Читать книгу The Quickening - Lynde Francis - Страница 10

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One would always remember the first day of a new creation; the day when God said, Let there be light.

It has been said that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is merely the overlooked. For weeks Thomas Jefferson had been scenting the unwonted in the air of sleepy Paradise. Once he had stumbled on the engineers at work in the "dark woods" across the creek, spying out a line for the new railroad. Another day he had come home late from a fishing excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the sitting-room with three strangers resplendent in town clothes, and the talk—what he could hear of it from his post of observation on the porch step—was of iron and coal, of a "New South," whatever that might be, and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to help bring about.

But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground premonitory of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when, as a reward of merit for having faultlessly recited the eighty-third Psalm from memory, he was permitted to go to town with his father. Behold him, then, dangling his feet—uncomfortable because they were stockinged and shod—from the high buggy seat while the laziest of horses ambled between the shafts up the white pike and around and over the hunched shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the morning of the day of revelations.

In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found Thomas Jefferson totally unprepared. He had been to town often enough to have a clear memory picture of South Tredegar—the prehistoric South Tredegar. There was a single street, hub-deep in mud in the rains, beginning vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending rather more definitely in the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the shops—only Thomas Jefferson and all his kind called them "stores"—one-storied, these, the wooden ones with lying false fronts to hide the mean little gables; the brick ones honester in face, but sadly chipped and crumbling and dingy with age and the weather.

Also, there were houses, some of them built of the pale red brick, with pillared porticoes running to the second story; hip-roofed, with a square balustered observatory on top; rather grand looking and impressive till you came near enough to see that the bricks were shaling, and the portico floors rotting, and the plaster falling from the pillars to show the grinning lath-and-frame skeletons behind.

Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace which, long before the war, had given the town its pretentious name. And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out of it.

Thomas Jefferson had seen it all, time and again; and this he remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the freshness of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful gladness in his heart.

But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced, blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap, with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the field, and made haste to occupy it.

So in South Tredegar, besprent now before the wondering eyes of a Thomas Jefferson. The muddy street had vanished to give place to a smooth black roadway, as springy under foot as a forest path, and as clean as the pike after a sweeping summer storm. The shops, with their false fronts and shabby lean-to awnings, were gone, or going, and in their room majestic vastnesses in brick and cut stone were rising, by their own might, as it would seem, out of disorderly mountains of building material.

Street-cars, propelled as yet by the patient mule, tinkled their bells incessantly. Smart vehicles of many kinds strange to Paradise eyes rattled recklessly in and out among the street obstructions. Bustling throngs were in possession of the sidewalks; of the awe-inspiring restaurant, where they gave you lemonade in a glass bowl and some people washed their fingers in it; of the rotunda of the Marlboro, the mammoth hotel which had grown up on the site of the old Calhoun House—distressing crowds and multitudes of people everywhere.

Thomas Jefferson, awe-struck and gaping, found himself foot-loose for a time in the Marlboro rotunda while his father talked with a man who wanted to bargain for the entire output of the Paradise furnace by the year. The commercial transaction touched him lightly; but the moving groups, the imported bell-boys, the tesselated floors, frescoed ceiling and plush-covered furniture—these bit deeply. Could this be South Tredegar, the place that had hitherto figured chiefly to him as "court-day" town and the residence of his preacher uncle? It seemed hugely incredible.

After the conference with the iron buyer they crossed the street to the railway station; and again Thomas Jefferson was foot-loose while his father was closeted with some one in the manager's office.

An express train, with hissing air-brakes, Solomon-magnificent sleeping cars, and a locomotive large enough to swallow whole the small affair that used to bring the once-a-day train from Atlanta, had just backed in, and the boy took its royal measure with eager and curious eyes, walking slowly up one side of it and down the other.

At the rear of the string of Pullmans was a private car, with a deep observation platform, much polished brass railing, and sundry other luxurious appointments, apparent even to the eye of unsophistication. Thomas Jefferson spelled the name in the medallion, "Psyche,"—spelled it without trying to pronounce it—and then turned his attention to the people who were descending the rubber-carpeted steps and grouping themselves under the direction of a tall man who reminded Thomas Jefferson of his Uncle Silas with an indescribable something left out of the face.

"As I was about to say, General, this station building is one of the relics. You mustn't judge South Tredegar—our new South Tredegar—by this. Eh?—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Vanadam? Oh, the hotel? It is just across the street, and a very good house; remarkably good, indeed, all things considered. In fact, we're quite proud of the Marlboro."

One of the younger women smiled.

"How enthusiastic you are, Mr. Parley. I thought we had outgrown all that—we moderns."

"But, my dear Miss Elleroy, if you could know what we have to be enthusiastic about down here! Why, these mountains we've been passing through for the last six hours are simply so many vast treasure-houses; coal at the top, iron at the bottom, and enough of both to keep the world's industries going for ages! There's millions in them!"

Thomas Jefferson overheard without understanding, but his eyes served a better purpose. Away back in the line of the Scottish Gordons there must have been an ancestor with the seer's gift of insight, and some drop or two of his blood had come down to this sober-faced country boy searching the faces of the excursionists for his cue of fellowship or antipathy.

For the sweet-voiced young woman called Miss Elleroy there was love at first sight. For a severe, be-silked Mrs. Vanadam there was awe. For the portly General with mutton-chop whiskers, overlooking eyes and the air of a dictator, there was awe, also, not unmingled with envy. For the tall man in the frock-coat, whose face reminded him of his Uncle Silas, there had been shrinking antagonism at the first glance—which keen first impression was presently dulled and all but effaced by the enthusiasm, the suave tongue, and the benignant manner. Which proves that insight, like the film of a recording camera, should have the dark shutter snapped on it if the picture is to be preserved.

Thomas Jefferson made way when the party, marshaled by the enthusiast, prepared for its descent on the Marlboro. Afterward, the royalties having departed and a good-natured porter giving him leave, he was at liberty to examine the wheeled palace at near-hand, and even to climb into the vestibule for a peep inside.

Therewith, castles in the air began to rear themselves, tower on wall. Here was the very sky-reaching summit of all things desirable: to have one's own brass-bound hotel on wheels; to come and go at will; to give curt orders to a respectful and uniformed porter, as the awe-inspiring gentleman with the mutton-chop whiskers had done.

Time was when Thomas Jefferson's ideals ran quite otherwise: to a lodge in some vast wilderness, like the rock-strewn slopes of high Lebanon; to the company of the birds and trees, of the wide heavens and the shy wild creatures of the forest. But it is only the fool or the weakling who may not reconsider.

Notwithstanding, when the day of revelations was come to an end, and the ambling horse was inching the ancient buggy up the homeward road, the boy found himself turning his back on the wonderful new world with something of the same blessed sense of relief as that which he had experienced in former home-goings from South Tredegar, the commonplace.

At the highest point on the hunched shoulder of the mountain Thomas Jefferson twisted himself in the buggy seat for a final backward look into the valley of new marvels. The summer day was graying to its twilight, and a light haze was stealing out of the wooded ravines and across from the river. From the tall chimneys of a rolling-mill a dense column of smoke was ascending, and at the psychological moment the slag flare from an iron-furnace changed the overhanging cloud into a fiery ægis.

Having no symbolism save that of Holy Writ, Thomas Jefferson's mind seized instantly on the figure, building far better than it knew. It was a new Exodus, with its pillar of cloud by day and its pillar of fire by night. And its Moses—though this, we may suppose, was beyond a boy's imaging—was the frenzied, ruthless spirit of commercialism, named otherwise, by the multitude, Modern Progress.