CHAPTER XIV.In which we Learn Something of Railroads, and Attend Some Remarkable Christenings.
CHAPTER XIV.
In which we Learn Something of Railroads, and Attend Some Remarkable Christenings.
And so, in due time, it came to pass that, our Aladdin having rubbed the magic ring with which his Genius had endowed him, there came, out of some thunderous and smoky realm, peopled with swart kobolds, and lit by the white fire of gushing cupolas and dazzling billets, a train of carriages, drawn by a tamed volcanic demon, on a wonderful way of steel, armed strongly to deliver us from the Castle Perilous in which we were besieged by the Giants. The way was marvelously prepared by theodolite and level, by tented camps of men driving, with shouts and cracking whips, straining teams in circling mazes, about dark pits on grassy hillsides, and building long, straight banks of earth across swales; by huge machines with iron fists thrusting trunks of trees into the earth; by mighty creatures spinning great steel cobwebs over streams.
At last, a short branch of steel shot off from Pendleton’s Pacific Division, grew daily longer and longer, pushed across the level earth-banks, the rows of driven tree-trunks, and the spun steel cobwebs, through the dark pits, nearer and nearer toLattimore, and at last entered the beleaguered city, amid rejoicings of the populace. Most of whom knew but vaguely the facts of either siege or deliverance; but who shouted, and tossed their caps, and blew the horns and beat the drums, because theHeraldin a double-leaded editorial assured them that this wastheevent for which Lattimore had waited to be raised to complete parity with her envious rivals. Furthermore, Captain Tolliver, magniloquently enthusiastic, took charge of the cheering, artillery, and band-music, and made a tumultuous success of it.
“He told me,” said Giddings, “that when the people of the North can be brought for a moment into that subjection which is proper for the masses, ‘they make devilish good troops, suh, devilish good troops!’”
And so it also happened that Mr. Elkins found himself the president of a real railway, with all the perquisites that go therewith. Among these being the power to establish town-sites and give them names. The former function was exercised according to the principles usually governing town-site companies, and with ends purely financial in view. The latter was elevated to the dignity of a ceremony. The rails were scarcely laid, when President Elkins invited a choice company to go with him over the line and attend the christening of the stations. He convinced the rest of us of the wisdom of this, by showing us that it would awaken local interest along the line, and prepare the way for the auction sales of lots the next week.
“It’s advertising of the choicest kind,” said he. “Giddings will sow it far and wide in the press dispatches, and it will attract attention; and attention is what we want. We’ll start early, run to the station Pendleton has called Elkins Junction, at the end of the line, lie over for a couple of hours, and come home, bestowing names as we come. Help me select the party, and we’ll consider it settled.”
As the train was to be a light one, consisting of a buffet-car and a parlor-car, the party could not be very large. The officers of the road, Mr. Adams, who was general traffic manager, and selected by the bondholders, and Mr. Kittrick, the general manager, who was found in Kansas City by Jim, went down first as a matter of course. Captain Tolliver and his wife, the Trescotts, the Hinckleys, with Mr. Cornish and Giddings, were put down by Jim; and to these we added the influential new people, the Alexanders, who came with the cement-works, of which Mr. Alexander was president, Mr. Densmore, who controlled the largest of the elevators, and Mr. Walling, whose mill was the first to utilize the waters of our power-tunnel, and who was the visible representative of millions made in the flouring trade. Smith, our architect, was included, as was Cecil Barr-Smith, sent out by his brother to be superintendent of the street-railway, and looking upon the thing in the light of an exile, comforted by the beautiful native princess Antonia. We left Macdonald out, because he always called the young man “Smith,” and could not be brought to forget an early impression that he and the architect were brothers; besides,said Jim, Macdonald was afraid of the cars as he was of the hyphen, being most of the time on the range with the cattle belonging to himself and Hinckley. Which, being interpreted, meant that Mr. Macdonald would not care to go.
Mr. Ballard was invited on account of his early connection with the L. & G. W. project, although he was holding himself more and more aloof from the new movements, and held forth often upon the value of conservatism. Miss Addison, who was related to the Lattimore family, was commissioned to invite the old General, who very unexpectedly consented. His son Will, as solicitor for the railway company and one of the directors, was to be one of us if he could. These with their wives and some invited guests from near-by towns made up the party.
We were well acquainted with each other by this time, so that it was quite like a family party or a gathering of old friends. Captain Tolliver was austerely polite to General Lattimore, whose refusal to concern himself with the question as to whether our city grew to a hundred thousand or shrunk to five he accounted for on the ground that a man who had led hired ruffians to trample out the liberty of a brave people must be morally warped.
