CHAPTER XXIV
SHE was right; the growth was now visibly upon the pleasant and substantial town, where all had once appeared to be so settled and so finished; for, just as with some of man’s disorders that develop slowly, at first merely hinting in mild prophetic symptoms, then becoming more sinister, and attacking one member after another until the whole body writhes and alters, so it is with this disorder that comes racking the midland towns through distortions and turmoil into the vaster likenesses of cities: haphazard and insignificant destructions begin casually, but gradually grow more sweeping and more violent until the victim town becomes aware of great crashings;—and then lies choking in a cloud of dust and smoke wherein huge new excrescences appear.
Cameras of the new age sometimes record upon strips of moving film the slow life of a plant from the seed to the blossoming of its flower; and then there is thrown upon the screen a picture in which time is so quickened that the plant is seen in the very motions of its growth, twisting itself out of the ground and stretching and swelling to its maturity, all within a few minutes. So might a film record be made of the new growth bringing to full life a quiet and elderly midland town; but the picture would be dumfounding. Cyclone, earthquake, and miracle would seem to stalk hand-in-hand upon the screen; thunder and avalanche should play in the orchestra pit.
In such a picture, block after block of heavy old mansions would be seen to topple; row on row of stout buildings would vanish almost simultaneously; families would be shown in flight, carrying away their goods with them from houses about to crumble; miles of tall trees would be uprooted; the earth would gape, opening in great holes and long chasms;—the very streets would unskin themselves and twist in agony; every landmark would fly dispersed in powder upon the wind, and all old-established things disappear.
Such a picture would be but the truth with time condensed;—that is to say, the truth made like a man’s recollection of events—and yet it would not be like the truth as the truth appeared to Daniel Oliphant and the other men who made the growth, nor like their subsequent memories. For these men saw, not the destruction, but only the city they were building; and they shouted their worship of that vision and were exultant in the uproar. They shouted as each new skyscraper rose swimming through the vast drifts of smoke, and shouted again as the plain, clean, old business streets collapsed and the magnificent and dirty new ones climbed above the ruins. They shouted when business went sweeping outward from its centre, tearing away the houses where people had lived contentedly for so long; and they shouted again as the new factory suburbs marched upon the countryside, far and wide, and the colossal black plumes of new chimneys went undulating off into a perpetual smoke-mist, so that the distant level plain seemed to be a plain surrounding not a city, but an ever-fuming volcano.
Once again, in the interminably cycling repetition of the new displacing the old, then becoming the old and being displaced in turn, an old order was perishing. The “New Materialism” that had begun to grow with the renewed growing of the country after the Civil War, and staggered under the Panic of ’73, but recovered and went on growing egregiously, had become an old materialism now. It had done great things and little things. Amongst the latter, it had furnished Europe with a caricature type of the American—the “successful American business man.” On the shelf, beside the figure of the loud-tweeded Boxing Briton with his “side whiskers,” Europe set the lank-and-drawling, chin-bearded, palace-buying Boaster of the Almighty Dollar, the Yankee of the great boom period.
That had been a great railroad-making and railroad-breaking period; the great steel period; the great oil period; the great electric-invention period; the great Barnum-and-Bunkum period; the period of “corrupt senators”; of reform; and of skyscrapers thirty stories high. All this was old now, routed by a newer and more gorgeous materialism. The old had still its disciplines for the young and its general appearance of piety; bad children were still whipped sometimes, and the people of best reputation played no games on Sunday, but went to church and seemed to believe in God and the Bible with almost the faith of their fathers. But many of these people went down with their falling houses; a new society, swarming upward above the old surfaces, became dominant. It began to breed, among other things, a new critic who attacked every faith, and offered, instead of mysteries, full knowledge of all creation as merely a bit of easily comprehended mechanics. And in addition to discovering the secret of the universe, the new society discovered golf, communism, the movies, and the turkey trot; it spread the great American cocktail over the whole world, abolished horses, and produced buildings fifty stories high.
. . . The slow beginnings of the new growth in the town had been imperceptible except to a few exuberant dreamers—the most persistent somnambulist of whom was Dan Oliphant—but now that the motion was daily more visible to all men, there was no stopping it. Hard times and prosperity were all one to it;—it marched, and so did its chief herald and those who went shouting before it with him, while the “old conservative business men,” the Shelbys and Rowes and John P. Johnses, sat shaking their heads and muttering “Gamblers!”
