Читать книгу The Lords of High Decision - Meredith Nicholson - Страница 7

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WAYNE and his father met the next morning at breakfast, a function at which, when Wayne appeared, the senior Craighill discussed the day’s news in his large way as a student of affairs. This morning he had brought the newspapers to the table and they were piled by his plate.

“I sent out notice of my engagement to all the papers last night. I suppose it was to be expected that they would treat the matter sensationally. They have spared nothing.”

Colonel Craighill deplored the pernicious tendencies of the American press generally and of the local newspapers particularly. They made light work of reputations, he declared; they were bitterly partisan in politics; and Colonel Craighill believed thoroughly that in an independent and courageous press lay the hope of the Republic. He pushed the papers toward his son with the tips of his fingers.

“They insisted on my portrait and had to have Miss Allen’s also. If I had refused they would probably have substituted something even worse than you see there. A picture like that is bound to awaken prejudice. It’s an outrage on public decency!” he ended indignantly.

Wayne eyed the papers critically. There was no lack of respect in the text which was spread across two columns at the top of the page beneath the joined portraits; he even caught the flavour of some of his father’s own phrases, though they were not directly quoted, and as for the illustrations, they were not better or worse than the average newspaper pictures. One journal presented a sketch of the Craighill family, with generous reference to Wayne’s mother and her high place among the women who had contributed to the city’s better life. Miss Allen was a woman of unusual charm, of an old New England family, who had lived much abroad, and her coming would be an event of interest and importance in the Greater City. Mrs. Blair and Wayne were mentioned in all these recitals to complete the family history.

“You get off easy,” remarked Wayne, carelessly, scanning the column of condensed news.

“The Star has an editorial on some of the points I made in my Cleveland speech. I suppose Bixby had that done. Bixby’s a good enough fellow, but why he should own a newspaper as vile as the Star I don’t know.”

“I guess men don’t own newspapers for fun,” remarked Wayne. “Bixby bought the Star to use as a club in his other businesses. It would help us if we had a sheet to fight back with.”

“I had a chance to buy the Star when Bixby took it, but I had too many cares already.”

“Well, you might have made a decent paper of it. That’s what you’ve always said we need in this town; but nobody wants to sink money in a daily Sunday-school organ.”

“If I had my life to live over again I should go into journalism; its opportunities for public service are limitless and I don’t believe the people really want these indecent things that are thrown on our doorsteps to-day.”

The decline of the American press was a familiar topic of conversation at the Craighill breakfast table, but to-day it served to divert attention from the great issue of the hour. When Wayne had finished with the papers he told the maid to take them away and addressed himself to the simple breakfast.

“They talk of running John for mayor,” remarked Colonel Craighill, “and I hope he’ll consent to be the Municipal League’s candidate. He’d have the support of the best element beyond a doubt.”

“Beyond a doubt,” Wayne repeated, not particularly interested in his brother-in-law’s political ambitions; “but that wouldn’t elect him. We’ve had reform candidates before who were just as good as John. They start all right, but they don’t finish.”

“All we can do in such matters is to keep up the fight. The powers of evil can’t prevail forever.”

“No; but they work with the boys in the trenches while the rest of us abuse them over expensive dinners. There’s a practical difference. This town’s all right. If we’d stop abusing it and suppress the muck-rakers we might get somewhere.”

“I’m glad Fanny takes my marriage in good part,” remarked Colonel Craighill, to whom Wayne’s political views were not important. Wayne answered cheerfully for his sister’s acceptance of the new situation in family affairs.

“Oh, Fanny’s all right! You can always be sure she’ll rise to an occasion.”

“Fanny is a fine woman,” declared Colonel Craighill.

“She is all of that,” replied Wayne.

“I used to fear, in her young girlhood, that she was a trifle flighty; but marriage settled her wonderfully.”

“There’s a prevailing impression that it will do that,” retorted Wayne.