The General came, tall and spare as ever, wearing his beautiful white moustache and imperial as a Frenchman would wear the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was quite unable to sympathize with our lot-selling, our plenitude of corporations, or our feverish pushing of “developments.” But thebuilding of the railway attracted him. He looked back at the new-made track as we flew along; and his eyes flashed under the bushy white brows. He sat near Josie, and held her in conversation much of the outward trip; but Jim he failed to appreciate, and treated indifferently.
“He is History incarnate,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “and cannot rejoice in the passing of so much that is a part of himself.”
Giddings said that this was probably true; and under the circumstances he couldn’t blame him. He, Giddings, would feel a little sore to see things which were a part ofhimselfgoing out of date. It was a natural feeling. Whereupon Mrs. Tolliver addressed her remarks very pointedly elsewhere; and Antonia Hinckley privately admonished Giddings not to be mean; and Giddings sought the buffet and smoked. Here I joined him, and over our cigars he confessed to me that life to him was an increasing burden, rapidly becoming intolerable.
We had noticed, I informed him, an occasional note of gloom in his editorials. This ought not to be, now that the real danger to our interests seemed to be over, and we were going forward so wonderfully. To which he replied that with the gauds of worldly success he had no concern. The editorials I criticised were joyous and ebulliently hilarious compared with those which might be expected in the future. If we could find some blithesome ass to pay him for theHeraldenough money to take him out of our scrambled Bedlam of a town, bring the idiot on,and he (Giddings) would arrange things so we could have our touting done as we liked it!
Now theHeraldhad become a very valuable property, and of all men Giddings had the least reason to speak despitefully of Lattimore; and his frame of mind was a mystery to me, until I remembered that there was supposed to be something amiss between him and Laura Addison. Craftily leading the conversation to the point where confidences were easy, I was rewarded by a passionate disclosure on his part, which would have amounted to an outburst, had it not been restrained by the presence of Cornish, Hinckley, and Trescott at the other end of the compartment.
“Oh, pshaw!” said I, “you’ve no cause for despair. On your own showing, there’s every reason for you to hope.”
“You don’t know the situation, Barslow,” he insisted, shaking his head gloomily, “and there’s no use in trying to tell you. She’s too exalted in her ideals ever to accept me. She’s told me things about the qualities she must have in the one who should be nearest to her that just simply shut me out; and I haven’t called since. Oh, I tell you, Barslow, sometimes I feel as if I could—Yes, sir, it’ll be accepted as the best piece of railroad building for years!”
I was surprised at the sudden transition, until I saw that our fellow passengers were crowding to our end of the car in response to the conductor’s announcement that we were coming into Elkins Junction. I made a note of Giddings’s state ofmind, as the subject of a conference with Jim. TheHeraldwas of too much importance to us for this to be neglected. The disciple of Iago must in some way be restored to his normal view of things. I could not help smiling at the vast difference between his view of Laura and mine. I, wrongly perhaps, thought her affectedly pietistic, with ideals likely to be yielding in spirit if the letter were preserved.
Elkins Junction was a platform, a depot, an eating-house, and a Y; and it was nothing else.
“We’ve come up here,” said Jim, “to show you probably the smallest town in the state, and the only one in the world named after me. We wanted to show you the whole line, and Mr. Schwartz felt as if he’d prefer to turn his engine around for the return trip. The last two towns we came through, and hence the first two going back, are old places. The third station is a new town, and Conductor Corcoran will take us back there, where we’ll unveil the name of the station, and permit the people to know where they live. While we’re doing the sponsorial act, lunch will be prepared and ready for us to discuss during the next run.”
On the way back there was a stir of suppressed excitement among the passengers.
“It’s about this name,” said Miss Addison to her seat-mate. “The town is on the shore of Mirror Lake, and they say it will be an important one, and a summer resort; and no one knows what the name is to be but Mr. Elkins.”
“Really, a very odd affair!” said Miss Allen, ofFairchild, Antonia’s college friend. “It makes a social function of the naming of a town!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Elkins, “and it is one of the really enduring things we can do. Long after the memory of every one here is departed, these villages will still bear the names we give them to-day. If there’s any truth in the belief that some people have, that names have an influence for good or evil, the naming of the towns may be important as building the railroad.”
I was sitting with Antonia. Miss Allen and Captain Tolliver were with us, our faces turned toward one another. General Lattimore, with Josie and her father, was on the opposite side of the car. Most of the company were sitting or standing near, and the conversation was quite general.
“Oh, it’s like a romance!” half whispered Antonia to us. “I envy you men who build roads and make towns. Look at Mr. Elkins, Sadie, as he stands there! He is master of everything; to me he seems as great as Napoleon!”
She neither blushed nor sought to conceal from us her adoration for Jim. It was the day of his triumph, and a fitting time to acknowledge his kinghood; and her admission that she thought him the greatest, the most excellent of men did not surprise me. Yet, because he was older than she, and had never put himself in a really loverlike attitude toward her, I thought it was simply an exalted girlish regard, and not at all what we usually understand by an affair of the heart. Moreover, at that time such praise as she gave him would not havebeen thought extravagant in almost any social gathering in Lattimore. Let me confess that to me it does not now seem so ... Cecil Barr-Smith walked out and stood on the platform.
