Mummy looked, and - I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd you come for? Say, I - cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd never have caught me, if - I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept out of your way all right. I - wasn't going to mess you again, and that suited me all right, that way. I - pegged shoes along with old Shays. Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan. - I'll knife him some day. No! No! I won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I - got something in me that burns me up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em - kill me. God, I was proud of you! I used to go home like dynamite, and - collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's - matter?' says Shays. 'Where is 't?' and goes hunting for justice at the - bottom of a jug of forty-rod whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story, - you and I?” - </p> - <p> - He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid - his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully. The - noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car gongs, came - in through the barred window. - </p> - <p> - “I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been happy - sometimes.” - </p> - <p> - “Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al,” he pleaded, - “don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to - be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've - done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?” - </p> - <p> - “I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man, Wood, - had a right to his life.” - </p> - <p> - “He had <i>no</i> right!” - </p> - <p> - Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air. - </p> - <p> - “Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why didn't - you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going away to - think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled together - again. I've said it, and you can quit talking.” - </p> - <p> - Allen clung to his hand. - </p> - <p> - “You're coming again, Al.” - </p> - <p> - He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that had - always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always - intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott, nor yet - with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever solution—not - with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering control, but - seeing his face and hearing his voice. - </p> - <p> - He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across the - table, and said little. - </p> - <p> - Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image of - the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw Allen - going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky step, - exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's enemies! How he - had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy paragraphs! How he - had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a “disease”! How he had lurked in the - shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How he had pegged shoes and - poured his excitement, in vivid language, into the ears of the east-side - loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back and forth over the Maple Street - bridge, where the drays and trolley cars jangled, where the Muscadine - flowed, muddy and muttering, below! - </p> - <p> - “You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I - wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.” - </p> - <p> - “Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, Al!” - </p> - <p> - “I was always afraid of you.” - </p> - <p> - “What for? You're coming again, Al!” - </p> - <p> - “You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!” - </p> - <p> - “I ain't going to mess you over again! No!” he whispered, twisting his - fingers. - </p> - <p> - Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous fingers. - </p> - <p> - “Drop it, Lolly!” - </p> - <p> - “What you going to do? You're coming again?” His voice was thin and - plaintive. - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - “How soon?” - </p> - <p> - “To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly.” - </p> - <p> - He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly - down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door. - </p> - <p> - “I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks.” - </p> - <p> - Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin. - </p> - <p> - “Pretty cool, ain't he?” said Sweeney presently. “I didn't hear much - noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here—look here, I told Mr. Hennion—why, - you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail.” - </p> - <p> - “I see. Not very creditable.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, no.” Sweeney argued in an injured tone. “Look at it!” - </p> - <p> - “I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, I guess so.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt - cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on - the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die. - </p> - <p> - “Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the - brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and wriggling - fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet. - </p> - <p> - Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before him - days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the long - doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, not to - be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front. - </p> - <p> - The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him - here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help him - here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to hang - Lolly. - </p> - <p> - At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The air - was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and - fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying: - “I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail—I who lied to - you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have but - one brother and one bond of blood,—to you who are my enemies. His - name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.” - </p> - <p> - People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak - so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist - in a stifling room. - </p> - <p> - He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces from - the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture one more - item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the gallery. When - he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the picture. - </p> - <p> - Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets - over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and - walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the - city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk - waggons clattered over the rough pavement. - </p> - <p> - “Poor boy!” - </p> - <p> - Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the - arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he - would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that Allen - was lurking near him. - </p> - <p> - Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often he - must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head blazing - with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, running high - now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not an inch beyond - its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, and if an inch of - water covered it, no man would know. - </p> - <p> - Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which I - tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional, - unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this - muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, and - the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all - interpretations of itself, in course of time. - </p> - <p> - In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one side - of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, on the - other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with shops in - most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. Already - Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy with cars and - hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river factories began to - blow. - </p> - <p> - The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a - street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He - stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, and - bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through the - narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his head on - the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he hardly - noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly. - </p> - <p> - One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, - cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil wells. - </p> - <p> - “Lolly! Lolly!” - </p> - <p> - Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the ideas - that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, iron - beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was justice? - One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a clamour and - cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even balance? There - was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? It was - revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must know that - uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that was justice. - </p> - <p> - Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy - stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must - have him!” - </p> - <p> - All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed - suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go away. It - seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue Assembly, - and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and stone, and the - iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple thing. Their - stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the city. - </p> - <p> - The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove from - without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds - flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights - where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new leaves - were growing. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XII—AIDEE AND CAMILLLA - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LCOTT came back to - the city in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was on Lower Bank Street, - knocking at Henry Champney's door. - </p> - <p> - “Is Miss Camilla Champney in?” - </p> - <p> - The startled maid stared at him and showed him into the library, where - Henry Champney's shelves of massive books covered the lower walls, and - over them hung the portraits of Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams with - solemn, shining foreheads. - </p> - <p> - He walked up and down, twisting his fingers, stopping now and then to - listen for Camilla's steps. She came soon. - </p> - <p> - “I'm so glad you're here! I want to ask——” She stopped, caught - a quick breath, and put her hand to her throat. - </p> - <p> - “What is it?” - </p> - <p> - Alcott's face was white and damp, and his black eyes stared at her. He - stood very still. - </p> - <p> - “What is it?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - “Do I look like that? Do I show what I am, gone blind and mad? Do I look - it? I could only think of this, of you—I must tell someone. There - must be some way. Help me!” He moved about jerkily, talking half - incoherently. “He's been here four years. Allen, you know! If I'd known, I - could have handled him somehow. But—he's—Hicks—he called - himself—Hicks. He killed Wood. I saw him last night, but he's - changed, but—my boy, Lolly! Four years he's been in Port Argent—watching - me! He called himself Hicks. Don't you see, Camilla! It's my boy! Don't - you see! Wait. I'll get buckled down. I can tell you better in a moment.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla leaned back against Henry Champney's big desk, and stared with - wide grey eyes. Alcott walked away breathing heavily, and returned. He sat - down in the desk chair and dropped his head on his arm. - </p> - <p> - “It's your brother!” - </p> - <p> - “I must save him! Don't you understand? No one shall touch him! He's - mine!” He sprang up, walked away, and came again. - </p> - <p> - Camilla thought of many confused things. The bluebird's note was gone from - her heart, but the current of the tumult that was there ran in one - direction. It poured into Alcott's passion and point of view. Her new - pillar of fire and cloud, the man with the halo of her own construction - was begging for help, a demigod suddenly become human and suffering, - stammering, calling himself blind and mad. - </p> - <p> - “Why, we must get him out!” she cried. - </p> - <p> - She thought of Dick. Another instinct warned her that he would not - understand. It was a case where Dick would be a rock in the way, instead - of one to anchor to. But thinking of him served to remind her of what he - had said the night before. - </p> - <p> - “Listen!” She went on. “He must get out. Listen! Somebody told Dick—what - was it? Something about a crowbar or pair of—nonsense! He said a - prisoner might get out if he had a chisel. Now we must think about it. - Could he get out?” - </p> - <p> - She sat down too. Alcott stared at her in a kind of dull confusion. - </p> - <p> - “Now, this is what I'm thinking,” she hurried on. “What is the place - like?” - </p> - <p> - “The place?” - </p> - <p> - “When do you go to him again?” - </p> - <p> - “When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought.” - </p> - <p> - They leaned closer together across the desk. - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of - their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went away. - </p> - <p> - “There's a chest of tools in the storeroom,” Camilla said. “We'll go up - there.” - </p> - <p> - They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows - looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes, - trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture. - </p> - <p> - Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the long - rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and ships, his - artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, while Camilla - aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative at ten years. She - cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful shapes—tombstone - cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention—and her solemn - exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears because Dick - would not admire them. - </p> - <p> - It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's - library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that held - her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's - blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window. - </p> - <p> - She flung it open, making a great noise and business. - </p> - <p> - “See! Will this do?” - </p> - <p> - It was a heavy carpenter's chisel with a scroll design on one side of the - battered handle, and on the other the crude semblance or intention of a - woful face. “I don't know whether it's Dick's or mine. We both used to - make messes here.” She chattered on, and thought the while, “He called me - Camilla—I wish—I wonder if he will again.” - </p> - <p> - He thrust it into an inner pocket, ripping through the lining of his coat. - She closed the lid, and turned about to the low-silled window, clasped her - hands about her knees, and stared away into the tree tops, flushed and - smiling. - </p> - <p> - “You needn't go yet?” - </p> - <p> - “It's three o'clock.” - </p> - <p> - “You'll come and tell me to-morrow? When?”. - </p> - <p> - Alcott did not seem to hear her. - </p> - <p> - “I'm sure I could take care of him now,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “But you'll remember that I helped!” - </p> - <p> - “Does anyone ever forget you?” - </p> - <p> - Both were silent, and then he started up nervously. - </p> - <p> - “It isn't done yet. Lolly is clever. He lived here four years and kept out - of my sight. But, afterwards, granted he succeeds—but the law is a - great octopus. Its arms are everywhere. But he'll have me with him. I - suppose we must go out of the country.” - </p> - <p> - “You! Do you mean—do you—you'll go too!” - </p> - <p> - “Go! Could I stay?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh! I don't know! I don't know!” - </p> - <p> - She shivered and leaned against the friendly old chest. - </p> - <p> - “But could I do it without that? How could I? I couldn't do less than - that.” - </p> - <p> - He came and sat beside her again, clasping his knees in the same way, - looking off into the tree tops, talking slowly and sadly. - </p> - <p> - “To be with him always, and give up my life to that, and see that he - doesn't do any more harm. That would be the debt I would owe to the rest - of the world. You see, I know him so well. I shall know how to manage him - better than I used to. I used to irritate him. Do you know, I think he's - better off in places where things are rough and simple. He has an odd mind - or temperament, not what people call balanced or healthy, but it's hot and - sensitive; oh, but loving and hating so suddenly, one never knows! You - understand. I don't know how you do, but you do understand, somehow, about - Lolly and me. You're wholly healthy, too, but Lolly and I, we're morbid of - course. Yes, we're morbid. I don't know that there's any cure for us. - We'll smash up altogether by and by.” - </p> - <p> - “When will you go?” she asked only just audibly. - </p> - <p> - “He ought to try it to-night. To-night or to-morrow night. He ought to be - away on one of the early freight trains, to St. Louis, and meet me there. - We know our bearings there.” - </p> - <p> - Camilla sat very still. - </p> - <p> - “I must be going,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Don't go! You'll come before—when?” - </p> - <p> - “To-morrow we'll know. To-morrow then.” - </p> - <p> - After he was gone, she lifted the window and peered over the mansards to - watch him going down the street. The tree tops were thick with busy - sparrows, the railroad yards clamorous, and there was the rattle of the - travelling crane, and the clug-chug of steamers on the river. - </p> - <p> - She drew back, and leaned against the old chest, and sobbed with her face - against the hard, worn edge of it. - </p> - <p> - “I didn't suppose it would be like this,” she thought. “I thought people - were happy.” - </p> - <p> - Meanwhile Miss Eunice sat below in the parlour knitting. Hennion came in - later and found her there. She said that Camilla, she thought, was - upstairs, and added primly: - </p> - <p> - “I think it will be as well if you talk with me.” - </p> - <p> - He smothered his surprise. - </p> - <p> - “Why, of course, Miss Eunice!” - </p> - <p> - “I think you need advice.” - </p> - <p> - He sat down beside her, and felt humble. - </p> - <p> - “That's just what I need. But, Miss Eunice, do you like me well enough to - give it?” - </p> - <p> - “I like you more than some people.” - </p> - <p> - “You might do better than that.” - </p> - <p> - “I like you well enough to give it,” she admitted. - </p> - <p> - Tick, tick, tick, continued the knitting needles. - </p> - <p> - “I'm stumped, you know, about Camilla,” Dick went on bluntly. “I don't get - ahead. She has changed lately. Hasn't she changed?” - </p> - <p> - “She has changed.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, then, she has! I thought so.” - </p> - <p> - The knitting needles ticked on, and both Dick and Miss Eunice studied - their vibrating points, criss-crossing, clicking dry comments over the - mystery of the web. - </p> - <p> - “It is my constant prayer that Camilla may be happy,” said Miss Eunice at - last. “I have felt—I have examined the feeling with great care—I - have felt, that, if she saw her happiness in your happiness, it would be - wise to believe her instinct had guided her well. My brother's thoughts, - his hopes, are all in Camilla. He could not live without her. He depends - upon her to such an extent,—as you know, of course.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course, Miss Eunice.” - </p> - <p> - “I have grieved that she seemed so wayward. I have wished to see this - anxious question settled. You have been almost of the family since she was - a child, and if she saw her happiness in—in you, I should feel quite - contented, quite secure—of her finding it there, and of my brother's - satisfaction, in the end. He must not be separated from her. He could not—I - think he could not outlive it. And in this way I should feel secure that—that - you would understand.” - </p> - <p> - “I hope I should deserve your tribute. I'm more than glad to have it.” - </p> - <p> - “Perhaps this long intimacy, which makes me feel secure, is, at the same - time, the trouble with her?” - </p> - <p> - “But why, Miss Eunice? I don't understand that. It has struck me so. And - yet I love Camilla the more for all I know of her, and the better for the - time. How can it be so different with her?” - </p> - <p> - “That is true. I don't doubt it, Richard.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, then, is it because I don't wear well?” - </p> - <p> - “No. It is true, I think, that we don't understand this difference always—perhaps, - not often. But I think,”—knitting a trifle more slowly, speaking - with a shade of embarrassment—“I think, with women, it must be - strange in order to be at all. It must not be customary. It must always be - strange.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion looked puzzled and frowning. - </p> - <p> - “Please go on.” - </p> - <p> - “Lately then, very lately, I have grown more anxious still, seeing an - influence creeping into her life, against which I could not openly object, - and which yet gave me great uneasiness. It—he was here an hour ago. - I should not perhaps have spoken in this way, but I thought there was - something unusual between them, some secrecy or confusion. I was - distressed. I feared something might have occurred already. I wished to - take some step. You know to whom I refer?” - </p> - <p> - “I think so.” - </p> - <p> - “A gentleman, in appearance at least. One does not know anything about his - past. He is admired by some, by many, and disliked or distrusted by - others. He has great gifts, as my brother thinks. But he thinks him also - 'heady,' 'fantastic.' He has used these words. My brother thinks that this - society called 'The Assembly' is a mere fashion in Port Argent, depending - for financial support, even now, on Mr. Secor, and he thinks this - gentleman, whom I am describing, is not likely to continue to be - successful in our society, in Port Argent, but more likely to have a - chequered career, probably unfortunate, unhappy. My brother regards—he - calls him—'a spasmodic phenomenon.' My own disapproval goes further - than my brother's in this respect. Yet he does not approve of this - influence on Camilla. It causes him uneasiness. I have not thought wise to - speak to her about it, for I am afraid of—of some mistake, but I - think my brother has spoken, has said something. This—this person - arouses my distrust, my dislike. I look at this subject with great - distress.” - </p> - <p> - Tick, tick, tick, the knitting needles, and their prim, dry comment. - </p> - <p> - Hennion said gravely: - </p> - <p> - “I have nothing to say about the gentleman you've been speaking of. I will - win Camilla if I can, but I've come to the point of confessing that I - don't know how.” - </p> - <p> - Tick, tick, the not uneloquent knitting needles. - </p> - <p> - “Will you tell me, Miss Eunice? You said something about love as it comes - to women, as it seems to them. I had never thought about it, about that - side of it, from that side.” - </p> - <p> - “I dare say not.” - </p> - <p> - Tick, tick, tick. - </p> - <p> - “You said it must always be strange. I suppose, that is, it's like a - discovery, as if nobody ever made it before. Well, but, Miss Eunice, they - never did make it before, not that one!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, indeed!” - </p> - <p> - “Don't you think I'm coming on?” - </p> - <p> - “You are progressing.” - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice's lips were compressed a little grimly, but there was a red - spot in either cheek. - </p> - <p> - “I ought to act as if I didn't see how she was possible, ought I?” - </p> - <p> - “You are progressing.” - </p> - <p> - “Whether I did see, or didn't?” - </p> - <p> - “Of course!” Miss Eunice was almost snappish. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I don't think I do see.” - </p> - <p> - “You'd better not.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion went away without seeing Camilla. Going up Bank Street he thought - of Camilla. At the corner of Franklin Street he thought of Miss Eunice. - </p> - <p> - “There's another one I was off about. I don't see how she's possible, - either.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIII—IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LLEN AIDEE lay on - his back across the bed in his whitewashed cell, and smoked, swinging one - foot swiftly, incessantly, like a pendulum, arguing with Sol Sweeney, and - gesticulating with loose fingers. The bed was a wooden cot with a mattress - on it. - </p> - <p> - Sweeney sat at the table under the gas jet, and smoked too. He had a large - friendly acquaintance with jailbirds, and his placid philosophy was - composed out of his knowledge of them. - </p> - <p> - “I seen folks like you, Hicks,” he said, “two or three. Trouble is you - gets hold of one end of a string. Any old string 'll do. All the same to - you. 'Hullo!' you says, 'this is a valyble string. Fact, there ain't any - other string, not any other real string. This the only genwine. Follow it, - and you gets wherever you like. It's that kind of a string,' says you. - 'God A'mighty, what a string!' says you. Then you rolls yourself up in it, - and there you are! Ball up! Ain't no more use! For you take a solid man - like me, and he talks to you and he shows you reason, but you don't see - it. Why? 'Cause you're balled up in the string, that's why.” - </p> - <p> - Allen snapped out his answer. - </p> - <p> - “I'll tell you the trouble with you.” - </p> - <p> - “Ain't any trouble with me.” - </p> - <p> - “Ain't! Well, I know this, I can stand your kind about half an hour at a - stretch. Give me two hours of you—damn! I'd drink rat poison to get - cooled down.” - </p> - <p> - “That's the trouble with you,” said the complacent jailor. “Ain't me.” - </p> - <p> - “Trouble! No! You ain't equal to that. You ain't capable of that! You've - got no more consistency or organisation than a barrel of oil. You're all - fat and hair. Solid! So's a brick solid. Damn! You're solid, but are you - alive? You'll be dead before anybody sees the difference. Ain't any real - difference!” - </p> - <p> - Sweeney puffed his pipe contentedly, but thoughtfully, and shook his heavy - beard. - </p> - <p> - “Well, well! But now, I'll say this for you, Hicks. You're an entertainin' - man. I'll say that to anybody that asks. I'll say, 'Hicks is a man that's - got language, if I know what's what.'” - </p> - <p> - The jailor rose. Allen swung his foot swiftly. - </p> - <p> - “I wish you'd do something for me, Sweeney.” - </p> - <p> - “What's that?” - </p> - <p> - “Let me have the gas at night. I don't sleep good. If I had the gas I - could get up and read. You heavy men, you sleep all night. You don't know - what it is.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, I'll see, Hicks. I'll ask about that to-morrow.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, let me have it to-night!” he pleaded. - </p> - <p> - “I ain't going to sleep good to-night. I can feel it. It'll be eternity - before morning. I swear I'll be dead before morning. I'll turn it low.” - </p> - <p> - “Well—I don't see no harm in that. It ain't in me to rough a man.” - </p> - <p> - He went out, locking the door noisily behind him. - </p> - <p> - Allan lay still. His foot swung steadily, but more slowly. After a time - Sweeney came down the corridor, making his ten o'clock round. He went to - the end, and back again, and then downstairs. The corridor was quiet. - </p> - <p> - Half an hour later Allen got up and filled his pipe, lit it at the gas - jet, turned the jet low, and lay down again across his mattress. He smoked - with quick, sharp puffs, but not fast. He swung his foot slowly, and - stared at a point on the blank wall over the gas jet. Eleven o'clock - struck. - </p> - <p> - After the theatre crowds were gone past, the noise of the city grew less. - There were fewer cars, and only now and then footsteps on the neighbouring - pavement. Twelve o'clock struck. - </p> - <p> - He got up again, slipped off his shoes, and went to his window. - </p> - <p> - A maple tree grew directly in front, some twenty feet away. Its leaves - were thick, but he could see the glitter of the electric light through - them. The sidewalk was high as the lower windows of the jail, for the - Court House Square was on sunken land. The black shadow of the maple - covered the front of the jail down to the ground. - </p> - <p> - The grating of the window had its bars set at both sides, and at the top - and bottom. There were two rows of bricks from the bars to the inner edge - of the window, and the wooden framework that held the panes of glass was - set close to the grating. The outside of the sill was stone. - </p> - <p> - Allen went back and lifted his mattress. There was a rent in the seam of - the lower edge. He thrust in his hand, drew out a black cloth cap and put - it on his head. Then he drew out a heavy chisel with a battered wooden - handle, and returned to the window. - </p> - <p> - The woodwork came away, cracking slightly as the nails drew out. He leaned - the boards and frame carefully against the wall. He tried one crack after - another between the bricks at the bottom of the window, pushing and - pressing. Presently one became loose, then another. He laid them one by - one in a neat row on the floor. - </p> - <p> - The work at the sides and top was slower, because it was difficult to get - a purchase, and to prevent fragments from falling. He dug till he got the - purchase, and then held the brick up with one hand and pried with the - other. Once a fragment of cement fell with a smart slap on the sill. He - got down suddenly and sat on the floor, and listened, wiping his wet hands - and forehead with his cap. Either Sweeney or his assistant was always - around at night, and would have heard, if he had happened to be in the - upper corridor. - </p> - <p> - He carried the mattress to the window and laid it underneath to catch and - deaden the noise, if anything more fell. - </p> - <p> - It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished - stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars were - buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to strip - them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which were - opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the end of - the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three o'clock. - </p> - <p> - He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched - intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, more - noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and except - for that, only little rasps and clicks. - </p> - <p> - When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating, - which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and he - rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars caught - in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In lifting the - blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. They suggested an - idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the chisel, carried it to - the window, and scratched it on the bricks until its black enamel was - rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. Whether possible to do so - or not, people would think he must have loosened the bricks with the - brace. He wasn't going to mess “old Al” again, he thought, no, nor meet - him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be led around the rest of his life - by a string. - </p> - <p> - “Not me, like a damn squealing little pig” - </p> - <p> - He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each - strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the blanket - through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it reached - the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side coat - pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest for - the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off the - gas jet, and climbed over the grating. - </p> - <p> - He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the - window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the cell, - and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the window - below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the blanket, and - so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. When his feet - reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under his hands. He - stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself to the ground, - and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly dropped window. The - lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned inside. - </p> - <p> - The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and furnished - with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the same place - as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide bed. A man - lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and in the air, - his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. The sleeper - was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and covered his face - with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that Sweeney slept - underneath him. - </p> - <p> - He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to the - sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him. - The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here and - there. - </p> - <p> - The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the - night wind against the wall. - </p> - <p> - As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower - across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too - spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that poured - its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were pealing, - shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court House - Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low down in - the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping blanket, - jail of the sleeping Sweeney. - </p> - <p> - He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of the - square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass globes—one - red, the other blue—the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous long - shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks around - seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and stared down - at him with their ghastly blank windows—nervous, startled fronts of - buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. There were - no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own steps and - their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner drug store - glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow and whirl all - over their glassy slopes. - </p> - <p> - He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out of - Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; and - here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any lights; so - that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden shanties were - on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School building. Still - higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse overhung the empty - lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky with its black wedge. In - front of him were the buildings of the Beck Carriage Factory, bigger than - church and school together. The vacant spaces between them, these - buildings and shanties, were by day overflowed with light, overrun by - school children and factory hands, over-roared by the tumult of the nearby - thoroughfares of Bank and Maple Streets. By night they were the darkest - and stillest places in Port Argent. One man might pass another, walking in - the thick dust of the cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too - dark to see the rickety fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small - sickly maples. - </p> - <p> - He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the dim - glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the corner - of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around the angle - of the building. - </p> - <p> - A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging - his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest, - not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head. - </p> - <p> - It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and - so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some - time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case. - </p> - <p> - Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction. - Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the corner - where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All walked - unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third between - them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear. - </p> - <p> - As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in behind - them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to the three - in front. - </p> - <p> - “Hullo!” said the policeman calmly; “jagged?” - </p> - <p> - “Say!” exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; “tha's mistake. - Smooth as silk. Ain't it?” - </p> - <p> - “You're out late, anyhow,” said the policeman. - </p> - <p> - “It's a weddin'. Ain't it? Wa'n't us. 'Nother feller did it.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, get along, then.” - </p> - <p> - “All ri'! All ri'!” - </p> - <p> - He watched the five men as far as the next electric light, and then - dropped them as objects of interest. - </p> - <p> - “Hoi' on!” exclaimed the man walking beside Allen, turning suddenly upon - him. “That ain't right. There's five of us. Two, three, four, five. Bet - your life! That ain't right.” - </p> - <p> - They all stopped and looked at Allen. He started and his breath came harsh - in his throat. - </p> - <p> - “'Nother weddin'?” said the middleman thickly. “Wa'n't him. 'Nother feller - did it. You didn', did you?” - </p> - <p> - Allen shook his head “No.” - </p> - <p> - “Tha's so! Well, tha's right. 'Sh good thing. If 'nother feller does it, - 'sh good thing.” - </p> - <p> - They shambled on amiably across the drawbridge. Allen fell behind, - stopped, and leaned against the guard rail. - </p> - <p> - In a few moments he could hear their footsteps no more, but he could hear - the mutter of the river against the stone piers. Leaning over the rail, he - could see here and there a dull glint, though the night was dark; and - across the wide spaces over the river he could see the buildings on each - side, low, heavy masses, only saved from the smothering night and made - sullenly visible by the general glow of the street lamps beyond them. - There a few red lights along shore, some in the freight yards, some - belonging to anchored or moored vessels, small sail-boats, and long black - lumber and coal barges from the northern lakes. He could remember looking - down at other times in the night at the dull glint of water, and being - shaken as now by the jar of fighting things in his own mind, angry things - fighting furiously. At those times it seemed as if some cord within him - were strained almost to snapping, but always some passing excitement, some - new glittering idea, something to happen on the morrow, had drawn him - away. But those moments of despair were associated mainly with the - glinting and mutter of dusky water. “I been a fool,” he muttered, and a - little later, “What's the use!” - </p> - <p> - He decided to go to the shoe-shop and change his clothes, shave his beard, - and pick up a few things, and then hide himself on some outgoing freight - train, the other side of Muscadine Street, before the morning came. The - morning could not be far off now. Shays would keep quiet, maybe, for a - while. He would take Shays' razor. - </p> - <p> - He roused himself and moved on. He began to have glimpses of schemes, - tricks, and plans. There were little spots of light in his brain, which - for a while had seemed numb, dull, and unstirring. But he carried away - with him the impression of the glints of the gloomy river and the mutter - of its hurrying. - </p> - <p> - His feet dragged with his weariness. He turned into Muscadine Street and - crept along the sidewalk on the right. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly a switch engine in the freight yards glared him in the face with - its one blinding eye, yelled and hissed through its steam whistle, and - came charging toward him. He leaped aside and fell into a doorway, and lay - there crouching. Then he sat up and whimpered, “I ain't fit. I'm all gone - away. I ain't fit.” - </p> - <p> - He rubbed his face and hands, peered around the corner to see the harmless - engine withdrawing in the distance then got up and crossed the street. The - nearness of the familiar shop windows, as he passed them one after - another, comforted him not a little. On the next corner was the grocer's, - the butcher's shop this side of it, and the shoemaker's shop was over the - rear of the grocery. The mingled butcher-shop and grocery smell pervaded - the corner, comforting, too, with its associations. - </p> - <p> - He turned the corner and climbed slowly the outside wooden stairway, with - the signboard at the top, “James Shays,” and leaning over the railing, he - saw a faint light in the windows of the shop. He entered the hall, turned - the knob of the door softly, opened the door part way, and peered in. - </p> - <p> - The table stood in its ordinary central place, on it were a bottle, a tin - cup, and a small lit lamp with a smoky chimney. The work bench was - unchanged in place. The door of the inner room beyond stood open, but that - room was dark. On the pile of hides in the corner some clothes, taken from - the hooks overhead, had been thrown, and on the clothes lay Coglan, face - downward and asleep. - </p> - <p> - Allen thought, “He's sleeping on my clothes,” and stepped in, closing the - door softly behind him. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIV—IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS REST - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E stood a moment - with his hands against the closed door behind him, listening to Coglan's - heavy breathing. Then he crossed noiselessly to the table, took the lamp - and went through to the inner room. - </p> - <p> - There were two cot beds in it. Shays lay asleep on one in all his clothes, - except his shoes. The other bed was broken down, a wreck on the floor. - Evidently Coglan had been using it, and it was not built for slumberers of - his weight, so he had gone back to the hides that had often furnished him - with a bed before. - </p> - <p> - Shays turned his face away from the light and raised one limp hand in - half-conscious protest. He opened his eyes and blinked stupidly. Then he - sat up. - </p> - <p> - “Don't make a noise, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'm going pretty soon.” - </p> - <p> - “G-goin'—wha' for?” stammered Shays. “Wha's that for?” - </p> - <p> - “I've broke jail. I'm going to change clothes and shave, then I'll light - out. You won't see me again, Jimmy.” - </p> - <p> - He sat down on the side of the bed and rocked to and fro, twisting his - fingers. - </p> - <p> - “You're decent, Jimmy. When they get to posting notices and rewards, you - see, you don't do a thing. Nor you don't wake Coglan. He's a damn hound. - See?” - </p> - <p> - Shays shook his head, indicating either a promise or his general confusion - and despondency. - </p> - <p> - “Wha' for, Hicksy?” - </p> - <p> - Allen was silent a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Jim-jams, Jimmy,” he said at last. “You'll die of those all right, and - Coglan will squat on you. You ain't bright, but you've been white to me.” - </p> - <p> - “Tha's right! Tom don't like you. Hicksy, tha's right,” whispered Shays - with sudden trembling. “Maybe he'd—'sh! We won't wake him, Hicksy. - Wha' for?” - </p> - <p> - “He's sleeping on my clothes, so I'll take yours. Get me your razor.” - </p> - <p> - “Wha' for? Wha's that for? All right! I ain't going to wake Tom.” - </p> - <p> - He stepped unsteadily on a shoe that lay sidewise, stumbled, and fell - noisily on the floor. - </p> - <p> - There he lay a moment, and then scrambled back to his feet, shaking and - grumbling. - </p> - <p> - “What's the matter?” Coglan cried, now awake in the shop. - </p> - <p> - “Nothin', Tommy! I'm gettin' back, Tommy!” - </p> - <p> - “What you doin' with thot light?” - </p> - <p> - “Nothin', Tommy.” - </p> - <p> - Allen stood still. When Coglan came stamping unevenly to the door, he only - made a quick shift of the lamp to his left hand, and thrust the other - inside his coat till he felt the wooden handle of the chisel. - </p> - <p> - “Oi!” said Coglan. - </p> - <p> - His eyes seemed more prominent than ever, his face and neck heavier with - the drink and sleep than was even natural. Allen looked at him with - narrowed eyes. - </p> - <p> - “He's broke out,” Shays said, feebly deprecating. “He's goin' off,” and - sat on the bed to pull on his shoes. - </p> - <p> - “Is he thot!” said Coglan. - </p> - <p> - Coglan turned back slowly into the shop. Shays shuffled after. Allen - followed, too, with the lamp and said nothing, but put the lamp on the - table. Coglan sat down, drank from the black bottle, and wiped his mouth. - The first dim light of the morning was in the windows. - </p> - <p> - “I'll be getting along, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'll take your razor.” - </p> - <p> - Coglan wiped his mouth again. - </p> - <p> - “An' ye'd be goin' widout takin' advice of a sinsible mon, Hicksy, an' a - friend in need! Sure, sure! Didn't I say ye weren't a wise mon? Nor Jimmy - here, he ain't a wise mon. An' ain't I proved it? Ain't it so? Would ye be - jailed if ye was a wise mon? No! Here ye are again, an' ye'd be runnin' - away this time of the mornin', an' be took by a polaceman on the first - corner. I do laugh an' I do wape over ye, Hicksy. I do laugh an wape. An' - all because ye won't take advice.” - </p> - <p> - “What's your advice?” - </p> - <p> - Coglan moved uneasily and cleared his throat. “'Tis this, for ye're - rasonable now, sure! Ye'll hide in the back room a day or two. Quiet, - aisy, safe! Jimmy an' me to watch. An' what happens to ye? Ye gets away - some night wid the night before ye.” - </p> - <p> - He lowered his voice and gestured with closed fist. - </p> - <p> - “Ye'll lie under Jimmy's bed. The polaceman comes. 'Hicks!' says Jimmy, - 'we ain't seen Hicks.' 'Hicks!' says I, 'Hicks be dommed! If he's broke - jail he's left for Chiney maybe.' I ask ye, do they look under Jimmy's - bed? No! What do they do? Nothin'!” - </p> - <p> - Allen drew a step back. - </p> - <p> - “You're right about one thing,” he said. “That reward would be easy - picking for you.” - </p> - <p> - “What's thot?” - </p> - <p> - “I ain't a wise man. I know it. But I know you. That's what it is. I'm - going now.” - </p> - <p> - “Ye're not!” - </p> - <p> - “Hicksy!” cried Shays feebly. “Tom, don't ye do it!” - </p> - <p> - Coglan plunged around the table and grasped at Allen's throat, at Allen's - hand, which had shot behind his head, gripping the heavy chisel. Allen - dodged him, and struck, and jumped after as Coglan staggered, and struck - again. The corner of the chisel seemed to sink into Coglan's head. - </p> - <p> - Allen stood and clicked his teeth over his fallen enemy, who sighed like a - heavy sleeper, and was still. It was a moment of tumult, and then all - still in the shop. Then Shays stumbled backward over the work bench, and - dropped on the hides. Allen turned and looked at him, putting the chisel - into one of the side pockets of his coat, where it hung half-way out. The - light was growing clearer in the windows. - </p> - <p> - “That's the end of me,” he said. - </p> - <p> - And Shays cried angrily, “Wha's that for?” and cowered with fear and - dislike in his red-lidded eyes. “Keep off me! You keep off me!” - </p> - <p> - “I got to the end, Jimmy. Goodbye.” - </p> - <p> - “Keep off me!” - </p> - <p> - Allen hung his head and went out of the shop into the dark hall. - </p> - <p> - Shays heard his steps go down the outside stairway. He scrambled up from - the pile of hides, and snatched his hat. He kept close to the wall, as far - as possible from where Coglan lay against the legs of the table. He was - afraid. He vaguely wanted to get even with the man who had killed Coglan. - He had loved Coglan, on the whole, best among living men. - </p> - <p> - People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were - stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried - down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block - away, walking slowly. - </p> - <p> - At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the - chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on, - with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he came - to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. The two - kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge. - </p> - <p> - The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it was - nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons to come - in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had been - turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the - disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering of - the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder than by - day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red glimmer of - the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge except Shays - and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the drawbridge house. - </p> - <p> - Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, too, - and muttered, “Wha's that for? Wha' for?” and found his mind blank of all - opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began to run - forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped on the - guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the river. - </p> - <p> - When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled - surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He leaned - over limply, and stared at the water. - </p> - <p> - “Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, and - rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the rail, - staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over the water - pointing downward. “Wha' for?” - </p> - <p> - The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A - freight train went over the P. and N. bridge. - </p> - <p> - Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost - to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car in - the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered - wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned - against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked up, - stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back in his - pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and he went - to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the Muscadine, - and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the stamp of - hoofs, and the shuffle of feet. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XV—HENNION AND SHAYS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION came to his - office early that Saturday morning with his mind full of Macclesfield's - bridge, and of the question of how to get Macclesfield interested in the - Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how Macclesfield would take to the - part of a municipal patriot. He thought that if he could only conquer some - shining success, something marked, public, and celebrated, then, perhaps, - his success might succeed with Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your - eyes on the path where you seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow - that path, for so one travelled ahead and found that success attracted - success by a sort of gravitation between them. All things came about to - him who kept going. This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and - son, much as it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise. - Neither Henry Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing - something to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder - Hennion nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making - something a little better than it had been. - </p> - <p> - Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window. - “I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed,” he thought. - </p> - <p> - The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay - reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the clamour - of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar noises, - now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of telephone wires - and the window panes across the street glittered in the bright sunlight. - </p> - <p> - The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. The - owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid, - unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered on - the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair. - </p> - <p> - “Look here, Shays! You don't get nourishment enough! You've burnt holes in - your stomach till it won't hold any more than a fish net. Now, I'll tell - you what you'd better do.” - </p> - <p> - “Misser Hennion—Misser Hennion—I want you to see me through!” - </p> - <p> - He stretched out his hand with scattered fingers, appealingly. - </p> - <p> - “I want you—Misser Hennion—you see me through!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, come in! Sit down.” - </p> - <p> - Shays sat down, and Hennion looked him over. - </p> - <p> - “Had any breakfast?” - </p> - <p> - “I want you see me through!” - </p> - <p> - “What's the matter?” - </p> - <p> - Shays sat on the edge of the chair and told his story, waving a thin hand - with high blue veins. He hurried, stumbled, and came on through confusion - to the end. - </p> - <p> - “Hicksy come about three o'clock,” he said. “I didn't do nothing, and Tom - he was asleep. Tha's right. We didn't want him, but he woke me up, and he - says, 'I'm off, Jimmy,' like that. 