Gamblers, or destroying angels, or prophets, whatever they were, they went trampling forward in thunder and dust. The great Sheridan, of the Trust Company and the Pump Works, had joined them. Unscrupulous and noisiest of the noisy, he was like a war band drumming and brassily trumpeting with the vanguard. There was Eugene Morgan who had begun building the “Morgan Car” when automobiles were a joke, and now puffed forth from his long lanes of shops black smoke that trailed off unendingly to the horizon that it dimmed. Pendleton, of the new “Pendleton Tractor,” marched with these, and old Sam Kohn and Sol Kohn and Sam Kohn, Junior—the Kohns were tearing down the Amberson Block, the very centre and business temple of the old town, the corner of National Avenue and First Street—and there were the Rosenberg Brothers, apartment builders who would buy and obliterate half a dozen solid old houses at a time. There were the Schmidts, the Reillys, the younger Johnsons, third generation of the old firm of Abner Johnson’s Sons, and there were the Caldinis, the Comiskeys, and the Hensels, as well as all the never-resting optimists who had come to the town from farms and villages to blast it into nothingness and build their own city and build themselves into it.
In the din of all the tearing down and building up, most of the old family names were not heard, or were heard but obscurely, or perhaps in connection with misfortunes; for many of the old families were vanishing. They and their fathers and grandfathers had slowly made the town; they had always thought of it as their own, and they had expected to sit looking out upon it complacently forever from the plate glass of their big houses on National Avenue and the two other streets parallel to the avenue and nearest it. They had built thick walls round themselves, these “old families,” not only when they built the walls of their houses, but when they built the walls encircling their close association with one another. The growth razed all these walls; the “sets” had resisted the “climbers,” but the defences fell now; and those who had sheltered behind them were dispersed, groping for one another in the smoke.
It was Dan Oliphant who began the destruction of National Avenue. Among the crumbling families were the Vertreeses;—they retired to what was left of their country estate, which had already been overtaken by the expanding town and compressed to half an acre. Dan bought the old Vertrees Mansion on National Avenue, tore it down and built upon its site a tremendous square box of concrete fronted with glass—the “sales building” of the “Ornaby Four, the Car of Excellent Service.” This was just across the street from where his grandmother had lived, and Harlan protested long and loudly; but Dan was too busy to give his brother a complete attention. He said mildly that his new building seemed at least an improvement upon the shabby boarding-house, which the Vertrees Mansion had become when he bought it; and, when Harlan hotly denied the improvement, Dan sat listening with an expression of indulgence, the while occupying his mind with computations concerning other matters.
For, as Martha had felt, these were his great days, and he was “in on” everything. The Earl of Ornaby was earl of more than Ornaby now; Ornaby and the “Ornaby Four” were but two of the adventurous fleets he had at sea. He was “in on” a dozen “promotions” at once; “in on” the stock of new “industrials”; inventors and exploiters lived at his office doors. And although all of his fellow-hustlers used the phrase, none could say “my city” with a greater right than he. When he began one of his boostings with, “I believe first of all in my own city,” the voice of a religion was heard. He was his city; he was its spirit, and more than any other he was its guide, and yet its slave and worshipper. He could not speak of it except with reverence, nor go on speaking of it long unless he made the eagle scream.
He had become a juggler of money, which poured streaming into one hand as fast as he hurled it aloft with the other. He was one of those men of whom it is said, “Nobody knows what he’s worth. He couldn’t tell you, himself, to save his life!” He was called “rich,” and sometimes he was said to be the richest man in town. He juggled with money, with land, with houses, with skyscrapers, and with factories, keeping them all in the air at once; and his brother said that even so, Dan still “danced the tight-rope,” maintaining his balance dangerously during the juggling. Meanwhile, as he balanced and tossed the glittering and ponderous things through the air, the rest of the deafening show went on; the hustling and booming and boosting moving round and round him in clouds of dust to the sound of brass bands, while crowds gazed marvelling up at the juggler, and admired and envied him.
Of all the admirers who now looked up to him, cheering, probably the most enthusiastic was his brother-in-law, George McMillan, whom Dan had made “General Manager of the Ornaby Four.” George had not quite fulfilled his own prediction that at forty he was to be a “drunken broker”; but he had come, as he said, “near enough to it”; and he was glad when Dan finally sent for him and his designer of a new gasoline engine, the prospective “Ornaby Four.”
“It’s the greatest idea in the world,” George told his sister. “It’s cheap, but not the cheapest; it doesn’t compete with the commonest little cars, nor, on the other hand, with even the moderately expensive ones. It’s got a place of its own in between, where there are millions of people that can afford a little better car than the cheapest, but wouldn’t dream of a luxurious one like the ‘Morgan.’ It was an inspiration of Dan’s to set the price of the ‘Ornaby’ at eight hundred and eighty-five dollars. I like the sense of adventure you get in a game like this. I like getting out of my New York, and I like the way things move in a place so friendly as this. It’s immensely alive, but somehow it does manage to be friendly, too. I don’t understand why you’ve always hated it so.”