General Lattimore was apparently thinking of the features of the situation which had struck Antonia as romantic.
“You young men,” said he, “are among the last of the city-builders and road-makers. My generation did these things differently. We went out with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don’t seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of standing-room on the magnet!”
“I nevah hea’d the real merit and strength and safety of ouah real-estate propositions bettah stated, suh!” said Captain Tolliver ecstatically.
Jim stood looking at the General with sober regard.
“Go on, General,” said he.
“Not only that,” went on the General, “but people begin forestalling the standing-room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the magnet, and the length of time it will draw. They buy to-day and sell to-morrow; or cast up what they imagine they might sell for, and callthe increase profit. Then comes the time when the magnet ceases to draw, or the forestallers, having, in their greed, grasped more than they can keep, offer too much for the failing market, and all at once the thing stops, and the dervish-dance ends in coma, in cold forms and still hands, in misery and extinction!”
There was a pause, during which the old soldier sat looking out of the widow, no one else finding aught to say. Elkins remained standing, and once or twice gave that little movement of the head which precedes speech, but said nothing. Cornish smiled sardonically. Josie looked anxiously at Jim, apprehensive as to how he would take it. At last it was Ballard the conservative who broke silence.
“I hope, General,” said he, “that our little movement won’t develop into a dervish-dance. Anyhow, you will join in our congratulations upon the completion of the railroad. You know you once did some railroad-building yourself, down there in Tennessee—I know, for I was there. And I’ve always taken an interest in track-laying ever since.”
“So have I,” said the General; “that’s what brought me out to-day.”
“Oh, tell us about it,” said Josie, evidently pleased at the change of subject; “tell us about it, please.”
“No, no!” he protested, “you may read it better in the histories, written by young fellows who know more about it than we who were there. You’ll find, when you read it, that it was something like this: Grant’s host was over around Chattanooga, starving for want of means for carrying in provisions. Wewere marching eastward to join him, when a message came telling us to stop at Decatur and rebuild the railroad to Nashville. So, without a thought that there was such a thing as an impossibility, we stopped—we seven or eight thousand common Americans, volunteer soldiers, picked at random from the legions of heroes who saved liberty to the world—and without an engineering corps, without tools or implements, with nothing except what any like number of our soldiers had, we stopped and built the road. That is all. The rails had been heated, and wound about trees and stumps. The cross-ties were burned to heat the rails. The cars had been destroyed by fire, and their warped ironwork thrown into ditches. The engines lay in scrap-heaps at the bottoms of ravines and rivers. The bridges were gone. Out of the chaos to which the structure had been resolved, there was nothing left but the road-bed.
“When I think of what we did, I know that with liberty and intelligence men with their naked hands could, in short space, re-create the destroyed wealth of the world. We made tools of the scraps of iron and steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the thrill there is in making things.”
“Out of the ranks came millers, and ground the grain the foragers brought in; came woodmen, and cut the trees; came sawyers, and sawed the lumber. We asked for blacksmiths; and they stepped from the ranks, and made their own tools and the tools of the machinists. We called for machinists; and out of the ranks they stepped, and rebuilt the engines, and made the cars ready for the carpenters. When we wanted carpenters, out of the same ranks of common soldiers they walked, and made the cars. From the ranks came other men, who took the twisted rails, unwound them from the stumps and unsnarled them from one another, as women unwind yarn, and laid them down fit to carry our trains. And in forty days our message went back to Grant that we had ‘stopped and built the road,’ and that our engines were even then drawing supplies to his hungry army. Such was the incomparable army which was commanded by that silent genius of war; and to have been one of such an army is to have lived!”
The withered old hand trembled, as the great past surged back through his mind. We all sat in silence; and I looked at Captain Tolliver, doubtful as to how he would take the old Union general’s speech. What the Captain’s history had been none of us knew, except that he was a Southerner. When the general ceased, Tolliver was sitting still, with no indication of being conscious of anything special in the conversation, except that a red spot burned in each dark cheek. As the necessity for speech grew with the lengthening silence, he rose and faced General Lattimore.
“Suh,” said he, “puhmit a man who was with the victohs of Manasses; who chahged with mo’ sand than sense at Franklin; and who cried like a child aftah Nashville, and isn’t ashamed of it, by gad! to offah his hand, and to say that he agrees with you, suh, in youah tribute to the soldiers of the wah, and honahs you, suh, as a fohmah foe, and a worthy one, and he hopes, a future friend!”