“What a happy future would be yours, my son, if you would take life a little more seriously,” sighed Colonel Craighill. “I’ve spoken of you very little to Adelaide; but you must consider her hereafter. I hope that her coming may mark a new era for you. I cannot but think that her influence will be for good in the family.”

“I dare say it will,” assented Wayne. “You need have no fears about Fanny and me and our treatment of your wife. You know—about my habits and all that—I think I’m ready to quit. I’ve decided that there’s nothing in drink, and I’ve given it up.”

“God grant that it may be so!”

Colonel Craighill spoke with deep emotion. Wayne had, in the old times when his father used to pray over him, often promised under pressure: this morning he had voluntarily announced his intention to reform. It was in Colonel Craighill’s mind at once that already good was coming of the marriage; that Wayne’s pride was aroused; that he wished thus to mark the coming of the new wife. Wayne was pouring himself a third cup of coffee, and this unusual indulgence he associated with some method which his son had adopted for breaking down the baser appetite.

“I have given up drink,” repeated Wayne, helping himself to sugar; “there’s nothing in it”; and while his words and tone were not quite what Roger Craighill would have liked, he could not quibble over phrases or question the sincerity of this voluntary declaration. He had long ago ceased trying to understand Wayne’s moods; his son’s state of mind this morning was unusually baffling.

“That you should be an honourable man has been the great prayer of my life, Wayne,” he said, with feeling.

“I’m afraid you’ve been praying in the wrong place. If God never helped me, maybe the devil will; he knows me better!” Wayne dropped his spoon into his saucer and laughed. “That’s almost blasphemy, isn’t it? The car’s at the door and whenever you’re ready——”

They rode into town together, each in his own corner of the tonneau as was the morning habit, and Colonel Craighill spoke only once or twice. In the lobby of the building that bore his name the day’s sensation was already in the air. One or two friends, tenants of his building, greeted Colonel Craighill cordially as the elevator shot them skyward and congratulated him with warmth; and every clerk in the Craighill offices, where the announcement had already been freely discussed, watched father and son pass on to their own rooms with a newly awakened curiosity.

“Oh, Wayne,” said Colonel Craighill, as they separated, “I should like you to lunch with me at the Club to-day—the Allequippa—about one. We’ll walk over together.”

Wayne pondered this when he had settled himself at his own desk. In normal circumstances he saw little of his father during the day. Colonel Craighill usually took luncheon with half a dozen men of his own age who represented the solid interests of Pittsburg. He prided himself on his knowledge of the general business conditions; he liked, as he put it, to keep in touch with the life of the city, and he so managed his hour and a half at the Allequippa as to gain information from authoritative sources on all manner of subjects. He was more or less conscious of the fact that he touched life on more sides than the majority of his fellows. They talked of iron and coal because they were, like himself, interested in forges and mines; but he could discuss cotton with knowledge of the conditions in India, or wheat, with the Argentine forecast in his mind. He subscribed for English reviews which he occasionally passed on to business friends whose narrower horizons were otherwise amply illuminated by the newspapers.

The Allequippa Club, at the luncheon hour, became a seething board of trade whose unrecorded transactions ran to large figures. Stock subscription papers were handed from table to table as carelessly as the wine card. Through these years of the Great Prosperity it was as easy to count millions as to count heads. In fact, Mr. Richard Wingfield, watching and listening in his corner, announced that a million had become a contemptible sum that hardly assured one’s daily bread.

Wayne Craighill was, in the fullest sense, a child of the city. Its oldest blood was in his veins. His mother had been a Wayne, the daughter of a merchant whose great-grandfather had fought in the Continental army, and whose grandfather had shared Perry’s glory on Lake Erie. The Craighills were not so old on this soil, but the name was not a negligible one in local history. Wayne’s grandfather Craighill had sat in the State Legislature and in Congress, and when Roger Craighill married the only daughter of the house of Wayne and the last of the family, the best blood of the State was united. The Craighill building, rising tower-like in the steep, narrow street of this many-towered Babel, spoke not merely for present affluence, but for the prescience that had secured and held the iron hills surrounding.