She explained that she had hated it less when she was in Europe, where she had at last got her year, having taken young Henry with her in spite of her husband’s strong protest. The mother and son had just returned. “I think I could stand the place perfectly well, George,” she said, “if I were quite sure I’d never have to see it again!”
“But don’t you begin to understandyetwhat a husband you’ve got?” George cried. “Why, he’s a great man, Lena!”
Lena laughed and looked at him pityingly; but contented herself with that for argument. To her mind Dan was not made great by becoming the great figure of a city that was merely growing larger, noisier, and dirtier. She had never cared for anything but Beauty, she said; and, to her mind, as to that of the fastidious Harlan, Dan was only helping to increase hideousness; so she joined her brother-in-law in habitually referring to “Ornaby the Beautiful” as “Ornaby the Horrible.” Moreover, although she had never manifested any interest in National Avenue before its destruction began, she became almost vehement upon the subject of its merit as the razing of its old houses continued; and Harlan was again in agreement with her here.
“You and Eugene Morgan and that rascally old Sheridan and your Jew friends are doing an awful thing,” he said to Dan at a family dinner. “You’re ruining the one decent thing the city possessed—a splendid, dignified old street. It’s happening all over the country—one doesn’t need half an hour in New York to see that Fifth Avenue is ruined; but I did think we might have escaped here. I doubt if it would ever have occurred to Morgan to put up his awful sales building—with a repair shop in it!—on National Avenue, if you hadn’t done it first. Then the others thought they had to follow; and if something isn’t done to stop you fellows, the whole avenue will be nothing but a mile row of motor-car sales buildings and pneumatic tire warehouses and garages—a market!—and with hundred-foot smoke-stacks! It may reach even here to our old house and the Shelbys’; and already you’ve made the peaceful neighbourhood aroundmyhouse horrible. I’d like to know what grandma Savage would have said about the things you people have done to this town! Why, you’ve made National Avenue begin to look like an old pipe-smoking hag’s mouth with every other tooth missing and the rest sticking up all black in the smoke.”
Dan laughed absent-mindedly, but remained impervious. Like the ardent Sheridan, he loved the smoke, called it “Prosperity,” and drew his lungs full of it, breathing in it the glory of his city. More and more, the city became his city, and with all his juggling and tight-rope dancing he found time to be mayor of it for a year, and to begin the “Park System” that was afterwards to bring so much beauty to it. One day he drove his father over the ground he had planned to include in this chain of groves and meadows; and he was glad afterwards that they had made the excursion together.
“It’ll be a great thing for the city,” his father said, as Dan’s car turned homeward with them. “It’s a great thing for you to do and to be remembered by. You were a good boy, Dan; and you’re a good man and a good citizen. You serve your fellow-men well, I think.”
Dan laughed, a little embarrassed by this praise; but although Mr. Oliphant perceived his son’s embarrassment, he had more to say, and went on with something like timidity, yet with a gentle persistence: “I’d like to tell you another thing, Dan. It’s something your mother and I never felt we ought to talk about to you, but I believe I’ll mention it to you to-day. We—you see your mother and I have always thought there’s a danger sometimes in letting a person see that you sympathize with him, because it might make him feel that he’s unhappy, or in trouble, whereas, if you just leave him to himself he may go on cheerfully enough and never think about it. But Iwouldlike to tell you—I’d like to say——”
He paused, and Dan asked: “You’d like to say what, sir?”
“Well—I’d like just to tell you that your mother and I think you’ve always been as kind as you could to Lena.”
Surprised, Dan stared at him; and Mr. Oliphant gravely and affectionately returned his look. “Yes, sir,” the son said awkwardly. “I hope so. Thank you, sir.” And he thought that the handsome, kind old face seemed whiter and more fragile than usual.
That was natural, Dan told himself; people couldn’t help growing old, and they grew whiter and thinner as age came upon them; but age didn’t necessarily mean ill-health. For that matter, his father hadn’t nearly reached a really venerable old age; he was more than a decade younger than old-hickory Shelby, who still never missed a day’s work. Nevertheless, there had been something a little disquieting in Mr. Oliphant’s manner; it was as if he had thought that perhaps he might never have another chance to say what he had said;—and that night, on the train to which he had hurried after their drive, Dan thought about his father often.