'I broke jail,' he says, 'an' ye - needn't wake Coglan,' he says, like that. Then I gets up and I falls down, - plunk! like that, and Tom woke up. Then he goes arguin' with Hicksy, like - they always done, and he says, 'You stay under Jimmy's bed,' he says, - friendly, like that. 'You get off when there ain't nobody lookin',' he - says. But Hicksy says, 'You're lookin' for the reward; you're goin' to - sell me out,' he says. Then he says he's off, but Tom won't let him. Then - they clinched, and Hicksy hit him with the chisel. Oh, my God! Misser - Hennion! You see me through! He dropped, plunk! like that, plunk! Oh, my - God! Misser Hennion! Jus' like that, plunk! He clipped him dead. He did, - too!” Shays paused and rubbed his lips. - </p> - <p> - “What next?” - </p> - <p> - “Then he says, 'Jimmy, that's the end of me,' like that, and he put that - thing what he done it with in his pocket. He goes creepin', scroochin' out - the door, like that, creepin', scroochin'. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! I - ain't goin' to stay there alone! Not me! I goes after him. And in - Muscadine Street I see him, but it was dark, but I see him creepin', - scroochin' along to the bridge; I see the chisel fall out and it clinked - on the stones. Pretty soon I picks it up, and pretty soon I see Hicksy out - on the bridge. Then he stopped. Then I knowed he'd jump. Then he jumped, - plunk! jus' like that, plunk!” - </p> - <p> - He had the chisel in his hand, and showed it to Hennion. - </p> - <p> - “Let me see that.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion swung away in his chair toward the light and examined the battered - handle with the straggling, ill-cut, and woe-begone face traced there. - </p> - <p> - He turned slowly and took a newspaper from his desk, rolled up the chisel - in the newspaper, thrust it into a drawer, locked the drawer and turned - back to the muttering Shays. - </p> - <p> - “I see. What next?” - </p> - <p> - “I says, 'Wha' for? Wha's that for?' Then I come to that place, and there - ain't nothin' there. He got under quick, he did. He stayed there. He never - come up. I watched. He never come up. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion, I ain't - goin' to stay there! Folks was comin' on the bridge. I ain't goin' to stay - there!” - </p> - <p> - “I see. What next?” - </p> - <p> - “Next?” - </p> - <p> - “Where'd you go then?” - </p> - <p> - “Misser Hennion! I went down under along the bridge, where there wa'n't - anybody.” - </p> - <p> - “What next?” - </p> - <p> - “Next?” - </p> - <p> - “Did you meet anyone? Say anything?” - </p> - <p> - “Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?” - </p> - <p> - “What did you do between then and now?” - </p> - <p> - “Me? Nothin'! I went to sleep by the bridge. Then I got breakfast at - Riley's 'All Night.' Then I come here. I ain't said a word, excep' to - Riley.” - </p> - <p> - “What did you say to Riley?” - </p> - <p> - “Me! I says, 'Give me some coffee and an egg sandwich,' and Riley says, - 'Ye're a dom little gutter pig, Jimmy,' and tha's every word.” - </p> - <p> - “I see.” - </p> - <p> - “Misser Hennion! You see me through!” - </p> - <p> - “All right. But you've got to mind this, or I get out from under you. You - leave out Hicks' dropping that chisel, or your picking it up. He dropped - nothing; you picked up nothing. Understand? He hit Coglan with something - he had in his hand. Whatever it was, never mind. He put it in his pocket - and carried it off. You followed. You saw him jump off the bridge. That's - all. Tell me the thing again, and leave that out. Begin where Hicks waked - you.” - </p> - <p> - “Me! Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?” - </p> - <p> - “I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!” - </p> - <p> - While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing - chair. - </p> - <p> - He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the battered - handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. He knew the - niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot where the tool - chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from whose windows one - looked through the upper branches of the trees out on the Muscadine. There - in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the sunlight, and in - winter through bare branches one could see the river. There Milly used to - sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red ribbon, and chatter like - a sweet-voiced canary bird. - </p> - <p> - He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind, - between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in a - newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday - afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed - emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday night - Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed Coglan, and - went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; Saturday morning - comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling through now, - anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, but—now as - to Aidee—that was the second time he had been to Camilla for help, - and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better than Hennion. - It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the “little maid” would be - “game,” but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like Aidee, who - came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in front and a - cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. A man ought - to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; that is to say, - not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth shut, and buy a - respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a respectable - hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's “crisis,” it looked as if - Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, instead of the - condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard luck. Still, his - criminal family was out of the way now, which did not seem a bad idea. Any - chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have to be smothered of - course, which meant smothering the whole thing. - </p> - <p> - “Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up.” - </p> - <p> - But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the - responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and have - nightmares. That wouldn't do either. - </p> - <p> - “Very good, Jimmy.” - </p> - <p> - He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the story - now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside. - </p> - <p> - “Plunk! jus' like that!” said Shays. “He went, plunk! I come up, and I - looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. He - stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks was - cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of him, but - Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not him, nor I - ain't goin' to stay there, not him.” - </p> - <p> - “You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?” Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and - according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, because - women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the subject. - Humph! Well—Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and in - fact, that “continuity of surprise” was all right. Aidee preached a kind - of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with the - individual man against men organised, and against the structure of things; - and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, or it might be - that view of things natural to women, their gift and function. What would - Camilla do next? “God knows!” She would see that the “continuity of - surprise” was all right. What on earth was Jimmy Shays talking about? - </p> - <p> - “Tom he says to me, 'Hicksy's a dangerous man, Jimmy,' he says, 'and I - wouldn't trust him with me life or me property. Nor,' he says, 'I don't - agree with his vilyanous opinions,' he says. That was Tom's word, - 'vilyanous,' and it's true and it's proved, Misser Hennion, ain't it? - Sure! Then he jumps into the river, plunk! like that, Misser Hennion! I - ain't done no harm.” - </p> - <p> - Shays was harmless surely, and cobbled shoes besides for the benefit of - society. - </p> - <p> - “Drop it, Jimmy. We'll go over to the police station.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVI—CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY HALL - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">C</span>AMILLA spent the - morning in the store-room, staring through the window at the tree tops and - glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving with her father. Henry - Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's plans for the new railroad - bridge and station, the three parks and moon-shaped boulevard. - </p> - <p> - “His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!” - </p> - <p> - In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. He - foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues. - </p> - <p> - “Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the - moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous - city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!” - </p> - <p> - He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the - small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings. - </p> - <p> - Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached - herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was - this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come - to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go - back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the - people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and - did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or - not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it must be wrong not to - be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what her father said about - it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry Champney was too busy - unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts were absent. But Camilla - noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans seemed to occupy her - father's mind of late. - </p> - <p> - “A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled. - </p> - <p> - So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla - wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud - came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel it - possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage through - someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was through - Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her. - </p> - <p> - She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the - afternoon papers. - </p> - <p> - When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her - father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the - porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver papers - without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not look at - the paper till she reached the store-room. - </p> - <p> - Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A - half hour slipped by. - </p> - <p> - “That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that - superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical - ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! - Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to - read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!” - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to be - expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see - Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that he - would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was of the - opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for young people, when - their elders were speaking, were giving important advice—it was not - considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to answer only that it was - four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, when neither statement was - important. The paper boy's rough manner of throwing the paper on the porch - she had never approved of. - </p> - <p> - They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the hall. - Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the front door. - Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting. - </p> - <p> - “Camilla is going out again!” - </p> - <p> - Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla could - have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation were - thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not injustice to - Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her father's newspaper, - a thing so important to his happiness before tea? Miss Eunice put aside - her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy. - </p> - <p> - She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed the - second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in front - of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice gasped, - took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla have been so - rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front page - proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents of a - Night.” - </p> - <p> - “Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.” - </p> - <p> - “Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.” - </p> - <p> - “Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port - Argent.” - </p> - <p> - “John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.” - </p> - <p> - “Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a - Hearse are his Limit.” - </p> - <p> - None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. No - headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any bearing on - Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that Richard had not - already told the family, about a railroad bridge and station, park - improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss Eunice's impression, - Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming. - </p> - <p> - She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled - newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed - tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and - helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether - it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and - Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of Miss - Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool chest, - and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in the - library, forlorn of his afternoon paper. - </p> - <p> - When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before six. - He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head bent down - drowsily, where he sat in his chair. - </p> - <p> - Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him - into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper. - </p> - <p> - “I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. I - found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't - understand, Richard!” - </p> - <p> - Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Well—you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to - Mr. Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it - might be just as well. He might be surprised.” - </p> - <p> - He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the corner - by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar. - </p> - <p> - He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of which - stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. The voices - came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the Assembly Hall. - He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to the street door, - out of hearing of the words. - </p> - <p> - “It's the other man's innings,” he thought ruefully. But, he thought too, - that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood when - Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his - shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets, - stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVII—AIDEE—CAMILLA—HENNION - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">C</span>AMILLA went up - Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin Street. It carried - her past the Court House Square, and so on to the little three-cornered - park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, and opposite the Hall - the block of grey houses with bay windows, of which the third from the - corner was Mrs. Tillotson's. - </p> - <p> - That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door. - </p> - <p> - “My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little - drawing-room usually thronged! <i>Now</i>, we can have such a talk, such - an <i>earnest</i> talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a <i>position</i>.” - </p> - <p> - She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand. - </p> - <p> - “I—I don't quite understand,” said Camilla. - </p> - <p> - “<i>Surely</i>, my dear, the two most important questions before the - Assembly are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion? - second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more - ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. Ralbeck - the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. I have in - particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have examined - thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have offered Mr. - Aidee <i>all</i> my knowledge, <i>all</i> my literary experience. But he - does not as yet take a <i>position!</i>” - </p> - <p> - Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson - thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the - opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she would - insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in insisting. - </p> - <p> - Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led - into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. The - door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. She - knew the windows of the study from without. - </p> - <p> - She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but no - one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. The - door yielded and opened, but the room was empty. - </p> - <p> - In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, - half-furnished—some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered - table, a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the - room seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning - as to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was - even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows - seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest - were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was - empty. - </p> - <p> - She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be - hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, - clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless people - outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming and forever - rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as accidents! So - pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should be empty of - Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, pacing the yellow - matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking. - </p> - <p> - She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw - that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on - the street. Wherever it led, he might be there. - </p> - <p> - She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly - to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way along - the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness felt the - panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet or cellar - stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, glimmering space - of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows now turning grey - from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its pillars and curved - galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its ranged tiers of seats, - its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high bulk of gilded organ pipes. - She had seen it before only when the tiers of seats had been packed with - people, when Aidee had filled the remaining space with his presence, his - purposes, and his torrent of speech; when the organ had played before and - after, ushering in and following the Preacher with its rolling music; when - great thoughts and sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people - had been there, where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery - dim bars of light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the - hall, and the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric - curves. Lines of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the - galleries; shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the - platform below the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. - Aidee had given the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still - haunted by his voice, haunted by his phrases. - </p> - <p> - Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the - Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started - forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her. - </p> - <p> - “Camilla!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh! Why didn't you come?” - </p> - <p> - “Come?” - </p> - <p> - “To me. I thought you would!” - </p> - <p> - He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained. - </p> - <p> - “When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This - morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them - talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but - there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came back.” - </p> - <p> - They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and - constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent - in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, - and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained - forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She - pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been - swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. - But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and she - seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to expect - some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; and it - stared up at her coldly and quietly. - </p> - <p> - “I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would - help us both.” - </p> - <p> - “Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. - I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.” - </p> - <p> - “What do you mean?” - </p> - <p> - They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped - her head, and wept with her face in her hands. - </p> - <p> - “It's not your story,” said Aidee. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, it is! It's mine!” - </p> - <p> - Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness, - and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him - threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain, - and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or - happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life. - That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse - on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his - mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side. - Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom - that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp, - the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to - go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle - with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly - would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and - clinging arms—“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in - St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the - mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump - cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a - rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come - to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot - where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his - early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then - the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many - listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening - or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” - he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the - book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and - asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!” - </p> - <p> - What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port - Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so - drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone - out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. He - would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again with - the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if anywhere; - and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact loudest. No, - rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say nothing. But - Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story too! He began - to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager. - </p> - <p> - “How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They - were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human - being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger. - Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no - more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the - rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent crust - to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, no! no!” she cried. - </p> - <p> - “For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You will - save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. I will - count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. Come with - me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!” - </p> - <p> - “No, no!” - </p> - <p> - His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his face - was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. The future - he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the struggle in - her own heart frightened her. - </p> - <p> - “You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it - out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!” - </p> - <p> - Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was waiting - and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing over him, - listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was listening. - </p> - <p> - “I can't!” she cried. “I can't!” - </p> - <p> - “You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. I'll - find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. Camilla, - look at me!” She lifted her face and turned slowly toward him, and a voice - spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, “Milly!”—and then - hesitated, and Hennion came out. - </p> - <p> - “I heard you crying,” he said quietly. “I didn't seem to be able to stand - that.” - </p> - <p> - “Dick! Take care of me!” she cried, and ran to him, and put her face - against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment. - </p> - <p> - Aidee said, “I'm answered.” - </p> - <p> - “I think you gave me a close call,” said Hennion, and drew Camilla past - him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back, - thinking: - </p> - <p> - “A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the - person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as - dense.” - </p> - <p> - At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not to - be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified - himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, “It's hardly a square - game besides.” He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and said - slowly: - </p> - <p> - “By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told - me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe - he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly - resistant. - </p> - <p> - “Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me that - chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it behind - him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact is, it was - mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else for your - hardware.” - </p> - <p> - Still no sound. - </p> - <p> - “However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river, - where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed - secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning this - to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no great - difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that you're clear - of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. I think you can - fill the place rather better—better than anyone else. Will you - stay?” - </p> - <p> - “No.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of - those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.” - </p> - <p> - “I won't make it.” - </p> - <p> - “It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the - highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me honest. - Will you?” - </p> - <p> - “No.” - </p> - <p> - “All right. Good-night.” - </p> - <p> - The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were shaded - by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. Hennion and - Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half sobbed, and - clung to him. They talked very little at first. - </p> - <p> - “Milly,” he said at last, “of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway. - You shall do as you like.” - </p> - <p> - “I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me.” - </p> - <p> - “Well—maybe I'm wrong—I've been that before—but it looks - to me in this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible - somehow, or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep - places. It stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know - altogether—I don't ask—but if you see anything that looks - steep ahead, why, perhaps it is, perhaps it is—but then, what of it? - And that's the moral I've been hedging around to, Milly.” - </p> - <p> - After a silence she asked, “How did you know I was there?” - </p> - <p> - “I thought it likely.” - </p> - <p> - He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the - shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that the - chisel had been “used on Coglan.” Passing that point, he went on, - comfortably comforting. - </p> - <p> - “You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what - they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, and - generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. Hicks was - a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the river on his - own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might have had - scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you didn't arrange - all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited to your good luck, - if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break jail, which was - natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if anyone wants to debate - it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He shouldn't have come to - you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do something of the kind, same - as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it your part in it that troubles - you? You'd better take my judgment on it.” - </p> - <p> - “What is it?” she said, half audibly. - </p> - <p> - “My judgment? Only that I want you for myself.” - </p> - <p> - He went on quietly after a pause: “There are objections to interfering - with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think, - don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, they're - staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of being right - are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your getting mixed with - that kind of thing or people, is—would be, of course, rather hard on - us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was good. Is that what you want - my judgment on?” - </p> - <p> - They turned up the path to the Champney house. - </p> - <p> - “You knew all about it!” she said hurriedly. “But you don't understand. It - was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he is! - But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, and it - was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came again. It - frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off everything here, - and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it because I was afraid. I'm - a coward.” - </p> - <p> - “Did, did he?” said Hennion comfortably. “That was good nerve, too.” - </p> - <p> - “You don't understand,” she said with a small sob, and then another. - </p> - <p> - “Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons.” - </p> - <p> - They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney - sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white - head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: “There's some of this - business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs to - me that”—pointing toward the window—“that may have been a - reason.” - </p> - <p> - “You do understand that,” she said, and they went in together. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVIII—T. M. SECOR—HENNION—CAMILLA - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ORT ARGENT had not - reached such a stage of civic life that its wealthy citizens went out into - the neighbouring country by reason of warm weather. Besides, the - neighbouring country is flat, and the summer heats seem to lie on it level - and undisturbed. There straight roads meet at right angles, one cornfield - is like another, and one stumpy pasture differs little from the next. It - is fertile, and looks democratic, not to say socialistic, in its - monotonous similarity, but it does not look like a landscape apt to draw - out to it the civilian, as the hill country draws out its civilians, with - the thirst of the hill people for their falling brooks and stormy - mountains, the wood thrushes and the columbine. An “observer of decades” - might have remarked that Herbert Avenue was the pleasantest spot he had - seen within a hundred miles of Port Argent, and that the civic life seemed - to be peculiarly victorious at that point. There was a village air about - the Avenue, only on a statelier scale, but with the same space and - greenness and quiet. One of the largest houses was T. M. Secor's. - </p> - <p> - Secor sat on his broad verandah in the early twilight. He stirred heavily - in his chair, and stretched out a great hand thick and hard, as Hennion - came up the steps. - </p> - <p> - “Glad to see you, sonny,” Secor said. “Stick up your feet and have a - drink.” - </p> - <p> - “Just come from Nevada?” - </p> - <p> - “One hour and one-half ago, during the which time Billy Macclesfield's - been here, greasy with some new virtues. I take it you had something to do - with greasing him. Next came Ted, who said he's going to get married. Next - came Aidee with a melodious melodrama of his own, and said he was going to - quit town. Why, things are humming here! How you feeling, sonny?” - </p> - <p> - A huge, hairy, iron-grey, talkative man, with a voice like an amiable - bison, was T. M. Secor. - </p> - <p> - He continued: “Hold on! Why, Aidee said you knew about that screed of his. - I gathered you got it by a sort of fortuitous congregation of atoms? I - gathered that there brother of Aidee's was, by the nature of him, a sort - of fortuitous atom.” - </p> - <p> - “About that.” - </p> - <p> - “Just so! Well—you ain't got a melodious melodrama too?” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Hennion. “I want to take up the conversation you had with - Macclesfield.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, you do!” - </p> - <p> - “I'm not feeling greasy with virtue myself, you know.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, you ain't!”—Secor was silent for some moments. - </p> - <p> - “I guess I'm on to you, sonny,” he said at last. “I'll tell you my mind - about it. I think you handled Macclesfield all right, and that's a very - good job, and you may be solid now with the gang, for aught I know, but my - idea is, it'll be only a question of time before you get bucked off. I'd - give you a year, maybe two.” - </p> - <p> - “I think so.” - </p> - <p> - “You figure on two years?” - </p> - <p> - “Next election. Tait's out with me now, and he'll get a knife in when he - can. Beckett, Freiburger, and Tuttle will probably be on edge before next - spring. That's too soon. Now—if I can get the parks and Boulevard - done, I'm willing to call off without a row. I want the Manual Training - School too. But Tuttle's going to get some rake off out of that. Can't - help it. Anyway Tuttle will see it's a good enough job. I don't mind Cam, - and John Murphy's indecent, but reasonable. But Freiburger's going to be a - holy terror. I don't see that I can run with that crowd, and I don't see - how it can be altered much at present. If I split it they'll lose the - election. Now—I think it'll split of itself, and I'd be of more use - without the responsibility of having split it. I think so. Anyhow, I'm - going to have something to show people for my innings.” - </p> - <p> - “Just so.” - </p> - <p> - After another silence Secor said: “What was Wood's idea? D'you know?” - </p> - <p> - “He thought it would split of itself.” - </p> - <p> - “Think so? Well, I've a notion he had a soft side to him, and you'd got on - it. Well—I don' know. Seemed to me that way. What then?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I'll go out. I don't want it anyway. I want my father's job. Maybe - I'm a bit of a Puritan, Secor, and maybe not, but when the heelers get - restless to explosion, and the Reformers grimmer around the mouth because - the city isn't rosy and polite, and my general utility's gone, I expect to - thank God, and go back to pile-driving exclusive. But I want time.” - </p> - <p> - “Just so. I can keep Beckett and Tuttle from being too soon, maybe. That - what you want of me?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - “You say 'Wood's machine,'” Hennion went on after a while. “It's a poor - metaphor, 'machine politics,' 'machine organisation.' Why, being an - engineer, I ought to know a machine when I see one. I've analysed Wood's - organisation, and I tell you you can't apply one bottom principle of - dynamics to it to fit. The machinery is full of ghosts.” - </p> - <p> - The two smoked a while, and Hennion said: “How about Aidee?” - </p> - <p> - “Ho! I don't see why he won't stay in Port Argent.” - </p> - <p> - “He won't. I asked him.” - </p> - <p> - “You don't say so! Why, there you are! I had a notion you two might team - it together, come along time enough.” - </p> - <p> - “It won't work.” - </p> - <p> - “Ho! Well! I dare say. Maybe you know why.” another silence. Secor said at - last: - </p> - <p> - “Dick, I got only one real notion in business and philanthropy. I bank on - it in both trades. I keep gunning for men with coal in their engines and a - disposition to burn it, and go on till they bust up into scrap iron, and - when I find one, I give him a show. If I think he's got the instinct to - follow his nose like a setter pup, and not get nervous and climb telegraph - poles, I give him a show. Well—Aidee had the coal and the - disposition, and he burnt it all right, and I gave him his show. Didn't I? - He's got the idea now that he's run himself into the ditch and turned - scrap iron. Humph! Well! He lost his nerve anyway. Why, Hicks is dead, and - Wood's dead, and they can scrap it out in hell between 'em, can't they? - What business he got to lose his nerve? He used to have an idea God - Almighty was in politics, and no quitter, and meant to have a shy at - business. Interesting idea, that. Ho! He never proved it. What the blazes - he want to quit for now? Well! I was going to say, I'm gambling on you now - for a setter pup, sonny, without believing you can ride Wood's machine. - I'll give you a show, when you're good and through with that. I've been - buying Chickering R. R. stock. Want some of it? Yes, sir, I'm going to own - that line inside a year, and give you a job there that'll make you grunt - to reach around it. Ho! Ted says he's going to take John Keys' girl and go - to Nevada. Ain't so foolish as you'd expect of him. Sounds cheerful. Ted's - a drooling damn fool all right, but he's no quitter. I hear you're going - to marry Champney's daughter?” - </p> - <p> - “I will if I can.” - </p> - <p> - “You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry Champney's - petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall in his time, - near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better outfit of - brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt coal all right. - Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her when I got to Port - Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my pocket, and she never - understood how it happened—claimed she didn't, anyhow—and that - afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the Court House steps - that sounded like he was President of the Board of Prophets, and I bet a - man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all right, and lost it, I did. - I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half. Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!' - Ho! Well, why can't you?” - </p> - <p> - The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion - presently took his leave. - </p> - <p> - He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but Camilla - spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the black - shadows of the vines. - </p> - <p> - “Do you want me, Dick?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid - moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and - arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made - little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on - the wall, little specks on the floor. - </p> - <p> - “Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.” - </p> - <p> - He bent over till her breath was warm on his face. - </p> - <p> - “How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you as - a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't stay - still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor - upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't - remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal - expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the - beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought - that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so.” - </p> - <p> - “I didn't know that.” - </p> - <p> - “I know. I'm a poor, tongue-tied lover, Milly. I ought to fling myself - loose on the subject, and describe the gorgeous state of my heart, and lie - like a seaman ashore, if I had the gift of my calling. I'm no poet or - dreamer of dreams. I'm after realities. I don't expect to be a burning and - shining light to other people or reform anybody whatever, but I expect to - please one girl, if she'll let me try. Real things! What do you suppose - they are? One time I was born, and now I love you, and sometime I'll die, - and God knows what then. Are those realities? Can you see the river there, - where the moonlight is on it? It runs down to the lake, and the force that - draws it down is as real as the river itself. Love is a real thing, more - real than hands and feet. It pulls like gravitation and drives like steam. - When you came to me there at the Hall, what was it brought you? An - instinct? You asked me to take care of you. I had an instinct that was - what I was made for. I thought it was all safe then, and I felt like the - eleventh commandment and loved mine enemy for a brother. I can't do - anything without you! I've staked my hopes on you, so far as I can see - them. I've come to the end of my rope, and there's something between us - yet, but you must cross it. I can't cross it.” - </p> - <p> - From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot at - the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was - deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly past - the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had turned - and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion glanced - out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric light. - Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his slow - footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the porch. - </p> - <p> - “Can I cross it?” Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired - and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. “Can I? If love - were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this way, - as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought—but can I come? If - you tell me truly that I can come—I will believe what you tell me.” - </p> - <p> - Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house, or - were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned on - Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply. He - expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose meaning - was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers that grew on - the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his shoulders, and her - head with its thick hair on the other. - </p> - <p> - “You have come!” he said. - </p> - <p> - Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. I have.” - </p> - <p> - Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last on - the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware that - there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch vines, with - their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace and went his - way up Bank Street. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIX—CONCLUSION - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION and Camilla - were married in the fall when the maple leaves were turning yellow and - red. It may be that Camilla thought of herself as one consenting with - humility to enter a quiet gateway, the shelter of a garden whose walks and - borders she knew; and it may be that she was mistaken and found it a - strange garden with many an herb of grace, and many an old-fashioned - perennial as fairly embroidered as any that grow in Arcadia; for when one - has found that the birth of one of the common flowers and hardy perennials - comes as wonderfully out of the deeps as the birth of a new day, it may be - that one understands heaven even better than when floating in Arcadia - among its morning islands. - </p> - <p> - She could never truly have a working share in Dick's working life. She - could sympathise with its efforts and achievements, but never walk even - with him along that road. He would come to her tired, asking for home and - rest, but never sick of soul, asking for healing, nor troubled and - confused, asking for help. It was not his nature. One must take the - measure of one's destiny and find happiness therein. After all, when that - is found, it is found to be a quite measureless thing; and therefore the - place where it is found must be a spacious place after all, a high-roofed - and wide-walled habitation. - </p> - <p> - Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars - rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented with - his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his forelock for - the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father Time, has been - given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of his as of a good - shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, that curious - untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that solution of - improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. But yet a little while, - and let the winds freshen the air and the waters go their clean rounds - again, and lo! he has shepherded us home from the desert, and comforted us - in new garments, and turned our minus into plus by a judicious shifting - across the equation. Shall we not give him his crook, his medicine case - and license to practise, his loom, his stylus and tablets, and by oracle - declare him “the Wisest,” and build him a temple, and consult his - auspices, and be no more petulant if he nurtures other seeds than those of - our planting, the slow, old-fashioned, silent gardener? We know no oracle - but Time, yet we are always harking after another. He is a fluent, dusky, - imperturbable person, resembling the Muscadine River. He goes on forever, - and yet remains. His answers are Delphic and ambiguous. Alas! he tends to - drown enthusiasm. Who is the wisest? “The one who knows that he knows - nothing,” quoth your cynic oracle. What is justice? “A solemn lady, but - with so bandaged eyes that she cannot see the impish capers of her - scales.” What is happiness? As to that he answers more kindly. “In the - main,” he says, “happiness is a hardy perennial.” - </p> - <p> - The “observer of decades,” who came to Port Argent some years later, found - it proud of its parks, its boulevard, and railroad stations, its new court - house, and jail, and manual training school; proud of its rapid growth, - and indignant at the inadequacy of the national census. He was shown the - new streets, and driven through suburbs where lately pasture and - cornfields had been. He found Port Argent still in the main electric, - ungainly, and full of growing pains, its problem of municipal government - still inaccurately solved, the system not so satisfactory a structure as - the railroad bridge below the boathouses, built by Dick Hennion for the - North Shore Railroad. In shop and street and office the tide of its life - was pouring on, and its citizens held singular language. Its sparrows were - twittering in the maples, bustling, quarrelling, yet not permanently - interested in either the sins or the wrongs of their neighbours, but going - tolerantly to sleep at night. Here and there a bluebird was singing apart - its plaintive, unfinished “Lulu-lu.” - </p> - <p> - He inquired of one of Port Argent's citizens for news, and heard that the - “Independent Reformers” had won an election sometime back; that they were - out again now, and inclined to be vituperative among themselves; that Port - Argent was again led by Marve Wood's ring, which was not such a - distressing ring as it might be. Hennion was not in it now. No, but he was - suspected of carrying weight still in the party councils, which perhaps - accounted for the “ring's” not being so distressing as it might be. - </p> - <p> - “He did more than he talked about,” said the garrulous citizen. “But - speaking of talkers, there was a man here once named Aidee. You've heard - of him. He's getting celebrated. Well, I'm a business man, and stick to my - times. But I read Aidee's books. It's a good thing to do that much.” - </p> - <p> - The observer of decades left the garrulous citizen, and went down Lower - Bank Street. He noted the shapeless, indifferent mass and contour of the - buildings on the river-front, the litter of the wharves, the lounging - black barges beside them, the rumble of traffic on the bridge and in - distant streets, the dusky, gliding river lapping the stone piers and - wooden piles, and going on forever while men come and go. He thought how - the stone piers would sometime waste and fall, and the Muscadine would - still go on, turbid and unperturbed. - </p> - <p> - “Adaptability seems the great test of permanence,” he thought. “Whatever - is rigid is fragile.” - </p> - <p> - In front of the Champney house he stopped and looked up past the lawn and - saw old Henry Champney, sitting in a wicker chair that was planted on the - gravel walk. He was leaning forward, his chin on his cane, and gazing - absorbed at his two grandchildren at his feet, a brown-haired child and a - dark-haired baby. They were digging holes in the gravel with iron spoons. - </p> - <p> - What with the street, the railway, and the river, it might almost be said - that from the Champney lawns one watched the world go by, clattering, - rolling, puffing, travelling these its three concurrent highways. But - Henry Champney seemed to take no interest now in this world's triple - highways, nor to hear their clamour, but only cared now to watch the - dark-haired baby, and listen to the little cooing voices. - </p> - <h3> - THE END - </h3> - <div style="height: 6em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT *** - -***** This file should be named 50269-h.htm or 50269-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/2/6/50269/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, -and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive -specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this -eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook -for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, -performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given -away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks -not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the -trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. - -START: FULL LICENSE - -THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE -PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK - -To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free -distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work -(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project -Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full -Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at -www.gutenberg.org/license. - -Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works - -1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to -and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property -(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all -the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or -destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your -possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a -Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound -by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the -person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph -1.E.8. - -1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be -used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who -agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few -things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See -paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this -agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. - -1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the -Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection -of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual -works in the collection are in the public domain in the United -States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the -United States and you are located in the United States, we do not -claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, -displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as -all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope -that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting -free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm -works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the -Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily -comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the -same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when -you share it without charge with others. - -1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern -what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are -in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, -check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this -agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, -distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any -other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no -representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any -country outside the United States. - -1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: - -1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other -immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear -prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work -on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the -phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, -performed, viewed, copied or distributed: - - This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and - most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no - restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it - under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this - eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the - United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you - are located before using this ebook. - -1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is -derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not -contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the -copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in -the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are -redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project -Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply -either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or -obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted -with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution -must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any -additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms -will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works -posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the -beginning of this work. - -1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm -License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this -work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. - -1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this -electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without -prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with -active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project -Gutenberg-tm License. - -1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, -compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including -any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access -to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format -other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official -version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site -(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense -to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means -of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain -Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the -full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. - -1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, -performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works -unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. - -1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing -access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works -provided that - -* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from - the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method - you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed - to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has - agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid - within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are - legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty - payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project - Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in - Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg - Literary Archive Foundation.” - -* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies - you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he - does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm - License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all - copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue - all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm - works. - -* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of - any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the - electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of - receipt of the work. - -* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free - distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. - -1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than -are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing -from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The -Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm -trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. - -1.F. - -1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable -effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread -works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project -Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may -contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate -or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other -intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or -other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or -cannot be read by your equipment. - -1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right -of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project -Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all -liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal -fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT -LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE -PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE -TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE -LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR -INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH -DAMAGE. - -1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a -defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can -receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a -written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you -received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium -with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you -with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in -lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person -or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second -opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If -the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing -without further opportunities to fix the problem. - -1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth -in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO -OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT -LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. - -1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied -warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of -damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement -violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the -agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or -limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or -unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the -remaining provisions. - -1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the -trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone -providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in -accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the -production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm -electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, -including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of -the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this -or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or -additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any -Defect you cause. - -Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm - -Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of -electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of -computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It -exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations -from people in all walks of life. - -Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the -assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's -goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will -remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project -Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure -and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future -generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see -Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at -www.gutenberg.org Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit -501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the -state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal -Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification -number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by -U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. - -The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the -mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its -volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous -locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt -Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to -date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and -official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact - -For additional contact information: - - Dr. Gregory B. Newby - Chief Executive and Director - gbnewby@pglaf.org - -Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg -Literary Archive Foundation - -Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide -spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of -increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be -freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest -array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations -($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt -status with the IRS. - -The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating -charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United -States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a -considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up -with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations -where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND -DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular -state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate - -While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we -have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition -against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who -approach us with offers to donate. - -International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make -any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from -outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. - -Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation -methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other -ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To -donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate - -Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. - -Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project -Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be -freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and -distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of -volunteer support. - -Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed -editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in -the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not -necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper -edition. - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search -facility: www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. - - - -</pre> - - </body> -</html> diff --git a/old/50269-h/images/0001.jpg b/old/50269-h/images/0001.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index b0f3db1..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h/images/0001.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-h/images/0010.jpg b/old/50269-h/images/0010.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 89b46ed..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h/images/0010.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-h/images/0011.jpg b/old/50269-h/images/0011.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 6860d03..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h/images/0011.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50269-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/50269-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index b0f3db1..0000000 --- a/old/50269-h/images/cover.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/old/50269-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/old/old/50269-h.htm.2021-01-25 deleted file mode 100644 index be8f426..0000000 --- a/old/old/50269-h.htm.2021-01-25 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8187 +0,0 @@ -<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html
- PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
- "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
-
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
- <head>
- <title>
- Port Argent, by Arthur Colton
- </title>
- <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
- <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
-
- body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
- P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
- H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
- hr { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
- .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;}
- blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
- .mynote {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
- .toc { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
- .toc2 { margin-left: 20%;}
- .indent5 { margin-left: 5%;}
- .indent10 { margin-left: 10%;}
- .indent15 { margin-left: 15%;}
- .indent20 { margin-left: 20%;}
- .indent30 { margin-left: 30%;}
- .indent40 { margin-left: 40%;}
- div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
- div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
- .figleft {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
- .figright {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
- .pagenum {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
- font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
- text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
- border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
- .side { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 15%; padding-left: 0.8em;
- border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
- text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
- font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
- .head { float: left; font-size: 90%; width: 98%; padding-left: 0.8em;
- border-left: dashed thin; text-align: center;
- text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
- font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
- p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
- span.dropcap { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
- pre { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
-
-</style>
- </head>
- <body>
-
-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Port Argent
- A Novel
-
-Author: Arthur Colton
-
-Illustrator: Eliot Keen
-
-Release Date: October 21, 2015 [EBook #50269]
-Last Updated: March 12, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
- <div style="height: 8em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h1>
- PORT ARGENT
- </h1>
- <h3>
- A Novel
- </h3>
- <h2>
- By Arthur Colton
- </h2>
- <h3>
- With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen
- </h3>
- <h4>
- New York
- </h4>
- <h4>
- Henry Holt And Company
- </h4>
- <h3>
- 1904
- </h3>
- <div class="fig" style="width:50%">
- <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0000 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0001.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
- </h5>
- <div class="fig" style="width:50%">
- <img src="images/0010.jpg" alt="0010 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0010.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
- </h5>
- <div class="fig" style="width:50%">
- <img src="images/0011.jpg" alt="0011 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0011.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
- </h5>
- <p>
- <br /> <br />
- </p>
- <h3>
- IN MEMORIAM
- </h3>
- <h3>
- C. W. WELLS
- </h3>
- <p>
- <br /> <br />
- </p>
- <h3>
- DEDICATED
- </h3>
- <h3>
- TO
- </h3>
- <h3>
- GEORGE COLTON
- </h3>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- <b>CONTENTS</b>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—PULSES </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—CAMILLA </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—TECUMSEH STREET </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—ALCOTT AIDEE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE THIRD LAMP </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—MECHANICS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—HICKS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—THE BROTHERS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—AIDEE AND CAMILLLA </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS
- REST </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV—HENNION AND SHAYS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI—CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY
- HALL </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII—AIDEE—CAMILLA—HENNION
- </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII—T. M. SECOR—HENNION—CAMILLA
- </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX—CONCLUSION </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER I—PULSES
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ORT ARGENT is a
- city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it a waterway to the
- trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, instead of elsewhere
- on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and better convenience.
- One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, and the city grew.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive
- Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no “press
- galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences have been
- drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on its issues, and
- lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its sub-committees? Does an
- administrative providence ever veto its bills, or effectively pardon the
- transgressors of any statute?
- </p>
- <p>
- Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres back
- of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would grow
- in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help to
- maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to
- favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead
- into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that
- direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small farmers
- and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social speculators
- “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a session of
- accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile.
- </p>
- <p>
- Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back of
- a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge of
- the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the
- bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But
- people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed
- of.
- </p>
- <p>
- There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney
- with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was born
- to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, late in
- his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new generation.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of
- Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers
- subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the
- breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of Port
- Argent.
- </p>
- <p>
- The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt
- legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded house,
- according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come to it
- once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to his mind
- not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something living and
- personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through arteries and veins
- (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), with brains working in a
- thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish emotions. He would note at one
- decade how it had thrown bridges across the river, steeples and
- elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden throbs of energy; had
- gathered a bundle of railroads and a row of factories under one arm, and
- was imitating speech through a half-articulate daily press; at another
- decade, it would seem to have slept; at another, it had run asphalt
- pavements out into the country, after whose enticing the houses had not
- followed, and along its busiest streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On
- the whole, Port Argent would seem masculine rather than feminine,
- reckless, knowing not form or order, given to growing pains, boyish
- notions, ungainly gestures, changes of energy and sloth, high hope and
- sudden moodiness.
- </p>
- <p>
- The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric
- character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its
- streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic
- heart beat and brain conceive.
- </p>
- <p>
- One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and
- found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street.
- </p>
- <p>
- Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down the
- river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything fitted
- anything else.
- </p>
- <p>
- Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty
- years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured
- Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take its
- pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but the
- improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port Argent's
- one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of the
- buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately line of
- square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the Champney
- place.
- </p>
- <p>
- A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since
- the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the
- city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the
- city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked a
- citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and
- freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these piles
- of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was told:
- “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to make
- them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Fixed him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, they're a happy family now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The citizens of Port Argent held singular language.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who is Marve Wood?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He's—there he is over there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And this Wood—is he an engineer and contractor?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No—well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of
- us.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases of
- the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of
- school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club.
- </p>
- <p>
- The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with a
- pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired,
- grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He produced
- the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated and
- consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried to and
- fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel and bar
- and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The elderly
- “Marve Wood,” stood beside him—thick-set, with a grey beard of the
- cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the faces
- that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He had a
- comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow
- Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a
- huge, black-moustached Irishman.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to
- work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy tucked
- in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The sidewalk
- grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the statue of a
- Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. He appeared to
- be facing his country's enemies with determination, but time and weather
- had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as if he found no
- enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. station and the
- workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street.
- </p>
- <p>
- Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw
- Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out
- there,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney went
- on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say,
- Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's
- arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She did
- not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front of the
- P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but looked away at
- the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, at the hurrying,
- glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the perfect blue. The
- lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained with the reek of the
- factory chimneys across the river; and the river, when you came to
- consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged with impetuous
- tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were energetic, too,
- concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats had no poise or
- repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery energies had solid
- bases, and the powers within them did not carry them away. There are men,
- as well as steam engines, whose energies carry them bodily, and there are
- others who are equally energetic from a fixed basis, and the difference is
- important—important to the observer of the signs of the times;
- possibly even important to Camilla.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were
- more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the
- spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny
- clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted a
- flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the ground
- glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and an
- extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in the
- next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The street
- outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building opposite
- were open.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his
- boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh—well—he's all
- right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry
- banner if he wants to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that function.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't stand
- any deadheads.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the
- shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the
- man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see
- him,” he added.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right, I'll do that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both
- satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel
- injured.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I'm glad to oblige him——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but—you'd
- better make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a
- cross-country schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's all right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and
- added, “I see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,”
- said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, “except
- one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It was a man
- named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started in to fight
- the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the landlord was full
- of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest rheumatism woke up,
- and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all right, supposing
- Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, like enough, he hadn't. But
- he went round town then making the same arrangement with other folks, a
- lawyer and a liveryman and others. Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he
- didn't, but after a while somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph
- buried him with a sigh. He never was really comfortable.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke
- with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at an
- upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what
- appeared dumb-show.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It means,
- if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's because folks
- get so tired of the warlike.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aidee?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine man—fine
- man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks got kind of tired
- of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. Well—maybe so. Then
- I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes along with a patent pill,
- and a new porous plaster, and claims his plaster has the holes arranged in
- triangles, instead of squares like all previous plasters; he has an air of
- candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my soul! Your system's out of order.'
- Sounds interesting once in a while. And then this world gets so tired of
- him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache eleven thousand years. I wish to God you
- wouldn't keep giving it new names.' Well,—a couple of years ago the
- <i>Chronicle</i> was publishing Aidee's speeches on Civic something or
- other every week. Aidee used to shoot straight but scattering at that
- time. He'd got too much responsibility for the details of the millennium.
- Why, when you come right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an
- opinion of himself as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If
- I could stand up like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of
- natural gas on the blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there
- ain't any real democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any
- man. Guess likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other
- gutter-man hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't.
- Aidee's a loose comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for
- boiling potatoes. Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent
- Reform and his Assembly—oh, well—he wasn't doing any great
- harm then. He ain't now, either. I told him one time, like this: “I says,
- 'Fire away anyhow that suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think
- you'd like my job?'”
- </p>
- <p>
- “'What is your job?' says he.
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little stumped.
- 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like
- it.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your
- job?'
- </p>
- <p>
- “And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact.
- </p>
- <p>
- “'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says.
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Complicated?'
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Yes.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it
- wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail last
- year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a clergyman on
- the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I can talk it.
- I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his intellectuals are all
- right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got the habit of meditation.
- So he starts in.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Bill, you've been a bad lot.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yep.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There ain't no hope for you, Bill.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” says Bill, “there ain't.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he
- allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says
- Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”'
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aidee laughed,—he did really,—and after that he looked
- thoughtful. Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say.
- 'Sweeney,' I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline
- of it. But I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you,
- thinking anybody could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of
- myself, sure.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't any
- of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable since.
- That's what I wanted to tell you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be
- interested to find out what he's up to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's got
- to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then turned
- into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the residence
- sections.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN Hennion
- reached his rooms the sunlight was slanting through the maples outside.
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat down after supper by his windows. The twilight was thickening in
- the foliage, the sparrows holding noisy caucuses there——
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion's father had been a contractor and engineer before him, and before
- the great war had made the face of the nation more thoughtful with the
- knowledge of what may happen in well-regulated families.
- </p>
- <p>
- Once the sun was a pillar of fire and cloud, the land of promise seemed
- every day attained, and the stars were jubilant. Were ever such broad
- green plains, strong brown rivers and blue lakes? There was oratory then,
- and sublime foreheads were smitten against the stars. Such oratory and
- such a forehead had Henry Champney, in those days. The subject of oratory
- was the devotion of the forefathers, the promises and attainments of the
- nation set forth in thrilling statistics. A thousand audiences shuffled
- and grinned, and went their way to accomplish the more immediate things
- which the orators had endeavoured to decorate. The admiration of the
- orator and the public was mutual. There was a difference in type,—and
- the submerged industrialist, who worked with odd expedients, who jested
- with his lips, and toiled terribly with brain and hand, admired the
- difference.
- </p>
- <p>
- The elder Hennion did not care about “the destinies of the nation.” He
- dredged the channel of that brown river, the Muscadine, drove the piles
- that held the docks of Port Argent, and dug the east section of the
- Interstate Canal. The war came, and someone appointed him to something
- connected with the transportation of commissary. He could not escape the
- habit of seeing that things did what they were supposed to do. Hennion's
- supplies were apt to reach the Army of the Cumberland regularly and on
- scheduled time, it would be hard to tell why.
- </p>
- <p>
- He built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A
- prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, and
- did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, “wrecked” the
- Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of it
- for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and
- philosophical.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. That's
- a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told his boys he
- hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did making it, but
- they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed him there, only
- he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and I wish I had your
- luck. But I've had a good time.” Such was “Rick” Hennion's philosophy.
- </p>
- <p>
- Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven
- years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of
- business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the
- inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on
- Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the State,
- agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and moreover
- some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw and trowel. He
- recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, white with the
- dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, somewhat small at
- first; men of another class seemed to look to him as naturally for jobs;
- his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile country. Among the
- friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he
- seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about the
- continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, one
- found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at one
- time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one of those
- personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but certainly
- members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor offices. Such a
- man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for the growth, a
- process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a function. If one
- wished to know anything intimate about the city, what was doing, or about
- to be done, or how the Council would vote, or any one thread in the
- tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood appeared to have this
- information. His opinion was better—at least better informed—than
- most opinions. For some reason it was difficult not to be on good terms
- with him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Port Argent concluded one day that it had a “boss.” It was suggested in a
- morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was
- interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said,
- “We're a humming town.” Real estate at auction went a shade higher that
- morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted for.
- The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wood, I hear you're a boss.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the window
- and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there
- it ought to be spelled with a brick.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—now—I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a
- shingle mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his
- shingle on my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago,
- and now every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the
- shingle, and spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been
- better. Want anything in particular?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, and
- when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen
- indestructible desks.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were quiet,
- because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The issues of
- their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, many a
- sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, and in the
- morning the issues be different, and the victims find their neighbours
- overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' sins are not
- interesting forever, let alone their wrongs.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank
- Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise than
- contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and
- furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to the
- people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. Hennion
- was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla ought to
- sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the spirit of
- another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped short years
- before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious worth; the
- curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams occupied
- gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads.
- </p>
- <p>
- Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white head
- of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat primly
- with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses.
- </p>
- <p>
- The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of the
- flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, or
- attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except Camilla,
- seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla said: “You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's
- important!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the
- importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and
- yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, and
- lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly people
- recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity and
- readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction would
- wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a notion of
- his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish even the
- constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not less apart
- from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their antiquities.
- She belonged to a set of associations that should not be mixed up with the
- street. In the street, in the clear light and grey dust, men and ideas
- were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence was to him a kind of
- vestal college. At least, it was the only presence that ever suggested to
- his mind things of that nature, symbols and sacred fires, and half-seen
- visions through drifting smoke.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was contented now to wait for the revelation.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Have you lots of influence really?” she said. “Isn't it fine! I want you
- to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow
- suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the
- dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent ideals
- lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where chants
- were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the
- transparencies, so to speak—it was unpleasant.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'd rather not see him here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But he's coming!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. I shan't run away.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And he has asked my father——”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, Camilla!” he broke in, and then laughed. “Did he ask Miss Eunice to
- come in, too?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The prospect had its humours—the guilelessness of the solemn
- preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of
- Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might turn
- out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She sometimes
- did; that is, she sometimes hovered over the comprehension of a joke, as a
- bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy absurdity jogging
- along the highway of this world, but she had so many other emotions to
- take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around her, that her humour
- could not always be depended on.
- </p>
- <p>
- The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, as
- he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired,
- black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air
- of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit.
- Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The five
- sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big white
- head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; Camilla was
- breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her gold-rimmed
- glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not rotund, though
- his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his feet, pacing the
- floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that Aidee was a
- peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. He swept
- together at first a number of general ideas which did not interest
- Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in
- particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing
- circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but
- disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned to
- dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the
- table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of
- ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You put
- your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand is mixed
- up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of foundations.
- Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and here they are
- bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share—in both of
- these results?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face
- was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick!
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him,
- so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of
- that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul
- abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt that
- Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of a
- noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. He
- felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact
- candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind of
- unreal, gaudy emotionalism.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to
- business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to have a
- certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain amount of
- preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, provided they're
- good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand themselves to be voting
- for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I contract with them to suit my
- business interests, but I never canvass. Probably the ward leaders do. I
- suppose there's a point in all this affair. I'd rather come to it, if you
- don't mind. You want me to do personal wire-pulling, which I never do and
- don't like, in order to down certain men I am under obligations to, which
- doesn't seem honourable, and against my business interests, which doesn't
- seem reasonable.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wire-pulling? No.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire
- that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like it,
- or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee hesitated.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Miss Champney——”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to yours——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why not? Class! I have no class!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone
- even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them this
- way.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why not?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The apology seems in place,” rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating
- thorough bass.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest”—Champney
- heaved his wide frame out of the chair—“that he be released from his
- situation.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you like the situation, sir?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I do not, sir,” with rising thunder. “I hope, if this discussion is
- continued here, or elsewhere,”—appearing to imply a preference for
- “elsewhere,”—“it will have no reference to my family.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of
- meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee
- stood still a moment. Then he said quietly:
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have made a mistake. Good-night,” and took his leave. He looked tired
- and weighed down.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla wept with her head on the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or
- repentance.
- </p>
- <p>
- Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like
- shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He
- wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away
- from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and
- the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too
- apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them to
- suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not altogether
- and solely for business men to do business in, else why such men as Aidee,
- so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to fill a
- practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he would not?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do not
- come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion that
- wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient
- attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” his
- philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no
- longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the
- wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies,
- backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current
- eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large
- repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death,”
- and of these the first four make their reports in the street.
- </p>
- <p>
- Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not
- Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven
- celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER III—CAMILLA
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OMEONE once
- suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found comfort in the
- suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a
- term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising,
- valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going.
- They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would
- have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent20">
- “The fervent love Camillus bore
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- His native land.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused.
- </p>
- <p>
- In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was
- lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and
- shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and
- throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either.
- </p>
- <p>
- At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still makes
- it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more exhilarating
- than ever.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic beliefs
- and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to interpret
- herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive of swarming
- energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where ran a swift
- river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She barely remembered
- when the family lived in the national capital, and Henry Champney was a
- noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental picture of an invalid
- mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her memories ran about Port
- Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, the household rule of Miss
- Eunice. They included glimpses of her father's friend, the elder Hennion,
- a broad-shouldered man, who always had with him the slim youth, Dick;
- which slim youth was marvellously condescending, and once reconstructed
- her doll with wires, so that when you pulled a wire it would wave arms and
- legs in the manner in which Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever
- waved her arms and legs. He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He
- taught her carpentry and carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer
- and saw, mallet and chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards
- of the Champney house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the
- tops of the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's
- hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with
- Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge the
- finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, because
- they were not true.
