Читать книгу The Heritage of Hatcher Ide - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

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As early as Nineteen-hundred and five the Aldriches, a farming family whose sons “went east to college”, had sold land to smoked-out “North Siders”. Beyond the northernmost suburb of that day, the Aldrich farm lay higher than the plain where spread the city; and it was found that at the edges of the low plateau, and between the trunks of old forest trees, there was such a thing as a View. Sunrises, sunsets and even horizons could be known again from here; and far to the southwest in the haze could sometimes be discerned the faint blue dome of the capitol.

Through the old forest groves ran a rough country road, called by the Aldriches “Butternut Lane”, and along this irregular sylvan highway landscaping began and costly houses in new fashions displaced the thickets. Family followed family, vacating the sooty brick houses in the region that now began to be called “downtown”; and, though farther from the city there was here and there “real country life” in bankers’ farm houses, Butternut Lane finally had most of the elderly survivors of the Nineteenth Century’s caste of the ablest and the greater number of their descendants. By the end of the first decade after the Great War, Butternut Lane was, in fact, the successor to the old North Side and the Twentieth Century’s home of the “best people”. All in all, though more loosely united and with many a newcomer among them, they still were that.

The Ides and the Linleys clung longest to Sheridan Avenue and their old North Side neighborhood. The rumble and jar of the new mechanical traffic shook their windows by day; thundered intermittently by night. Burnt coal and burnt gas were the air they breathed; and they could seldom alight at the old carriage blocks before their houses, where still stood the obsolete black cast-iron hitching posts with horses’ heads. Parked cars took all the space, and in Nineteen-sixteen, when a wedding last filled the Linley house with flowers and music, influence and police were needed to let the guests arrive at the awning’s entrance.

That was when the stalwart Frederic Ide married Harriet Linley. The wedding was gay, though the gayety imperfectly covered anxieties; the bridegroom and his Best Man, the bride’s brother, Victor Linley, were to leave within the same week to be made into soldiers by the training camp at Plattsburg. Young Victor Linley, mild-mannered, studious, and, like all of his tribe, fastidious of mind and delicate in body, had broken the Linley line of lawyers. A Beaux Arts student of architecture in Paris, he’d also acquired expert chauffeuring by driving an ambulance, but came home for the wedding and to join his new brother-in-law in absorbing as much of the military art as they could hastily stuff into themselves.

This, though they were peaceful young men, they did because, like their forebears of 1812, they believed that their country would and should maintain American Rights and the Freedom of the Seas, and that a nation timorously obedient to the commands of a foreign State in matters involving murder has lost its independence. So the two old-fashioned young men went not only to the camp but presently afterward to fight in a war that was to become in no very long time the most misunderstood, mis-propagandized and innocently maligned conflict in the country’s history. The Linley house began to brighten again with the return of Frederic Ide, sound and brown; and the tall plate-glass windows were radiant far into the smoky night when Major Victor Linley came home, not sound nor brown but with the four decorations he never wore except upon the days when he received them.

It was a light-hearted household then, with a baby in it of whom the father had caught little more than a glimpse before going to war. Frederic Ide, his happy wife and their first-born, lived with the Linleys until Nineteen-twenty, when Frederic finished the building of his spacious new house among the forest trees of Butternut Lane. After this departure the Linleys still clung to their house, though people laughed and said their attachment to it was absurd; asked them why they couldn’t see that the old neighborhood was doomed. Realistic irony, supplanting sentiment, had become the fashion, especially among the youthful; and the Linleys were demonstrably sentimental.

There were only four of them left. Victor’s twin brother had died at fourteen when the two had diphtheria together; and the youngest of his three sisters, Alice, married to an engineer, lived in Oregon. The remaining sister, Nancy, authoritatively called the “most delightful girl of her time”, a delicate slight lovely creature, was frequently sought in marriage but found life at home too agreeable. She couldn’t help comparing other men with her father and her brother, and she had something like a passion for the house itself, in spite of what the Growth was doing to it.

Even after the deaths of their mother and father, within a month of each other in Nineteen twenty-four, Nancy and Victor, devotedly congenial, went on living there. The next year, on a summer day, Nancy was struck down by a truck and brought home in an ambulance. As they carried her in she made a little gesture with her hand as though she waved a farewell to the house. “What a dear place it’s been!” she said to Victor, and spoke never again. After that, Victor Linley went to live at the Carlyle Club, and it was helpful that pressure of work upon a rising architect could occupy most of his daytime thoughts.

He had his share in the rushing expansions of the city as it over-built itself in those booming years, not so large a share as that of his brother-in-law, Frederic Ide. The old firm of Ide and Son had become Ide and Aldrich, a partnership of two able young men. Frederic, steady of head and hand, trustworthy in heart and judgment, was called the “brains” of the firm, and jolly big Harry Aldrich the “mixer” and “business getter”. This being what is known as an “ideal combination”, Ide and Aldrich rode happily atop the great wave that began to sink in bubble and foam in ’Twenty-nine.

Ide and Aldrich sank with it, but didn’t drown—Frederic was too careful a swimmer. “We’ve all got to do what our grandfathers did after ’Seventy-three,” he said, in Nineteen thirty-one, to his partner. “The city’s been doing what it had done then—over-borrowing, over-buying, over-expanding, and, worst of all, over-building. That’s why the building trades went down first, taking the rest of us with ’em. The stock market didn’t do it; that was only the pie-crust falling down. Retrenchment, tightening the belt, everybody getting along with less, hard economies—we’ll have to do it on a bigger scale than our grandfathers did; but it’s the same and only answer. Business is the life of the country and business is sick; but it’ll cure itself. That’ll take some time and there’s already great hardship. I don’t doubt that before the sickness of business is over, the city will be feeding fifteen thousand people a day. That means more taxes on top of other drains; but naturally we’ll do it.”