Somehow, the Captain’s swelling phrases, his sonorous allusions to himself in the third person, had for the moment ceased to be ridiculous. The environment fitted the expression. The general grasped his hand and shook it. Then Ballard claimed the right, as one of the survivors of Franklin, to a share in the reunion, and they at once removed the strain which had fallen upon us with the General’s first speech, by relating stories and fraternizing soldierwise, until Conductor Corcoran called in at the door, “Mystery Number One! All out for the christening!”
As we gathered on the platform, we saw that the signboard on the station-building, for the name of the town, had been put up, but was veiled by a banner draped over it. Tents were pitched near, in which people lived waiting for the lot-auction, that they might buy sites for shops and homes. The waters of the lake shone through the trees a few rods away; and in imagination I could see the village of the future, sprinkled about over the beautiful shore. The future villagers gathered near the platform; and when Jim stepped forward to make the speech of the occasion, he had a considerable audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “our visit is for the purpose of showing the interest which the Lattimore & Great Western takes and will continue to take in the towns on its line, and to add a name to what, I notice, has already become a local habitation. In conferring that name, we are aware that the future citizens of the place have claims upon us. So one has been selected which, as time passes, will grow more and more pleasant to your ears; and one which the person bestowing it regards as an honor to the town as high as could be conferred in a name. No station on our lines could have greater claims upon our regard than the possession of this name. And now, gentlemen—”
Mr. Elkins removed his hat, and we all followed his example. Some one pulled a cord, the banner fell away, and the name was revealed. It was “Josephine.” The women looked at it, and turned their eyes on Josie, who blushed rosily, and shrank back behind her father, who burst into a loud laugh of unalloyed pleasure.
“I propose three cheers for the town of Josephine,” went on Mr. Elkins, “and for the lady for whom it is named!”
They were real cheers—good hearty ones; followed by an address, in the name of the town, by a bright young man who pushed forward and with surprising volubility thanked President Elkins for his selection of the name, and closed with flowery compliments to the blushing Miss Trescott, whose identity Jim had disclosed by a bow. He was afterwards a thorn in our flesh in his practice as a personal-injury lawyer.At the time, however, we warmed to him, as under his leadership the dwellers in the tents and round about the waters of Mirror Lake all shook hands with Jim and Josie.
Cornish stood with a saturnine smile on his face, and glared at some of the more pointed hits of the young lawyer. Cecil Barr-Smith beamed radiant pleasure, as he saw the evident linking in this public way of Jim’s name and Josie’s. Antonia stood close to Cecil’s side, and chatted vivaciously to him—not with him; for her words seemed to have no correlation with his.
“Quite like the going away of a bridal party!” said she with exaggerated gayety, and with a little spitefulness, I thought. “Has any one any rice?”
“All aboard!” said Corcoran; and the joyful and triumphant party, with their outward intimacy and their inward warfare of passions and desires, rolled on toward “Mystery Number Two,” which was duly christened “Cornish,” and celebrated in champagne furnished by its godfather.
“Don’t you ever drink champagne?” said Cornish, as Josie declined to partake.
“Never,” said she.
“What,never?” he went on, Pinaforically.
“My God!” thought I, “the assurance of the man!” And the palm-encircled alcove at Auriccio’s, as it was wont so often to do, came across my vision, and shut out everything but the Psyche face in its ruddy halo, speeding by me into the street, and the vexed young man in the faultless attire slowly following.
Mystery Number Three was “Antonia,” a lovely little place in embryo; “Barslow” came next, followed by “Giddings” and “Tolliver.” We were tired of it when we reached “Hinckley,” platted on a farm owned by Antonia’s father, and where we ceased to perform the ceremony of unveiling. It was a memorable trip, ending with sunset and home. Captain Tolliver assisted General Lattimore to alight from the train, and they went arm in arm up to the old General’s home.
That night, according to his wont, Jim came to smoke with me in the late evening. “Let’s take a car,” said he, “and go up and have a look at the houses.”
These were our new mansions up in Lynhurst Park Addition, now in process of erection. In the moonlight we could see them dimly, and at a little distance they looked like masses of ruins—the second childhood of houses. A stranger could have seen, from the polished columns and the piles of carved stone, that they were to be expensive and probably beautiful structures.
“What do you think of the General in the rôle of Cassandra?” asked Jim, as we sat in the skeleton room which was to be his library.
“It struck me,” said I, “as a particularly artistic bit of croaking!”
“The Captain says frequently,” said Jim, his cigar glowing like a variable star, “that opportunity knocks once. The General, I’m afraid, knocks all the time. But if it should turn out that he’s right about the—the—dervish-dance ... it would be ... toput it mildly ... a horse on us, Al, wouldn’t it?”
I had no answer to this fanciful speech, and made none. Instead, I told him of Giddings’s love-sickness.