Eastern Pennsylvania is better known in song, story and history than the state’s western hills, but the Greater City, big, brawny, powerful, sprawled over valley and hill where the broad rivers gather new courage for their adventure seaward, hides in its iron heart many and sonorous Iliads. It may fairly be said that Pennsylvania is our most typical state and Pittsburg our most typical city, for here the weakness and strength of the democracy wage daily war. Here political corruption has been venomously manifested. Those who seek to account for the unaccountable ask whether the old Scotch clan-instinct has not reasserted itself in the politics of the state. The question is suggestive; but it may not be discussed in these pages. The spirit of Democracy, brooding upon the hills, and looking down upon the City of the Iron Heart, must smile often, wondering that a people so highly favoured and with antecedents so honourable, tamely submit to plunder and bend their necks so meekly to the spoilsman. But a new era was even now at hand. “There shall be an highway for the remnant of his people,” declared Isaiah, prophet of the day of kings, but a higher light was already stealing into the Iron City. The “remnant” was proving its own quality by searching out the squalor of its back doors and “runs” where wan spectres of Decadence elbowed ill-begotten, helpless, staring-eyed Defectives and Dependents.

It may be said that at Pittsburg the East ends and the West begins. The division is in nothing more pronounced than in the speech of the native. In the noonday throng of the Allequippa Club it puzzles the stranger. It is not the lazy drawl that crept into the Central West from the Southeast with the early migration, and that is still discernible wherever the old stock has held its own, but a hybrid wrought of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch influences. It is less interesting for elisions and the flattening of vowels than for its cadences. In familiar dialogue these are marked and weave a spell upon the unfamiliar ear. They are not peculiar to the man in the street, but flavour in the polite babble of drawing rooms. They lure the ear of strangers, and newcomers unconsciously adopt them. The operators at the telephone exchange teach the most common and the most readily communicable of these cadences daily. In repeating a number of four figures the voice invariably rises on the next to the last syllable to fall again at the end. The native tongue, long attuned to this practice, adds a word to short sentences so that the intonation may not fail to scan and thus miss its effect. For example: “Did he get it?” does not quite lend itself to the usage; but if we prefix And: (And did he get it?) the speaker satisfies his own ear. Those who are keen for controversy in such matters may gnaw this bone all they like. Some will trace it to Scotch, others to Irish influences; but from the lips of the pretty girls of the Greater City, whether behind shop counters or tea tables, it is melodious and haunting. To some shrewder pen than this must be left a prediction as to the ultimate fate of our language at this great Western gateway, where the mingling of dialects spoken under all the flags of Europe is bound to exert in time new influences on the common speech.

As Colonel Craighill and his son entered the Club to-day commerce seemed less insistently dominant. Their names had been on many lips; and they were at once the centre of attraction. The ticker curled its tape unnoticed in the basket while the Craighill marriage was discussed. As the two checked their coats the congratulations began, and in the lounging room they were immediately the centre of a group of friends. Wayne, it seemed, was the object of more attention than his father; the “Colonel,” as nearly everyone called him would of course beam in his characteristic way; but Wayne, in his own relation to the matter, was to be viewed in a fresh aspect. There were those among his intimates who chaffed him about his new stepmother. She would, they hinted, undoubtedly visit upon him the traditional contumely of stepmothership. Others re-appraised the Craighill millions with a view of determining just how much the new wife’s advent would cut into the expectations of Mrs. Blair and Wayne. Roger Craighill’s first wife, everyone remembered, had brought him a considerable fortune, and many were now trying to recall how much of this had reposed in him, and how much had passed direct to the children.