They did it. The city fed more than fifteen thousand people a day; but business had troubles in addition to its sickness and didn’t make a recovery. Relapse and collapse reached depths, and Frederic was mystified when the year Nineteen Thirty-three brought new bafflements instead of an overdue convalescence. His brother-in-law, Victor Linley, gave him the detached opinion of a meditative observer.

“We’re all in for it,” Victor said. “When business is sick, the rest of us ail, too; and business is about to have the peculiar experience of a doctoring that systematically kicks the patient in his vitals. Of course the physicians will praise themselves for their benignity.”

Frederic asked him what on earth he meant.

“Politics,” Victor explained. “You business men used to think it didn’t much matter when the office-seekers assaulted you from down in the South Side, and it didn’t; but now, with distress and bewilderment running epidemic through a population more educated and less intelligent than it used to be when it was smaller, look out for soap-boxers! When the type, politician, first evolved, Fred, merely rudimentary cunning must have made one or two of ’em try to do what their later successors have almost all done, and are still doing mostly, of course. I suspect that even in the stone-age somebody ambitiously climbed up on a rock and made a speech to all of the tribe that were idle enough to listen. ‘I’m your only friend,’ I think he’d shout. ‘See those rascals living in better caves than yours? Hate ’em for it; they’re your enemies! You are as worthy to have the good things of life as anybody else is, aren’t you? It follows that those swindlers must have got the best caves by oppressing and tricking you. Make me and my brothers your chieftains and we’ll drive the scoundrels out for you so that we shall all enjoy the best caves!’ ”

Frederic Ide, as simple in thought as in his honesty, was disturbed yet incredulous. “Nonsense about caves would do for those times,” he said. “But business must thrive or nobody can. To make things harder for us now—why, what could be worse for everybody?”

“Everybody except the successful politician, Fred. When was practical politics ever anything but the struggle for power over people and property? The politicians have their great chance at last because they have an audience that’s sorry for itself and humanly wants to blame somebody else. It’s always a relief. Good politics would be pretty stupid if now it doesn’t use the old technique; and of course you’re the mark for both the politicians and the uplifters to shoot at. They’ve both got all this convenient social-and-economic type of verbiage to use, and they will—till the politician has pretty much everything and everybody under his thumb. If you business men complain that he’s incompetently making rather a botch of affairs that used to be yours he’ll say he’s saving you from a bloody revolution. Simultaneously he’ll announce to the people that you’re the selfish few who want to starve the poor.”

“That’s a horrible prediction,” Frederic Ide said. “You utter it lightly. Are you spending your time these days in becoming a philosophic humorist?”

“What else have I to do with it?” his brother-in-law asked, and wasn’t answered.

Frederic couldn’t develop a philosophic humor, himself; and, as the hard times didn’t soften, found little humor in anything. His buoyant partner, Harry Aldrich, worked undespondently, for he was a sprightly and ever-hopeful soul; but Frederic bent to the burden. Not even his wife knew what miles of floor-pacing he did, what care shortened his sleep as he strove to pay his bills, to continue the expensive education of his three children and to keep the old firm on its feet. Ide and Son, and afterward Ide and Aldrich, had a large establishment. The depleted business couldn’t carry so many people, and every dismissal in turn was an anguish to the head of the firm and a shock to his light-hearted but kindly partner.

Business got its head up a little now and then, but complained that “for the public good” it was being so “regulated”, harried, drained and bedeviled by squads of new officials and their new rulings that the elevations could never be better than momentary. Nevertheless, there were miracles; the very people who bore the largest burdens contrived to widen the enlightenment of their city. Even in these worst of times, they enlarged the hospitals and the art museum; and they supported a symphony orchestra. Nobody thanked them; but public spirit and the American business man’s love of his city die hard.

Youth, thrown upon the world by university and high school commencements, had as bad a time as anybody did, and here and there, following a new fashion, insisted upon something’s being done for it—a natural clamor at a time when a great deal was being done for all other people whose mutual needs or desires organized them into “pressure groups” sufficiently multitudinous to interest the politicians. Political assistance for youth didn’t reach many of the young people who came home from the universities to fathers formerly prosperous but now trying to pay the interest on notes and mortgages.

In better days, when the young graduate returned to the old North Side, or, later, to Butternut Lane or other well-to-do environs, he usually hadn’t a problem to face and wasn’t one, himself. He was taken into his father’s business or perhaps an uncle’s office, or a family friend or a college friend of his own might find place for him; but the Depression had changed all that. Possession of property had become an insecure occupation of it; ownership of a business meant fear and the endless compilation of dangerous reports. To practise a profession was to work for fees that mightn’t be collected; but even in these hazards there was no room for the yearly multitude of young graduates. They came “out into the world” to face the long granite wall of opportunity denied. Nobody had even advice to give them, and, baffled, hurt and perplexed, some of them turned fitfully to “fascinating new ideologies”; some walked the streets, some went wild, and some mended the lawnmower and cut the grass at home. Of all the sufferers from the Depression the children of “the Rich” were not the least hard-stricken and sorely bewildered.