“The philosophy of Iago has broken down,” said he, “and the boy is sort of short-circuited. Antonia can take him in hand, and turn him out full of confidence; and with that, I’ll answer for the lady. That can be fixed easy, and ought to be. Let’s walk back.”
“What was it he said?” he asked, as we parted. “‘Coma, cold forms, still hands, and extinction.’ Well, if the dervish-dance does wind up in that sort of thing, it’s only a short-cut to the inevitable. Those are pretty houses up there; we’d have been astounded over them when we used to fish together on Beaver Creek;—but suppose they are?
“‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keepThe Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;And Bahram, that great hunter—the Wild AssStamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep!’
Good-night, Al!“
CHAPTER XV.Some Affairs of the Heart Considered in their Relation to Dollars Cents.
CHAPTER XV.
Some Affairs of the Heart Considered in their Relation to Dollars Cents.
Antonia was sitting in a hammock. Josie and Alice were not far away watching Cecil Barr-Smith, who was wading into the lake to get water-lilies for them, contrary to the ordinances of the city of Lattimore in such cases made and provided. The six were dawdling away our time one fine Sunday in Lynhurst Park. I forgot to say Mr. Elkins and myself were discussing affairs of state with Miss Hinckley.
“He’s such a ninny,” said Antonia.
“Aren’t all people when in his forlorn condition?” asked Jim.
Antonia looked away at the clouds, and did not reply.
“But if he had a morsel of the cynical philosophy he boasts of,” said she, “he could see.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Jim lazily, looking over at the other group; “a woman can conceal her feelings in such a case pretty completely.”
“I don’t know about that,” echoed Antonia. “I wish I did; it would simplify things.”
“I believe,” said I, “that it’s a simple enough matter for you to solve and manage as it is.”
“But it’s so absurd to bother with!” said she; “and what’s the use?”
“Doesn’t it seem that way?” said Jim. “And yet you know we brought him here for a definite purpose; and in his present state he can’t make good. Just read his editorial this morning: it would add gloom to the proceedings, read at a funeral. We want things whooped up, and he wants to whoop ’em; but long screeds on ‘The Sacred Right of Self-destruction’ hurt things, and bring the paper into disrepute, and crowd out optimistic matter that we desire. And as long as both families want the thing brought about, and there is good reason to think that Laura will not prove eternally immovable, I take it to be an important enough matter, from the standpoint of dollars and cents, for the exercise of our diplomacy.”
“Well, then,” said Antonia, “get the people together on some social occasion, and we’ll try.”
“I’ve thought,” said Jim, “of having a house-warming—as soon as the weather gets so that the very name of the function won’t keep folks away. My house is practically done, you know.”
“Just the thing,” said Antonia. “There are cosy nooks and deep retreats enough to make it a sort of labyrinth for the ensnaring of our victims.”
“Isn’t it a queer thing in language,” said Jim, “that these retreats are the places where advances are made!”
“Not when you consider,” said Antonia, “that retreats follow repulses.”
“We ought to have the Captain and the General here, if this military conversation is to continue,” said I. “And here comes Cecil. Stop before he comes, or we shall never get through with the explanation of the jokes.”
This remark elicited the laughter which the puns failed to provoke; for Cecil was color-blind in all things relating to the American joke. The humor ofPunchappealed to him, and the wit of Sterne and Dean Swift; but the funny column and the paragrapher’s niche of our newspapers he regarded as purely pathological phenomena. I sometimes feel that Cecil was right about this. Can the mind which continues to be charmed by these paragraphic strainings be really sound?—but this is not a dissertation. Cecil reconciled himself to his position as the local exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule—and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances.
It was easy to hope, in Lattimore, then. It was not many days after our talk in the park before I noticed a change for the better in Giddings, even. Just before Jim’s house-warming, he came to me with something like optimism in his appearance. I started to cheer him up, and went wrong.
“I’m glad to see by your cheerful looks,” said I, “that the philosophy of Iago—”
“Say, now!” cried he, “don’t remind me of that, for Heaven’s sake!”
“Why, certainly not,” said I, “if you object.”
“I do object,” said he most earnestly; “why, that damned-fool philosophy may have ruined my life, you know.”
“Of course I know what you mean,” said I; “but I’m convinced, and so are all your friends, that if you fail, it’ll be your own lack of nerve, and nothing else, that you’ll owe the disaster to. You should—”
“I should have refrained from trampling under foot the dearest ideals of the only girl— However, I can’t talk of these things to any one, Barslow. But I have some hope now. Antonia and Josie have both been very kind lately—and say, Barslow, I see now how little foundation there is for that old gag about the women hating each other!”
“I’ve always felt,” said I, anxious to draw him out so that I might see what the conspirators had been doing, “that there’s nothing inthatidea. But what has changed your view?”
