HENNION came back from seeing Wood laid away (where other men were lying, who had been spoken of in their day, whom Port Argent had forgotten or was in process of forgetting) and saw the last bricks laid and rammed on Lower Bank Street. There was satisfaction in the pavement of Lower Bank Street, in knowing what was in it and why. The qualities of sand, crushed stone, and paving brick were the same yesterday and to-day. Each brick was three inches and three-eighths thick, and not one would be ambitious of four inches to-morrow. If it were broken, and thrown away, there would be no altruistic compunctions. One built effectively with such things.
Charlie Carroll whispered to Hennion as they came out of the cemetery:
“It's all right. The boys are satisfied.”
“Why are they?”
“They'd be scared not to do what Wood said now. It wouldn't go down.”
“Go down where?”
“Well, they seem to like the idea too. They will have it.”
But why should he be congratulated over a prospective invitation from “the boys” to labour in their interests? He was not sure why he had not already refused, by what subconscious motive or scruple. Properly there should be scruples about accepting. The leadership of the organisation was an unsalaried position, with vague perquisites. Wood had taken honorariums and contributions, spent what he chose on the organisation, and kept what he chose. Apparently he had not kept much, if any. He had seemed to care only for influence. He had liked the game. He had left only a small estate. But whether he had kept or passed it on, the money was called unclean.
If one went into politics to effect something—and Hennion could not imagine why one went into anything otherwise—the leadership of the organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that were needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be dynamics and mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism it seemed oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any machine, turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. Still these sets and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like an interesting problem in engineering, that had been met rather experimentally. As mechanics, it seemed to be all in an experimental stage. Hennion wondered if there were any text-books on the subject, and then pulled himself up with a protest.
What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be sure, but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's time politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly a class of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and mechanic laws, they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it seemed to succeed by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense.
Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces.
The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney.
Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more of its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. Those who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less about the matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called him corrupt, which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, the chartered machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation to suit those who furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity of Port Argent had always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a complicated motive, half private, hardly confessed.
Hennion entered another protest against the direction of his thoughts, and noticed the big foreman, Kennedy, close beside him. The workmen were gathering their tools.
“All right, Kennedy. Come around tomorrow. We'll begin that grading on the east side next.”
Kennedy looked after him wistfully, and the workmen stood still, holding their tools and looking after him. He noticed it as he turned away, and it occurred to him to wonder how it happened that he knew so many men like Kennedy, who seemed to have a sort of feudal attachment for him.
He passed through Tecumseh Street on his way home, and noticed where the policeman had ripped off the advertising boards. Hicks must be a queer specimen, he thought. But relatively to mechanics, every man was an eccentric.
Tecumseh Street was absorbed in its daily business. It seemed to have no conscience-smitten, excited memories. A mob and a flash of gunpowder, a runaway horse, the breaking down of a truck, everything went the way of incident. “Everything goes,” was the phrase there, meaning it is accepted and goes away, for the street has not time to remember it.
Hennion glanced up at the window of the little room inThe Pressbuilding. Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him a machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men to drive it—what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances and hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type to run that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and what “the boys” wanted, why, they wantedtheir“jobs,” like everybody else. Hennion wanted his own.
Carroll came flitting around the corner of Hancock Street at that moment, and nearly ran into him.
“Oh! Committee meets to-morrow night.”
“I don't want it.”
“Come off! You can't help it.”
Carroll flitted away in the direction ofThe Pressbuilding.
Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in sleep all the great issues of their day.
Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly called “The Versailles,” and came out in the street. It was too early to see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across the street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the Fourth Ward, church and state—Father Harra and Frei-burger.
Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, and for the symbol of his father's life and his own hope in the working world. He liked to stand on it, to feel it beneath and around him, knowing what each steel girder meant, and what in figures was the strength of its grip and pull. There was no emotional human nature in it, no need of compromise. Steel was steel, and stone stone, and not a bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice or private folly. In a certain way he seemed to find his father there, and to be able to go over with him their old vivid talks.
The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, shattered fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in his ear: “Got a light?”
Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the other.
“Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd float all right if you fell into the river.”
“Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.”
He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with the pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the basket girl. “Hi!”
The child stopped and looked at him.
“I gets one end. Tha'sh right.”
She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them. Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song.
A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping creatures like the basket girl!
Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a moving line of lit windows.
Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran as accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had—but mixed ideas of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the westbound train would have been a silly affair.
Hennion came from the bridge and down Bank Street, which was brilliant with lights. He turned up an outrunning street and came out on the square, where stood Port Argent's city hall and court house and jail, where there was a fountain that sometimes ran, and beds of trimmed foliage plants arranged in misguided colour-designs.
Several lights were burning in the barred windows of the old jail. He stopped and looked at the lights, and wondered what varieties of human beings were there. The jail was another structure which would have been futile without people to go in, at least to dislike going in. The man who shot Wood was there. Why did he shoot Wood? What was his futile idea in that?
The jail was old and dilapidated. Some of the bricks had crumbled under the barred windows.
Hennion walked into the entrance, and rang the bell.
The jailor was middle-aged, bearded, and smoking a short pipe.
“Can I see Hicks, Sweeney?”
“Got a permit? Oh! Mr. Hennion! Well, it ain't regular, you know.”
“You can stay by.”
“Well, all right. No, but I'll have to lock you in. It's the rules.”
They went up a flight of dark stairs, through a corridor, where a watchman passed them. They stopped at a door, and the jailor turned the key.
“Hicks, gentleman to see you.”
HICKS was sitting within by a plain board table, reading. It was a whitewashed room and had a window with rusted bars. The door banged, and the key again creaked in the lock. The jailor walked to and fro in the corridor.
Hicks looked up from his reading, and stared in a half-comprehending way.
“I have a selfish thirst for knowledge, Mr. Hicks,” said Hennion.
He took the chair on the opposite side, and looked at the book on the table. The feeble gas jet stood some six inches out from the wall, directly over the table.
“It's the Bible,” said the other. “It needs to be made modern, but there's knowledge in it.”
“I didn't mean that.”
“Lazarus and Dives. That's fanciful justice. A trick to pacify Lazarus. But there's knowledge. Notice what the dogs did. That's satire.”
It seemed a trifle uncanny, the place, the little man with the absorbed manner, metallic voice and strange language, black hair and beard, intent black eyes. Hennion had never interviewed a criminal before.
“I'm not a reporter, Mr. Hicks, nor a lawyer.”
Hicks marked his place and closed the book.
“I know who you are.”
“I was a friend of Wood's, in a way, but I'm not here in malice. I gathered you hadn't anything personal against him. It seemed to follow you had some sort of a long-range motive in it. I wanted to ask you why you shot Wood.”
Hicks' gaze grew slowly in intentness as if his mind were gathering behind it, concentrating its power on one point. The point seemed to be midway between and above Hennion's eyes. Hennion had an impulse to put his hand to the spot, as if it were burnt, but his habit of impassiveness prevented. He thought the gaze might represent the way in which Hicks' mind worked. A focussing mind was a good thing for anyone who worked with his brains, but it might have extravagances. An analysis concentrated and confined to an infinitely small point in the centre of the forehead might make an infinitely small hole to the back of the head, but it would not comprehend a whole character. A man's character ran to the ends of his hands and feet.
“I'm an engineer,” Hennion went on, “and in that way I have to know the effectiveness of things I handle and apply. And in that way men too are to me so much effectiveness.”
“I know about you,” said Hicks sharply. “Your men like you. You've never had a strike.”
“Why—no.”
Hicks' manner had changed. It was quick, excited, and angular.
“You're wrong. They're something more to you, that you didn't count in. Why do they like you?”
“I don't know.”
“Exactly. But it's something effective, ain't it?”
Hennion paused and felt confused. A man of such sharp analysis and warped performance as this, how was one to get to understand him? He leaned back in his chair and crossed his knees. The sharp analysis might be a trick Hicks had caught from listening to Aidee's speeches. It sounded like Aidee.
“Well, anyhow, Mr. Hicks, in the way of effectiveness, why did you shoot Wood?”
