Читать книгу Port Argent - Arthur Willis Colton - Страница 5

Table of Contents

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.