“Antonia, and Josie, and even your wife,” said he, “have been keeping up a regular lobby in my behalf with Laura. They think they’ve got the deal plugged up now, so that she’ll give me a show again, and—”
“Why, surely,” said I; “in my opinion, there never was any need for you to feel downcast.”
“Barslow,” he said, with the air of a man who has endured to the limit, “you are a good fellow, but you make me tired when you talk like that. Why, four weeks ago I had no more show than a snowballin—in the crater of Vesuvius. But now I’m encouraged. These girls have been doing me good, as I just said, and I’m convinced that my series of editorials on ‘The Influence of Christianity on Civilization,’ in which I’ve given the Church the credit of being the whole thing, has helped some.”
“They ought to do good somewhere,” said I, “they certainly haven’t boomed Lattimore any.”
“Damn Lattimore!” said he bitterly. “When a man’s very life—But see here, Barslow, I know you’re not in earnest about this. And I’ll be all right in a day or two, or I’ll be eternally wrong. I’m going to make one final cast of the die. I may go down to bottomless perdition, or I may be caught up to the battlements of heaven; but such a mass of doubts and miseries as I’ve been lately, I’ll no longer be! Pray for me, Barslow, pray for me!”
This despairing condition of Giddings’s was a sort of continuing sensation with us at that time. We discussed it quite freely in all its aspects, humorous and tragic. It was so unexpected a development in the young man’s character, and, with all due respect to the discretion and resisting powers of Miss Addison, so entirely gratuitous and factitious.
“He has ability as a writer,” said the Captain; “but in such a mattah anybody but a fool ought to see that the thing to do is to chahge the intrenchments. I trust that I may not be misunde’stood when I say that, in my opinion, a good rattling chahge would not be a fo’lo’n hope!”
“It bothers,” said Jim; “and if it weren’t for that,I’d feel conscience-stricken at doing anything to rob the idiot of a most delicious grief.”
The coolness of early autumn was in the air the night of Jim’s house-warming. To describe his dwelling, in these days when fortunes are spent on the details of a stairway, and a king’s ransom for the tapestries of a salon, all of which luxuries are spread before the eyes of the public in the columns of Sunday papers and magazines, would be to court an anticlimax. But this was before the multimillionaire had made the need for an augmentative of the word “luxury”; and Jim’s house was noteworthy for its beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands through silken portières; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out in rug, and bed, and canopy. There were decorations made by men whose names were known in London and Paris. From out-of-the-way places Mr. Elkins had brought collections of queer and interesting and pretty things which, all his life, he had been accumulating; and in his library were broad areas of well-worn book-backs. Somehow, people looked upon the Mr. Elkins who was master of all these as a more important man than the Elkins who had blown into the town on some chance breeze of speculation, and taken rooms at the Centropolis.
It was all light and color, that night. Even the formal flower-beds of the grounds and the fountainspouting on the lawn were like scenery in the lime-light. Only, back in the shrubbery there were darker nooks in summer-houses and arbors for those who loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds, to the common mind, were likely to seem foolish. I remember thinking that if Mr. Giddings really wanted a chance to take the high dive of which he had spoken to me, the opportunity was before him.
His Laura was there, her devotee-like expression striving with an exceedingly low-cut dress to sound the distinguishing note of her personality. Giddings was at the punch-bowl as on their arrival she swept past with the General. When he saw the nun-like glance over the swelling bosom, the poor stricken cynic blushed, turned pale, and wheeled to flee. But Cecil, as if following orders, arrested him and began plying him with the punch—from which Giddings seemed to draw courage: for I saw him, soon, gravitate to her whom he loved and so mysteriously dreaded.
“It’s a pe’fect jewel-case of a house!” said the Captain, as he moved with the trooping company through the mansion.
“Indeed, indeed it is,” said Mrs. Tolliver to Alice; “the jewel, whoever it may be, is to be envied.”
“I hope,” said Jim to Josie, “that you agree with Mrs. Tolliver?”
“Oh, yes,” said Josie, “but you attach far too much importance to my judgment. If it is any comfort to you, however, I want to praise—everything—unreservedly.”
“I won’t know, for a while,” said Jim, “whetherit is to be my house only, or home in the full sense of the word.”
“One doesn’t know about that, I fancy,” said Cecil; “for a long time—”
“I mean to know soon,” said Jim.
Josie was looking intently at the carving on one of the chairs, and paid no heed, though the remark seemed to be addressed to her.
“What I mean, you know,” said Cecil, “is that, no matter how well the house may be built and furnished, it’s the associations, the history of the place, the things that are in the air, that makes ’Ome!”
There was in the manner of his capitalizing the word as he uttered it, and in the unwonted elision of the H, that tribute to his dear island which the exiled Briton (even when soothed by the consolation offered by street-car systems to superintend, and rose-pink blondes to serve), always pays when he speaks of Home.
