Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 9

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IN the Midland town, as elsewhere over the country, almost everybody—among the native born—went to church either regularly or at intervals. True, there were atheists and materialists here and there; and there were scattered agnostics, followers of Ingersoll; but the church governed the customs and prevailed in the established conventionalities of the people. Moreover, the universal rule of the church, and these customs and conventionalities, were not even slightly disregarded except by daring people willing to risk interdiction. There was a terrible and excluding word that excommunicated them—“fast”. In the age of bicycles and family surreys and “livery-stable rigs”, this word, with its implication of rapid movement, was almost the worst that could be said.

Divorce and rouge were “fast” and as rare as a game of whist on Sunday; late hours were “fast”; French novels were “fast”; a girl was “fast” if she mentioned her stockings; a young man was “fast” if he mentioned them; a married woman who went to a concert with a man not her husband was “fast”, and so was the man; Welsh rarebit cooked with beer was “fast”; people who went to evening concerts in German beer gardens were “fast”; people who played games of cards, or any other games, for stakes, were “fast”; a woman who wore a low corsage was “fast”; it was “fast” to be interested in the ballet, to read Ouida, or to have read Byron’s Don Juan; it was “fast” to give lively dinner parties on Sunday. On Sunday, indeed, even fast horses were supposed to repose; it was no seemly day for the red-wheeled runabout.

The churchly rule of the elders prevailed unchallenged by any “young intellectual”. Everywhere, even among those who were not churchgoers, there was an abiding and accepting, not a questioning. One night a milkman expressed his sense of this acceptance to me and spoke reverently in the very spirit of the times. A friend of mine died; I had been spending the night beside his coffin, and just before dawn had gone out to walk up and down upon the lawn in the moist spring air. The milkman, coming into the yard, observed me, and having filled the household can upon the back steps approached for a hushed conversation.

“Is this where the fine young man’s dead that I read about in the papers last night?”

“Yes.”

He sighed thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “I ain’t a churchgoing man myself, I’m sorry to say; but I’m an abiding man. My wife’s a church member and all, but I can’t claim to be. I don’t know whether it’s going to keep me out of heaven or not, because that’s something nobody can tell beforehand, not even church members themselves; but, on the other hand, I reckon being an abiding man’s pretty safe to keep me out of hell. I like to read James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye, and I can’t claim I read the Bible anywhere like as much as I do them two; but yet I never did claim there’s any comparison in a religious way between James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye and them old prophets like David and Goliath and Elisha and Job and Jeremiah, and all them. No, sir; I read James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye for pleasure; I can’t deny it; but when it comes to abiding, I abide by them old Bible prophets. Don’t you believe us abiding people got a pretty good chance to get in?”

“In? You mean into heaven?”

“Yes. That’s my opinion, anyhow. We can’t all be church members—got too much to do that prevents it. Me, for instance, when I get back to the dairy farm after my route on Sunday morning, why, it couldn’t hardly be expected I’d clean up and get on my Sunday suit and go to church. Night watchmen, they can’t get to church, either; but they’re just as likely to be abiding men as any. Pretty much everybody is either a church member or at least abiding, when you get right down to the facts. Ain’t that your experience?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Yes, sir,” he went on, “that’s pretty much the way of it. It’s just the same all over the country, too. I’ve done considerable travelling; I’ve travelled on every railroad in this state, and I’ve been on excursions to Niagara Falls and Washington and Asbury Park; I’ve been in Cincinnati time and again—I got kin living there—I’ve been to Keokuk, and I’ve been twice to Chicago. Well, you naturally always get to talking to passengers on trains, and, after you find out where they’re from, and all about their family, and how the crops look in their part of the country, and what business conditions seem to be out there, why, nine times out of ten you and them get to talking about religion. Well, sir, I never come across but one infidel yet, in all my experience; and even he wasn’t so much of one—said a good many parts of the Old Testament was too much for him. Except for that, he was as abiding a man as anybody. But I expect he might go to hell on account of them parts he said he didn’t believe in. He’s the only one I’ve run across, myself, though of course I know there’s some others here and there that don’t believe in the Bible at all; but there ain’t many willing to take such a risk. No, sir, not many. Of course I know there’s plenty that’ll take a chance sliding off to one side now and then, like pitching horseshoes out behind the barn on Sunday, or getting drunk Saturday nights, or cussing around up an alley, maybe; but they know they can get back into line by repenting and abiding again before it’s too late. Yes, sir; if you leave out saloon keepers and gamblers, and such like, the United States is a pretty good pious sort of country, by and large. The children respect and honour and obey the laws, and where there’s a few like me that can’t hardly make it to get to church, why, anyhow, they’re abiding. Ain’t that the way it seems to you?”