Hicks' eyes were little pin-points of concentration.
“He sold the people to the corporations.”
“Well. But suppose he did. Will the next man do any better? If not, where's the effectiveness?”
“He won't be so sharp.”
“You thought Wood was too sharp to be downed Aidee's way?”
“He was the devil's latest scheme. I sent him to the devil.”
“And shoulder the consequences. I like that. But the next man. Suppose I were the next man.”
Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They were thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said softly:
“Look out what you do.”
“What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I ask some of you?”
Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain, unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did not feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by thinking Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, and would probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks was that he was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense convictions and repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his purpose fixed on would become a white-hot point, blinding him to circumstances. And this focussing nature, which acted like a lens to contract general heat into a point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in dynamics. It seemed a characteristic of better service for starting a fire, and furnishing the first impulse of a social movement, than for running steady machinery. Some people claimed that society was running down and needed a new impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, the trouble with Hicks might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at the wrong time, a fire that had to be put out.
“You ask me!”
“Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and satisfy you?”
Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find the centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the attempt to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was to break up the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails scratching across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose.
“I beg your pardon.”
“You ask me!”
“Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock. But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea was. I told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the circumstances, I beg your pardon.”
“Why do you ask me?” Hicks' fingers shook on the table. “There's a man who can tell you. He can lead you. He led me, when I wasn't a fool.”
“Who? You mean Aidee?”
Hicks nodded, and fell to glowering at his nervous fingers, absent and brooding.
“He didn't tell you to shoot Wood. I know better than that.”
“No, he didn't.”
“Why, there's another thing I'd like to know. What did Aidee do?”
“Do! He held me back! He was always holding me back! I couldn't stand it!” he cried sharply, and a flash of anger and impatience went over his face. “He shouldered me like a log of wood on his back. Maybe I liked that papoose arrangement, with a smothered damn fire in the heart of me. No, I didn't! I had to break loose or turn charcoal.”
Hennion wondered. The man reminded him of Aidee, the same vivid phrase, the figures of speech. But Aidee had said that he did not know him. It appeared that he must know him. If Aidee had been lying about it, that opened sinister suggestions. Hennion did not like Aidee, neither did he like in himself this furtive sense of satisfaction in the suggestions.
“Aidee told me he didn't know you. I hadn't thought he would lie about it.”
“By God, don't call him a liar to me!” Hicks jumped to his feet, and had his wooden chair swung over his back in an instant.
“I don't. I want it explained,” Hennion said coolly. “You can't do anything with that. Sit down.”
“He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds, cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!”
“Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an explanation.”
“Don't you call him a liar!”
“Haven't. Sit down.”
Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were narrowed, glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put his hands into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas jet, and the ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. They were wild, disordered, and fugitive, as if reflections from the spirit behind Hicks' eyes, instead of from the jet at the end of a lead pipe.
“I'll help you out with a suggestion,” Hennion said slowly. “You don't mean to leave Aidee in that shape, since you feel about him in this way. But you don't know whether your story would go down with me, or whether it might not get Aidee into trouble. Now, if I'm forecasting that story, it's something like this. You knew each other years ago, not in Port Argent.”
Hicks said nothing.
“Carried you around papoose-fashion, did he? But there's some likeness between you. It might happen to be a family likeness.” Still no comment.
“If it so happened, you might be related. You might be twins. And then again you might not. You might have been his first convert. Partners maybe in Nevada. That: was where he came from,—silver mines and what not. It's no business of mine.”
He paused and meditated, looking at the pulsating light; then brought his chair down and leaned forward.
“I take the liberty to disagree with you. I'm no exception to the run of men, and I'm neither a hound, nor a coward, nor a thief, nor yet a liar.”
“I know you're not.”
“However, your story, or Aidee's, is no business of mine. I gave you those inferences because they occurred to me. Naturally you'd suspect they would. So they do. Gabbling them abroad might make some trouble for Aidee, that's true. I shan't gabble them.”
“I know you won't.”