He thought about him often, too, the next day, in New York; and during the conferences there with the landscape architects who were designing the new parks, his thoughts went uneasily westward;—not to the green stretches of grove and sward that were to be, but to the quiet old man who had walked so slowly between the tall white gateposts after bidding his son good-bye. Recalling this, it seemed to Dan that he had never before seen him walk so slowly; and he went over in his mind, for the fiftieth time, his father’s manner in speaking of Lena—the slight, timid insistence, as if there might never be another opportunity to say something he had always wished to say. It had given what he said the air of a blessing bestowed—and of a valedictory.
Thus Dan’s vague uneasiness grew, and although he scolded himself for it, and told himself he was imaginative beyond reason, he could not be rid of it. That was well for him; since such uneasiness may be of help when life is like a path whereon tigers leap from nowhere, as it is, sometimes;—the wayfarer will not avoid wounds, but may better survive them for having been in some expectance of them.
For a year Mr. Oliphant’s heart had been “not just what it ought to be”; but he told no one that this was his physician’s report to him. Harlan’s telegram reached New York just as Dan was starting home. Mr. Oliphant had indeed taken his last opportunity to say what he had so long wished to say, for now the kind heart beat no longer;—but he had died proud of his son.
CHAPTER XXV
NEITHER Mr. Oliphant’s daughter-in-law nor his grandson was at home at the time of his death. Lena had gone abroad again, for a “three-months’ furlough,” as she called it; and again in spite of Dan’s vehement protest that the boy “ought to see his own country first,” she had taken Henry with her.
“I wouldn’t mind it so much,” Dan said to her before they went;—“but you never even stop off and show him Niagara Falls when you take him to New York to visit your family; and when I want to take him withme, you always say he’s got a cold or something and has to stay at home. It seems to me pretty near a disgrace for parents to carry their children all over Europe and pay no attention to the greatest natural wonders in the world, right here at home. My father and mother went to Europe with Harlan and me, but not before they’d taken us to see Mammoth Cave and Niagara Falls. Why, it’d takefiveEuropes to give me the thrill I got the first time I ever looked at the Falls! It’s not fair to Henry, and besides, look what it does to his school work! He picked up some French, yes, the other time you had him over there; but he dropped a whole year in his classes. And how much French is he goin’ to need when I take him into business with me? Not a thimbleful in a lifetime! He’s the best boy I ever knew and got the finest nature; and he ought to be given the opportunity to learn something about his own country instead of too much Paris!”
This patriotic vehemence went for nothing, since Henry intended to accompany his mother and announced his intentions with a firmness that left his father nothing to do but grumble helplessly, while Lena laughed. At fifteen, Henry had his precocities, and among them a desire (not mentioned) to revisit the Bal Tabarin, as he retained a pleasant memory of a quiet excursion to this entertainment, during his previous travels, when he was twelve and already influential with Parisian hotel guides. Lena had her way, and, having placed the ocean between herself and further argument on the part of her husband, remained twice as long as the “furlough” she had proposed. She did not return until Dan’s term as mayor was concluded, four months after Mr. Oliphant’s death.
When she finally did arrive, her appearance was mollifying;—she had always looked far less than her age, and now, fresh from amazing cosmetic artists, and brilliantly studied by superb milliners, she was prettier than she had ever been. Strangers would have believed a firm declaration that she was twenty-four; she knew this, and her homecoming mood was lively—but when Dan within the hour of her arrival wished to drive her out to Ornaby to see the new house, which he had at last begun to build, after years of planting and landscaping, she declined. Her look of gayety vanished into the faraway expression that had always come upon her face when the new house was mentioned.
“Not to-day,” she said. “I’m not so sure we ought to go ahead with it at all. I don’t think we ought to leave your mother; she’d be too lonely in the old house now—living here all alone.”
“But I never dreamed of such a thing,” Dan protested. “She’ll come with us, of course. This old place is going to be sold before long; I’ve just about talked her into it, and she can get real money for it now. Land along here is worth something mighty pretty these days. Why, Fred Oliphant’s family got seven hundred a front foot for their place three months ago, and an absolutely magnificent office-building for doctors is goin’ to be put up there. They’ve got the foundations all in and the first story’s almost up already. That’s only two blocks below here; and I can get mother almost any price she wants. I’d buy it myself and sell it again, only I wouldn’t like to feel I’d taken advantage of her. Why don’t you come on out now with Henry and me and take a look at our own doin’s? It’ll surprise you!”
“Oh, some day,” she said, the absent look not disappearing from her eyes. “I’d rather lie down now, I believe. You run along with Henry.”