- </p>
- <p>
- Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age of
- twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, but all
- hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit.
- </p>
- <p>
- On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window
- knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and
- underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal and
- brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from ship to
- car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad bridge;
- beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long roofs, and
- black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood tenements of East
- Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because one knew they were
- there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the suburbs, a flat,
- prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, highways, and
- trestle pyramids of the oil wells.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river and
- factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's
- disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla
- came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to
- reminiscence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a time
- she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, and
- began running through the titlepages.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic
- Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Aidee lent you such books!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' 'The
- Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!” She had slipped beyond the titlepage
- of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked in a new
- impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss Eunice
- returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs
- between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young have
- not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to their
- predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the purport of
- the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we might live, but
- were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had her heartbeats and
- flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or how. No matter what her
- romance was. It was a story of few events or peculiarities. She had grown
- somewhat over-rigid with time. That her melancholy—if melancholy it
- should be called, a certain dry severity—that it gave most people a
- slight impression of comedy, was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it.
- As to that long-past phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not
- remember ever having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled
- “Socialism and Anarchy,” or “The Civic Disease,” or “The Inner Republic.”
- She was glad to believe that Camilla was “a type,” because it was easier
- to condemn a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and
- flushed cheeks over matters so unsuitable.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss Eunice's
- flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social emphasis on
- sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the difference, and
- looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the
- room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair
- beside him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now! What do you think?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the
- first.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think your books will lose their backs,” Champney rumbled mildly.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed in
- at the tall side windows.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Think of what, my dear?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Listen!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she
- read from the grey volume, as follows:
- </p>
- <p>
- “'You have remarked too often “I am as good as you.” It is probable that
- God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he knows
- that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked “You are
- as good as I,” it would have represented a more genial frame of mind. It
- would have rendered your superiority more probable, since whichever remark
- you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence that it is not true.
- But indeed it is probable that neither your life nor your ideas are
- admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not to become convinced
- that no one is better than you, but to find someone to whom you can
- honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not back, nor away among
- the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am asking you to search for
- your leader among your contemporaries, not satisfied until you find him,
- not limited in your devotion when you have found him, taking his cause to
- be yours. I am asking you to remember that evil is not social, but human;
- that good is not social, but human. You have heard that an honest man is
- the noblest work of God. You have heard of no institution which merits
- that finality of praise. You have heard that every institution is the
- lengthened shadow of a man. Is it then in shadows or by shadows that we
- live?'”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla paused.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle,” said
- Champney.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Champney took the volume, read, “Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master Went,”
- and turned back to the title page. “H'm—'The Inner Republic, by
- Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?” he asked. “We discover America
- every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy
- surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures most
- capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he replied
- gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had his happy
- surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for the efforts
- Champ-ney had made—not altogether painless—to realise the
- lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the new,—that
- his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; so that the
- two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk friendly and long,
- without patronage or impatience.
- </p>
- <p>
- To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete,
- that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an old
- story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his shelves
- had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had
- connection through himself with the stir of existence.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Websterian periods had taken on a ghostly echo, and the slow ebbing of
- the war issues had left him with a sense of being stranded on dry sands.
- There seemed to be a flatness everywhere,—a silence, except for the
- noisy rattle of the street.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is a pleasant saying, that “The evening of life comes bringing its own
- lamp,” but it seemed to him it was a drearily false one. The great men of
- a great time, he thought, were gone, or fast going. It was a stagnation
- period in his life, pictured in his mind afterward as an actual desert,
- dividing arable lands. Were the new men so small, so unuplifted, or was it
- only his own mind grown dry and nerveless? He was afraid it was the
- latter,—afraid life was dying away, or drying up in his still
- comfortable body.
- </p>
- <p>
- He would prove to himself that it was not.
- </p>
- <p>
- This was the beginning of the effort he had made,—a defiant,
- half-desperate rally. The struggle began at a definite date. One day he
- put away his old books. He bought new ones, and new periodicals, and
- determined to find the world still alive,—to find again that old
- sense of the importance of things that were going on. It was an intimate
- fight this time, unapplauded—against a shadow, a creeping numbness.
- He fought on, and at length had almost begun to lose hope.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Camilla came back from college and Eastern friends she dawned upon
- him in a series of minute surprises. She brought him his victory, and the
- lamp for his evening. So it came about. The struggle was over, and the
- longed-for hope and cheer came back to him.
- </p>
- <p>
- So it came that the relation between them was peculiar. New books had a
- meaning when Camilla read them to him, as she read from Alcott Aidee's
- book to-day, while the noise of the freight-yards, and the rattle of the
- travelling crane unloading a docked ship, sounded dull and distant. The
- sunlight came yellow and pleasant through tall windows, and the fire
- snapped briskly, and Alcott Aidee spoke through the medium of Camilla and
- the grey volume, making these singular remarks:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Incarnation of divinity! Surely you have been unfortunate, if in going to
- and fro in this world you have nowhere observed any measure of divinity
- incarnated in a man, apparent in ordering or in obedience, in leading or
- in following, speaking from lips which said, 'Follow me,' as well as from
- those which said, 'Thy will, not mine be done,' speaking, for aught I
- know, as largely in one way as the other. I am not measuring divinity. I
- am showing you where to look for it. I am trying to persuade you that it
- does not speak from lips which say 'I am as good as you.'”
- </p>
- <p>
- New books, ran Champney's thoughts, new men, new times, new waves foaming
- up the old slant shores. But only as they spoke with Camilla's voice, did
- they seem to him now to make the numbed cords vibrate again, or comfort
- his wintry age.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Isn't it interesting, daddy? If you're going to be frivolous, I shan't
- read.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Champney was looking at the volume with a grim smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was thinking that to read only in the middle of the gentleman's book
- was perhaps not doing him justice. It was perhaps why I did not understand
- where he began, or where he was going. It seems to be neither old
- democracy nor new socialism, but more like the divine rights of some kind
- of aristocracy. Shall we not read the book through in order, my dear?
- Having become convinced that Mr. Aidee himself contains a measure of this
- divinity, and having taken him for our leader, shall we not then induce
- our recalcitrant friend Dick to join us, and in that way induce him to
- become a politician?”
- </p>
- <p>
- This was the Champney manner in the stately vein of irony.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh!” Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, a Champney gesture, “Dick
- was horrid about that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Recalcitrant, Hum! Horrid, horridus, bristling, Ha! Not inappropriate to
- the attitude on that occasion of the said Dick. Not usual for him, I
- should say. He is like his father, Camilla. A quiet man, but striking, the
- latter. You don't remember him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes! But you see, Dick didn't like it, because Mr. Aidee asked me to
- help him. But it isn't like him to be fussy. Anyway, I liked it, but Dick
- didn't. So!” Camilla pushed back her hair, another Champney gesture—the
- defiant one. “Now, what made him act like hornets?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I also took the liberty not to like it, Camilla,” with a rumble of
- thorough bass.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla glanced up, half startled, and put a small warm hand into her
- father's hand, which was large, bony, and wrinkled. The two hands clasped
- instinctively hard, as if for assurance that no breach should come between
- them, no distance over which the old and the young hand could not clasp.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla turned back to Alcott Aidee's book, and read on. Champney found
- himself now listening in a personal, or what he might have described as a
- feminine, way; he found himself asking, not what meaning or truth there
- was in this writer, but asking what meaning it might have toward Camilla,
- at the Arcadian age when maids are fain of surprises. He thought of Dick
- Hennion, of the Hennions, father and son. One always wondered at them,
- their cross-lot logic, their brevities, their instinct as to where the
- fulcrum of a thing rested. One believed in them without asking reasons—character
- was a mysterious thing—a certain fibre or quality. Ah! Rick Hennion
- was dead now, and Henry Champney's fighting days were over. It was good to
- live, but a weariness to be too old. He thought of Alcott Aidee, of his
- gifts and temperament, his theory of devotion and divinity—an
- erratic star, a comet of a man, who had a great church—by the way,
- it was not a church—a building at least, with a tower full of
- clamouring bells, and a swarming congregation. It was called “The Seton
- Avenue Assembly.” So Aidee had written this solid volume on—something
- or other. One could see he was in earnest, but that Camilla should be
- over-earnest in the wake of his argument seemed a strong objection to the
- argument. A new man, an able writer—all very interesting—but——
- In fact, he might prove resident divinities, or prove perpetual
- incarnations of the devil, if he chose, but what did the fellow mean by
- asking Camilla to—— In fact, it was an unwarranted liberty.
- Champney felt suddenly indignant. Camilla read on, and Champney disliked
- the doctrine, whatever it was, in a manner defined even by himself as
- “feminine.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Not in vain,' she read, 'have men sought in nature the assurance of its
- large currents, of its calm and self-control, the knitting up of “the
- ravelled sleave of care,” “the breathing balm of mute insensate things,”
- “the sleep that is among the lonely hills.” It has been written,
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent20">
- “Into the woods my Master went
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- Clean foresprent,
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- and that “the little grey leaves were kind to him.” All these things have
- I found, and known them. Was it there my Master went? I found the balm,
- the slumber, and the peace. But I found no inspiration. This, wherever I
- found it, always spoke with human lips, always looked out of human eyes.
- The calm of nature is as the calm of the past. Green battlefields lie
- brooding, because the issue is over; deep woods and secluded valleys,
- because the issue is elsewhere. The apostle who met a vision of his Master
- on the Appian Way, and asked, “Whither goest thou?” was answered, “Into
- the city.” Do you ask again, whither he went? I answer that he went on
- with the vanguard of the fight; which vanguard is on the front wave and
- surf of these times; which front wave and surf is in the minds and moods
- of persons; not in creeds, customs, formulas, churches, governments, or
- anywhere else at all; for the key to all cramped and rusted locks lies in
- humanity, not in nature; in cities, not in solitudes; in sympathy, not in
- science; in men, not in institutions; not in laws, but in persons.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aren't you interested, daddy?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, my dear. Why do you ask?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You look so absent-minded. But it's a new chapter now, and it's called
- 'Constitutions.'” Camilla laughed triumphantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Constitutions! Then the gentleman will be political. Go on.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Chapter ninth,'” she read. “'Constitutions.'
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Most men govern themselves as monarchies; some as despotisms that topple
- to anarchies, some as nearly absolute monarchies; but mainly, and on the
- whole, they govern themselves as partially restricted or constitutional
- monarchies; which constitutions are made up of customs, precedents, and
- compromises, British Constitutions of opportunism and common law. Indeed,
- they claim that the inner life <i>must</i> be a monarchy by its nature,
- and every man's soul his castle. They are wrong. It must be a republic,
- and every man's soul an open house.
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Now, it is nowhere stated in any Declaration or Constitution put forth
- of this Inner Republic that “all men are by nature free and equal.” If
- such a declaration occurred to the framers of this Constitution, they
- would seem to have thought it difficult to reconcile with observation, and
- not very pertinent either. As a special qualification for citizenship, it
- appears to be written there that a man must love his neighbour as himself—meaning
- as nearly as he can, his citizenship graded to his success; and as a
- general maxim of common law, it is written that he shall treat other men
- as he would like them to treat him, or words to that effect. However,
- although to apply and interpret this Constitution there are courts enough,
- and bewildering litigation, and counsel eager with their expert advice,
- yet the Supreme Court holds in every man's heart its separate session.”
- </p>
- <p>
- To all of which Champney's thoughts made one singular comment. “Camilla,”
- they insisted, “Camilla.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HILE Camilla and
- Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over Aidee's book, Miss Eunice
- in the parlour bent a grey head over her knitting, and thought of Camilla,
- and disapproved of the type of girls who neither knitted nor even
- embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over such subjects, for instance, as
- “Richard,” but over such subjects as “Problems of the Poor,” and “Civic
- Diseases.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the
- window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered
- roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and
- disapproved of what she saw.
- </p>
- <p>
- There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent.
- Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with
- their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so.
- </p>
- <p>
- Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was
- over the Maple Street bridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the
- bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first
- corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was
- unlikely, the sign would read “Muscadine Street.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories;
- Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one side
- and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or brick,
- with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors mainly shops
- for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun with
- inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children
- quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of whom
- those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever faces
- generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and
- triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither
- circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more than
- endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's disapproval,
- and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is singular how
- many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and neither be the
- better or worse on that account.
- </p>
- <p>
- On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a
- flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street
- leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the
- stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that “James
- Shays, Shoemaker,” was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do so
- on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the
- shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first was
- the shop.
- </p>
- <p>
- A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a smoky-chimneyed
- lamp thereon, some newspapers, and half of a book that had been ripped
- savagely in two. A double shoemaker's bench stood next the window, a
- cooking stove and a cupboard opposite. Clothes hung on wall-hooks, hides
- lay on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays sat on one end of the bench, a grey-haired, grey-moustached,
- watery-eyed man, pegging a shoe vaguely. A black-haired little man with a
- thin black beard sat on the other end, stitching a shoe fiercely. A
- redlipped, red-cheeked, thick-nosed, thick-necked man with prominent eyes,
- sat tilted back in one of the wooden chairs, stating his mind
- deliberately.
- </p>
- <p>
- Most of these phases of Muscadine Street might be found so arranged, on
- most mornings, by any visitor. Shays and the red-cheeked Coglan could not
- be depended on; but the men on the sidewalk, the women in the windows, the
- children in the street, the clamour and the smells would be there; also
- the grocer, the butcher, and Hicks, the stitcher of vehement stitches. If
- Coglan and Shays were there, Coglan would be found in the process of
- stating his mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' eyes were black, restless, and intense, his mouth a trifle on one
- side, his forehead high with a deep line down the middle. It was a painful
- line; when he smiled it seemed to point downward frowningly to the fact
- that the smile was onesided.
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan was Shays' associate in the pursuit of happiness. His value lay in
- this: that upon a certain amount of hard liquor purchased by Shays, and
- divided fairly and orderly between them, Shays became needy of help, and
- Coglan generally remained in good condition and able to take him home.
- Hicks was Shays' partner in the shop. His value lay in this: that he did
- twice as much work as Shays, and was satisfied with half the profits. Both
- men were valuable to Shays, and the shop supported the three.
- </p>
- <p>
- The relations between them had grown settled with time. Nearly four years
- earlier Hicks had entered Shays' shop. There he learned to cobble footwear
- in some incredibly short time, and took his place in the apprehension of
- Muscadine Street. Hicks he called himself and nothing more. “Hicks” was a
- good enough name. It went some distance toward describing the brooding and
- restless little man, with his shaking, clawlike fingers, smouldering
- temper, and gift for fluent invective. Some said he was an anarchist. He
- denied it, and went into fiery definitions, at which the grocer and candy
- man shook their heads vaguely, and the butcher said, “Says he ain't, an'
- if he ain't, he ain't,” not as I see which seemed a conclusive piece of
- logic. At any rate he was Hicks.
- </p>
- <p>
- The elderly Shays was a peaceful soul, a dusty mind, a ruined body. He was
- travelling through his life now at a pace that would be apt to bring him
- to the end of it at no distant date, enjoying himself, as he understood
- enjoyment, or as enjoyment was interpreted to him by the wise Coglan.
- Coglan maintained a solidly planted dislike of Hicks, whose attacks
- threatened his dominance, whose acrid contempt and unlimited vocabulary
- sometimes even threatened his complacence. Coglan's wisdom saw that the
- situation was preferable to searching for jobs, and that the situation
- depended on Hicks' acceptance of it. Hicks was a mystery to him, as well
- as to Shays, and something of a fear, but Coglan was not disturbed by the
- mystery. He could leave that alone and do very well. But Hicks was a
- poisoned needle. Hicks knew where to find Coglan's sensitive point and jab
- it. Coglan hated him solidly, but balancing his dislike against his
- interest and ease, Coglan wisely found that the latter were more solid
- still—beyond comparison solid.
- </p>
- <p>
- All this could be learned by any visitor inquiring in Muscadine Street.
- The grocer underneath would add tersely that Shays was a soak, but
- good-hearted; that Hicks was a fool, and ought to set up shop for himself;
- that Coglan was a loafer, and had his bread buttered now about to suit
- him. Disapproval of each other was current in Muscadine Street. It was a
- part of their interest in life.
- </p>
- <p>
- The same morning sunlight that slanted through Henry Champney's tall
- library and parlour widows was slanting through the small streaked window
- of Shays, the shoe-mender. Coglan was stating his mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jimmy Shays, yer a good man,” he was saying slowly; “an', Hicksy, yer an'
- industhrious man; but nayther of ye is a wise man; but Jimmy is the wisest
- man of ye two. For why? Ask that, an' I says this. For when Jimmy wants a
- bit of thinkin' done for him, he gets a sensible man to do it, an' a poor
- man, an' a workin' man like himself, an' a man that's a friend, and that
- stands by him in throuble. But what does ye do, Hicksy? Ye goes over the
- river. Ye goes up to Seton Avenue. Ye listens to a chin-waggin' preacher.
- An' what's his name? Aidee! He ain't a workin' man himself, but wears the
- clothes of the rich, an' ates his dinner wid the rich, an' says hard words
- of the friends of the poor. An' yer desaved, Hicksy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks stopped work and shook a thin fist at Coglan. “If you're talkin' of
- him, you keep your manners.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi, the Preacher! Oi, he might be meanin' well, Hicksy. I ain't sayin'
- not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What are you saying then?” jabbing viciously with his needle. “Damn!
- You're an Irishman, ain't you? Chin-wagging institution yourself. What!
- Who's the working man? You! Ain't you got a description of you that's
- vivider'n that?” breaking into a cackling laugh. “Then I'll ask you, what
- friends of the poor you're talking about so glib, like a greased wheel?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi! Yer askin' what I mean by a friend, Hicksy? Ye are! An' yer right,
- an' I'll show ye the point. I'll speak to ye of John Murphy, now, what
- I've had many a drink on him, an' a helpin' hand. A friend is a friend in
- need. That's him. Now, thin, Murphy's a friend of Wood's, for he says so.
- Now, thin, I'll show you Dick Hennion. For if I wants a job, I says the
- word to Murphy, an' he speaks the word maybe to Hennion an' he gets me a
- job, for he done it onct, an' I know, don't I? if so be it happen I wants
- a job. An' Hennion's a friend of Wood's, too, as anywan knows. Now! A
- friend of me, I says, is a man that acts friendly to me. That's him. So
- would ye say, Hicksy, if ye was a wise man an' a man of sense, instead of
- chasin' afther a chin-waggin' preacher, like a schnare-drum afther a
- thrombone. Haw, haw, haw! a brass throm-bone! But Wood's a friend of the
- poor, an' I've proved it. For why? For I say it's the rich that he bleeds,
- but the poor man he's friendly to. Now, thin! What does Aidee do but say
- the bad word of Wood. In consequence, in consequence, I says,”—and
- Coglan smote his knee,—“he ain't no friend of the poor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' black eyes glittered and focussed themselves, a concentrated stare
- at a minutely small spot between Coglan's eyes. His teeth clicked.
- Coglan's laugh died away. He turned his eyes aside and rubbed his red face
- uneasily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Coglan,” said Hicks, “I warned you before. You shake your mouth at the
- Preacher again and I'll stick a knife into your dirty throat. You hear
- that!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan's redness showed purple spots.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Think I'm afraid of ye!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yep, I think you are.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll break your little chick bones!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yep. You're afraid, and you better stay so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hicksy!” broke in Shays with quavering voice. “Tom! we're all friends,
- ain't we? Now, then, Tom, Hicksy makes a point you leave out the Preacher,
- don't he? He'll argue peaceful. Jus' leave out the Preacher. Won't you,
- Hicksy? Hey? You'll argue peaceful.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I said I would.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Leave out the Preacher,” said Shays. “All friens'. Hey?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan wiped his perspiring face. “I'm a sensible man,” he said. “When
- Jimmy Shays asks a favour, I say, sure! I'm a sensible man.” He looked
- resentfully and uneasily at Hicks, but seemed relieved to withdraw from
- his aggressive position without losing his dominance.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi! I told ye what I meant by a friend. I said Marve Wood was a friend of
- the poor, an' I proved it. I'll be fair an' square. I'll ask ye, what's <i>your</i>
- meanin'?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks dropped his eyes, and fell to his jabbing needlework.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Friend!” he said. “You mean a man that's useful to you. <i>You</i> say
- so! <i>You</i> say so! That's your meaning. Good's what's good for me.
- Sense is what agrees with me. Nothing's got any value that ain't valuable
- to that God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked 'me,' named Coglan, that's got no
- more value than to fertilise a patch of potatoes. Friend! You get another
- word. I got nothing to say to you. But I'll tell you this. I'll tell you
- what I think of Wood. He's got a reckoning coming. What is Wood? I'll tell
- you that he's the meeting point of two enemies—the corporations and
- the people, the rich and the poor. His job's to keep in with both. That's
- what his friendliness amounts to. His job's to sell the corporations what
- belongs to the people. And he'll grin at the people on one side, so! And
- he'll wink at the corporations on the other, so! And he'll say: 'How do,
- Johnny, and Billy, and Sammy?' So! And he'll say to the corporations,
- 'What'll you give for Johnny's hat?' So! Then he gives Johnny half what he
- gets for the hat, so! Then he's got Sammy and Billy to back the deal, so!
- Well, what's Wood! I've told you what he is. Friend of the poor! What do
- you know about it?” He dropped the shoe, shook his loose fingers in the
- air, and cried. “He's a cancer! Cut him out! He's an obstruction! Blow him
- up! What, then? Then I say this, Tom Coglan, and I say it's a good thing
- when damn rascals are afraid!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quotin' the Preacher?” said Coglan complacently.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks narrowed his black eyes again, and focussed them on Coglan, who
- turned away uneasily. Hicks went on:
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether Wood
- ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in his life,
- nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against him, then,
- or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm talking about?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi!” said Coglan. “Yer right. I'll ask ye that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine”—tapping his narrow
- chest—“ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going
- to mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that
- does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to
- fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi! Quotin' the Preacher.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I am, some of it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each
- other and then stealthily at Hicks.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hear no talk against the Preacher,” Hicks went on, after a time; “I
- won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor the
- like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,—neither him, nor his talk,
- nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent but me
- that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my thinking for
- me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about him, or me?
- What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, and then if you
- said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to go crazy, and
- always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting you on fire and
- then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; and if you talked
- like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk to you. I'd talk
- so, too, for his way ain't my way.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of
- it's not. That's my way.”
- </p>
- <p>
- His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and savage
- that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a startled
- way, as if he expected to see something ghastly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But it ain't the Preacher's way. But I ain't the man to be held back,”
- said Hicks, “and patted and cooed over. Not me. Show me a snake and I
- stamp on it! Show me the spot and I hit it! Damn!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He twisted his mouth. His teeth clicked again, and his crooked fingers
- drove the glittering needles swiftly back and forth through the leather.
- Coglan stared at him with prominent eyeballs and mouth open. Shays wiped
- his glasses, and then his red-lidded eyes with his coat sleeve.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All frien's, Hicksy! Ain't we?” he murmured uneasily.
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan recovered. “An' that's right, too. Jimmy Shays is a kind man and a
- peaceable man, an' I'm a sensible man, an' yer an industhrious man, but
- yer not a wise man, Hicksy, an'”—with sudden severity—“I'll
- thank ye not to stomp on Tom Coglan.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He got up. Shays rose, too, and put on his coat, and both went out of the
- door. Hicks gave a cackling laugh, but did not look after them.
- </p>
- <p>
- Presently he finished the shoe, laid it down, rubbed his hands, and
- straightened his back. Then he went and got the torn book, sat down, and
- read in it half an hour or more, intent and motionless.
- </p>
- <p>
- The factory whistles blew for twelve o'clock. He rose and went to a side
- cupboard, took out a leathern rifle case, put a handful of cartridges in
- his pockets, and left the shop.
- </p>
- <p>
- The grocer's children in the side doorway fled inward to the darkness of
- the hall as he passed. The grocer's wife also saw him, and drew back
- behind the door. He did not notice any of them.
- </p>
- <p>
- The long eastward-leading street grew more and more dusty and unpaved. He
- passed empty lots and then open fields, cornfields, clumps of woods, and
- many trestles of the oil wells. He climbed a rail fence and entered a
- large piece of woods, wet and cool. The new leaves were just starting from
- their buds.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a mild April day, with a silvery, misty atmosphere over the green
- mass of the woods. A few of the oil wells were at work, thudding in the
- distance. Cattle were feeding in the wet green fields. Birds, brown and
- blue, red-breasted and grey-breasted, twittered and hopped in tree and
- shrub. A ploughman in a far-off field shouted to his team. Crows flapped
- slowly overhead, dropping now and then a dignified, contented croak. The
- only other sound was the frequent and sharp crack of a rifle from deep in
- the centre of the woods.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER V—TECUMSEH STREET
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>ECUMSEH STREET was
- the fourth street back from the river. Tradition said that the father and
- Certain aunts of the man who laid out the street had been scalped by
- Tecumseh, the Indian. It was the only distinguished event in his family,
- and he wished to commemorate it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The street was paved with undressed Medina. The newspaper offices were all
- there, and the smash and scream of undressed Medina under traffic was in
- the columns. It was satisfactory to Port Argent. The proper paving of
- streets in front of newspaper offices was never petitioned in the Council.
- Opposite the offices was a half block of vacant lots, a high board fence
- of advertisements around it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The space between was packed with a jostling crowd. A street lamp lit a
- small section of it. Lights from the office windows fell in patches on
- faces, hats, and shoulders. A round moon floated above the tower of <i>The
- Chronicle</i> Building with a look of mild speculation, like a “Thrice
- Blessed Buddha,” leading in the sky his disciple stars, who all
- endeavoured to look mildly speculative, and saying, “Yonder, oh,
- mendicants! is a dense mass of foolish desires, which indeed squirm as
- vermin in a pit, and are unpleasant to the eye of meditation. Because the
- mind of each individual is there full of squirming desires, even as the
- individual squirms in the mass.” No doubt it looks so when one floats so
- far over it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Opposite the windows of <i>The Chronicle</i> (Independent-Reform) and <i>The
- Press</i> (Republican) the advertising boards were covered with white
- cloth, and two blinding circles shone there of rival stereopticons. There
- was no board fence opposite <i>The Western Advocate</i> (Democratic), and
- no stereopticon in the windows. This was deplored. It showed a lack of
- public spirit—a want of understanding of the people's needs. If
- there could be no stereopticon without a board fence, there should be a
- brass band.
- </p>
- <p>
- The proprietor of <i>The Advocate</i> sent out for a bushel of Roman
- candles, and discharged them from his windows by threes, of red, white,
- and blue. This was poetic and sufficient.
- </p>
- <p>
- The stereopticons flashed on the white circles the figures of returns,
- when there were any, pictures and slurs when there were no figures,—a
- picture of a cage full of riotous monkeys on <i>The Chronicle</i> circle,
- underwritten, “The Council,”—a picture of an elderly lady with a
- poke bonnet and lifted hands of reprehension, on the <i>Press</i> circle,
- underwritten, “Independent Reform.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Auction of the City of Port Argent!” flashed <i>The Chronicle</i>.
- “Office of M. Wood. Cash on Delivery of Goods.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All citizens must go to Sunday School or be fined,” from <i>The Press</i>.
- </p>
- <p>
- “6th Ward. Rep. Plurality, 300.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “1st Ward. Ind. Ref. Plurality, 28.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Whish! a rocket from the windows of <i>The Western Advocate</i>. And the
- crowd roared and shuffled.
- </p>
- <p>
- The last of <i>The Press</i> windows to the left belonged to a little room
- off the press-room, containing a desk, a board table, and several chairs.
- The desk seemed only to be used as an object at which to throw articles,
- in order that, they might roll to the floor. There were crude piles of
- newspapers on it and about it, hats, a section of a stove pipe, and a
- backgammon board. The table looked as if it sometimes might be used to
- write on.
- </p>
- <p>
- The room was supposed to be the editor's, but no one in Port Argent
- believed Charlie Carroll ever stayed in the same place long enough to
- pre-empt it. He edited <i>The Press</i> from all over the city, and wrote
- the editorials wherever he stopped to catch breath. <i>The Press</i>
- editorials were sometimes single sentences, sometimes a paragraph. More
- than a paragraph was supposed to mean that Carroll had ridden on a street
- car, and relieved the tedium of his long imprisonment.
- </p>
- <p>
- A number of men stood at the window or stood grouped back, and watched the
- canvas across the street. The only light came through the door from the
- press-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- Carroll put his curly head through the door, shouted something and
- vanished. <i>The Press</i> stereopticon withdrew a view of Yosmite Valley
- and threw on the canvas:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Recount in the 1st Ward announced.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>The Chronicle</i> cleared its canvas promptly and flung across the
- street:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Fraud!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Only two men sat still by the window of the darkened room. The rest rushed
- out.
- </p>
- <p>
- The street was in an uproar, hats crushed over heads, fists shaken in the
- air to the instructive comment of the moon.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How foolish, oh, mendicants! How do men make for themselves troubles, as
- though one should stir quiet waters with his hand, saying, 'It is a storm.
- The gods have afflicted me.'”
