Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 7

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HERE then was a young man rather emaciated by his siege of New York, and returned to write until dawn, most nights, at home in a placid town among the green, far inland flat lands. No great discontent was involved, however. On the contrary, it was a luxury to live pamperedly again in the pleasant house in the friendly neighbourhood where he’d been born and had grown up. The whole town, except for the business district, was made of friendly neighbourhoods, in fact; and so was like a hundred other just such towns of the Midlands and of East and West.

The great change had not shown its first beginnings; though now, looking back upon those peaceful days and those quiet, seemingly settled and completed American towns, we can see that it impended imminently. We see that the shadow of the change loomed close over them, like the ceiling shadow of a lifted war club over one of the pioneer settlers reading his Bible by candlelight in the log cabin out of which the cities grew. For no catastrophe of earthquake, of war, or fire, or flood, or tornado, or all combined, could have done more to those towns than the change has done. Of the pleasant smallish city I lived in when I came from New York in that year of the fin de siècle, there remains about as much as the Roman left of Punic Carthage when he drove his ploughs over its site before building his own city there.

No one could have dreamed that our town was to be utterly destroyed; such a thing was as unbelievable as that the pioneer’s Bible would be dismembered along with the town. At the centre, we had finished the building of our great monument to the men of our state who had fought in the Civil War, the War with Mexico and the War of 1812. The shaft rose two hundred feet and more in the air, a mark to be seen all over the countryside, far and wide. Forever it was to dominate; forever it was to stand high above the tallest buildings of the city; for it was higher, even, than the noble green dome of the State House. Straight northward from the monument ran the “principal residence street”, paralleled by four other “principal residence streets” of rival merit. These avenues were amply broad for the family carriages, bicycles, phaëtons, buggies and light delivery wagons that formed the traffic; and they were shaded by maples, by sycamores where lazy bayous from the creek had been, and by old elms, hickory and black walnut trees, relics of the original forest. By mid-Maytime, on many of the streets, leafy branches had crossed and mingled above the roadway, so that the movement below was through cool green tunnels and emerged into sharp sunlight only at the crossings.

Most of the houses facing upon the “principal residence streets” were built solidly of brick and trimmed with white stone; the windows were all plate-glass; the ceilings were high—eleven to fifteen and even sixteen feet; the staircases were walnut and the verandas were of stone or painted wood. The lawns were broad, often generously without fences to mark dividing lines; there were shade and orchard trees in every yard; some yards had fountains, and one or two cast-iron deer were left, though these were disappearing.

From some of the verandas, after dark, there came on summer evenings the tinkle of mandolins and guitars, or the twanging of a banjo; young voices might be heard softly singing “Answer, Bid Me Good-bye” and “Go, Love’s Sorrow”, or the livelier measures of “Mandalay” or of a new “coon song”; for in the milder seasons the verandas were the foregathering places of youth and courtship. The elder folk were usually indoors after nightfall, but with open windows; though on hot evenings they would sit out upon the lawn in wicker chairs, fanning themselves and murmuring against the heat. There was not obviously an official chaperonage, but, by the very custom of that simple way of living, the older people were usually within earshot of the young.

Bicycling had begun to give the latter more range; though not beyond the lamplight of the streets after dark, for the roads were too rough. Phaëtons and dogcarts and runabouts permitted tête-à-tête driving by daylight; but not to great distances, nor with roadside parking in the dusk—an idea completely unknown to the hourglass girl of the higher caste. She lived within strict boundaries both of conduct and of manner, and she was sufficiently her own chaperone. To have offered her a cigarette, except as a rather feeble attempt at humour, would have disturbed her as with something near an insult; and a rumour that she slyly used a little rouge, or artificially coloured her lips or eyebrows or lashes, would have frightened her as a threatening of intolerable slander. And if such a thing as that she sometimes liked a drink of gin could have been imagined and actually told of her, she might as well have cut the throat of her baby brother in his cradle.

Yet who shall say she was less care-free and less buoyantly happy in her youth in that pleasant town than are the liberated maidens of the place to-day? Pleasures were simpler then; but that has never meant less pleasure. Life was slower; but that means there was time to enjoy it a little copiously. When the first country club was built, far, far out among the woods and farms, it took us almost an hour to drive there from downtown, unless we had a light vehicle and a fast horse. Even upon a bicycle the going was slow; there were ruts to ride, and bumpy, dusty country roads; and, after all, when the club was reached there was nothing to do except to sit upon a veranda and look down upon the river below the bluff. Yet the young people did it, and so did their elders, and believed themselves delighted. A lovely landscape was there, something to dwell with a little in those leisurely days when there was time to talk and even time to think.

But that same summer the landscape at the country club was artificially altered. The alteration was so slight that it was almost imperceptible from the veranda; nevertheless it was a forerunner of the change into the coming age, the first to touch the countryside. It was the feeble beginning of a prodigious thing, yet we who watched the making of that little alteration at the country club thought no more of it than if it had been the laying out of a bowling green. At best it meant the appearance of a slight imported fad, we supposed; a curious game that the followers of fads in games might play for a season or so and then forget, since it was too bothersome ever to get a grip of people and attain the stability of tennis or croquet, or even quoits.

Two young men, members of the club, returned from a journey abroad, and, hiring a few puzzled farm labourers from the neighbourhood, constructed something they called a links. But if ever that word may be used in the singular, what these two travellers made should be spoken of as a link. It consisted of a square deposit of lumpy sod, imaginably a green, and, at the distance of a hundred yards, a clay platform. That was all, but the place soon resounded with conscientious cries of “Fore!” And when these first golfers were ardent in sport upon their stretch of ground, members of the club and visitors, glancing that way, would be stricken into attitudes of still amazement. All summer and autumn there was one question that had to be answered, or else given up, continuously:

“Are those people crazy?”