Henry showed no great enthusiasm about accompanying his father, and when they arrived at the new house seemed indifferent to the busy work going on there. Dan was loud and jocose with him, slapping him on the back at intervals, and inquiring in a shout how it felt to “be back in God’s country again.” Upon each of these manifestations, Henry smiled with a politeness somewhat constrained, replying indistinctly; and, as they went over the building, now in a skeleton stage of structure, Dan would stop frequently and address a workman with hearty familiarity: “Look what I got with me, Shorty! Just got him back all the way from Europe! How’dyoulike to have a boy as near a man as this? Pretty fine! Yes, sir; pretty fine, Shorty!” And he would throw his ponderous arm about his son’s thin shoulders, and Henry would bear the embrace with a bored patience, but move away as soon as he could find an excuse to do so.
He was a dark, slender, rather sallow boy, short for the sixteen years he verged upon, though his face, with its small and shapely features, like his mother’s, looked older and profoundly reticent. It was one of those oldish young faces that seem too experienced not to understand the wisdom of withholding everything; and Henry appeared to be most of all withholding when he was with his boisterous, adoring father. Obviously this was not because the boy had any awe of Dan. On the contrary, as one of the friendly and admiring carpenters observed, “The Big Fellow, he’s so glad to have that son of his back he just can’t keep his hands off him; wants to jest hug him all the time, and it makes the kid tired. Well, I can remember when I was like that—thought I knew it all, and my old man didn’t know nothin’! I expect this kid does know a few things the Big Fellow doesn’t know he knows, mebbe! Looks like that kind of a kid to me.”
The estimate was not ill-founded, as Henry presently demonstrated. Escaping from his father’s fond and heavy arm, he seated himself upon a slab of carved stone, produced a beautiful flat gold case, the size and shape of a letter envelope, and drew from it a tiny cigarette of a type made in France for women.
Dan stared at him, frowned, and inquired uncomfortably, but with some severity: “Don’t you think you’re too young for that, Henry?”
“Young?” Henry seemed to be mildly surprised as he lighted the cigarette. “No, I shouldn’t think so. I’ve smoked for quite some time now, you know.”
“No; I certainly didn’t know.”
“Oh, yes,” Henry returned placidly. “It’s years since I first began it.”
“Well, but see here——” Dan began; then paused, reddening. “I don’t believe it’ll be very good for your health,” he concluded feebly.
“My health’s all right,” the youth said, with an air that began to be slightly annoyed. “Mother’s known I smoked a long while.”
“Well, but——” Dan stopped again, his embarrassment increasing and his perplexity increasing with it as he remembered that he himself had smoked at fifteen, surreptitiously. “Well——” he began again, after a pause, during which Henry blew a beautifully formed little smoke ring. “Well——”
“Yes, sir?”
“Well——” Dan said. “Well, I’m glad if you do smoke, you do it openly, anyhow.”
“Yes, sir?” Henry returned, with a slight accent of surprise that suggested his inability to perceive any reason for not smoking openly. Then, regarding the incident as closed, he asked: “I suppose you’ll put up a garage in proportion to the house, won’t you? It’s about time I had a car of my own, don’t you think, sir?”
“I expect so,” Dan said, still uncomfortable. “I expect we’ll have to see about it before long. Anyhow, I would rather you did it openly, Henry. I—I don’t—I——” He stopped, in difficulties with a depth of feeling that affected his voice. “I—I don’t ever expect to be half as good a father to you, Henry, as my—as my own father was to me, but I—well, your uncle Harlan and I were afraid to smoke before him until we were almost grown up. We used to sneak out to the stable to smoke—or in alleys—and though my father was so much better a man than I am, and so much better a father to me than I can ever hope to be to you, I guess—I guess this is better, Henry. I mean I guess it’s better to have you open with me, like this. It’s an advance, I expect. I don’t know why we were afraid to smoke before father; he never whipped us and he was the kindest man—the best—the best father that ever——” He was unable to continue; and Henry glanced up to see him, red-faced and swallowing, struggling with an emotion that made the boy wonder what in the world was the matter with him.
“I suppose he was, probably,” Henry said. “How about that car? Don’t you think I might as well have it pretty soon? How about this week’s being as good as any other time?”
Dan recovered himself, smiled, and patted his son’s shoulder. “I expect so, maybe. We’ll drive down to our agents on the avenue before we go home.”
And at this Henry proved that he could still show some animation. He sprang up, shouting. “Ya-ay!” he cried. “Vive le sport!” And he leaped into the big Morgan limousine that stood waiting for them in the cluttered driveway. “Come on!” he shouted. “I’ll show you how to shoot a little life into this old town!”