- </p>
- <p>
- “How foolish!” said one of the men at the darkened window. “Those boys are
- terribly anxious to carry that Ward, and no point in it, Dick!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Suppose I'd been out canvassing for Reform, Wood? Think you'd have lost?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood peered curiously at Hennion in the half-lit dusk. “Like enough! Well—want
- anything in particular? I admit the bill, if it ain't too big.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't want anything.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood tilted his chair and was silent a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look what comes of making rows,” he went on. “I wouldn't have that Ward
- now for a gift. <i>The Chronicle</i>'s red in the face with wrath and
- happiness. Everybody's hair on end as it is. Disgusting, ain't it? Well—down
- east, where the land's tilted up so you can turn a section over bottom
- upwards by heaving one end with a rail, well—there was a man there
- had a farm at the bottom of a long hill, and his neighbour's punkins up
- above used to roll down on him. But he didn't make any row, because his
- yard was littered with punkins, no. He ate the punkins. Well, now, take
- the neighbour above, he might have gone down and called somebody a thief
- for not returning strayed punkins, and two pillars of the church might
- have disliked each other. But he didn't. He built a board fence along the
- lower edge of his cornfield and caught his own punkins. And there was
- mutual respect, mutual respect. Well—the boys, they always want to
- fight. They go round saying, 'The old man's level-headed,' but they ain't
- satisfied with building that fence to catch those punkins without heaving
- a rock down an aggravating man's chimney, or else it makes 'em mad to have
- punkins rolled at 'em, and moreover they don't roll fast enough.
- Disgusting, ain't it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wood! Wood! Wherein——” Carroll rushed in and turned up the
- electric light impatiently. “Wh-what you going to do about the First
- Ward?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He had thin bright curly hair, the slimmest of bodies, and moved like a
- restless insect.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tell'em to count it twenty-eight Reform plurality, no more and no less!
- And turn off that light! And clear out! Well—now—that Charlie
- Carroll, he's a living fidget. Well—when they used to race
- steamboats on the Mississippi, they'd put a nigger on the safety valve, so
- it wouldn't get nervous. I've heard so. I've seen 'em tie it up with a
- string. Well—winning the race depended some on the size and serenity
- of the nigger, that'd see it wasn't his place to worry, for he'd get blown
- off all right in the natural course of things. For sitting on a safety
- valve you want a nigger that won't wriggle. Well—Charlie's a good
- man. Keeps people thinking about odds and ends of things. If one thing out
- of forty is going to happen, his mind's going to be a sort of composite
- picture of the whole forty. Sees eight or ten dimensions to a straight
- line. Yes—folks are pretty liberal. They'll allow there's another
- side to 'most anything, and a straight line's got no business to be so
- gone particular. It's the liberal-mindedness of the public that lets us
- win out, of course. But—you've got to sit still sometimes, and wait
- for the earth to turn round.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose you have. It'll turn round.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, it'll turn round.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The tumult outside had subsided in a dull, unsettled rumble. The moon went
- into retreat among silver-grey clouds. Tecumseh Street muttered in the
- darkness of its pit. The stereopticons continued.
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>The Chronicle</i> suspects the U. S. Census,” from <i>The Press</i>.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Census O. K. Wood didn't make it,” from <i>The Chronicle</i>.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Port Argent stands by the G. O. P.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did Wood mention his Candidate's Name?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The <i>Press</i> threw defiantly the portrait of its candidate for mayor.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pull the String and See it Jump!” from <i>The Chronicle.</i>
- </p>
- <p>
- Behind <i>The Press</i> stereopticon a telephone jingled, telegraph
- instruments clicked, men wrote busily at a long table under a row of
- pendent electric lights that swayed in the draught.
- </p>
- <p>
- A large man came in, panting. His short coat swung back under his
- arm-pits, away from the vast curve of his waistcoat. He had a falling
- moustache and a round face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Vere iss Vood? So!” He peered curiously into the darker room. “Vere.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come along, Freiburger,” said Wood. “Pull up a chair. Well—how's
- your Ward? All quiet?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Freiburger settled into a chair with the same caution.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes, quviet. Not shtill, but quviet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's the difference between 'still' and 'quiet'?” asked Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Veil, it vass drunk, und someone vass punch Cahn der barber's nose, but
- not me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You call it quiet till somebody hits you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Vy should he hit me?” cried Freiburger indignantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He shouldn't,” said Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No! Veil, it vass not shtill, but quviet. Ach!” sadly, “ven a man iss
- drunk, vy don't he shleep?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He wants to stay awake and enjoy it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Freiburger shook his head slowly and felt of his nose, as if to be quite
- sure before taking the responsibility of repeating the statement.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It vass Cahn. It vass not me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood sat silently, looking through the window to where the stereopticons
- flashed over the crowd's changing emotions, half listening to the
- conversation near him. Freiburger peered anxiously at him in the dusk. His
- mind was trembling with the thrill and tumult of the day, longing that
- Wood might say something, utter some sentence that it might cling to,
- clasp about with comprehension, and be safe from wandering, unguaranteed
- ideas. Hennion seemed interested in examining Freiburger's soul.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Freiburger, you're as honest a man as I know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Veil, yes, I'm honest. I don't know who you know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You never owed a dollar you didn't pay.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, no, I don' do it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Business fair?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, what did you want to get on the Council for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! Veil! It vass goot for business.” He seemed pleased to talk about
- this, but expression was a matter of labour and excitement. “Veil! You
- see! Die boys sie come at Freiburger's saloon, und I know 'em all on Maple
- Street und der Fourt Vard. Und nights at Freiburger's I hear von der shobs
- und der Union und der prices. Und sie tell me vy der carriage factory
- strike. Und sie tell me Hennion iss a shquvare man, und Vood vill do as he
- say he vill do, und Shamieson in der freight yards iss a hog, und Ranald
- Cam iss make money, und Fater Harra iss teach lil' boys fight mit gloves
- in St. Catherine's parochial school und bleed der badness out of der
- kleine noses. Und sie say, 'I loss my shob, Freiburger!' 'My lil' boy
- sick, Freiburger.' Ach, so! All dings in der Vard iss tell me. Veil now,
- aber, look here! I am a Councilman. Der iss no man so big on Maple Street
- as Fater Harra und me, und Freiburger's iss head-quaverters of der Vard,
- und das iss goot for business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's all right. I see your point. But the Council isn't supposed to be
- an adjunct to the different councilmen's business, is it? I suppose the
- Ward understood itself to be trusting its interests in your hands, don't
- you? and you're a sort of guardian and trustee for the city, aren't you?
- Seems as if that would take a good deal of time and worry, because you'd
- want to be sure you were doing right by the city and the Ward, and it's a
- complicated affair you have to look after, and a lot of people's interests
- at stake.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood stirred slightly in his chair, partly with pleasure at the humour of
- it, partly with uneasiness. It was all right for Hennion to examine the
- Freiburger soul, if he liked, but to cast on its smooth seas such
- wide-stirring, windy ideas seemed unkind to Freiburger.
- </p>
- <p>
- Freiburger puffed heavily in the darkness.
- </p>
- <p>
- The excitement of expressing himself subsided, and Hennion's idea opened
- before him, a black gulf into which he could for a while only stare
- dubiously. His mind reached out vaguely for something familiar to cling
- to.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Veil—I don' know—die boys and Fater Harra und—Mein
- Gott! I ask Vood!” He puffed heavily again after the struggle and triumph.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Couldn't do better. It's what your boys expect of you anyhow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And Hennion returned to his silence. Freiburger's soul glowed peacefully
- once more.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It iss Vood's business, hein?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He looked from one to the other of the impassive, self-controlled men. He
- wanted Wood to say something that he could carry away for law and wisdom
- and conviction, something to which other ideas might be fitted and
- referred. He had the invertebrate instinct of a mollusk to cling to
- something not itself, something rooted and undriven, in the sea.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You've done well, Freiburger,” said Wood, rousing himself. “Tell the boys
- they've done well. Stay by your beer and don't worry till the keg's dry.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Freiburger rolled away, murmuring his message loyally. “Stay by mein—a—mein
- keg's dry.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Freiburger won't cost you much,” Hen-nion murmured after a while. Wood
- swung softly in his chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Got something on your mind, ain't you, Dick?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes. Of course. But I don't know what it is. I've fished for it till
- I'm tired. I've analysed Freiburger, and didn't get much. Now I'd like to
- examine your soul in a strong chemical solution. Maybe I'm a bit
- embarrassed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood chuckled. “Go ahead. Most men 'll lie, if you give 'em time to
- rearrange their ideas. Well—it won't take me so long.” His manner
- became genial. “You've got a good head, Dick. Well—I'll tell what
- I'm thinking. It's this. The old man 'll have to drop his job one of these
- days, and—if you're feeling for pointers—I don't say you are,
- but supposing you are—I don't mind saying I shall back you to head
- the organization. Maybe—well,—in fact, I don't suppose there's
- much money in it you'd care to touch—maybe there ain't any—but
- there's a place for the right man. I like you. I liked your father. He was
- built something your way. The boys want somebody over 'em that won't
- wriggle off the safety valve, and knows how to pick up punkins peacefully
- as they come. This First Ward business—well, you've got a pretty
- good grip through the crowd to begin with.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now there!” broke in Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You and Aidee are both trying to do the same thing. You want to get me
- into politics. I don't care for your primaries and committees. I don't see
- ten cents' difference to the city which party runs it. I dare say whoever
- runs it expects to make a living out of it. Why do you both come to me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess we've both got an idea you're useful.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion thought a moment and then spoke more quietly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Henry Champney used to boss this section. He did it from the platform
- instead of the committee room. And my father handled bigger contracts than
- I've touched yet. But Champney didn't ask him to run his canal into the
- next caucus, or furnish stray batches of constituents with jobs.
- Understand, I'm not grumbling about the last. Champney stayed on his
- platform, and my father stayed in his big ditch and dug. The proper thing
- now seems to be for everybody to get into the street and row around
- together. Here's Aidee too thinks he's got to jump into it now, and take
- with him—take with him everything he can' reach.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's straight,” murmured Wood. “So they do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, and I call off, myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. I was only guessing what you had in your mind. Well—it's
- business sets the pace nowadays. 'Most everything else has to catch its
- gait or be left. I remember Champney forty years gone. He was a fine
- picture, when he got up and spread himself. He didn't do anything that's
- here now, unless it's a volume of his speeches, congressional and
- occasional. Not much. He kept us all whooping for Harry Clay. Well—Clay's
- dead, Whig Party and Compromises and all burnt up. Your father built sixty
- miles of canal. Canal stock's pretty dead now, but that's not his fault.
- He laid a few thousand miles of railroad, went around this place and that,
- cleaning up the country. Several million people travel his railroads and
- walk his bridges. Anybody ever call him a great man like Henry Champney?
- Gone little he cared if they did or didn't. He and his like were a sight
- more important. Well—no; Champney didn't ask favours of anybody in
- those days. And he didn't ask votes. They shovelled 'em at him, and he
- went on telling 'em the Constitution was the foundation of America, and
- Harry Clay the steeple. They weren't. Rick Hennion and his like were the
- foundation, and there wasn't any steeple. If you ask what they're all
- rowing round in the street for now, why, I don't know. I guess they've all
- found out the point's got to be fought out there or nowhere. Well—better
- think over what I was telling you, Dick. You're Rick Hennion's son. Well—it's
- none of my business—but—I'd gone like to see you old
- Champney's son-in-law—if that's it. I believed in Champney once, and
- shouted for Clay, and thought there was something in it. I did, that's a
- fact. I'd lock horns with any other bull then, and swear my name was
- Righteouashess and his was Sin.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, but Champney——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes—Champney!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “When he turned a vote, it meant he'd persuaded a man, didn't it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes—Champney! His best argument was a particular chest tone. If I
- tell a man, 'Hullo, Jimmy!' and give him a cigar, it's as reasonable as a
- chest tone.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's not in my line, Wood,” said Hen-nion after a silence. “What makes
- you so down? You're not old.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Going on seventy, Dick.” Wood's mood seemed more than usually frank and
- talkative. He seemed to be smoothing out the creases in his mind, hunting
- into corners that he hardly knew himself, showing a certain wistfulness to
- explain his conception of things, complex and crumpled by the wear and
- pressures of a long life, possibly taking Hennion to represent some
- remembrance that he would like to be friends with after long estrangement,
- and in that way pleading with his own youth to think kindly of him. Or it
- might have been he was thinking of “Rick” Hennion, who helped him forty
- years before, and stayed with him longest of worn-out ideals.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a rush of feet and clamour of voices in the press-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wood! Wood!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “First Ward.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thrown out forty votes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wouldn't do what you told 'em.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The little room was jammed with men, thinned out, and jammed again. The
- electric light flashed up.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's to pay now?”
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>The Chronicle</i> flung its bold cone of light and glaring challenge
- across the street. It seemed to strike the canvas with a slap.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Forty Reform votes thrown out in 1st Ward. Fraud!”
- </p>
- <p>
- A hush fell on Tecumseh Street. Then a roar went up that seemed to shake
- the buildings. Tecumseh Street thundered below, monstrous and elemental,
- and trembled above like a resonant drum. The mob rolled against the brick
- front of the block like a surf that might be expected to splash any moment
- up the flat perpendicular. Grey helmets of policemen tossed on the
- surface. Faces were yellow and greenish-white in the mingled
- electric-light and moonlight. Fists and spread hands were shaken at <i>The
- Press</i> windows. Five or six heads were in the window of the little
- room. Wood's face was plain to make out by his grey shovel-beard. They
- shouted comments in each other's ears.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's a riot.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Looks like the bottom of hell, don't it?” Then a little spit of smoke and
- flame darted like a snake's tongue between the advertising boards, seven
- feet above the sidewalk. There was a sharp crack that only the nearest
- heard.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood flung up his hand, pitched forward, and hung half over the window
- sill.
- </p>
- <p>
- Someone directly beneath, looking up, saw a head hanging, felt a drop
- splash on his face, and drew back wincing.
- </p>
- <p>
- The thrill and hush spread from the centre. It ran whisperingly over the
- mass. The roar died away in the distance to right and left. Tecumseh
- Street was still, except for the crash where a policeman tore a board from
- the advertisements with a heave of burly shoulders, and plunged through
- into the darkness of empty lots.
- </p>
- <p>
- The little room above was now crowded and silent, like the street. They
- laid Wood on the table with a coat under his head. He coughed and blinked
- his eyes at the familiar faces, leaning over him, strained and staring.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You boys are foolish. Charlie Carroll—I want—take Hennion—Ranald
- Cam, you hear me! Becket—Tuttle.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was like a Roman emperor dispensing the succession, some worn Augustus
- leaving historic counsel out of his experience of good and evil and the
- cross-breeds of expediency—meaning by good, good for something, and
- by evil, good for nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Seems queer to be plugged at my time of life. Take Hennion. You ain't got
- any heads. Dick!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion stood over him. Wood looked up wistfully, as if there were
- something he would like to explain.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The game's up to you, Dick. I played it the only way I knew how.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The moon floated clear above the street, and mild and speculative. Ten
- minutes passed, twenty, thirty. The mass began to sway and murmur, then
- caught sight of Carroll in the window, lifting his hand, and was quiet.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Gentlemen, Mr. Wood is dead.”
- </p>
- <p>
- For a moment there was hardly a motion. Then the crowd melted away,
- shuffling and murmuring, into half a score of dim streets.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VI—ALCOTT AIDEE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Sexton Avenue
- Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, with wide windows and a
- tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the Avenue in a block of
- bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house from the corner. Aidee
- rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, but his study was in the
- Assembly building. The house belonged to one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife
- of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote articles for <i>The Chronicle</i>, and
- verses which were military at one time, nay, even ferocious, which
- afterward reflected her pensioned widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She
- hoped her drawing-room might be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly.
- She was tall, thin, grey-haired, and impressive.
- </p>
- <p>
- The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a
- kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, but
- some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly
- organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who
- delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations
- of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There
- was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule.
- Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and
- rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had
- fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. There
- was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted for
- excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large,
- good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her trail,
- Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling mills.
- </p>
- <p>
- T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he
- liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was
- on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded from
- his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission into
- Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set forever on
- higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. Tillotson's
- drawing-room, and held conversation.
- </p>
- <p>
- Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by
- means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature by
- the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with natural gas
- and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern, intensely
- modern.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man of
- radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism there
- had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he came to
- the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his life in
- the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, leaving two
- sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and “Lolly,” on a
- small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on the same small
- farm.
- </p>
- <p>
- The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and
- then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in
- that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by
- the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions objected to
- by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school commissioner was
- fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left it all suddenly,
- their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, the corn lot, the
- muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud of its two stories
- and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period followed in a disorderly
- city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed himself prodigally, and the
- finances of the brothers went to pieces. Allen's endeavour to improve
- their finances led him to a barred and solitary cell. Alcott was at the
- door of the prison when he came out.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, a
- weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce,
- affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him to
- Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a pit, like
- other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with a
- circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed miners.
- There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric youth,”
- said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!”
- </p>
- <p>
- There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level
- horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in
- astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in
- an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart.
- </p>
- <p>
- “By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell,
- do you? Got any idea where it is?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ho! You have!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Some hot chunks of it in this town.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, and
- I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof off.
- What church are you, anyhow?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm no church. I'm a freak.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ho! You don't say!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost,
- strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But they did not find him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee.
- </p>
- <p>
- But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him.
- The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was a
- love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which
- followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a
- burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience,
- and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself
- loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and good
- may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,” says the
- penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of unuse, if they
- came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse there was, and
- irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that
- title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become a
- tyranny.”
- </p>
- <p>
- In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is
- certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before
- him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey
- volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near the
- beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have mainly
- given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, has
- known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker becoming
- a larger glow,—the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better moments
- than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The other has
- seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and brooding and
- pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. Two lamps—the
- Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting
- multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated
- thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and
- died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier and
- more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an
- elemental unit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and to
- care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, Port
- Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing the
- Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in opposition
- next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth and nail on
- local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the mystery.
- </p>
- <p>
- “T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its way.
- Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton Avenue
- Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port Argent
- concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid man it
- found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for rhetorical
- speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted him a
- definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it found him
- rather repellent.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days
- had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics
- started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one
- newspaper, <i>The Chronicle</i>, and sometimes elected a few councilmen,
- sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the
- Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by
- over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and
- disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied to
- a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They
- generally do.
- </p>
- <p>
- Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became
- familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He
- walked much about the city, watching faces—dingy and blurred faces,
- hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no equality
- among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew to be a kind
- of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. Personally, he
- was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about other men by too
- much direct contact with them, they put him out. He looked at them
- hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him companionable. His
- solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his conscience.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her
- aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring
- bells for a place of residence.
- </p>
- <p>
- He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall with its
- platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his wide-windowed
- study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, scatter his seed,
- and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could do no more than
- throw his personality into the welter of things, and leave the worth of it
- to other decisions than his own. Here his travels were ended, except as
- one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and timeless.
- </p>
- <p>
- In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by two
- concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and overlapping
- each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of the other, the
- Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner Republic,” might be
- called signboards, or statements of condition. Even there might be noted
- the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” crossing and following the
- path of his convictions and interpretations, showing itself here and there
- in some touch of bitterness, some personal sense of the confusion and
- mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured humanity as if it were a
- personal dishonour, and so in a passionate championship of wrecked and
- aimless people. He spoke of them as if they were private and near. One
- champions kindred with little question of their deserts. This was part of
- the secret of Alcott's power on the platform. Over his success, as well as
- his failures, was written “Allen.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you
- sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish,
- violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and my
- books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does not
- matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For though I
- know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp this sorry
- scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's desire, yet I am no
- socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but human,—and I know
- not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen,
- present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his speech
- the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse drove Allen
- to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the next wave.
- Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had ruined his
- career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was no jest in
- that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly into the woof
- of his life that it tinged the whole pattern.
- </p>
- <p>
- The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street and met
- Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll glittered
- with malice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Say, that man's name was Hicks.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What of it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, he's one of your heelers.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't know him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in Muscadine
- Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way back under your
- gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and drinking eloquence
- like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, not exactly.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carroll shook his head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never
- saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular.
- No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carroll laughed and flitted away.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody cared
- what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his brother's
- keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business to do his
- best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a likeable
- man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee had seen
- men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest. If somebody
- from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's paragraphs by
- applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business of Carroll's
- either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with seeing that they
- said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused them to say.
- </p>
- <p>
- But the thing tasted badly.
- </p>
- <p>
- He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a man
- translated “Down with the devil!” into “Go shoot Wood!” and became ready
- to take another's life and give over his own in exchange.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door,
- followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping
- Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and
- giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's “brotherly
- love” was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan that
- his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played dolls
- with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the “Standard Oil” by way of
- relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with
- thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident. A
- lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no opinions,
- except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was better than
- these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And who were the
- bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men followed him now
- or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman like the murderer,
- Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care for him, Aidee. They
- liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew of no one person in
- Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was a collection of the
- half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated, the drunken with a
- little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches, and a percentage of
- socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch plaids. What
- dedication was there in any of them?
- </p>
- <p>
- What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is
- genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was
- one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One
- could not deny that.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success, when
- he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day in
- Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on the
- edge of his claim—which was paying at that time—and felt the
- same mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis.
- </p>
- <p>
- Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning
- stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why at
- other times their voices were effortless and sweet.
- </p>
- <p>
- On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss of
- Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was final,
- and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest percentage
- of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move men had come,
- and brought with it the longing to move them to certain ends, and he had
- thought:
- </p>
- <p>
- “All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is
- afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but
- neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of the
- other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the solitary
- issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my message.”
- Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and had faith.
- </p>
- <p>
- Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith and
- doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them
- bacteria. They passed from man to man—they floated in the air—one
- caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera—they
- were apt to be epidemic.
- </p>
- <p>
- And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them disease.
- The one we must have, the other we must be rid of.
- </p>
- <p>
- So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out
- gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown by
- the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street car, a
- headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent people
- were talking of the Wood murder—some gabbling about it like Mrs.
- Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated
- me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his
- life—harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in
- the street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door,
- and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the
- house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an hour he
- took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson drawing-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VII—THE THIRD LAMP
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HILE Aidee was
- looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, the Tillotson
- coterie were discussing the Wood murder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will put
- it in music, the schema thus—The wronged cry for justice! They rise!
- Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! Allegro-mezzoforte!”
- </p>
- <p>
- And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs.
- Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying
- sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring
- herself either to countenance crime.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist to
- Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People will ask
- our position.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about
- Wood and Hicks, really?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Scrumptious!” said Alberta.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Tillotson hesitated.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the
- throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to
- Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, a reference furnished her by Berry.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't
- countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the
- breach of necessary laws.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself.
- “But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by
- nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, and
- not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of
- technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An
- unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent
- crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful,
- inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed and
- smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this
- keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to be
- erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here than
- he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, whose
- knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless as
- possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson scared
- him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, and he
- knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson posed, that
- Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive pocket, and
- finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were rather good.
- </p>
- <p>
- The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and
- Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Camilla Champney! She's coming in!”
- </p>
- <p>
- While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent and
- familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, and
- then nearly a year before.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing
- eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling
- interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. Tillotson
- appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of rituals; they
- tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he said, in the
- place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who substituted
- ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence followed
- anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, therefore
- peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought Mrs. Tillotson
- might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted his scorn. Mrs.
- Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his scorn.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted and
- Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large houses
- and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin Street. The
- crowds increased as they drew nearer the business section—late
- afternoon crowds hurrying home.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said
- stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's
- your gift.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla was radiant for a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr.
- Hennion was right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be men's
- conventions.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He <i>couldn't!</i>” She was radiant
- again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs.
- Tillotson's drawing-room.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But I like Alberta!”
- </p>
- <p>
- She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood.
- </p>
- <p>
- The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left
- through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred
- windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet
- young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked into
- its black secrecy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't
- matter, and besides—I don't know how to ask you—but there's
- something I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about
- 'The Inner Republic'!”
- </p>
- <p>
- She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought it was different—from the other books—that is—I
- thought there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not more, but besides.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man ought
- not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he ought to
- add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask for are
- extensive.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently.
- </p>
- <p>
- They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a few
- saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden and specked
- vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, weed-grown, and
- unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between the Lower Bank
- Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent once builded
- their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither they had
- capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of Bank Street
- and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great red-brick ward
- schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was surrounded with a
- rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy trees were putting forth
- pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a steepleless church thrust
- out its apse toward the same empty space.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted as
- unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in asking for
- explanatory notes.
- </p>
- <p>
- A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse
- began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman at
- the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some
- quarrelling children.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the
- rebuff.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me—because
- you seemed to know, to understand about one's life—because I
- thought,—you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't
- mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence
- with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless
- space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above,
- “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and
- pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence
- to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties
- of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the
- songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the
- same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about
- the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens
- every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into
- smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the
- earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry.
- Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if she
- thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to
- believe. And perhaps she would understand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you
- understand? This is what I mean.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you do understand now!” said Camilla.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood
- murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder
- would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You
- asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore.
- Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like two
- rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty years,
- and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I dragged him out
- of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. Then he left me
- and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead or alive. He was a
- thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man than I in several ways,
- and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore me in two.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been a
- schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and miner.
- Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a dray horse
- all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. Sometimes I've
- had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about those explanatory
- notes? Do you think they would help you any? The reviews say my book is
- morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's hysteric.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank
- admiration.
- </p>
- <p>
- The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying
- softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty
- unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and
- folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps and
- grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street grew
- noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the fence and
- looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come
- you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the
- genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me to be
- happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a schoolhouse
- where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every day. Tell me
- your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old disease. Old!
- Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in the spring, or
- because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it is impossible
- not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till we've outdreamed the
- wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are wonderful. The hope of
- the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a debt. I owe it to tell you
- whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered and foolish as you like.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla laughed happily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what you
- think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He glowered a little.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I think a
- man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like thievery
- of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like Wood were
- disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I suppose Hicks
- is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him in the disguise of
- a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is illegal killing.
- They'll probably put him to death, and that will be legal killing. They'll
- think their motive is good. The motives of the two killings are not so
- different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I think no man has a right
- to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't care for the laws. I'd as
- lief break them as not. They are codified habits, some of them bad habits.
- Half the laws are crimes against better laws. You can break all the Ten
- Commandments with perfect legality. The laws allow you to kill and steal
- under prescribed conditions. Wood stole, and Hicks killed, and most men
- lie, though only now and then illegally. It's all villainous casuistry.
- Taking life that doesn't belong to you is worse than taking money that
- doesn't belong to you, because it's the breach of a better ownership. But
- Hicks' motive seems better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and
- breadth of sin? Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in
- jail, because I felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as
- to the rights of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks
- is probably no less so. Wood was a likeable——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt politician
- class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the classification
- hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? I'm not a
- systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks confidently
- about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that he never saw
- them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they would look
- apart.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or,
- “confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance
- of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him—a man new, at
- least, and original—conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before
- her, and held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the
- statesmen, poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read
- about. Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long
- morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for any
- deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was
- conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks
- to flying signals of excitement.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness
- soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and
- lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney!
- </p>
- <p>
- “The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have
- been a lyric poet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose
- and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a
- laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a
- bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the
- surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked
- up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've
- forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but
- she always thrashes him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “How dreadful!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of
- things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can
- do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to
- admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone
- conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and
- benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's
- drawing-room.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested in
- marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things found
- not altogether worshipful—egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies,
- weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond
- most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in getting
- the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man walking
- beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, restless
- eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the moment met
- them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother whom he was
- describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than doubtfully. But
- Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both
- were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the
- more beautiful for the other.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age
- of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons,
- into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland
- Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone
- has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent
- anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window and kissed us at
- night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation as ever came to
- Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a balloon, and was
- iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person then.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every
- book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in the
- grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed to reason
- so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and longing
- petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes spoke
- humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it seemed to
- her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship carrying a
- mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and impressions
- of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with the
- restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed
- that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish
- children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in
- the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.
- </p>
- <p>
- Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German
- and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street
- seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats,
- cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail
- of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I love it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Reason enough for its cheerfulness.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I've loved it for ages.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You needn't insist on it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not if I think it important?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, never at all!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Better owe it than pay it in small coin.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I offer a promissory note.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You mean—you will tell me more about——” Camilla paused
- and dropped her voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in the
- springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, and
- small tinklings of wit are thought poetical.
- </p>
- <p>
- Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The
- paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood
- idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to
- Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Can't help it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the
- Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it, Dick? What have you done?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder with
- his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we forget
- about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla went
- up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the gangs of
- workmen.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm
- not quite clear how you were right, but you were.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Right about the whole business?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm adopting
- your scruples.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a
- sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh. “I'm
- a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. Would it
- be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?” implying
- that he knew what the paragraphs would be.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Never saw him that I know of.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—I don't see where you're concerned.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what Aidee
- meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity of
- dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself
- liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious
- scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were
- not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the
- bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within him
- had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the disease,
- but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about the place.
- Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their open window.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VIII—MECHANICS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION came back
- from seeing Wood laid away (where other men were lying, who had been
- spoken of in their day, whom Port Argent had forgotten or was in process
- of forgetting) and saw the last bricks laid and rammed on Lower Bank
- Street. There was satisfaction in the pavement of Lower Bank Street, in
- knowing what was in it and why. The qualities of sand, crushed stone, and
- paving brick were the same yesterday and to-day. Each brick was three
- inches and three-eighths thick, and not one would be ambitious of four
- inches to-morrow. If it were broken, and thrown away, there would be no
- altruistic compunctions. One built effectively with such things.