“I wanted your point of view in shooting Wood. If you don't see your way to give it, all right. I judge it was the same way you were going to club me with a chair. Simple enough and rather silly. Goodnight, then. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes.”
Hennion leaned back and studied the gaslight, and disliked himself. Hicks clasped and unclasped his hands on the table.
“It won't hurt him,” he said hoarsely, “between you and me. Besides, you can do that for me. He's my brother, old Al. But I cut away from him. I kept off. I kept away from him for a while, but I couldn't live without seeing him. You see? I couldn't do it. Then he came here, and I followed him, and I lived with a shoemaker across the river and cobbled shoes. But I heard every speech he made in Port Argent, though he never saw me. He thinks I'm dead, don't he? I dodged him pretty slick.” He flushed and smiled—“I liked it,” he whispered, growing excited. “It was better'n the old way, for we got along all right this way. You've heard of him! Ain't he wonderful? Ain't he a great one, hey? That was Al. I liked it, but he didn't know. You see? How'd he know when he thought I was dead, didn't he? I watched him, old Al!”
His face was lit up with the warm memory of it. He clicked his teeth, and swayed to and fro, smiling.
“We got along all right this way. All right. My idea. Wasn't Al's. I kept the other side the river, mostly. Nobody can touch him when he's fired up, can they? They didn't know Al like I knew him. They called him the Preacher. He scared 'em like prairie fire. He's got his way. I've heard him. I watched 'em, and I knew him, but they didn't, did they?”
He focussed his excited eyes suddenly on Hennion.
“You! I know you; I know your men that live on the east side. I heard a man say you'd got a heart like a baked potato and don't know it. That fat-headed foreman of yours, Kennedy, he can tell you more 'n you ever thought of. Think you're a composite of steel and brick, set up according to laws of mechanics, don't you? Oh, hell! Go and ask Al. He's a wonder. Why do your men like you? Go and ask 'em. I've told you why. Why'd I shoot Wood? Al wouldn't have let me, but it 'll do good. He scares 'em his way, I scare 'em mine. You wait and see! It 'll do good.”
Hennion studied the gas jet, until he could see nothing but an isolated impish dancing flame, until it seemed as if either the little man across the table were chattering far away in the distance and darkness, or else he and the gas jet were one and the same.
Aidee had been four years in Port Argent, and so Hicks had been following and watching him, cobbling shoes, living a fanciful, excited life, maniacal more or less. Hennion fancied that he had Hicks' point of view now.
“You wait and see! It'll do good.”
“Well,” said Hennion, “I dare say you've answered the question. You haven't told me yet what I can do for you.”
Hicks' excitement died out as suddenly as it had risen. He reached a trembling hand across the table, and whispered:
“I thought—— What do you think they'll do to me?”
“I can't help you there. You'll have counsel.”
“No, no! It's this. I thought I'd write a letter to Al, and you'd give it to him afterwards, a year afterwards—supposing—you see?”
He hesitated pitifully.
“All right, I'll do that.”
“I won't write it now.”
“I see.”
“You'll keep it still? You won't tell? You won't get a grudge against Al? If you do! No. I know about you. You won't tell.”
“No, I won't. Well, good-night, then.”
“Good-night.”
His voice was husky and weak now. He put out his hand, hesitating. Hennion took it promptly. It felt like a wet, withered leaf.
Hennion went and knocked at the door, which Sweeney opened. Hicks sat still by the table, looking down, straggling locks of his black hair plastered wet against his white forehead, his finger nails scratching the boards.
The door clanged to, and the noise echoed in the corridor.
“I heerd him gettin' some excited,” said the jailor.
“Some.”
“Think he's crazy?”
“That's for the court to say.”
“Ain't crazier'n this old jail. I need a new one bad, Mr. Hennion. Look at them windows! I seen mighty clever boys here. A sharp one could dig out here some night, if he had the tools.”
“Then you'd better not suggest it to Hicks.”
“Ho! He ain't thinkin' of it. He's a weakly man.”
“No, probably not.”
“He ain't got the tools, either. I know the business. Look at the experience I've had! But I need a new jail, Mr. Hennion, bad, as I told Mr. Wood.”
“Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for your trouble.”
The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe.
He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent.
“Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?” Champney asked.
“Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to think it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had a crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; so he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary.”
HENNION knew Wood's organisation intimately enough. He had been a part of it on the outside. Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” a body that had total charge of the party's municipal campaigns, including admission to caucuses, and local charge in its general campaigns. Local nominations were decided there. It was only less active between elections than during them. It had an inner ring which met by habit, socially, in Wood's office. Whatever was decided in Wood's office, it was understood, would pass the Committee, and whatever passed the Committee would pass the City Council, and be welcomed by a mayor who had been socially at the birth of the said measure. Port Argent was a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better ring than ordinary. Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to something peculiar in Wood.
Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in his office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. Carroll was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long neck and close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by profession; Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, devoid of grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some reason unmatched in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, saloon-keeper from East Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, plastered, and gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, small, thin, dry, of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent speech, a lawyer, supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay Tuttle, President of the School Board, white-moustached and pompous.
Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers who suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s. Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of them held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and personal interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They varied discussion with anecdotes of Wood.
Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans and estimates of competing architects.
“Any preference, Major?” asked Hennion.
“I have given it some consideration,” said the Major puffily, and stated considerations.
“Well,” Hennion suggested, “why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon, and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up.”
The circle laughed and nodded.
The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. Tait read a document signed “Wm. R. Macclesfield, President.” Hennion suggested that they offer a counter-proposition.
“We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him expect his right of way for a gift?”
“You know what they chipped in this spring?” said Tait, looking up.
“Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?” He turned to Ranald Cam.
“Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet,” growled Cam, “for all they gas about it.” Tait was silent. The others disputed at length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy influence of the “old man” was still so strong in the circle that no one ventured to put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. They only disputed points of fact.
“He kept things solid,” said Carroll, “that's the point.”
“I should say Macclesfield would have to come up,” said Hennion at last. “I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week.”
When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest. Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together.
“I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait,” said Beckett. “Suit me all right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?” Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood.
“Possibly, possibly,” said the Major.
Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him. Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward them. They did not like Tait.
“Want to go over there with me, Hennion?” said Tait, puffing his black cigar rather fast. “See Macclesfield?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Suppose I bring him over here?” Hennion stared at the top of his desk for a full moment. “All right. Come in an hour.”
Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring.
William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at first knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long after. Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview which here dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as well unmade. Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it.
“Should I congratulate or commiserate?” said Macclesfield, smiling and shaking hands.
“Commiserate, thank you.”
Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly.
“Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, man. I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your father and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his profession. Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, too, we young men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. Port Argent has grown. There have been remarkable developments in politics and engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a manager in the background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is needed, but it's a peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were Wood's choice, and he was a very judicious man. You find it takes time and labour. Yes, and it calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some people seem to think one in that position ought not to get anything for his trouble. I call that absurd. I always found in railroading that time, labour, and ability had to be paid for. By the way, you learned engineering from your father, I think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was thinking coming over the street just now with Tait—I was thinking what fine things he did in his profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. Remarkable. And yet engineering was almost in its infancy then.”
“Yes,” said Hennion, “the changes would have interested him.”
“Indeed they would! So—the fact is—I was thinking that, if you cared to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that bridge of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son can do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in business.”
Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in the young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him.
“I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment needs any forgiveness from me?”
“My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?”
“If you continue to want them.”
“Good! Now—oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think the figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be moderate?”
“Moderate in its generosity.”
“Ah—I don't know—I was thinking that we understood each other—that is—the situation.”
Hennion swung in his chair.
“I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and I was wondering what my father would have said about the situation. Wouldn't he have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and the representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two transactions that had better not be mixed?”
“My dear boy, who's mixing them?”
“Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme. Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there. You'll have to come in by a subway.”
Macclesfield shook his head smilingly.
“We can't afford that, you see.”
“Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?”
“Oh, well—isn't this a little inquisitorial?”
“Not necessary, anyway. I know, about.”
He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised.
Hennion went on slowly:
“The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at all. You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. There'll be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well suspect it now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose.”