Rising from her nap, an hour later, Lena looked from her window and saw them returning. Henry was still animated, talking busily, and, as they came into the house, seemed willing to bear the weight of his father’s arm across his shoulders. The mother, looking down upon the pair, smiled thoughtfully to herself;—she was not more indulgent with the boy than his father was; but she knew that Henry was more hers than he was his father’s. He had always been so, because of some chord of subtle understanding struck by her nature and Henry’s. She had sometimes been in a temper with him when he was a noisy little boy, but as he grew older she had begun to feel only amusement over his naughtinesses, because she understood them so well;—she laughed at him sometimes, but had long since ceased to chide him. She had no blame for him, and she knew that he would never find fault with her, no matter what she did. They had a mysterious comprehension of each other—a comprehension so complete that they had never needed to speak of it.
She heard him chattering to his grandmother in the hall downstairs, and knew by his tone that his father had bought him something, of which the boy would presently tell her;—she remained standing beside the closed window, waiting for him to come in with his news. Then, as she stood there, a gust drove down a multitude of soot flakes from the smokestack of an apartment house that had been built near by, on the cross street just south of the Oliphants’, while she was away. After the soot, which flecked the window, the smoke itself descended, enveloping the house so thickly that the window became opaque. Sounds were not shut out, however, and she could still hear all too well the chattering of a steam drill at work across the street, where a public garage was being built. She frowned at the noise, for the drill had disturbed her sleep; and so had the almost unceasing rumble of trucks passing the house; and so had the constant yelp of automobile signals rasping at one another for right of way.
The smoke thinned out, revealing the busy street that had been so different when she had first looked forth upon it from this same window, a bride. She remembered how quiet it had been then—and suddenly she spoke aloud.
“Well, I’m still here!”
Then she laughed softly, as her eyes wandered to the north, crossed the iron picket fence that divided the Oliphants’ yard from the Shelbys’, and beheld the fountain swan. He was green no longer; his colour was that of the smoke; and though he still shot a crystal spray, the flying water was the only clean thing about him, or in sight.
“Ridiculous old beast!” Lena said; but there was no bitterness in her tone. It was a long time since she had felt jealous of Martha; and, although she often told Harlan that Martha would never marry him, “because she still hopes Dan’ll be a widower some day,” the warning had come to be merely jocular, without intended sting. Moreover, she practised the same raillery with her brother after he had taken up his residence in the town; for George offered himself as a rival to Harlan in the half-serious manner of a portly bachelor of forty mildly courting a contemporary.
Lena repeated her opinion of the swan. “Ridiculous old beast!” This time she did not murmur the words as before; but spoke them in her mind, and she immediately followed them with others, the connection being made without any more feeling than she had about the swan. Her thought was merely speculative, even a little compassionate: “I suppose she does still hope it, poor old thing! She thinks maybe, if I leave him——”
But Henry came in with the news of his father’s munificence, and interrupted this thought that had been in her mind ever since the night of Martha’s return from the long absence in Italy. Throughout all the long time since then, there had always been in Lena’s mind a conviction, however obscured or half-forgotten, that some day she would leave her husband.
CHAPTER XXVI
SHE was mistaken about Martha, who never had the definite hope Lena’s imagination attributed to her. Martha was steadfast because she could not help it, having been born with this endowment evidently; and her tenderness for the boy she had loved so heartily was imperishable; but the Dan Oliphant of the middle years did not seem to her to be that boy. What she felt for the big middle-aged man, she felt only because he had long ago been the beloved youth; she was not in love with him, nor with anybody. This was the explanation she still found it necessary to make to his brother about once a year—usually on New Year’s Day; for it was Harlan’s habit to select that hopeful anniversary as a good time to dwell a little upon his patience.
“You call it your patience, but it became only your habit long ago,” she told him. “It would really unsettle you badly if I ever said I’d marry you, Harlan; and it would unsettle you even more if I not only said I would, but went ahead and did it. You’d find you’d never forgive me for upsetting your routine. If we were married, where in the world would you evergo? You haven’t been anywhere for so long, except to see me, that you’d be left without the destination you’ve been accustomed to. It’s gallant of you to still mention your willingness, every now and then, and I own up that I rather expect it and should miss it if you didn’t; but if you want to marry, you ought to look about for—well, say a pretty widow of twenty-nine, Harlan. She’d be better for you than one of the ‘buds,’ though you could have whichever you chose;—they’d jump at the chance! The trouble with me is that I’m too old—and I’m horribly afraid I look my age.”