In general, though there were exceptions, that was the way it seemed to anybody. There was a tremendous universal respect for respectability. People who did not abide by the rule of the church and the law of the land were not within that respect, and, unless they were very powerful and adroit, they were outcasts if their disobedience became known. And almost universally children honoured their parents, believing them to be perfect in goodness, perfect in dignity; and the parents of that day took infinite pains to present only this aspect of themselves to their children. Less strict with the young than their own parents had been, and much more liberal in everything, they nevertheless retained authority and knew that they must never weaken it by endangering the complete respect their children had for them.

The churches ruled over all the outward part of life, and, although there were depths within the social body where they did not rule, even in the depths they were feared and the infractions were stealthy, like night poachings in the king’s preserve. Even the legalized saloons dared not be open enemies of the churches, and groped obscurely, under cover, for a little local power in dirty small politics. But the rule of the churches was not the rule of the Inquisition; it was neither early Puritanism nor early Wesleyanism; it was not militant, except when the corruption of brewery politics became too brazen. The children did not challenge the church or the faith of their parents; usually they accepted that faith themselves as a matter of course. Moreover, respectability did not make the town gloomy; and, looking back upon it now, it seems to have been not only a contented and peaceful place but a fairly happy one.

Beauty was there, outdoors, and in the tranquil, friendly life of the people. By June, if you ascended to the top of the monument and looked forth from that high vantage in the air, you seemed to be upon a tower rising from an island of stone surrounded not by water but by verdure. There were just glimpses of roofs and windows among green leaves, for the shade trees marched down the streets all the way to the State House, the Courthouse, and the Circle, where stood the monument. Beyond the town, a lazy silken creek wandered among great sycamores; and there were other waters—a crystal river below high bluffs and a canal that was like a long straight strip of green looking-glass. And all the air was pure; only the clean white dust of the country roads blew a little in the sunshine, and the sky over the town was unflawed blue in winter and in summer.

Upon a summer evening, if you walked abroad, there was the multitudinous rustle of leaves as if you walked in a woodland—as indeed you did; there was the quiet murmur of voices from the verandas, or from where the people sat out upon the lawns; there was the plod-plod of horses passing with surreys for the evening family drive; there was the tinkling of the little bicycle bells and the gliding passage of the wheelmen’s lamps, whiter small lights than the gold pencillings of the fireflies among the shrubberies on the lawns. Sometimes the surrey drivers would draw rein and pause, and the foot passengers upon the sidewalk would stop; a quiet audience thus would gather outside an open window where a girl with a lovely voice sang to her piano. It is true that the song was likely to be sentimental, even sentimentally pathetic, and the theme was nearly always a variation upon the topic of constancy.

Oh, love for a year, a week, a day!

But alas for the love that loves alway!

Or it might be the audience gathered on the sidewalk and in the street beyond a picket fence about a lawn where young people danced upon a waxed platform and an orchestra played by the light of Japanese lanterns strung among the trees. The young people danced happily, and, although they sometimes danced as late into the next morning as two o’clock, they began—even when they were under seventeen—at about eight. They danced for sheer gaiety and without other stimulation, though liquor was obtainable openly at any bar. When the young men drank they kept away from the “girls they knew”; and, if they were known to drink often, the “girls they knew” kept away from them—permanently.