Macclesfield said nothing.
“I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like.”
“By all means!”
“I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down, below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't know the holdings down there I'll give them to you.”
He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed figures, following the suggested line from point to point, massed the figures of the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and went on.
“The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll save about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably more. You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the P. and N. By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple Street you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to develop your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable there, probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the Boulevard, if the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have a better curve, same connection with the P. and N., and this one here with the L. and S. You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. Here you get your site in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, we'll take your approach on the east side.” More details massed and ordered. Macclesfield listened intently. Tait half closed his eyes and swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion concluded and paused a moment.
“Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to this—first, if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me with anything.”
“If I seemed to attempt it,” said Macclesfield, “I owe you an apology for my awkwardness.”
“None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings this side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I can make it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new bridge can now be very properly withdrawn.”
Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully.
“I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the subject very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a report.”
“All right.”
“And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I—don't, in fact, withdraw it.”
He rose and shook hands with Hennion.
“So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I sometimes have them.”
“Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man—for God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.”
“Is he going to bite or build?”
“Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man—a—that won't lose his temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!”
Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, to wonder what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. Macclesfield, who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery man, a little fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. Perhaps that was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he had left Hennion with a sense of having done him an injustice.
He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then pushed aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to East Argent and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before he had gone far he changed his mind.
The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. It might be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without watching; it would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced for blundering with his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around acting like a desolate orphan about it.
He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there paced the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through some miles of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and warm in the distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a street that had been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of the city to tempt inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them at wide intervals. The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of built-up streets about them. He followed the line of the Boulevard surveys, absorbed, often stopping and making notes. He came through a stretch of cornfield and pasture. If the city bought it in here before it began to develop the section, it would be shrewd investment. The marshes would be crossed by an embankment.
A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch of three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some years back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to small boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted through between banks of slippery clay.
The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the bottom lands and in the brush.
To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to accomplish something worth while, to make a name—it looked like a weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway.
Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the subject.
Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic capers.
Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy neighbourhood—factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with refuse—and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port Argent on a Sunday afternoon.
The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.
He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park.
Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple Street. They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the rest of the flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men getting on the trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! He knew them too. One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine Street, east side; the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another time one of a batch of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped John Murphy to get jobs for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays lived in a house on Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, who shot Wood, used to live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer named Wilson. Names of Kottar's children, remembered to have once been so stated by Kottar, Nina, Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and Elizabeth. One appeared to remember things useful, like the price per gross of three-inch screws at present quoting, as well as things useless, like the price three years ago. Hennion thought such an inveterate memory a nuisance.
Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields—all people, and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in.
He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the whole section but a few generations back.
“Mighty good luck to be young, Dick,” the “Governor” had said, and died, calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done.
Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He caught a car and went back to the centre of the town.
When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he did not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading Charlie Carroll's sinister paragraphs on “a certain admired instigator of crime.” She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone.
“He says he doesn't care about it,” she cried, “but I do!”
“Do you? Why?”
“Why!”
Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether to say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about them.
“Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics. Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to take it.”
“It's wicked!” cried Camilla passionately.
Hennion laughed.
“Well—he needn't have called Wood names—that's true.”
“If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!”
“'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they can't.”
Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him.
“My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says. Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of it? I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going to do anything in particular?”
“He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks.”
“What!”
“To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that nobody else will,” cried Camilla breathlessly, “and of course you'll say he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs.”
“You go too fast for me.” He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much that he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He was not quite clear why he disliked him at all.
It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of the grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations.
He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine with excitement,—but he did not seem to succeed,—over the subject of a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a lady's throat.
“I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. She's eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it today. It struck me she needed washing and drying.”
True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, “That's tremendously nice, Dick,” and stared into the fire with absent wistful eyes.
He drew nearer her and spoke lower, “Milly.”
“No, no! Don't begin on that!”
Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his disappointment.
“Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But I will, though!”
He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up under the trees at Hicks' barred window.
“Aidee's getting a black eye too in there,” he thought. “That's too bad.”
When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's bridge.