The fear was warranted, though it need not have been a fear. She had escaped the portliness that seemed to threaten her at thirty, and had escaped too far, perhaps; but her thinness was not angular; and if she looked her age, then that age was no more than a pleasantly responsible age, as Harlan told her, and neither a careworn nor a gray-haired age. In fact, it must be the perfect age, he said—and he wondered if it mightn’t be as kind as it looked, and be the perfect age for him.
At that, she became more serious. “I’m surprised at myself every year I grow older,” she said. “I’m so much more romantic than I was at twenty, and it seems I keep growing more so. At twenty how I’d have laughed if I’d heard of a woman of forty who said she couldn’t marry because she was in love with no one! I suppose what would have struck me as funniest would have been the idea of a woman of forty talking about marrying at all.”
She was “in love with no one,” but she could still be Harlan’s brother’s champion, if need arose; and after George McMillan took up his residence in the town, and began his mild rivalry, she had this amiable bachelor to second her. Moreover, it is to be admitted for her that she, who in the bloom of youth had never known how to display the faintest symptoms of coquetry, now sometimes enjoyed tokens of disturbance unwillingly exhibited by Harlan when the rival appeared to win an advantage. McMillan, dark and growing a little bald, counterbalanced what was lacking above by a decoration below already rare in the land, but not yet a curiosity, a Van Dyke beard, well suited to his face. In manner, too, he was equal to the flavour of a fine old portrait, and he had spoken from his childhood in the accent Harlan had carefully acquired. Thus the latter was sometimes but too well encountered on his own ground.
He met one of these defeats in an early April twilight when he had expected to find Martha alone, as he knew a meeting of the board of directors of the “Ornaby Four” had been called for that evening, and George McMillan was a member of the board. The air was warm with one of the misplacements of this season, when sometimes a midsummer day wanders from its proper moorings and irrationally ascends almost to the chilly headwaters of spring. Martha was upon the veranda, occupied with a fan and the conversation of Mr. McMillan when Harlan arrived; and the newcomer was so maladroit as to make his disappointed expectations plain.
“I thought you had a directors’ meeting,” he said, almost with his greeting and before he had seated himself in one of the wicker chairs brought out upon the veranda by the unseasonable warmth. “I thought there was——”
George assented placidly. “There was, but it couldn’t be held. Our president had to go to another one that he’s president of—the Broadwood Interurban. It’s in difficulties, I’m afraid, because of too high wages and too much competition by motorcycles and small cars. I hope Dan can straighten it out.”
“I hope so,” Harlan said. “That is, strictly as his brother I hope so. As a human being still trying to exist in what was once a comfortable house, I might take another attitude. I live deep in the downtown district now, for my worst sins, and those long Broadwood cars screech every hour, night and day, on a curve not a hundred yards from my library.” He sighed. “But why should I waste my breath, still complaining? It all grows steadily worse and worse, year after year, and if one happens to like living in a city in his own native land, there’s nowhere to escape to. I suppose National Avenue—poor thing, look at the wreck of it!—I say I suppose it couldn’t have hoped to escape the fate of Fifth Avenue; for the same miserable ruction is going on all over the country. My illustrious brother and his kind have ruined everything that was peaceful and everything that was clean—they began by murdering the English language, and now they’ve murdered all whiteness. Beauty is dead.”
“Isn’t that only a question of your definition?” McMillan inquired.
“Why is it?”
“For one reason, because everything’s a question of definitions.”
“No, it isn’t,” Harlan returned somewhat brusquely; and Martha sat in silence, amused to perceive that her two callers had straightway resumed a tilting not infrequent when they met. A lady’s part was only to preside at the joust. “There’s only one definition of beauty,” Harlan added to his contradiction.
“What is it?”
“The one Athens believed in.”
“It won’t do for that brother of yours,” his antagonist returned. “The Greeks are dead, and you can’t tie Dan and his sort down to a dead definition. The growth isn’t beautiful to you, but it is to them, or else they wouldn’t make it. Of course you’re sure you’re right about your own definition, but they’re so busy making whatthey’re sure is beautiful they don’t even know that anybody disagrees with them. It won’t do you the slightest good to disagree with them, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve got everything in their hands,” George McMillan replied cheerfully;—“and they’re too busy to listen to any one who isn’t making something besides criticisms.”
“And for that reason,” Harlan began, “all of us who care for what’s quiet and cool and charming in life are to hold our peace and let——”
He was interrupted, unable to make himself heard because of a shattering uproar that came from beyond the iron fence to the south. A long and narrow motor car, enamelled Chinese red, stood in the Oliphants’ driveway, and an undersized boy of sixteen had just run out of the house and jumped into the driver’s seat. Dusk had not fallen darkly; he saw the group upon the neighbouring veranda well enough, but either thought it too much effort to salute Martha and his uncles, or was preoccupied with the starting of his car;—he gave no sign of being aware of them. Evidently the unmuffled machine-gun firing of his exhaust was delightful to his young ears, for he increased its violence to the utmost, although the noise was unlawful, and continued it as he shot the car down the drive, out of the gates and down the street at a speed also unlawful.