“Associations,” said Jim, “may be historical or prophetic. In the former case, we have to take them on trust; but as to those of the future, we are sure of them.”
“Yahs,” said Cecil, using the locution which he always adopted when something subtle was said to him, “I dare say! I dare say!”
“Well, then,” Jim went on, “I have this matter of the atmosphere or associations under my own control.”
“Just so,” said Cecil. “Clever conceit, Miss Trescott, isn’t it, now?”
But Miss Trescott had apparently heard nothing ofJim’s speech, and begged pardon; and wouldn’t they go and show her the bronzes in the library?
“This mansion, General,” said the Captain, “takes one back, suh, to the halcyon days of American history. I refeh, suh, to those times when the plantahs of the black prairie belt of Alabama lived like princes, in the heart of an enchanted empire!”
“A very interesting period, Captain,” said the General. “It is a pity that the industrial basis was one which could not endure!”
“In the midst of fo’ests, suh,” went on the Captain, “we had ouah mansions, not inferio’ to this—each a little kingdom with its complete wo’ld of amusements, its cote, and its happy populace, goin’ singin’ to the wo’k which supported the estate!”
“Yes,” said the General, “I thought, when we were striking down that state of things, that we were doing a great thing for that populace. But I now see that I was only helping the black into a new slavery, the fruits of which we see here, around us, to-night.”
“I hahdly get youah meaning, suh—”
“Well,” said the General, looking about at the little audience. (It was in the smoking-room, and those present were smokers only.) “Well, now, take my case. I have some pretty valuable grounds down there where I live. When I got them, they were worthless. I could build as good a mansion as this or any of your ante-bellum Alabama houses for what I can get out of that little tract. What is that value? Merely the expression in terms of money of the power of excluding the rest of mankind from that little pieceof ground. I make people give me the fruits of their labor, myself doing nothing. That’s what builds this house and all these great houses, and breeds the luxury we are beginning to see around us; and the consciousness that this slavery exists, and is increasing, and bids fair to grow greatly, is what is making men crazy over these little spots of ground out here in the West! It is this slavery—”
“Suh,” exclaimed the Captain, rising and grasping the General’s hand, “you have done me the favo’ of making me wisah! I nevah saw so cleahly the divine decree which has fo’eo’dained us to this opulence. Nothing so satisfactory, suh, as a basis and reason foh investment, has been advanced in my hearing since I have been in the real-estate business! Let us wo’k this out a little mo’ in detail, if you please, suh—”
“Let us escape while there is yet time!” said Cornish; and we fled.
After supper there was a cotillion. The spacious ballroom, with its roof so high that the lights up there were as stars, was a sight which could scarcely be reconciled with the village community which he had found and changed. The palms, and flowers, and lights which decorated the room; the orchestra’s river of dance-music; the men, all in the black livery which—on the surface—marks the final conquest of civilization over barbarism; the beautiful gowns, the sparkling jewels, and the white shoulders and arms of the ladies—all these made me wonder if I had not been transported to some Mayfair or Newport, so pictorial, so decorative, so charged with art,it seemed to be. The young people, carrying on their courtships in these unfamiliar halls, their disappearances into the more remote and tenebrous outskirts of the assembly—all seemed to me to be taking place on the stage, or in some romance.
I told Alice about this as we walked home—it was only across the street—to our own new house.
“Don’t tell any one about this feeling of yours,” said she. “It betrays your provincialism, my dear. You should feel, for the first time in your life, perfectly at home. ‘Armor, rusting on his walls, On the blood of Clifford calls,’ you know.”
“Mine didn’t hear the call,” said I; “I’m probably the first of my race to wear this—But I enjoyed it.”
“Well, I am too full of something that took place to discuss the matter,” said she, as we sat down at home. “I am perplexed. You know about Mr. Cornish and Josie, don’t you?”
She startled me, for I had never told her a word.
“Know about them!” I cried, a little dramatically. “What do you mean? No, I don’t!”
“Why, what’s the matter, Albert?” she queried. “I haven’t charged them with midnight assassination, or anything like that! Only, it seems that he has been making love to her, for some time, in his cool and self-contained way. I’ve known it, and she’s been perfectly conscious, that I knew; but never said anything to me of it, and seemed unwilling even to approach the subject. But to-night Cecil and I found her out in the canopied seat by the fountain, and I knew something was the matter, and sent Cecilaway. Something told me that Mr. Cornish was concerned in it, and I asked her at once where he went.
“‘He is gone!’ said she. ‘I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care! I wish I might never see him any more!’
“You may imagine my surprise. When a young woman uses such language about a man, it is a certainty that she isn’t voicing her true feelings, or that it isn’t a normal love affair. So I wormed out of her that he had made her an offer.”
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘if, as I infer from your conversation, you have refused him, there’s an end of the matter; and you need not worry about seeing him any more.’