Dick Wingfield, who crystalized in his own person the Greater City’s aspirations in art and music, declared as he surveyed the large dining room and contemplated the two Craighills in their unusual intimacy, that for the hour Pig Iron had yielded the centre of the stage to Cupid. Many gentlemen left their tables, napkin in hand, to congratulate the Colonel; and Wayne, too, submitted his hand to many grasps, some of them lingeringly sympathetic, others expressive of a general friendliness and liking. The Colonel was a shrewd one, so many remarked; it was a real stroke to present himself to the eye of the Greater City in company with his son on this memorable day. It was not like Colonel Craighill to make a marriage that would estrange his children; the outward and visible acceptance by them of the impending union was indubitably presented in the corner where father and son ate their luncheon together. When there came a lull in the visits to the Craighill table Wingfield lounged thither, and drew up his chair for a chat with Wayne. Not being a hypocrite, Wingfield shook hands with the Colonel but did not refer to the topic of the hour. He addressed himself to Wayne on the prospects of the Greater City’s orchestra for the winter and called his attention to some new pictures at the Art Institute. He mentioned the presence in America of a great French portrait painter with whose work Mr. Craighill was familiar.

“You should certainly have him paint you, Colonel. This is the best place in the world for the assembling of works of art; the grime soon makes old masters of them all. The orchestra trustees meet at three this afternoon in the board room of the Fine Arts building. Your check was generous, Colonel; but Wayne will have to work. Don’t forget the meeting, Wayne. We count on him, Colonel Craighill. By the way, Wayne, an old friend of ours has turned up here—Paddock of agile legs and stammering tongue. What profits it, may I ask, for any man to lay up store of wealth for his children when they’re likely to scorn the fleshpots for locusts and wild honey? One might expect Paddock to come here to study the iron business, but bless me! he’s come to save our souls.”

“Yes; I’ve seen Jimmy.”

“I thought you hadn’t seen him,” remarked Colonel Craighill in surprise.

“Oh, yes; I ran into him the other night by chance,” replied Wayne, “just after we had been talking about him. He’s the same chap. Our meeting wasn’t very fortunate—in fact, we didn’t seem to hit it off.”

“He always was modest about himself, you remember,” said Wingfield. “I wanted to give him a dinner at the Club to interest people in his missionary schemes, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“He’s doing a noble work, I hear,” said Colonel Craighill. “It’s unfortunate that he won’t accept help from those among us who know the local conditions.”

“Well, it’s a relief that philanthropy can enter this town just once without preluding itself with a lot of bombast and brag,” sighed Wingfield. “I’m for Paddock; in fact, I have every honourable intention of placing my soul at his disposal. It’s only decent to patronize new home industries.”

Colonel Craighill had not known of Wayne’s election to the orchestra board, and as Wingfield left he said:

“That’s the kind of thing I like our name to be identified with—the best aims and endeavours of the city. I’m deeply gratified to know that you are interested in the orchestra. We older men have our hands full. It’s for your generation to build upon our foundations.”

“They put me on the board, I guess, because I used to play the fiddle!”

“So you did! That was your dear mother’s idea—that you should take violin lessons. As I remember, you showed considerable aptitude.”

“I believe I rather liked it.”

And Wayne saw himself again in knickerbockers standing at his mother’s side by the piano, in the half-remembered days of his happy childhood. He was thrown back upon the mood of four nights before, when he had stood before his mother’s portrait and felt the call of memory. There was in his heart a turbulent rebellion against this impeccable father, who faced him as always, bland, poised, assured. Imaginary wrongs grew real; slight injuries and injustices, long forgotten, cried fiercely in their recrudescence for vengeance.

And conscious of its foulness he had planned an evil thing. It had crossed his mind like a dark shadow, obscuring the fair horizon of his better nature the moment he looked upon the face of the woman his father was about to marry. He had known her first, that was the beautiful irony of it; and he was keeping silent because in her, installed as his father’s wife, he saw a means of retaliation. His hatred of his father was no growth of a day, and the face in the locket, the letter from the woman herself that he had read the night he began his latest debauch, had hardened it into a fixed idea.

The knowledge that his father had brought him here to-day merely to advertise the perfect amity of their relationship angered him; and now Colonel Craighill dismissed him urbanely, saying that he would take his cigar with Fraser, the short, grave, round-faced corporation lawyer, who was soon, it appeared, to accept the nation for his client.

Wingfield, with his eye on the situation, carried Wayne below for a game of billiards.