The music to which they danced was made by violins, ’cellos, flutes, harps, triangles and bass viols; sometimes there was a clarinet and sometimes mild drums and cymbals were heard; and again no one can deny that most of the sound these instruments made was sentimental. What seems incredible now, it is a fact that in those days old people could bear to listen to the dance music that was modern then. Not only could they bear to listen—they loved to listen; they could listen all evening long without bleeding at the ears. For one reason, saxophones had not yet been ejected by the volcanic insides of hyenas in eruption.

There were even midnight serenades, in those days, of a summer night; that dashing custom had not quite disappeared. Young men would hire an orchestra and an “express wagon”, as the horsedrawn truck with a big canvas top was called; musicians and gallants would drive to the house of a pretty girl, encamp themselves noiselessly upon the lawn, and presently, after a faint and covert tuning of instruments, dulcet melody would ascend to her window. When she was sweetly thus awakened, she would slide out of bed, crawl on hands and knees to the window and lower the shade, raised for the passage of air. Then she would light the gas, and the bright window in the dark night was the serenaders’ reward, the assurance that their music was heard and accepted. After a while they would move silently back to the “express wagon”, the wagon would creak away, and the window would go dark again; yet for a time a breath of romance would linger within it and upon the air.

No serenaded lady could have thought to say she “got a kick” out of such a thing. Beyond question, it was a sentimental age! It was the age of sentiment, of faith, of leisurely days and quiet nights, of reverent children, of dignified parents, of placid newspapers and of settled and contented living at home.

There the town lay, then, peaceful and completed, warm and green and a little drowsy, upon a September afternoon, when the strangest sight of all the fin de siècle—a sight even stranger than the photograph of a living man’s skeleton—came rolling forth from within the cavern of forge and fire where it had been conceived.

The languid town awoke. Children, playing in back yards, ran shrieking into the street; coloured servants, glancing from front windows, yelled with surprise and bellowed for those in the kitchen to come and look; old ladies were roused from naps and fluttered to the windows. Horses snorted, reared and could not be soothed; dogs barked themselves insane, and well they might.

Well, indeed, might those jolly old dogs bark; well might those kindly old horses prance and run away! For what they beheld that day was their Juggernaut; they might as well have cast themselves beneath its wheels then and there. But for more than horses and dogs the monster rolling through the street was to be the destroyer. Yet a little time and it would have down those sturdy, strong-built, big old brick houses with their broad plate-glass windows where faces stared, half startled, half derisive, at the monster’s first passing. A little time and the monster would have them all down, every one of them; it would have them down and their trees down and their green lawns devoured. It would have the whole town down, and more; it would have the fin de siècle down and extinct, only the memory of it surviving in belittling laughter.

More, the monster and its adjutants would have the very spirit of that age down. The old faiths were to be put at bay; the old abiding was to vanish; the universal rule of the churches was to vanish; the old content was to vanish; the old romantic sentiment was to vanish; leisure was to vanish; the old reverences and dignities were to vanish; the old authority of parents was to vanish; even dance music was to vanish and be music no more. From the moment of that first apparition upon the streets of the placid town, Death waited for the God of Things as They Are.

And yet the monster that was to erase the world was no great shakes to look at when we goggled at it that September day. It was only a topless surrey with a whirling belt and other inexplicable machinery beneath it, emitting vapour and hideous noises. But there were no shafts for a horse—there was no horse—yet the wheels turned and the ridiculous miracle moved.

In the front seat a jarred and vibrated man, reddened in the face by his dreadful conspicuousness, held a crooked rod that seemed somewhat uncertainly to guide the forward wheels. And along the sidewalks and even at the tail of the monster, raced crowds of vociferous, mocking boys and girls.

“Git a hoss!” they shrieked continuously. “Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a hoss!”