- </p>
- <p>
- Charlie Carroll whispered to Hennion as they came out of the cemetery:
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's all right. The boys are satisfied.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why are they?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They'd be scared not to do what Wood said now. It wouldn't go down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go down where?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, they seem to like the idea too. They will have it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But why should he be congratulated over a prospective invitation from “the
- boys” to labour in their interests? He was not sure why he had not already
- refused, by what subconscious motive or scruple. Properly there should be
- scruples about accepting. The leadership of the organisation was an
- unsalaried position, with vague perquisites. Wood had taken honorariums
- and contributions, spent what he chose on the organisation, and kept what
- he chose. Apparently he had not kept much, if any. He had seemed to care
- only for influence. He had liked the game. He had left only a small
- estate. But whether he had kept or passed it on, the money was called
- unclean.
- </p>
- <p>
- If one went into politics to effect something—and Hennion could not
- imagine why one went into anything otherwise—the leadership of the
- organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of
- chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain
- subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the
- subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the
- chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that were
- needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be dynamics and
- mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism it seemed
- oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any machine,
- turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. Still these sets
- and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like an interesting problem
- in engineering, that had been met rather experimentally. As mechanics, it
- seemed to be all in an experimental stage. Hennion wondered if there were
- any text-books on the subject, and then pulled himself up with a protest.
- </p>
- <p>
- What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer
- and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be sure,
- but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's time
- politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly a class
- of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and mechanic laws,
- they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it seemed to succeed
- by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as
- important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of
- the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces.
- </p>
- <p>
- The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had
- thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions
- for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more of
- its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. Those
- who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less about the
- matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called him corrupt,
- which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, the chartered
- machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation to suit those who
- furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity of Port Argent had
- always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a complicated motive, half
- private, hardly confessed.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, and
- noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were
- gathering their tools.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on the
- east side next.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding
- their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and it
- occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men like
- Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the
- policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer
- specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an
- eccentric.
- </p>
- <p>
- Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no
- conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a
- runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way of
- incident. “Everything goes,” was the phrase there, meaning it is accepted
- and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room in <i>The Press</i>
- building. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him a
- machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men to
- drive it—what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the
- enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the
- mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances and
- hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type to run
- that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and what “the
- boys” wanted, why, they wanted <i>their</i> “jobs,” like everybody else.
- Hennion wanted his own.
- </p>
- <p>
- Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that moment,
- and nearly ran into him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't want it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come off! You can't help it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carroll flitted away in the direction of <i>The Press</i> building.
- </p>
- <p>
- Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in
- sleep all the great issues of their day.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly
- called “The Versailles,” and came out in the street. It was too early to
- see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street
- presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across the
- street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the
- Fourth Ward, church and state—Father Harra and Frei-burger.
- </p>
- <p>
- Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be
- chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense
- of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over
- the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father
- than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple
- now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The
- elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the
- bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, and for the symbol of his
- father's life and his own hope in the working world. He liked to stand on
- it, to feel it beneath and around him, knowing what each steel girder
- meant, and what in figures was the strength of its grip and pull. There
- was no emotional human nature in it, no need of compromise. Steel was
- steel, and stone stone, and not a bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice
- or private folly. In a certain way he seemed to find his father there, and
- to be able to go over with him their old vivid talks.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, shattered
- fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in his ear: “Got
- a light?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder,
- there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure,
- creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown
- child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the
- other.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd float
- all right if you fell into the river.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with the
- pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the basket
- girl. “Hi!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The child stopped and looked at him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I gets one end. Tha'sh right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away
- over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them.
- Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song.
- </p>
- <p>
- A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping
- creatures like the basket girl!
- </p>
- <p>
- Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The
- west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a
- moving line of lit windows.
- </p>
- <p>
- Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and
- solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The
- west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran as
- accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of
- smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the
- people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had—but mixed ideas
- of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the
- westbound train would have been a silly affair.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion came from the bridge and down Bank Street, which was brilliant
- with lights. He turned up an outrunning street and came out on the square,
- where stood Port Argent's city hall and court house and jail, where there
- was a fountain that sometimes ran, and beds of trimmed foliage plants
- arranged in misguided colour-designs.
- </p>
- <p>
- Several lights were burning in the barred windows of the old jail. He
- stopped and looked at the lights, and wondered what varieties of human
- beings were there. The jail was another structure which would have been
- futile without people to go in, at least to dislike going in. The man who
- shot Wood was there. Why did he shoot Wood? What was his futile idea in
- that?
- </p>
- <p>
- The jail was old and dilapidated. Some of the bricks had crumbled under
- the barred windows.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion walked into the entrance, and rang the bell.
- </p>
- <p>
- The jailor was middle-aged, bearded, and smoking a short pipe.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Can I see Hicks, Sweeney?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Got a permit? Oh! Mr. Hennion! Well, it ain't regular, you know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You can stay by.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, all right. No, but I'll have to lock you in. It's the rules.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They went up a flight of dark stairs, through a corridor, where a watchman
- passed them. They stopped at a door, and the jailor turned the key.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hicks, gentleman to see you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IX—HICKS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ICKS was sitting
- within by a plain board table, reading. It was a whitewashed room and had
- a window with rusted bars. The door banged, and the key again creaked in
- the lock. The jailor walked to and fro in the corridor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks looked up from his reading, and stared in a half-comprehending way.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have a selfish thirst for knowledge, Mr. Hicks,” said Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- He took the chair on the opposite side, and looked at the book on the
- table. The feeble gas jet stood some six inches out from the wall,
- directly over the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's the Bible,” said the other. “It needs to be made modern, but there's
- knowledge in it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I didn't mean that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lazarus and Dives. That's fanciful justice. A trick to pacify Lazarus.
- But there's knowledge. Notice what the dogs did. That's satire.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed a trifle uncanny, the place, the little man with the absorbed
- manner, metallic voice and strange language, black hair and beard, intent
- black eyes. Hennion had never interviewed a criminal before.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm not a reporter, Mr. Hicks, nor a lawyer.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks marked his place and closed the book.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know who you are.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was a friend of Wood's, in a way, but I'm not here in malice. I
- gathered you hadn't anything personal against him. It seemed to follow you
- had some sort of a long-range motive in it. I wanted to ask you why you
- shot Wood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' gaze grew slowly in intentness as if his mind were gathering behind
- it, concentrating its power on one point. The point seemed to be midway
- between and above Hennion's eyes. Hennion had an impulse to put his hand
- to the spot, as if it were burnt, but his habit of impassiveness
- prevented. He thought the gaze might represent the way in which Hicks'
- mind worked. A focussing mind was a good thing for anyone who worked with
- his brains, but it might have extravagances. An analysis concentrated and
- confined to an infinitely small point in the centre of the forehead might
- make an infinitely small hole to the back of the head, but it would not
- comprehend a whole character. A man's character ran to the ends of his
- hands and feet.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm an engineer,” Hennion went on, “and in that way I have to know the
- effectiveness of things I handle and apply. And in that way men too are to
- me so much effectiveness.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know about you,” said Hicks sharply. “Your men like you. You've never
- had a strike.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why—no.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' manner had changed. It was quick, excited, and angular.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're wrong. They're something more to you, that you didn't count in.
- Why do they like you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Exactly. But it's something effective, ain't it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion paused and felt confused. A man of such sharp analysis and warped
- performance as this, how was one to get to understand him? He leaned back
- in his chair and crossed his knees. The sharp analysis might be a trick
- Hicks had caught from listening to Aidee's speeches. It sounded like
- Aidee.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, anyhow, Mr. Hicks, in the way of effectiveness, why did you shoot
- Wood?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' eyes were little pin-points of concentration.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He sold the people to the corporations.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well. But suppose he did. Will the next man do any better? If not,
- where's the effectiveness?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He won't be so sharp.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You thought Wood was too sharp to be downed Aidee's way?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He was the devil's latest scheme. I sent him to the devil.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And shoulder the consequences. I like that. But the next man. Suppose I
- were the next man.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They were
- thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said softly:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look out what you do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I
- ask some of you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something
- unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain,
- unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and
- sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did not
- feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by thinking
- Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, and would
- probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks was that he
- was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense convictions and
- repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his purpose fixed on would
- become a white-hot point, blinding him to circumstances. And this
- focussing nature, which acted like a lens to contract general heat into a
- point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in dynamics. It seemed a
- characteristic of better service for starting a fire, and furnishing the
- first impulse of a social movement, than for running steady machinery.
- Some people claimed that society was running down and needed a new
- impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, the trouble with Hicks
- might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at the wrong time, a fire that
- had to be put out.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You ask me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and
- satisfy you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find the
- centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the attempt
- to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was to break up
- the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails scratching
- across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I beg your pardon.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You ask me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of
- order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it
- expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock.
- But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about
- it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea was. I
- told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the circumstances, I
- beg your pardon.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why do you ask me?” Hicks' fingers shook on the table. “There's a man who
- can tell you. He can lead you. He led me, when I wasn't a fool.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who? You mean Aidee?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks nodded, and fell to glowering at his nervous fingers, absent and
- brooding.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He didn't tell you to shoot Wood. I know better than that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, he didn't.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, there's another thing I'd like to know. What did Aidee do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do! He held me back! He was always holding me back! I couldn't stand it!”
- he cried sharply, and a flash of anger and impatience went over his face.
- “He shouldered me like a log of wood on his back. Maybe I liked that
- papoose arrangement, with a smothered damn fire in the heart of me. No, I
- didn't! I had to break loose or turn charcoal.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion wondered. The man reminded him of Aidee, the same vivid phrase,
- the figures of speech. But Aidee had said that he did not know him. It
- appeared that he must know him. If Aidee had been lying about it, that
- opened sinister suggestions. Hennion did not like Aidee, neither did he
- like in himself this furtive sense of satisfaction in the suggestions.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aidee told me he didn't know you. I hadn't thought he would lie about
- it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By God, don't call him a liar to me!” Hicks jumped to his feet, and had
- his wooden chair swung over his back in an instant.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't. I want it explained,” Hennion said coolly. “You can't do
- anything with that. Sit down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds,
- cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an
- explanation.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't you call him a liar!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Haven't. Sit down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were narrowed,
- glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put his hands
- into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas jet, and the
- ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. They
- were wild, disordered, and fugitive, as if reflections from the spirit
- behind Hicks' eyes, instead of from the jet at the end of a lead pipe.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll help you out with a suggestion,” Hennion said slowly. “You don't
- mean to leave Aidee in that shape, since you feel about him in this way.
- But you don't know whether your story would go down with me, or whether it
- might not get Aidee into trouble. Now, if I'm forecasting that story, it's
- something like this. You knew each other years ago, not in Port Argent.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks said nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Carried you around papoose-fashion, did he? But there's some likeness
- between you. It might happen to be a family likeness.” Still no comment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If it so happened, you might be related. You might be twins. And then
- again you might not. You might have been his first convert. Partners maybe
- in Nevada. That: was where he came from,—silver mines and what not.
- It's no business of mine.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He paused and meditated, looking at the pulsating light; then brought his
- chair down and leaned forward.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I take the liberty to disagree with you. I'm no exception to the run of
- men, and I'm neither a hound, nor a coward, nor a thief, nor yet a liar.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know you're not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “However, your story, or Aidee's, is no business of mine. I gave you those
- inferences because they occurred to me. Naturally you'd suspect they
- would. So they do. Gabbling them abroad might make some trouble for Aidee,
- that's true. I shan't gabble them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know you won't.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wanted your point of view in shooting Wood. If you don't see your way
- to give it, all right. I judge it was the same way you were going to club
- me with a chair. Simple enough and rather silly. Goodnight, then. Is there
- anything I can do for you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion leaned back and studied the gaslight, and disliked himself. Hicks
- clasped and unclasped his hands on the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It won't hurt him,” he said hoarsely, “between you and me. Besides, you
- can do that for me. He's my brother, old Al. But I cut away from him. I
- kept off. I kept away from him for a while, but I couldn't live without
- seeing him. You see? I couldn't do it. Then he came here, and I followed
- him, and I lived with a shoemaker across the river and cobbled shoes. But
- I heard every speech he made in Port Argent, though he never saw me. He
- thinks I'm dead, don't he? I dodged him pretty slick.” He flushed and
- smiled—“I liked it,” he whispered, growing excited. “It was better'n
- the old way, for we got along all right this way. You've heard of him!
- Ain't he wonderful? Ain't he a great one, hey? That was Al. I liked it,
- but he didn't know. You see? How'd he know when he thought I was dead,
- didn't he? I watched him, old Al!”
- </p>
- <p>
- His face was lit up with the warm memory of it. He clicked his teeth, and
- swayed to and fro, smiling.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We got along all right this way. All right. My idea. Wasn't Al's. I kept
- the other side the river, mostly. Nobody can touch him when he's fired up,
- can they? They didn't know Al like I knew him. They called him the
- Preacher. He scared 'em like prairie fire. He's got his way. I've heard
- him. I watched 'em, and I knew him, but they didn't, did they?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He focussed his excited eyes suddenly on Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You! I know you; I know your men that live on the east side. I heard a
- man say you'd got a heart like a baked potato and don't know it. That
- fat-headed foreman of yours, Kennedy, he can tell you more 'n you ever
- thought of. Think you're a composite of steel and brick, set up according
- to laws of mechanics, don't you? Oh, hell! Go and ask Al. He's a wonder.
- Why do your men like you? Go and ask 'em. I've told you why. Why'd I shoot
- Wood? Al wouldn't have let me, but it 'll do good. He scares 'em his way,
- I scare 'em mine. You wait and see! It 'll do good.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion studied the gas jet, until he could see nothing but an isolated
- impish dancing flame, until it seemed as if either the little man across
- the table were chattering far away in the distance and darkness, or else
- he and the gas jet were one and the same.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee had been four years in Port Argent, and so Hicks had been following
- and watching him, cobbling shoes, living a fanciful, excited life,
- maniacal more or less. Hennion fancied that he had Hicks' point of view
- now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You wait and see! It'll do good.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Hennion, “I dare say you've answered the question. You
- haven't told me yet what I can do for you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks' excitement died out as suddenly as it had risen. He reached a
- trembling hand across the table, and whispered:
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought—— What do you think they'll do to me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can't help you there. You'll have counsel.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, no! It's this. I thought I'd write a letter to Al, and you'd give it
- to him afterwards, a year afterwards—supposing—you see?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He hesitated pitifully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right, I'll do that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I won't write it now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You'll keep it still? You won't tell? You won't get a grudge against Al?
- If you do! No. I know about you. You won't tell.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, I won't. Well, good-night, then.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- His voice was husky and weak now. He put out his hand, hesitating. Hennion
- took it promptly. It felt like a wet, withered leaf.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion went and knocked at the door, which Sweeney opened. Hicks sat
- still by the table, looking down, straggling locks of his black hair
- plastered wet against his white forehead, his finger nails scratching the
- boards.
- </p>
- <p>
- The door clanged to, and the noise echoed in the corridor.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I heerd him gettin' some excited,” said the jailor.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Some.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Think he's crazy?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's for the court to say.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ain't crazier'n this old jail. I need a new one bad, Mr. Hennion. Look at
- them windows! I seen mighty clever boys here. A sharp one could dig out
- here some night, if he had the tools.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then you'd better not suggest it to Hicks.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ho! He ain't thinkin' of it. He's a weakly man.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, probably not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He ain't got the tools, either. I know the business. Look at the
- experience I've had! But I need a new jail, Mr. Hennion, bad, as I told
- Mr. Wood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for
- your trouble.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke
- away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry
- Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark
- sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?” Champney asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to think
- it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had a
- crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; so
- he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION knew Wood's
- organisation intimately enough. He had been a part of it on the outside.
- Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” a body that had total
- charge of the party's municipal campaigns, including admission to
- caucuses, and local charge in its general campaigns. Local nominations
- were decided there. It was only less active between elections than during
- them. It had an inner ring which met by habit, socially, in Wood's office.
- Whatever was decided in Wood's office, it was understood, would pass the
- Committee, and whatever passed the Committee would pass the City Council,
- and be welcomed by a mayor who had been socially at the birth of the said
- measure. Port Argent was a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better
- ring than ordinary. Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to
- something peculiar in Wood.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in his
- office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. Carroll
- was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long neck and
- close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by profession;
- Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, devoid of
- grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some reason unmatched
- in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, saloon-keeper from East
- Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, plastered, and
- gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, small, thin, dry,
- of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent speech, a lawyer,
- supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay Tuttle, President of
- the School Board, white-moustached and pompous.
- </p>
- <p>
- Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers who
- suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s.
- Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew
- them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of them
- held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and personal
- interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They varied
- discussion with anecdotes of Wood.
- </p>
- <p>
- Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans
- and estimates of competing architects.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Any preference, Major?” asked Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have given it some consideration,” said the Major puffily, and stated
- considerations.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” Hennion suggested, “why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon,
- and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The circle laughed and nodded.
- </p>
- <p>
- The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new
- bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. Tait read
- a document signed “Wm. R. Macclesfield, President.” Hennion suggested that
- they offer a counter-proposition.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him expect
- his right of way for a gift?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know what they chipped in this spring?” said Tait, looking up.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?” He turned to
- Ranald Cam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet,” growled Cam,
- “for all they gas about it.” Tait was silent. The others disputed at
- length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy influence
- of the “old man” was still so strong in the circle that no one ventured to
- put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. They only
- disputed points of fact.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He kept things solid,” said Carroll, “that's the point.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I should say Macclesfield would have to come up,” said Hennion at last.
- “I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week.”
- </p>
- <p>
- When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest.
- Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait,” said Beckett. “Suit me all
- right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's
- rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to
- rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?”
- Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Possibly, possibly,” said the Major.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him.
- Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward them.
- They did not like Tait.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Want to go over there with me, Hennion?” said Tait, puffing his black
- cigar rather fast. “See Macclesfield?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not that I know of.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Suppose I bring him over here?” Hennion stared at the top of his desk for
- a full moment. “All right. Come in an hour.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring.
- </p>
- <p>
- William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal
- courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal
- courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at first
- knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long after.
- Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview which here
- dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as well unmade.
- Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Should I congratulate or commiserate?” said Macclesfield, smiling and
- shaking hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Commiserate, thank you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great
- judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, man.
- I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your father
- and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his profession.
- Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, too, we young
- men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. Port Argent has
- grown. There have been remarkable developments in politics and
- engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a manager in the
- background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is needed, but it's a
- peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were Wood's choice, and he
- was a very judicious man. You find it takes time and labour. Yes, and it
- calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some people seem to think one
- in that position ought not to get anything for his trouble. I call that
- absurd. I always found in railroading that time, labour, and ability had
- to be paid for. By the way, you learned engineering from your father, I
- think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was thinking coming over the street
- just now with Tait—I was thinking what fine things he did in his
- profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. Remarkable. And yet engineering
- was almost in its infancy then.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” said Hennion, “the changes would have interested him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Indeed they would! So—the fact is—I was thinking that, if you
- cared to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that
- bridge of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son
- can do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in
- business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in the
- young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment
- needs any forgiveness from me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you continue to want them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good! Now—oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think
- the figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a
- little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the
- feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how
- much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering
- the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be moderate?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Moderate in its generosity.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ah—I don't know—I was thinking that we understood each other—that
- is—the situation.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion swung in his chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and I was
- wondering what my father would have said about the situation. Wouldn't he
- have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and the
- representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two
- transactions that had better not be mixed?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear boy, who's mixing them?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme.
- Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford
- to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there.
- You'll have to come in by a subway.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Macclesfield shook his head smilingly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We can't afford that, you see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect
- to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, well—isn't this a little inquisitorial?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not necessary, anyway. I know, about.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion went on slowly:
- </p>
- <p>
- “The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at all.
- You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. There'll
- be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well suspect it
- now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Macclesfield said nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By all means!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down,
- below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't know
- the holdings down there I'll give them to you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed figures,
- following the suggested line from point to point, massed the figures of
- the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and went on.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some
- trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll save
- about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably more.
- You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the P. and N.
- By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple Street
- you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to develop
- your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable there,
- probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the Boulevard, if
- the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have a better curve,
- same connection with the P. and N., and this one here with the L. and S.
- You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. Here you get your site
- in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, we'll take your approach on
- the east side.” More details massed and ordered. Macclesfield listened
- intently. Tait half closed his eyes and swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion
- concluded and paused a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to this—first,
- if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me with anything.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If I seemed to attempt it,” said Macclesfield, “I owe you an apology for
- my awkwardness.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings this
- side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I can make
- it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new bridge can
- now be very properly withdrawn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the subject
- very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a report.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I—don't, in
- fact, withdraw it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He rose and shook hands with Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I
- sometimes have them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man—for
- God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is he going to bite or build?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man—a—that won't
- lose his temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, to wonder
- what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. Macclesfield,
- who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery man, a little
- fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. Perhaps that
- was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he had left Hennion
- with a sense of having done him an injustice.
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then pushed
- aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to East Argent
- and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before he had gone
- far he changed his mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. It might
- be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without watching; it
- would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced for blundering with
- his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around acting like a desolate
- orphan about it.
- </p>
- <p>
- He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there paced
- the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through some miles
- of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and warm in the
- distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a street that had
- been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of the city to tempt
- inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them at wide intervals.
- The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of built-up streets about
- them. He followed the line of the Boulevard surveys, absorbed, often
- stopping and making notes. He came through a stretch of cornfield and
- pasture. If the city bought it in here before it began to develop the
- section, it would be shrewd investment. The marshes would be crossed by an
- embankment.
- </p>
- <p>
- A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the
- wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch of
- three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some years
- back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to small
- boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted through
- between banks of slippery clay.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It
- was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the
- city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the
- south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape
- gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was
- brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the
- bottom lands and in the brush.
- </p>
- <p>
- To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be
- shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to
- accomplish something worth while, to make a name—it looked like a
- weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still,
- after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get
- ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be
- blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent
- after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way,
- Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The
- rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch.
- Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the
- subject.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A
- wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road
- and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted
- regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic
- commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a
- fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic
- capers.
- </p>
- <p>
- Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy
- neighbourhood—factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with
- refuse—and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by
- Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its
- lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with
- cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river
- bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday
- afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for
- picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard
- drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a
- band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and
- several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port
- Argent on a Sunday afternoon.
- </p>
- <p>
- The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious
- jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks
- and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current
- here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on
- either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it
- were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know
- almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent.
- But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an
- impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most
- faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park.
- </p>
- <p>
- Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them.
- Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple Street.
- They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the rest of the
- flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men getting on the
- trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! He knew them too.
- One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine Street, east side;
- the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another time one of a batch
- of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped John Murphy to get jobs
- for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays lived in a house on
- Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, who shot Wood, used to
- live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer named Wilson. Names of
- Kottar's children, remembered to have once been so stated by Kottar, Nina,
- Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and Elizabeth. One appeared to
- remember things useful, like the price per gross of three-inch screws at
- present quoting, as well as things useless, like the price three years
- ago. Hennion thought such an inveterate memory a nuisance.
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in
- Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its
- people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or
- worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields—all
- people, and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in.
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over
- the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the
- whole section but a few generations back.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mighty good luck to be young, Dick,” the “Governor” had said, and died,
- calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times
- he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He
- caught a car and went back to the centre of the town.
- </p>
- <p>
- When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was
- there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about
- to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he did
- not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading Charlie
- Carroll's sinister paragraphs on “a certain admired instigator of crime.”
- She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He says he doesn't care about it,” she cried, “but I do!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you? Why?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether to
- say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever
- bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics.
- Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to take
- it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's wicked!” cried Camilla passionately.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion laughed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—he needn't have called Wood names—that's true.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity
- they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they
- can't.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor
- Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says.
- Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of it?
- I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing
- visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going to
- do anything in particular?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that
- nobody else will,” cried Camilla breathlessly, “and of course you'll say
- he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will
- talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You go too fast for me.” He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much that
- he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He was not
- quite clear why he disliked him at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of the
- grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's
- situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be
- confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more
- comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations.
- </p>
- <p>
- He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine with
- excitement,—but he did not seem to succeed,—over the subject
- of a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a
- lady's throat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port
- Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll
- have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. She's
- eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it today. It
- struck me she needed washing and drying.”
- </p>
- <p>
- True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, “That's
- tremendously nice, Dick,” and stared into the fire with absent wistful
- eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- He drew nearer her and spoke lower, “Milly.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, no! Don't begin on that!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his
- disappointment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But I
- will, though!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up under
- the trees at Hicks' barred window.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aidee's getting a black eye too in there,” he thought. “That's too bad.”
- </p>
- <p>
- When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's
- bridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XI—THE BROTHERS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>AY I see Hicks?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short
- pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around
- the gas jet over his head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ain't you the Preacher?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So they call me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked into
- the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Where is his cell?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word,” said the jailor
- thoughtfully. “Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it, so
- he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's som'p'n in
- it. But I seen in the <i>Press</i> this mornin'—say, you ain't goin'
- to instigate him again?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee laughed, and said:
- </p>
- <p>
- “They have to be lively.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their
- heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're a philosopher.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I do a pile of thinkin',” said the jailor complacently.
- </p>
- <p>
- He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked
- it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hicks, gentleman to see you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the
- end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low
- voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Spiritual consolation! That's the word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to
- his side and grasped his arm and whispered, “Don't you yell out!” while
- Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the
- corridor.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What do you come here for? Keep quiet!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lolly!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who told you it was me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across
- and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his
- head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lolly, boy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did he tell you it was me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hennion!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nobody told me it was you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You came to see Hicks!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. “Hey! I know! You wanted to ask
- me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on one
- side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of a cornered
- animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer smile—Lolly
- the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in his small
- resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable and clever! They
- used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his twisted smile, and
- hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin, straggling beard had
- changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six years. Alcott thought he
- would hardly have recognised him at a little distance. So—why,
- Hicks!—Carroll said Hicks used to drink down Alcott's own speeches
- like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood!
- </p>
- <p>
- “What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a
- low, excited voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard every
- speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they do to
- me?” he whispered, turning to the window. “I wished I could get out. Say,
- Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose I was? Over
- the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near spotting me
- once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on the east side
- with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes to his one. But
- sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how Mummy looked, and
- I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd you come for? Say, I
- cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd never have caught me, if
- I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept out of your way all right. I
- wasn't going to mess you again, and that suited me all right, that way. I
- pegged shoes along with old Shays. Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan.
- I'll knife him some day. No! No! I won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I
- got something in me that burns me up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em
- kill me. God, I was proud of you! I used to go home like dynamite, and
- collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's
- matter?' says Shays. 'Where is 't?' and goes hunting for justice at the
- bottom of a jug of forty-rod whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story,
- you and I?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid
- his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully. The
- noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car gongs, came
- in through the barred window.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been happy
- sometimes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al,” he pleaded,
- “don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to
- be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've
- done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man, Wood,
- had a right to his life.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He had <i>no</i> right!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why didn't
- you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going away to
- think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled together
- again. I've said it, and you can quit talking.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen clung to his hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're coming again, Al.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that had
- always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always
- intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott, nor yet
- with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever solution—not
- with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering control, but
- seeing his face and hearing his voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across the
- table, and said little.
- </p>
- <p>
- Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image of
- the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw Allen
- going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky step,
- exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's enemies! How he
- had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy paragraphs! How he
- had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a “disease”! How he had lurked in the
- shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How he had pegged shoes and
- poured his excitement, in vivid language, into the ears of the east-side
- loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back and forth over the Maple Street
- bridge, where the drays and trolley cars jangled, where the Muscadine
- flowed, muddy and muttering, below!
- </p>
- <p>
- “You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I
- wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, Al!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was always afraid of you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What for? You're coming again, Al!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ain't going to mess you over again! No!” he whispered, twisting his
- fingers.
- </p>
- <p>
- Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous fingers.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Drop it, Lolly!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you going to do? You're coming again?” His voice was thin and
- plaintive.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “How soon?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly
- down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pretty cool, ain't he?” said Sweeney presently. “I didn't hear much
- noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here—look here, I told Mr. Hennion—why,
- you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see. Not very creditable.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, no.” Sweeney argued in an injured tone. “Look at it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, I guess so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt
- cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on
- the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the
- brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and wriggling
- fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet.
- </p>
- <p>
- Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before him
- days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the long
- doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, not to
- be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him
- here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help him
- here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to hang
- Lolly.
- </p>
- <p>
- At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The air
- was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and
- fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying:
- “I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail—I who lied to
- you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have but
- one brother and one bond of blood,—to you who are my enemies. His
- name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.”
- </p>
- <p>
- People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak
- so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist
- in a stifling room.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces from
- the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture one more
- item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the gallery. When
- he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the picture.
- </p>
- <p>
- Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets
- over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and
- walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the
- city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk
- waggons clattered over the rough pavement.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Poor boy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the
- arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he
- would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that Allen
- was lurking near him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often he
- must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head blazing
- with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, running high
- now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not an inch beyond
- its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, and if an inch of
- water covered it, no man would know.
- </p>
- <p>
- Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which I
- tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional,
- unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this
- muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, and
- the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all
- interpretations of itself, in course of time.
- </p>
- <p>
- In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one side
- of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, on the
- other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with shops in
- most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. Already
- Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy with cars and
- hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river factories began to
- blow.
- </p>
- <p>
- The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a
- street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He
- stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, and
- bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through the
- narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his head on
- the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he hardly
- noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots,
- cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil wells.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lolly! Lolly!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the ideas
- that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, iron
- beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was justice?