“‘But,’ said she, ‘Alice, I haven’t refused him!’
“That took me aback a little,” went on Alice, “for I had other plans for her; so I said: ‘You haven’t accepted the fellow, have you?’
“‘Oh, no, no!’ said she, in a sort of quivery way, ‘but what right have you to speak of him in that way?’ And that is all I could get out of her. She was so unreasonable and disconnected in her talk, and the others came out, and I tell you what, Albert Barslow, that man Cornish will do evil yet, among us! I have always thought so!”
“I don’t see any ground for any such prediction,” said I, “in anything you have told me. Her inability to make up her mind—”
“Means that there’s something wrong,” said my wife dogmatically. “It means that he has some sinister influence over her, as he has over almost everybody,with those coal-black eyes of his and his satanic ways. And worse than all else, it means that he’ll finally get her, in spite of herself!”
“Pshaw!” said I.
“Go away, Albert!” said she, “or we shall quarrel. Go back and find my fan—I left it on the mantel in the library. The house is lighted yet; and I was going to send you back anyhow. Kiss me, and go, please.”
I felt that if Alice had had in her memory my vision of the supper at Auriccio’s, she would have been confirmed in her fears; but to me, in spite of the memory, they seemed absurd. My only apprehension was that she might be right as to the final outcome, to the wreck of Jim’s hopes. I did not take the matter at all seriously, in fact. I think we men must usually have such an affair worked out to some conclusion, for weal or woe, before we regard it otherwise than lightly. That was the reason that Giddings’s distraught condition was only a matter of laughter to all of us. And as something like this passed through my mind, Giddings himself collared me as I crossed the street.
“Old man!” said he, “congratulate me! It’s all right, Barslow, it’s all right.”
“Up on the battlements, are you?” said I. “Well, I congratulate you, Giddings; and don’t make such an ass of yourself, please, any more. I never noticed until this evening what a fine girl Laura is. You’re really a very fortunate fellow indeed!”
“You never noticed it!” said he with utter scorn. “Well, if—”
“It’s late,” said I. “Come and see me in the morning! Good-night.”
I went in at the front door of the house. It stood wide open, as if the current of guests passing out had removed its tendency to swing shut. It seemed lonely now, inside, with all the decorations of the assembly still in place in the empty hall. I passed into the library, and found Jim sitting idly in a great leather chair. He seemed not to see me; or if he did, he paid no attention. I went to the mantel, picked up Alice’s fan, and turned to Jim.
“Sit down,” said he.
“Having a sort of ‘oft in the stilly night’ experience, Jim, or a case of William the Conqueror on the Field of Hastings?”
“Yes,” said he. “Something like that.”
“Well, your house-warming has been a success, Jim,” said I, “though a fellow wouldn’t think so to look at you. And the house is faultless. I envy you the house, but the ability to plan and furnish it still more. I didn’t think it was in you, old man! Where did you learn it all?”
“You may have the house, if you want it, Al,” said he. “I don’t think it’s going to be of any use to me.”
“Why, Jim,” said I, seeing that it was something more than a mere mood with him, “what is it? Has anything gone wrong?”
“Nothing that I’ve any right to complain of,” said he. “Of course, no man puts as much of his life into such a thing as I have into this—without thinking of more than living in it—alone. I’venever had what you can really call a home—not since I was a little chap, when it was home wherever there were trees and mother. I’ve filled this—with those associations I spoke to Barr-Smith about—to-night—a little more than I seem to have had any warrant to do. I tried to make sure about the jewel for the jewel-case to-night, and it went wrong, Al; and that’s all there is of it. I don’t think I shall need the house, and if you like it you can have it.”
“Do you mean that Josie has refused you?” said I.
“She didn’t put it that way,” said he, “but it amounts to that.”
“Nothing that isn’t a refusal,” said I, “ought to be accepted as such. What did she say?”
“Nothing definite,” he answered wearily, “only that it couldn’t be ‘yes,’ and when I urged her to make it ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ she refused to say either; and asked me to forget that I had ever said anything to her about the matter. There have been some things which—led me to hope—for a different answer; and I’m a good deal taken down, Al ... I wouldn’t like to talk this way—with any one else.”
There seemed to be no reason for abandonment of hope, I urged upon him, and after a cigar or so I left him, evidently impressed with this view of the case, but nevertheless bitterly disappointed. It meant delay and danger to his hopes; and Jim was not a man to brook delay, or suffer danger to go unchallenged. I dared not tell him of Cornish’s offer, and of its fate, so similar to his.
“I wonder if it is coquetry on her part,” thought I, as I went back with the fan. “I wonder if it will cause things to go wrong in our business affairs. I wonder if it is possible for her to be sincerely unable to make up her mind, or if there is anything in Alice’s malign-influence theory. Anyhow, in the department of Cupid business certainly is picking up!”