Читать книгу Son of a Hundred Kings - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 6

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There was so much happening on this cold, clear New Year’s Day that it is difficult to decide where the story should begin. There was, first and foremost, the arrival of the boy from England. Boys were arriving from England all the time, but there were quite special circumstances in connection with this one. There was also the tragedy which occurred late in the afternoon. As the annals of the small city of Balfour were plain and simple in the main, any death by violence was bound to create complications and much trouble. In addition there were several lesser happenings, any one of which might do well enough as a starting point. A tussle broke out between two small boys during a Sunday-school party at the ivy-covered home of the minister, of all places. Drygoodsman McGregor, sitting proudly in his office immediately behind the life-sized statue of himself which adorned the front of the store and projected out above his famous sign, Lockie McGregor, The Remarkable Man, made a resolution to which he would adhere, being a man of stern fiber, through thick and thin. Finally, there was Police Magistrate Jenkinson, grumbling in front of his fire and dictating the whole course of the story by delaying the special session of his court until late afternoon.

Perhaps, therefore, it would be best to start with the day itself. It was one of considerable importance, being the first day of the year 1890 and so the official start of a fabulous period which would come to be called in course of time the Gay Nineties. It may have been that Nature knew in advance about this absurd but rather pleasant decade which was getting under way and felt a sense of responsibility. At any rate, this first day had been given a setting such as never could have been achieved by sentimental Christmas card or sugary valentine. A heavy snow had turned the world white, and there was a sun as cold and brilliant as a finely cut diamond (and which, at a later hour, would paint the horizon as red as the nose of Santa Claus). It was indeed a perfect day to usher in the years when things would be so proper on the surface and so naughty underneath, when taste would be represented by curlicues and architectural gingerbread, when great moist tears would drip from the notes of popular songs; when, finally, people would be firmly convinced that civilization had achieved the absolute peak of perfection and nothing would ever change again.

It was strange that this conviction of a static world should have been so general, for these years were to see the start of the greatest changes the poor old globe had ever experienced. South of the border, in a workshop filled with curious machines, a silent man was putting the final touches to a magic cylinder which would hum and rasp and squeak with a human voice. In a very short time thereafter two brothers would be running a bicycle shop and dreaming of getting much closer than Icarus to the sun and stars. Strips of celluloid were being made which would flow through a contraption like a glorified magic lantern and would cause figures on a screen to move. In a very few years there would be a race of horseless carriages from Paris to Bordeaux and back at an average speed of fifteen miles an hour!

Still more fateful, still more threatening to the peace and content of this seemingly unchangeable world, the gay ten years were to see underground movements starting, hatreds festering along Slavic rivers and Balkan mountains, black smoke belching from the tall chimneys of Essen and Skoda, and Pomeranian grenadiers goose-stepping with feverish haste. There was no hint of all this on the surface, nor would there be until after the turn of the century. People were to go on singing, laughing, eating three huge meals a day, and sleeping like tops, without any suspicion at all that dark buds were beginning to sprout on the vines of wrath.

There was less suspicion perhaps in Balfour than in any other part. This busy western Ontario city had a life so completely and passionately its own that a meeting of the Bicycling Club or a fire on Holbrook Street was of much more concern than all the rumors circulating in all the chancelleries of Europe.