- One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a clamour and
- cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even balance? There
- was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? It was
- revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must know that
- uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that was justice.
- </p>
- <p>
- Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy
- stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must
- have him!”
- </p>
- <p>
- All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed
- suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go away. It
- seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue Assembly,
- and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and stone, and the
- iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple thing. Their
- stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the city.
- </p>
- <p>
- The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove from
- without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds
- flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights
- where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new leaves
- were growing.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XII—AIDEE AND CAMILLLA
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LCOTT came back to
- the city in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was on Lower Bank Street,
- knocking at Henry Champney's door.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is Miss Camilla Champney in?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The startled maid stared at him and showed him into the library, where
- Henry Champney's shelves of massive books covered the lower walls, and
- over them hung the portraits of Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams with
- solemn, shining foreheads.
- </p>
- <p>
- He walked up and down, twisting his fingers, stopping now and then to
- listen for Camilla's steps. She came soon.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm so glad you're here! I want to ask——” She stopped, caught
- a quick breath, and put her hand to her throat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Alcott's face was white and damp, and his black eyes stared at her. He
- stood very still.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do I look like that? Do I show what I am, gone blind and mad? Do I look
- it? I could only think of this, of you—I must tell someone. There
- must be some way. Help me!” He moved about jerkily, talking half
- incoherently. “He's been here four years. Allen, you know! If I'd known, I
- could have handled him somehow. But—he's—Hicks—he called
- himself—Hicks. He killed Wood. I saw him last night, but he's
- changed, but—my boy, Lolly! Four years he's been in Port Argent—watching
- me! He called himself Hicks. Don't you see, Camilla! It's my boy! Don't
- you see! Wait. I'll get buckled down. I can tell you better in a moment.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla leaned back against Henry Champney's big desk, and stared with
- wide grey eyes. Alcott walked away breathing heavily, and returned. He sat
- down in the desk chair and dropped his head on his arm.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's your brother!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I must save him! Don't you understand? No one shall touch him! He's
- mine!” He sprang up, walked away, and came again.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla thought of many confused things. The bluebird's note was gone from
- her heart, but the current of the tumult that was there ran in one
- direction. It poured into Alcott's passion and point of view. Her new
- pillar of fire and cloud, the man with the halo of her own construction
- was begging for help, a demigod suddenly become human and suffering,
- stammering, calling himself blind and mad.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, we must get him out!” she cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- She thought of Dick. Another instinct warned her that he would not
- understand. It was a case where Dick would be a rock in the way, instead
- of one to anchor to. But thinking of him served to remind her of what he
- had said the night before.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Listen!” She went on. “He must get out. Listen! Somebody told Dick—what
- was it? Something about a crowbar or pair of—nonsense! He said a
- prisoner might get out if he had a chisel. Now we must think about it.
- Could he get out?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She sat down too. Alcott stared at her in a kind of dull confusion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now, this is what I'm thinking,” she hurried on. “What is the place
- like?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The place?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “When do you go to him again?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They leaned closer together across the desk.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of
- their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went away.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There's a chest of tools in the storeroom,” Camilla said. “We'll go up
- there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows
- looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes,
- trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture.
- </p>
- <p>
- Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the long
- rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and ships, his
- artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, while Camilla
- aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative at ten years. She
- cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful shapes—tombstone
- cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention—and her solemn
- exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears because Dick
- would not admire them.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's
- library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that held
- her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's
- blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window.
- </p>
- <p>
- She flung it open, making a great noise and business.
- </p>
- <p>
- “See! Will this do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a heavy carpenter's chisel with a scroll design on one side of the
- battered handle, and on the other the crude semblance or intention of a
- woful face. “I don't know whether it's Dick's or mine. We both used to
- make messes here.” She chattered on, and thought the while, “He called me
- Camilla—I wish—I wonder if he will again.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He thrust it into an inner pocket, ripping through the lining of his coat.
- She closed the lid, and turned about to the low-silled window, clasped her
- hands about her knees, and stared away into the tree tops, flushed and
- smiling.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You needn't go yet?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's three o'clock.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You'll come and tell me to-morrow? When?”.
- </p>
- <p>
- Alcott did not seem to hear her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm sure I could take care of him now,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you'll remember that I helped!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Does anyone ever forget you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Both were silent, and then he started up nervously.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It isn't done yet. Lolly is clever. He lived here four years and kept out
- of my sight. But, afterwards, granted he succeeds—but the law is a
- great octopus. Its arms are everywhere. But he'll have me with him. I
- suppose we must go out of the country.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You! Do you mean—do you—you'll go too!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go! Could I stay?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! I don't know! I don't know!”
- </p>
- <p>
- She shivered and leaned against the friendly old chest.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But could I do it without that? How could I? I couldn't do less than
- that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He came and sat beside her again, clasping his knees in the same way,
- looking off into the tree tops, talking slowly and sadly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “To be with him always, and give up my life to that, and see that he
- doesn't do any more harm. That would be the debt I would owe to the rest
- of the world. You see, I know him so well. I shall know how to manage him
- better than I used to. I used to irritate him. Do you know, I think he's
- better off in places where things are rough and simple. He has an odd mind
- or temperament, not what people call balanced or healthy, but it's hot and
- sensitive; oh, but loving and hating so suddenly, one never knows! You
- understand. I don't know how you do, but you do understand, somehow, about
- Lolly and me. You're wholly healthy, too, but Lolly and I, we're morbid of
- course. Yes, we're morbid. I don't know that there's any cure for us.
- We'll smash up altogether by and by.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “When will you go?” she asked only just audibly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He ought to try it to-night. To-night or to-morrow night. He ought to be
- away on one of the early freight trains, to St. Louis, and meet me there.
- We know our bearings there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla sat very still.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I must be going,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't go! You'll come before—when?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To-morrow we'll know. To-morrow then.”
- </p>
- <p>
- After he was gone, she lifted the window and peered over the mansards to
- watch him going down the street. The tree tops were thick with busy
- sparrows, the railroad yards clamorous, and there was the rattle of the
- travelling crane, and the clug-chug of steamers on the river.
- </p>
- <p>
- She drew back, and leaned against the old chest, and sobbed with her face
- against the hard, worn edge of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I didn't suppose it would be like this,” she thought. “I thought people
- were happy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Meanwhile Miss Eunice sat below in the parlour knitting. Hennion came in
- later and found her there. She said that Camilla, she thought, was
- upstairs, and added primly:
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think it will be as well if you talk with me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He smothered his surprise.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, of course, Miss Eunice!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think you need advice.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat down beside her, and felt humble.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's just what I need. But, Miss Eunice, do you like me well enough to
- give it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I like you more than some people.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You might do better than that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I like you well enough to give it,” she admitted.
- </p>
- <p>
- Tick, tick, tick, continued the knitting needles.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm stumped, you know, about Camilla,” Dick went on bluntly. “I don't get
- ahead. She has changed lately. Hasn't she changed?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “She has changed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then, she has! I thought so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The knitting needles ticked on, and both Dick and Miss Eunice studied
- their vibrating points, criss-crossing, clicking dry comments over the
- mystery of the web.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is my constant prayer that Camilla may be happy,” said Miss Eunice at
- last. “I have felt—I have examined the feeling with great care—I
- have felt, that, if she saw her happiness in your happiness, it would be
- wise to believe her instinct had guided her well. My brother's thoughts,
- his hopes, are all in Camilla. He could not live without her. He depends
- upon her to such an extent,—as you know, of course.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course, Miss Eunice.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have grieved that she seemed so wayward. I have wished to see this
- anxious question settled. You have been almost of the family since she was
- a child, and if she saw her happiness in—in you, I should feel quite
- contented, quite secure—of her finding it there, and of my brother's
- satisfaction, in the end. He must not be separated from her. He could not—I
- think he could not outlive it. And in this way I should feel secure that—that
- you would understand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hope I should deserve your tribute. I'm more than glad to have it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Perhaps this long intimacy, which makes me feel secure, is, at the same
- time, the trouble with her?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But why, Miss Eunice? I don't understand that. It has struck me so. And
- yet I love Camilla the more for all I know of her, and the better for the
- time. How can it be so different with her?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That is true. I don't doubt it, Richard.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then, is it because I don't wear well?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. It is true, I think, that we don't understand this difference always—perhaps,
- not often. But I think,”—knitting a trifle more slowly, speaking
- with a shade of embarrassment—“I think, with women, it must be
- strange in order to be at all. It must not be customary. It must always be
- strange.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion looked puzzled and frowning.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Please go on.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lately then, very lately, I have grown more anxious still, seeing an
- influence creeping into her life, against which I could not openly object,
- and which yet gave me great uneasiness. It—he was here an hour ago.
- I should not perhaps have spoken in this way, but I thought there was
- something unusual between them, some secrecy or confusion. I was
- distressed. I feared something might have occurred already. I wished to
- take some step. You know to whom I refer?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “A gentleman, in appearance at least. One does not know anything about his
- past. He is admired by some, by many, and disliked or distrusted by
- others. He has great gifts, as my brother thinks. But he thinks him also
- 'heady,' 'fantastic.' He has used these words. My brother thinks that this
- society called 'The Assembly' is a mere fashion in Port Argent, depending
- for financial support, even now, on Mr. Secor, and he thinks this
- gentleman, whom I am describing, is not likely to continue to be
- successful in our society, in Port Argent, but more likely to have a
- chequered career, probably unfortunate, unhappy. My brother regards—he
- calls him—'a spasmodic phenomenon.' My own disapproval goes further
- than my brother's in this respect. Yet he does not approve of this
- influence on Camilla. It causes him uneasiness. I have not thought wise to
- speak to her about it, for I am afraid of—of some mistake, but I
- think my brother has spoken, has said something. This—this person
- arouses my distrust, my dislike. I look at this subject with great
- distress.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Tick, tick, tick, the knitting needles, and their prim, dry comment.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion said gravely:
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have nothing to say about the gentleman you've been speaking of. I will
- win Camilla if I can, but I've come to the point of confessing that I
- don't know how.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Tick, tick, the not uneloquent knitting needles.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Will you tell me, Miss Eunice? You said something about love as it comes
- to women, as it seems to them. I had never thought about it, about that
- side of it, from that side.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I dare say not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Tick, tick, tick.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You said it must always be strange. I suppose, that is, it's like a
- discovery, as if nobody ever made it before. Well, but, Miss Eunice, they
- never did make it before, not that one!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, indeed!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't you think I'm coming on?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You are progressing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice's lips were compressed a little grimly, but there was a red
- spot in either cheek.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ought to act as if I didn't see how she was possible, ought I?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You are progressing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Whether I did see, or didn't?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course!” Miss Eunice was almost snappish.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I don't think I do see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You'd better not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion went away without seeing Camilla. Going up Bank Street he thought
- of Camilla. At the corner of Franklin Street he thought of Miss Eunice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There's another one I was off about. I don't see how she's possible,
- either.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIII—IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LLEN AIDEE lay on
- his back across the bed in his whitewashed cell, and smoked, swinging one
- foot swiftly, incessantly, like a pendulum, arguing with Sol Sweeney, and
- gesticulating with loose fingers. The bed was a wooden cot with a mattress
- on it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sweeney sat at the table under the gas jet, and smoked too. He had a large
- friendly acquaintance with jailbirds, and his placid philosophy was
- composed out of his knowledge of them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I seen folks like you, Hicks,” he said, “two or three. Trouble is you
- gets hold of one end of a string. Any old string 'll do. All the same to
- you. 'Hullo!' you says, 'this is a valyble string. Fact, there ain't any
- other string, not any other real string. This the only genwine. Follow it,
- and you gets wherever you like. It's that kind of a string,' says you.
- 'God A'mighty, what a string!' says you. Then you rolls yourself up in it,
- and there you are! Ball up! Ain't no more use! For you take a solid man
- like me, and he talks to you and he shows you reason, but you don't see
- it. Why? 'Cause you're balled up in the string, that's why.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen snapped out his answer.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll tell you the trouble with you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ain't any trouble with me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ain't! Well, I know this, I can stand your kind about half an hour at a
- stretch. Give me two hours of you—damn! I'd drink rat poison to get
- cooled down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's the trouble with you,” said the complacent jailor. “Ain't me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Trouble! No! You ain't equal to that. You ain't capable of that! You've
- got no more consistency or organisation than a barrel of oil. You're all
- fat and hair. Solid! So's a brick solid. Damn! You're solid, but are you
- alive? You'll be dead before anybody sees the difference. Ain't any real
- difference!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sweeney puffed his pipe contentedly, but thoughtfully, and shook his heavy
- beard.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, well! But now, I'll say this for you, Hicks. You're an entertainin'
- man. I'll say that to anybody that asks. I'll say, 'Hicks is a man that's
- got language, if I know what's what.'”
- </p>
- <p>
- The jailor rose. Allen swung his foot swiftly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wish you'd do something for me, Sweeney.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Let me have the gas at night. I don't sleep good. If I had the gas I
- could get up and read. You heavy men, you sleep all night. You don't know
- what it is.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, I'll see, Hicks. I'll ask about that to-morrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, let me have it to-night!” he pleaded.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ain't going to sleep good to-night. I can feel it. It'll be eternity
- before morning. I swear I'll be dead before morning. I'll turn it low.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—I don't see no harm in that. It ain't in me to rough a man.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He went out, locking the door noisily behind him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Allan lay still. His foot swung steadily, but more slowly. After a time
- Sweeney came down the corridor, making his ten o'clock round. He went to
- the end, and back again, and then downstairs. The corridor was quiet.
- </p>
- <p>
- Half an hour later Allen got up and filled his pipe, lit it at the gas
- jet, turned the jet low, and lay down again across his mattress. He smoked
- with quick, sharp puffs, but not fast. He swung his foot slowly, and
- stared at a point on the blank wall over the gas jet. Eleven o'clock
- struck.
- </p>
- <p>
- After the theatre crowds were gone past, the noise of the city grew less.
- There were fewer cars, and only now and then footsteps on the neighbouring
- pavement. Twelve o'clock struck.
- </p>
- <p>
- He got up again, slipped off his shoes, and went to his window.
- </p>
- <p>
- A maple tree grew directly in front, some twenty feet away. Its leaves
- were thick, but he could see the glitter of the electric light through
- them. The sidewalk was high as the lower windows of the jail, for the
- Court House Square was on sunken land. The black shadow of the maple
- covered the front of the jail down to the ground.
- </p>
- <p>
- The grating of the window had its bars set at both sides, and at the top
- and bottom. There were two rows of bricks from the bars to the inner edge
- of the window, and the wooden framework that held the panes of glass was
- set close to the grating. The outside of the sill was stone.
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen went back and lifted his mattress. There was a rent in the seam of
- the lower edge. He thrust in his hand, drew out a black cloth cap and put
- it on his head. Then he drew out a heavy chisel with a battered wooden
- handle, and returned to the window.
- </p>
- <p>
- The woodwork came away, cracking slightly as the nails drew out. He leaned
- the boards and frame carefully against the wall. He tried one crack after
- another between the bricks at the bottom of the window, pushing and
- pressing. Presently one became loose, then another. He laid them one by
- one in a neat row on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- The work at the sides and top was slower, because it was difficult to get
- a purchase, and to prevent fragments from falling. He dug till he got the
- purchase, and then held the brick up with one hand and pried with the
- other. Once a fragment of cement fell with a smart slap on the sill. He
- got down suddenly and sat on the floor, and listened, wiping his wet hands
- and forehead with his cap. Either Sweeney or his assistant was always
- around at night, and would have heard, if he had happened to be in the
- upper corridor.
- </p>
- <p>
- He carried the mattress to the window and laid it underneath to catch and
- deaden the noise, if anything more fell.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished
- stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars were
- buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to strip
- them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which were
- opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the end of
- the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three o'clock.
- </p>
- <p>
- He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched
- intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, more
- noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and except
- for that, only little rasps and clicks.
- </p>
- <p>
- When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating,
- which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and he
- rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars caught
- in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In lifting the
- blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. They suggested an
- idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the chisel, carried it to
- the window, and scratched it on the bricks until its black enamel was
- rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. Whether possible to do so
- or not, people would think he must have loosened the bricks with the
- brace. He wasn't going to mess “old Al” again, he thought, no, nor meet
- him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be led around the rest of his life
- by a string.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not me, like a damn squealing little pig”
- </p>
- <p>
- He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each
- strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the blanket
- through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it reached
- the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side coat
- pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest for
- the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off the
- gas jet, and climbed over the grating.
- </p>
- <p>
- He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the
- window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the cell,
- and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the window
- below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the blanket, and
- so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. When his feet
- reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under his hands. He
- stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself to the ground,
- and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly dropped window. The
- lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned inside.
- </p>
- <p>
- The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and furnished
- with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the same place
- as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide bed. A man
- lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and in the air,
- his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. The sleeper
- was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and covered his face
- with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that Sweeney slept
- underneath him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to the
- sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him.
- The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here and
- there.
- </p>
- <p>
- The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the
- night wind against the wall.
- </p>
- <p>
- As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower
- across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too
- spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that poured
- its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were pealing,
- shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court House
- Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low down in
- the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping blanket,
- jail of the sleeping Sweeney.
- </p>
- <p>
- He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of the
- square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass globes—one
- red, the other blue—the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous long
- shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks around
- seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and stared down
- at him with their ghastly blank windows—nervous, startled fronts of
- buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. There were
- no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own steps and
- their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner drug store
- glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow and whirl all
- over their glassy slopes.
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out of
- Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; and
- here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any lights; so
- that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden shanties were
- on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School building. Still
- higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse overhung the empty
- lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky with its black wedge. In
- front of him were the buildings of the Beck Carriage Factory, bigger than
- church and school together. The vacant spaces between them, these
- buildings and shanties, were by day overflowed with light, overrun by
- school children and factory hands, over-roared by the tumult of the nearby
- thoroughfares of Bank and Maple Streets. By night they were the darkest
- and stillest places in Port Argent. One man might pass another, walking in
- the thick dust of the cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too
- dark to see the rickety fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small
- sickly maples.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the dim
- glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the corner
- of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around the angle
- of the building.
- </p>
- <p>
- A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging
- his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest,
- not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head.
- </p>
- <p>
- It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and
- so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some
- time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case.
- </p>
- <p>
- Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction.
- Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the corner
- where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All walked
- unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third between
- them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear.
- </p>
- <p>
- As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in behind
- them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to the three
- in front.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hullo!” said the policeman calmly; “jagged?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Say!” exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; “tha's mistake.
- Smooth as silk. Ain't it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're out late, anyhow,” said the policeman.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's a weddin'. Ain't it? Wa'n't us. 'Nother feller did it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, get along, then.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All ri'! All ri'!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He watched the five men as far as the next electric light, and then
- dropped them as objects of interest.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hoi' on!” exclaimed the man walking beside Allen, turning suddenly upon
- him. “That ain't right. There's five of us. Two, three, four, five. Bet
- your life! That ain't right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They all stopped and looked at Allen. He started and his breath came harsh
- in his throat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “'Nother weddin'?” said the middleman thickly. “Wa'n't him. 'Nother feller
- did it. You didn', did you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen shook his head “No.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tha's so! Well, tha's right. 'Sh good thing. If 'nother feller does it,
- 'sh good thing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They shambled on amiably across the drawbridge. Allen fell behind,
- stopped, and leaned against the guard rail.
- </p>
- <p>
- In a few moments he could hear their footsteps no more, but he could hear
- the mutter of the river against the stone piers. Leaning over the rail, he
- could see here and there a dull glint, though the night was dark; and
- across the wide spaces over the river he could see the buildings on each
- side, low, heavy masses, only saved from the smothering night and made
- sullenly visible by the general glow of the street lamps beyond them.
- There a few red lights along shore, some in the freight yards, some
- belonging to anchored or moored vessels, small sail-boats, and long black
- lumber and coal barges from the northern lakes. He could remember looking
- down at other times in the night at the dull glint of water, and being
- shaken as now by the jar of fighting things in his own mind, angry things
- fighting furiously. At those times it seemed as if some cord within him
- were strained almost to snapping, but always some passing excitement, some
- new glittering idea, something to happen on the morrow, had drawn him
- away. But those moments of despair were associated mainly with the
- glinting and mutter of dusky water. “I been a fool,” he muttered, and a
- little later, “What's the use!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He decided to go to the shoe-shop and change his clothes, shave his beard,
- and pick up a few things, and then hide himself on some outgoing freight
- train, the other side of Muscadine Street, before the morning came. The
- morning could not be far off now. Shays would keep quiet, maybe, for a
- while. He would take Shays' razor.
- </p>
- <p>
- He roused himself and moved on. He began to have glimpses of schemes,
- tricks, and plans. There were little spots of light in his brain, which
- for a while had seemed numb, dull, and unstirring. But he carried away
- with him the impression of the glints of the gloomy river and the mutter
- of its hurrying.
- </p>
- <p>
- His feet dragged with his weariness. He turned into Muscadine Street and
- crept along the sidewalk on the right.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly a switch engine in the freight yards glared him in the face with
- its one blinding eye, yelled and hissed through its steam whistle, and
- came charging toward him. He leaped aside and fell into a doorway, and lay
- there crouching. Then he sat up and whimpered, “I ain't fit. I'm all gone
- away. I ain't fit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He rubbed his face and hands, peered around the corner to see the harmless
- engine withdrawing in the distance then got up and crossed the street. The
- nearness of the familiar shop windows, as he passed them one after
- another, comforted him not a little. On the next corner was the grocer's,
- the butcher's shop this side of it, and the shoemaker's shop was over the
- rear of the grocery. The mingled butcher-shop and grocery smell pervaded
- the corner, comforting, too, with its associations.
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned the corner and climbed slowly the outside wooden stairway, with
- the signboard at the top, “James Shays,” and leaning over the railing, he
- saw a faint light in the windows of the shop. He entered the hall, turned
- the knob of the door softly, opened the door part way, and peered in.
- </p>
- <p>
- The table stood in its ordinary central place, on it were a bottle, a tin
- cup, and a small lit lamp with a smoky chimney. The work bench was
- unchanged in place. The door of the inner room beyond stood open, but that
- room was dark. On the pile of hides in the corner some clothes, taken from
- the hooks overhead, had been thrown, and on the clothes lay Coglan, face
- downward and asleep.
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen thought, “He's sleeping on my clothes,” and stepped in, closing the
- door softly behind him.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIV—IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS REST
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E stood a moment
- with his hands against the closed door behind him, listening to Coglan's
- heavy breathing. Then he crossed noiselessly to the table, took the lamp
- and went through to the inner room.
- </p>
- <p>
- There were two cot beds in it. Shays lay asleep on one in all his clothes,
- except his shoes. The other bed was broken down, a wreck on the floor.
- Evidently Coglan had been using it, and it was not built for slumberers of
- his weight, so he had gone back to the hides that had often furnished him
- with a bed before.
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays turned his face away from the light and raised one limp hand in
- half-conscious protest. He opened his eyes and blinked stupidly. Then he
- sat up.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don't make a noise, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'm going pretty soon.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “G-goin'—wha' for?” stammered Shays. “Wha's that for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I've broke jail. I'm going to change clothes and shave, then I'll light
- out. You won't see me again, Jimmy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat down on the side of the bed and rocked to and fro, twisting his
- fingers.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're decent, Jimmy. When they get to posting notices and rewards, you
- see, you don't do a thing. Nor you don't wake Coglan. He's a damn hound.
- See?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays shook his head, indicating either a promise or his general confusion
- and despondency.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wha' for, Hicksy?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen was silent a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jim-jams, Jimmy,” he said at last. “You'll die of those all right, and
- Coglan will squat on you. You ain't bright, but you've been white to me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tha's right! Tom don't like you. Hicksy, tha's right,” whispered Shays
- with sudden trembling. “Maybe he'd—'sh! We won't wake him, Hicksy.
- Wha' for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He's sleeping on my clothes, so I'll take yours. Get me your razor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wha' for? Wha's that for? All right! I ain't going to wake Tom.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He stepped unsteadily on a shoe that lay sidewise, stumbled, and fell
- noisily on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- There he lay a moment, and then scrambled back to his feet, shaking and
- grumbling.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's the matter?” Coglan cried, now awake in the shop.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nothin', Tommy! I'm gettin' back, Tommy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you doin' with thot light?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nothin', Tommy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen stood still. When Coglan came stamping unevenly to the door, he only
- made a quick shift of the lamp to his left hand, and thrust the other
- inside his coat till he felt the wooden handle of the chisel.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oi!” said Coglan.
- </p>
- <p>
- His eyes seemed more prominent than ever, his face and neck heavier with
- the drink and sleep than was even natural. Allen looked at him with
- narrowed eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He's broke out,” Shays said, feebly deprecating. “He's goin' off,” and
- sat on the bed to pull on his shoes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is he thot!” said Coglan.
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan turned back slowly into the shop. Shays shuffled after. Allen
- followed, too, with the lamp and said nothing, but put the lamp on the
- table. Coglan sat down, drank from the black bottle, and wiped his mouth.
- The first dim light of the morning was in the windows.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'll be getting along, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'll take your razor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan wiped his mouth again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “An' ye'd be goin' widout takin' advice of a sinsible mon, Hicksy, an' a
- friend in need! Sure, sure! Didn't I say ye weren't a wise mon? Nor Jimmy
- here, he ain't a wise mon. An' ain't I proved it? Ain't it so? Would ye be
- jailed if ye was a wise mon? No! Here ye are again, an' ye'd be runnin'
- away this time of the mornin', an' be took by a polaceman on the first
- corner. I do laugh an' I do wape over ye, Hicksy. I do laugh an wape. An'
- all because ye won't take advice.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's your advice?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan moved uneasily and cleared his throat. “'Tis this, for ye're
- rasonable now, sure! Ye'll hide in the back room a day or two. Quiet,
- aisy, safe! Jimmy an' me to watch. An' what happens to ye? Ye gets away
- some night wid the night before ye.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He lowered his voice and gestured with closed fist.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ye'll lie under Jimmy's bed. The polaceman comes. 'Hicks!' says Jimmy,
- 'we ain't seen Hicks.' 'Hicks!' says I, 'Hicks be dommed! If he's broke
- jail he's left for Chiney maybe.' I ask ye, do they look under Jimmy's
- bed? No! What do they do? Nothin'!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen drew a step back.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You're right about one thing,” he said. “That reward would be easy
- picking for you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's thot?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ain't a wise man. I know it. But I know you. That's what it is. I'm
- going now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ye're not!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hicksy!” cried Shays feebly. “Tom, don't ye do it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Coglan plunged around the table and grasped at Allen's throat, at Allen's
- hand, which had shot behind his head, gripping the heavy chisel. Allen
- dodged him, and struck, and jumped after as Coglan staggered, and struck
- again. The corner of the chisel seemed to sink into Coglan's head.
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen stood and clicked his teeth over his fallen enemy, who sighed like a
- heavy sleeper, and was still. It was a moment of tumult, and then all
- still in the shop. Then Shays stumbled backward over the work bench, and
- dropped on the hides. Allen turned and looked at him, putting the chisel
- into one of the side pockets of his coat, where it hung half-way out. The
- light was growing clearer in the windows.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That's the end of me,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- And Shays cried angrily, “Wha's that for?” and cowered with fear and
- dislike in his red-lidded eyes. “Keep off me! You keep off me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I got to the end, Jimmy. Goodbye.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Keep off me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Allen hung his head and went out of the shop into the dark hall.
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays heard his steps go down the outside stairway. He scrambled up from
- the pile of hides, and snatched his hat. He kept close to the wall, as far
- as possible from where Coglan lay against the legs of the table. He was
- afraid. He vaguely wanted to get even with the man who had killed Coglan.
- He had loved Coglan, on the whole, best among living men.
- </p>
- <p>
- People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were
- stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried
- down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block
- away, walking slowly.
- </p>
- <p>
- At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the
- chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on,
- with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he came
- to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. The two
- kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it was
- nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons to come
- in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had been
- turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the
- disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering of
- the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder than by
- day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red glimmer of
- the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge except Shays
- and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the drawbridge house.
- </p>
- <p>
- Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, too,
- and muttered, “Wha's that for? Wha' for?” and found his mind blank of all
- opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began to run
- forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped on the
- guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the river.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled
- surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He leaned
- over limply, and stared at the water.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, and
- rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the rail,
- staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over the water
- pointing downward. “Wha' for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A
- freight train went over the P. and N. bridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost
- to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car in
- the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered
- wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned
- against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked up,
- stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back in his
- pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and he went
- to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the Muscadine,
- and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the stamp of
- hoofs, and the shuffle of feet.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XV—HENNION AND SHAYS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION came to his
- office early that Saturday morning with his mind full of Macclesfield's
- bridge, and of the question of how to get Macclesfield interested in the
- Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how Macclesfield would take to the
- part of a municipal patriot. He thought that if he could only conquer some
- shining success, something marked, public, and celebrated, then, perhaps,
- his success might succeed with Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your
- eyes on the path where you seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow
- that path, for so one travelled ahead and found that success attracted
- success by a sort of gravitation between them. All things came about to
- him who kept going. This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and
- son, much as it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise.
- Neither Henry Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing
- something to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder
- Hennion nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making
- something a little better than it had been.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window.
- “I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed,” he thought.
- </p>
- <p>
- The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay
- reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the clamour
- of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar noises,
- now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of telephone wires
- and the window panes across the street glittered in the bright sunlight.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. The
- owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid,
- unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered on
- the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look here, Shays! You don't get nourishment enough! You've burnt holes in
- your stomach till it won't hold any more than a fish net. Now, I'll tell
- you what you'd better do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Misser Hennion—Misser Hennion—I want you to see me through!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He stretched out his hand with scattered fingers, appealingly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want you—Misser Hennion—you see me through!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, come in! Sit down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays sat down, and Hennion looked him over.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Had any breakfast?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want you see me through!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What's the matter?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays sat on the edge of the chair and told his story, waving a thin hand
- with high blue veins. He hurried, stumbled, and came on through confusion
- to the end.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hicksy come about three o'clock,” he said. “I didn't do nothing, and Tom
- he was asleep. Tha's right. We didn't want him, but he woke me up, and he
- says, 'I'm off, Jimmy,' like that. 'I broke jail,' he says, 'an' ye
- needn't wake Coglan,' he says, like that. Then I gets up and I falls down,
- plunk! like that, and Tom woke up. Then he goes arguin' with Hicksy, like
- they always done, and he says, 'You stay under Jimmy's bed,' he says,
- friendly, like that. 'You get off when there ain't nobody lookin',' he
- says. But Hicksy says, 'You're lookin' for the reward; you're goin' to
- sell me out,' he says. Then he says he's off, but Tom won't let him. Then
- they clinched, and Hicksy hit him with the chisel. Oh, my God! Misser
- Hennion! You see me through! He dropped, plunk! like that, plunk! Oh, my
- God! Misser Hennion! Jus' like that, plunk! He clipped him dead. He did,
- too!” Shays paused and rubbed his lips.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then he says, 'Jimmy, that's the end of me,' like that, and he put that
- thing what he done it with in his pocket. He goes creepin', scroochin' out
- the door, like that, creepin', scroochin'. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! I
- ain't goin' to stay there alone! Not me! I goes after him. And in
- Muscadine Street I see him, but it was dark, but I see him creepin',
- scroochin' along to the bridge; I see the chisel fall out and it clinked
- on the stones. Pretty soon I picks it up, and pretty soon I see Hicksy out
- on the bridge. Then he stopped. Then I knowed he'd jump. Then he jumped,
- plunk! jus' like that, plunk!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He had the chisel in his hand, and showed it to Hennion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Let me see that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion swung away in his chair toward the light and examined the battered
- handle with the straggling, ill-cut, and woe-begone face traced there.
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned slowly and took a newspaper from his desk, rolled up the chisel
- in the newspaper, thrust it into a drawer, locked the drawer and turned
- back to the muttering Shays.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see. What next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I says, 'Wha' for? Wha's that for?' Then I come to that place, and there
- ain't nothin' there. He got under quick, he did. He stayed there. He never
- come up. I watched. He never come up. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion, I ain't
- goin' to stay there! Folks was comin' on the bridge. I ain't goin' to stay
- there!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see. What next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Where'd you go then?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Misser Hennion! I went down under along the bridge, where there wa'n't
- anybody.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Next?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did you meet anyone? Say anything?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What did you do between then and now?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Me? Nothin'! I went to sleep by the bridge. Then I got breakfast at
- Riley's 'All Night.' Then I come here. I ain't said a word, excep' to
- Riley.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What did you say to Riley?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Me! I says, 'Give me some coffee and an egg sandwich,' and Riley says,
- 'Ye're a dom little gutter pig, Jimmy,' and tha's every word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Misser Hennion! You see me through!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. But you've got to mind this, or I get out from under you. You
- leave out Hicks' dropping that chisel, or your picking it up. He dropped
- nothing; you picked up nothing. Understand? He hit Coglan with something
- he had in his hand. Whatever it was, never mind. He put it in his pocket
- and carried it off. You followed. You saw him jump off the bridge. That's
- all. Tell me the thing again, and leave that out. Begin where Hicks waked
- you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Me! Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!”
- </p>
- <p>
- While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing
- chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the battered
- handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. He knew the
- niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot where the tool
- chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from whose windows one
- looked through the upper branches of the trees out on the Muscadine. There
- in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the sunlight, and in
- winter through bare branches one could see the river. There Milly used to
- sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red ribbon, and chatter like
- a sweet-voiced canary bird.
- </p>
- <p>
- He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind,
- between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in a
- newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday
- afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed
- emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday night
- Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed Coglan, and
- went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; Saturday morning
- comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling through now,
- anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, but—now as
- to Aidee—that was the second time he had been to Camilla for help,
- and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better than Hennion.
- It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the “little maid” would be
- “game,” but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like Aidee, who
- came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in front and a
- cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. A man ought
- to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; that is to say,
- not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth shut, and buy a
- respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a respectable
- hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's “crisis,” it looked as if
- Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, instead of the
- condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard luck. Still, his
- criminal family was out of the way now, which did not seem a bad idea. Any
- chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have to be smothered of
- course, which meant smothering the whole thing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the
- responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and have
- nightmares. That wouldn't do either.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Very good, Jimmy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the story
- now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Plunk! jus' like that!” said Shays. “He went, plunk! I come up, and I
- looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. He
- stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks was
- cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of him, but
- Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not him, nor I
- ain't goin' to stay there, not him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?” Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and
- according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, because
- women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the subject.
- Humph! Well—Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and in
- fact, that “continuity of surprise” was all right. Aidee preached a kind
- of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with the
- individual man against men organised, and against the structure of things;
- and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, or it might be
- that view of things natural to women, their gift and function. What would
- Camilla do next? “God knows!” She would see that the “continuity of
- surprise” was all right. What on earth was Jimmy Shays talking about?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tom he says to me, 'Hicksy's a dangerous man, Jimmy,' he says, 'and I
- wouldn't trust him with me life or me property. Nor,' he says, 'I don't
- agree with his vilyanous opinions,' he says. That was Tom's word,
- 'vilyanous,' and it's true and it's proved, Misser Hennion, ain't it?
- Sure! Then he jumps into the river, plunk! like that, Misser Hennion! I
- ain't done no harm.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Shays was harmless surely, and cobbled shoes besides for the benefit of
- society.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Drop it, Jimmy. We'll go over to the police station.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVI—CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY HALL
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">C</span>AMILLA spent the
- morning in the store-room, staring through the window at the tree tops and
- glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving with her father. Henry
- Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's plans for the new railroad
- bridge and station, the three parks and moon-shaped boulevard.
- </p>
- <p>
- “His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!”
- </p>
- <p>
- In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. He
- foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the
- moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous
- city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the
- small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached
- herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was
- this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come
- to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go
- back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the
- people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and
- did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or
- not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it must be wrong not to
- be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what her father said about
- it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry Champney was too busy
- unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts were absent. But Camilla
- noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans seemed to occupy her
- father's mind of late.
- </p>
- <p>
- “A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled.
- </p>
- <p>
- So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla
- wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud
- came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel it
- possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage through
- someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was through
- Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her.
- </p>
- <p>
- She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the
- afternoon papers.
- </p>
- <p>
- When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her
- father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the
- porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver papers
- without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not look at
- the paper till she reached the store-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A
- half hour slipped by.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that
- superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical
- ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock!
- Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to
- read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to be
- expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see
- Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that he
- would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was of the
- opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for young people, when
- their elders were speaking, were giving important advice—it was not
- considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to answer only that it was
- four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, when neither statement was
- important. The paper boy's rough manner of throwing the paper on the porch
- she had never approved of.
- </p>
- <p>
- They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the hall.
- Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the front door.
- Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Camilla is going out again!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla could
- have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation were
- thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not injustice to
- Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her father's newspaper,
- a thing so important to his happiness before tea? Miss Eunice put aside
- her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy.
- </p>
- <p>
- She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed the
- second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in front
- of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice gasped,
- took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla have been so
- rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front page
- proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents of a
- Night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port
- Argent.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a
- Hearse are his Limit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. No
- headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any bearing on
- Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that Richard had not
- already told the family, about a railroad bridge and station, park
- improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss Eunice's impression,
- Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming.
- </p>
- <p>
- She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled
- newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed
- tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and
- helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether
- it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and
- Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of Miss
- Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool chest,
- and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in the
- library, forlorn of his afternoon paper.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before six.
- He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head bent down
- drowsily, where he sat in his chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him
- into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. I
- found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't
- understand, Richard!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to
- Mr. Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it
- might be just as well. He might be surprised.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the corner
- by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar.
- </p>
- <p>
- He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of which
- stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. The voices
- came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the Assembly Hall.
- He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to the street door,
- out of hearing of the words.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's the other man's innings,” he thought ruefully. But, he thought too,
- that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood when
- Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his
- shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets,
- stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVII—AIDEE—CAMILLA—HENNION
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">C</span>AMILLA went up
- Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin Street. It carried
- her past the Court House Square, and so on to the little three-cornered
- park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, and opposite the Hall
- the block of grey houses with bay windows, of which the third from the
- corner was Mrs. Tillotson's.
- </p>
- <p>
- That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little
- drawing-room usually thronged! <i>Now</i>, we can have such a talk, such
- an <i>earnest</i> talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a <i>position</i>.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I—I don't quite understand,” said Camilla.
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Surely</i>, my dear, the two most important questions before the
- Assembly are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion?
- second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more
- ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. Ralbeck
- the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. I have in
- particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have examined
- thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have offered Mr.
- Aidee <i>all</i> my knowledge, <i>all</i> my literary experience. But he
- does not as yet take a <i>position!</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson
- thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the
- opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she would
- insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in insisting.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led
- into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. The
- door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. She
- knew the windows of the study from without.
- </p>
- <p>
- She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but no
- one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. The
- door yielded and opened, but the room was empty.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare,
- half-furnished—some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered
- table, a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the
- room seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning
- as to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was
- even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows
- seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest
- were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was
- empty.
- </p>
- <p>
- She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be
- hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel,
- clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless people
- outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming and forever
- rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as accidents! So
- pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should be empty of
- Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, pacing the yellow
- matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking.
- </p>
- <p>
- She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw
- that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on
- the street. Wherever it led, he might be there.
- </p>
- <p>
- She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly
- to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way along
- the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness felt the
- panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet or cellar
- stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, glimmering space
- of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows now turning grey
- from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its pillars and curved
- galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its ranged tiers of seats,
- its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high bulk of gilded organ pipes.
- She had seen it before only when the tiers of seats had been packed with
- people, when Aidee had filled the remaining space with his presence, his
- purposes, and his torrent of speech; when the organ had played before and
- after, ushering in and following the Preacher with its rolling music; when
- great thoughts and sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people
- had been there, where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery
- dim bars of light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the
- hall, and the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric
- curves. Lines of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the
- galleries; shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the
- platform below the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat.
- Aidee had given the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still
- haunted by his voice, haunted by his phrases.
- </p>
- <p>
- Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the
- Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started
- forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Camilla!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! Why didn't you come?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To me. I thought you would!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained.
- </p>
- <p>
- “When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This
- morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them
- talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but
- there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came back.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and
- constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent
- in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair,
- and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained
- forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She
- pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been
- swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone.
- But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and she
- seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to expect
- some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; and it
- stared up at her coldly and quietly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would
- help us both.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story.
- I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What do you mean?”
- </p>
- <p>
- They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped
- her head, and wept with her face in her hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It's not your story,” said Aidee.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, it is! It's mine!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness,
- and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him
- threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain,
- and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or
- happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life.
- That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse
- on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his
- mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side.
- Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom
- that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp,
- the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to
- go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle
- with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly
- would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and
- clinging arms—“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in
- St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the
- mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump
- cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a
- rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come
- to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot
- where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his
- early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then
- the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many
- listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening
- or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,”
- he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the
- book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and
- asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!”
- </p>
- <p>
- What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port
- Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so
- drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone
- out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. He
- would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again with
- the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if anywhere;
- and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact loudest. No,
- rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say nothing. But
- Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story too! He began
- to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They
- were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human
- being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger.
- Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no
- more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the
- rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent crust
- to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, no! no!” she cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You will
- save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. I will
- count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. Come with
- me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, no!”
- </p>
- <p>
- His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his face
- was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. The future
- he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the struggle in
- her own heart frightened her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it
- out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was waiting
- and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing over him,
- listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was listening.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can't!” she cried. “I can't!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. I'll
- find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. Camilla,
- look at me!” She lifted her face and turned slowly toward him, and a voice
- spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, “Milly!”—and then
- hesitated, and Hennion came out.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I heard you crying,” he said quietly. “I didn't seem to be able to stand
- that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dick! Take care of me!” she cried, and ran to him, and put her face
- against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee said, “I'm answered.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think you gave me a close call,” said Hennion, and drew Camilla past
- him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back,
- thinking:
- </p>
- <p>
- “A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the
- person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as
- dense.”
- </p>
- <p>
- At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not to
- be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified
- himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, “It's hardly a square
- game besides.” He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and said
- slowly:
- </p>
- <p>
- “By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told
- me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe
- he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly
- resistant.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me that
- chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it behind
- him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact is, it was
- mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else for your
- hardware.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Still no sound.
- </p>
- <p>
- “However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river,
- where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed
- secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning this
- to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no great
- difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that you're clear
- of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. I think you can
- fill the place rather better—better than anyone else. Will you
- stay?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of
- those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I won't make it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the
- highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me honest.
- Will you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. Good-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were shaded
- by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. Hennion and
- Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half sobbed, and
- clung to him. They talked very little at first.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Milly,” he said at last, “of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway.
- You shall do as you like.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—maybe I'm wrong—I've been that before—but it looks
- to me in this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible
- somehow, or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep
- places. It stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know
- altogether—I don't ask—but if you see anything that looks
- steep ahead, why, perhaps it is, perhaps it is—but then, what of it?
- And that's the moral I've been hedging around to, Milly.”
- </p>
- <p>
- After a silence she asked, “How did you know I was there?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought it likely.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the
- shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that the
- chisel had been “used on Coglan.” Passing that point, he went on,
- comfortably comforting.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what
- they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, and
- generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. Hicks was
- a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the river on his
- own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might have had
- scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you didn't arrange
- all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited to your good luck,
- if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break jail, which was
- natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if anyone wants to debate
- it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He shouldn't have come to
- you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do something of the kind, same
- as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it your part in it that troubles
- you? You'd better take my judgment on it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it?” she said, half audibly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My judgment? Only that I want you for myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He went on quietly after a pause: “There are objections to interfering
- with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think,
- don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, they're
- staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of being right
- are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your getting mixed with
- that kind of thing or people, is—would be, of course, rather hard on
- us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was good. Is that what you want
- my judgment on?”
- </p>
- <p>
- They turned up the path to the Champney house.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You knew all about it!” she said hurriedly. “But you don't understand. It
- was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he is!
- But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, and it
- was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came again. It
- frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off everything here,
- and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it because I was afraid. I'm
- a coward.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did, did he?” said Hennion comfortably. “That was good nerve, too.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don't understand,” she said with a small sob, and then another.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney
- sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white
- head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: “There's some of this
- business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs to
- me that”—pointing toward the window—“that may have been a
- reason.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You do understand that,” she said, and they went in together.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVIII—T. M. SECOR—HENNION—CAMILLA
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ORT ARGENT had not
- reached such a stage of civic life that its wealthy citizens went out into
- the neighbouring country by reason of warm weather. Besides, the
- neighbouring country is flat, and the summer heats seem to lie on it level
- and undisturbed. There straight roads meet at right angles, one cornfield
- is like another, and one stumpy pasture differs little from the next. It
- is fertile, and looks democratic, not to say socialistic, in its
- monotonous similarity, but it does not look like a landscape apt to draw
- out to it the civilian, as the hill country draws out its civilians, with
- the thirst of the hill people for their falling brooks and stormy
- mountains, the wood thrushes and the columbine. An “observer of decades”
- might have remarked that Herbert Avenue was the pleasantest spot he had
- seen within a hundred miles of Port Argent, and that the civic life seemed
- to be peculiarly victorious at that point. There was a village air about
- the Avenue, only on a statelier scale, but with the same space and
- greenness and quiet. One of the largest houses was T. M. Secor's.
- </p>
- <p>
- Secor sat on his broad verandah in the early twilight. He stirred heavily
- in his chair, and stretched out a great hand thick and hard, as Hennion
- came up the steps.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Glad to see you, sonny,” Secor said. “Stick up your feet and have a
- drink.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Just come from Nevada?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “One hour and one-half ago, during the which time Billy Macclesfield's
- been here, greasy with some new virtues. I take it you had something to do
- with greasing him. Next came Ted, who said he's going to get married. Next
- came Aidee with a melodious melodrama of his own, and said he was going to
- quit town. Why, things are humming here! How you feeling, sonny?”
- </p>
- <p>
- A huge, hairy, iron-grey, talkative man, with a voice like an amiable
- bison, was T. M. Secor.
- </p>
- <p>
- He continued: “Hold on! Why, Aidee said you knew about that screed of his.
- I gathered you got it by a sort of fortuitous congregation of atoms? I
- gathered that there brother of Aidee's was, by the nature of him, a sort
- of fortuitous atom.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “About that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Just so! Well—you ain't got a melodious melodrama too?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Hennion. “I want to take up the conversation you had with
- Macclesfield.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, you do!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I'm not feeling greasy with virtue myself, you know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, you ain't!”—Secor was silent for some moments.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess I'm on to you, sonny,” he said at last. “I'll tell you my mind
- about it. I think you handled Macclesfield all right, and that's a very
- good job, and you may be solid now with the gang, for aught I know, but my
- idea is, it'll be only a question of time before you get bucked off. I'd
- give you a year, maybe two.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You figure on two years?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Next election. Tait's out with me now, and he'll get a knife in when he
- can. Beckett, Freiburger, and Tuttle will probably be on edge before next
- spring. That's too soon. Now—if I can get the parks and Boulevard
- done, I'm willing to call off without a row. I want the Manual Training
- School too. But Tuttle's going to get some rake off out of that. Can't
- help it. Anyway Tuttle will see it's a good enough job. I don't mind Cam,
- and John Murphy's indecent, but reasonable. But Freiburger's going to be a
- holy terror. I don't see that I can run with that crowd, and I don't see
- how it can be altered much at present. If I split it they'll lose the
- election. Now—I think it'll split of itself, and I'd be of more use
- without the responsibility of having split it. I think so. Anyhow, I'm
- going to have something to show people for my innings.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Just so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- After another silence Secor said: “What was Wood's idea? D'you know?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He thought it would split of itself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Think so? Well, I've a notion he had a soft side to him, and you'd got on
- it. Well—I don' know. Seemed to me that way. What then?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I'll go out. I don't want it anyway. I want my father's job. Maybe
- I'm a bit of a Puritan, Secor, and maybe not, but when the heelers get
- restless to explosion, and the Reformers grimmer around the mouth because
- the city isn't rosy and polite, and my general utility's gone, I expect to
- thank God, and go back to pile-driving exclusive. But I want time.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Just so. I can keep Beckett and Tuttle from being too soon, maybe. That
- what you want of me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You say 'Wood's machine,'” Hennion went on after a while. “It's a poor
- metaphor, 'machine politics,' 'machine organisation.' Why, being an
- engineer, I ought to know a machine when I see one. I've analysed Wood's
- organisation, and I tell you you can't apply one bottom principle of
- dynamics to it to fit. The machinery is full of ghosts.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The two smoked a while, and Hennion said: “How about Aidee?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ho! I don't see why he won't stay in Port Argent.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He won't. I asked him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don't say so! Why, there you are! I had a notion you two might team
- it together, come along time enough.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It won't work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ho! Well! I dare say. Maybe you know why.” another silence. Secor said at
- last:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dick, I got only one real notion in business and philanthropy. I bank on
- it in both trades. I keep gunning for men with coal in their engines and a
- disposition to burn it, and go on till they bust up into scrap iron, and
- when I find one, I give him a show. If I think he's got the instinct to
- follow his nose like a setter pup, and not get nervous and climb telegraph
- poles, I give him a show. Well—Aidee had the coal and the
- disposition, and he burnt it all right, and I gave him his show. Didn't I?
- He's got the idea now that he's run himself into the ditch and turned
- scrap iron. Humph! Well! He lost his nerve anyway. Why, Hicks is dead, and
- Wood's dead, and they can scrap it out in hell between 'em, can't they?
- What business he got to lose his nerve? He used to have an idea God
- Almighty was in politics, and no quitter, and meant to have a shy at
- business. Interesting idea, that. Ho! He never proved it. What the blazes
- he want to quit for now? Well! I was going to say, I'm gambling on you now
- for a setter pup, sonny, without believing you can ride Wood's machine.
- I'll give you a show, when you're good and through with that. I've been
- buying Chickering R. R. stock. Want some of it? Yes, sir, I'm going to own
- that line inside a year, and give you a job there that'll make you grunt
- to reach around it. Ho! Ted says he's going to take John Keys' girl and go
- to Nevada. Ain't so foolish as you'd expect of him. Sounds cheerful. Ted's
- a drooling damn fool all right, but he's no quitter. I hear you're going
- to marry Champney's daughter?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will if I can.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry Champney's
- petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall in his time,
- near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better outfit of
- brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt coal all right.
- Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her when I got to Port
- Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my pocket, and she never
- understood how it happened—claimed she didn't, anyhow—and that
- afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the Court House steps
- that sounded like he was President of the Board of Prophets, and I bet a
- man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all right, and lost it, I did.
- I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half. Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!'
- Ho! Well, why can't you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion
- presently took his leave.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but Camilla
- spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the black
- shadows of the vines.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you want me, Dick?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid
- moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and
- arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made
- little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on
- the wall, little specks on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He bent over till her breath was warm on his face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you as
- a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't stay
- still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor
- upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't
- remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal
- expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the
- beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought
- that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I didn't know that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know. I'm a poor, tongue-tied lover, Milly. I ought to fling myself
- loose on the subject, and describe the gorgeous state of my heart, and lie
- like a seaman ashore, if I had the gift of my calling. I'm no poet or
- dreamer of dreams. I'm after realities. I don't expect to be a burning and
- shining light to other people or reform anybody whatever, but I expect to
- please one girl, if she'll let me try. Real things! What do you suppose
- they are? One time I was born, and now I love you, and sometime I'll die,
- and God knows what then. Are those realities? Can you see the river there,
- where the moonlight is on it? It runs down to the lake, and the force that
- draws it down is as real as the river itself. Love is a real thing, more
- real than hands and feet. It pulls like gravitation and drives like steam.
- When you came to me there at the Hall, what was it brought you? An
- instinct? You asked me to take care of you. I had an instinct that was
- what I was made for. I thought it was all safe then, and I felt like the
- eleventh commandment and loved mine enemy for a brother. I can't do
- anything without you! I've staked my hopes on you, so far as I can see
- them. I've come to the end of my rope, and there's something between us
- yet, but you must cross it. I can't cross it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot at
- the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was
- deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly past
- the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had turned
- and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion glanced
- out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric light.
- Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his slow
- footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the porch.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Can I cross it?” Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired
- and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. “Can I? If love
- were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this way,
- as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought—but can I come? If
- you tell me truly that I can come—I will believe what you tell me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house, or
- were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned on
- Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply. He
- expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose meaning
- was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers that grew on
- the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his shoulders, and her
- head with its thick hair on the other.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You have come!” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. I have.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last on
- the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware that
- there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch vines, with
- their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace and went his
- way up Bank Street.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIX—CONCLUSION
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>ENNION and Camilla
- were married in the fall when the maple leaves were turning yellow and
- red. It may be that Camilla thought of herself as one consenting with
- humility to enter a quiet gateway, the shelter of a garden whose walks and
- borders she knew; and it may be that she was mistaken and found it a
- strange garden with many an herb of grace, and many an old-fashioned
- perennial as fairly embroidered as any that grow in Arcadia; for when one
- has found that the birth of one of the common flowers and hardy perennials
- comes as wonderfully out of the deeps as the birth of a new day, it may be
- that one understands heaven even better than when floating in Arcadia
- among its morning islands.
- </p>
- <p>
- She could never truly have a working share in Dick's working life. She
- could sympathise with its efforts and achievements, but never walk even
- with him along that road. He would come to her tired, asking for home and
- rest, but never sick of soul, asking for healing, nor troubled and
- confused, asking for help. It was not his nature. One must take the
- measure of one's destiny and find happiness therein. After all, when that
- is found, it is found to be a quite measureless thing; and therefore the
- place where it is found must be a spacious place after all, a high-roofed
- and wide-walled habitation.
- </p>
- <p>
- Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars
- rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented with
- his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his forelock for
- the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father Time, has been
- given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of his as of a good
- shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, that curious
- untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that solution of
- improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. But yet a little while,
- and let the winds freshen the air and the waters go their clean rounds
- again, and lo! he has shepherded us home from the desert, and comforted us
- in new garments, and turned our minus into plus by a judicious shifting
- across the equation. Shall we not give him his crook, his medicine case
- and license to practise, his loom, his stylus and tablets, and by oracle
- declare him “the Wisest,” and build him a temple, and consult his
- auspices, and be no more petulant if he nurtures other seeds than those of
- our planting, the slow, old-fashioned, silent gardener? We know no oracle
- but Time, yet we are always harking after another. He is a fluent, dusky,
- imperturbable person, resembling the Muscadine River. He goes on forever,
- and yet remains. His answers are Delphic and ambiguous. Alas! he tends to
- drown enthusiasm. Who is the wisest? “The one who knows that he knows
- nothing,” quoth your cynic oracle. What is justice? “A solemn lady, but
- with so bandaged eyes that she cannot see the impish capers of her
- scales.” What is happiness? As to that he answers more kindly. “In the
- main,” he says, “happiness is a hardy perennial.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The “observer of decades,” who came to Port Argent some years later, found
- it proud of its parks, its boulevard, and railroad stations, its new court
- house, and jail, and manual training school; proud of its rapid growth,
- and indignant at the inadequacy of the national census. He was shown the
- new streets, and driven through suburbs where lately pasture and
- cornfields had been. He found Port Argent still in the main electric,
- ungainly, and full of growing pains, its problem of municipal government
- still inaccurately solved, the system not so satisfactory a structure as
- the railroad bridge below the boathouses, built by Dick Hennion for the
- North Shore Railroad. In shop and street and office the tide of its life
- was pouring on, and its citizens held singular language. Its sparrows were
- twittering in the maples, bustling, quarrelling, yet not permanently
- interested in either the sins or the wrongs of their neighbours, but going
- tolerantly to sleep at night. Here and there a bluebird was singing apart
- its plaintive, unfinished “Lulu-lu.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He inquired of one of Port Argent's citizens for news, and heard that the
- “Independent Reformers” had won an election sometime back; that they were
- out again now, and inclined to be vituperative among themselves; that Port
- Argent was again led by Marve Wood's ring, which was not such a
- distressing ring as it might be. Hennion was not in it now. No, but he was
- suspected of carrying weight still in the party councils, which perhaps
- accounted for the “ring's” not being so distressing as it might be.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He did more than he talked about,” said the garrulous citizen. “But
- speaking of talkers, there was a man here once named Aidee. You've heard
- of him. He's getting celebrated. Well, I'm a business man, and stick to my
- times. But I read Aidee's books. It's a good thing to do that much.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The observer of decades left the garrulous citizen, and went down Lower
- Bank Street. He noted the shapeless, indifferent mass and contour of the
- buildings on the river-front, the litter of the wharves, the lounging
- black barges beside them, the rumble of traffic on the bridge and in
- distant streets, the dusky, gliding river lapping the stone piers and
- wooden piles, and going on forever while men come and go. He thought how
- the stone piers would sometime waste and fall, and the Muscadine would
- still go on, turbid and unperturbed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Adaptability seems the great test of permanence,” he thought. “Whatever
- is rigid is fragile.”
- </p>
- <p>
- In front of the Champney house he stopped and looked up past the lawn and
- saw old Henry Champney, sitting in a wicker chair that was planted on the
- gravel walk. He was leaning forward, his chin on his cane, and gazing
- absorbed at his two grandchildren at his feet, a brown-haired child and a
- dark-haired baby. They were digging holes in the gravel with iron spoons.
- </p>
- <p>
- What with the street, the railway, and the river, it might almost be said
- that from the Champney lawns one watched the world go by, clattering,
- rolling, puffing, travelling these its three concurrent highways. But
- Henry Champney seemed to take no interest now in this world's triple
- highways, nor to hear their clamour, but only cared now to watch the
- dark-haired baby, and listen to the little cooing voices.
- </p>
- <h3>
- THE END
- </h3>
- <div style="height: 6em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Port Argent, by Arthur Colton
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORT ARGENT ***
-
-***** This file should be named 50269-h.htm or 50269-h.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
- http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/2/6/50269/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
-be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
-States without permission and without paying copyright
-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
-
-START: FULL LICENSE
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
-1.E.8.
-
-1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
-Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
-you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
-country outside the United States.
-
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
-on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
-phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
- This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
- most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
- restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
- under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
- eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
- United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
- are located before using this ebook.
-
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
-beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
-other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
-Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-provided that
-
-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
- the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
- you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
- to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
- agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
- within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
- legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
- payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
- Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
- Literary Archive Foundation.”
-
-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
- you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
- does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
- License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
- copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
- all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
- works.
-
-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
- any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
- electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
- receipt of the work.
-
-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
- distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
-contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
-cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
-of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
-without further opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
-remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
-Defect you cause.
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
-from people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
-www.gutenberg.org Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-
- Dr. Gregory B. Newby
- Chief Executive and Director
- gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
-volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
-edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
-facility: www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
- </body>
-</html>
|