“There, at least,” Harlan said, “is something of which criticism might possibly be listened to with good effect—even by my busy brother.”
But George laughed and shook his head. “No. That’s the very last thing he’d allow you to criticize. He’d only tell you that Henry is ‘the finest young man God ever made!’ In fact, that’s what he told me yesterday evening when I dined there; and I had more than a suspicion I’d caught a whiff of something suggesting a cocktail from our mutual nephew, as he came in for a hurried dinner between speedings. But that isn’t Dan’s fault.”
“Yes, it is,” Harlan said. “Giving a sixteen-year-old boy a car like that!”
“No, the fault is my sister’s. What’s a boy to do when his mother keeps him hanging around Paris so long in the autumn that it’s too late for him to make up his class-work, and he has only a tutor to cajole? I don’t blame Henry much. In fact, the older I grow the less I blame anything.”
“No?” Harlan said. “I’m afraid the world won’t get anywhere very fast unless there are some people to point out its mistakes.”
But the other bachelor jouster was not at all disconcerted by this reproof, nor by the tone of it, which was incautiously superior. “By George, Oliphant, I alwayshavebelieved you were really a true Westerner under that surface of yours! The way you said ‘the world won’t get anywhere very fast’ was precisely in the right tone. You’re reverting to type, and if the reversion doesn’t stop I shan’t be surprised to hear of your breathing deep of the smoke and calling it ‘Prosperity’ with the best of them!”
Harlan was displeased. “I suppose the smoke comes under your definition of beauty, too, doesn’t it?”
“It isn’t my definition,” George explained. “I was groping for Dan’s. Yes, I think the smoke’s beautiful to him because he believes it means growth and power, and he thinks they’re beautiful.”
“I dare say. Would you consider it a rational view for any even half-educated man to hold—that soft-coal smoke is beautiful? Do you think so, Martha, when it makes pneumonia epidemic, ruins everything white that you have in your house and everything white that you wear? Do you?”
“It’s pretty trying,” she answered, as a conscientious housewife, but added hopefully: “We’ll get rid of it some day, though. So many people are complaining of it I’m sure they’ll do something about it before long.”
Harlan laughed dryly, for he had hoped she would say that. “I’ve been re-reading John Evelyn’s diary,” he said. “Evelyn declared the London smoke was getting so dreadful that a stop would have to be put to it somehow. The king told him to devise a plan for getting rid of it, and Evelyn set about it quite hopefully. That was in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Evelyn is dead, but the smoke’s still there.”
“And yet,” George McMillan said coolly, “I’m told they’ve made quite a place of London, in spite of that!”
Martha laughed aloud, and Harlan was so unfortunate as to be annoyed. “It seems rather a childish argument in view of the fact that we sit here in the atmosphere of what might well be a freight yard,” he said; and, turning to Martha he spoke in a lowered voice, audible to his opponent, yet carrying the implication that McMillan was excluded from the conference. “My committee have at last got the symphony organization completed,” he said. “The orchestra knows it can depend on a reliable support now, and the first concert will be two weeks from to-night. I hope you won’t mind going with me.”
“No; I won’t mind,” she said, and hospitably explained to McMillan: “We’ve been trying for years to expand our week of the ‘April Festival’ into something more permanent. Mr. Oliphant has done most of the work, and it’s really a public service. It will be good news for your sister;—I understand she’s always felt we were a lost people, in music particularly.”
“We’ll have a start at any rate,” Harlan said, as he rose to go. “That is, if the smoke doesn’t throttle our singers. Venable is back from South America and there ought to be some interest to hear him.”
“Venable?” George repeated. “Did you say Venable?”
“Yes; the baritone. He’s still just in his prime; at least so his agent says. Have you ever heard him?”
“Long ago,” the other returned. “I——” He stopped abruptly.
“Did you know him?” Martha asked.
“No. That is, I had a short interview with him once, but—no, I shouldn’t say I know him.” He rose, in courtesy to the departing Harlan, and extended his hand. “You mustn’t wait behind the next corner and leap out on me with a bowie-knife, Oliphant,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be such a disagreeable arguer.”
“Not at all,” Harlan returned, somewhat coldly, though he added an effect of geniality to his departure by a murmur of laughter, and got away without any further emphasis upon his disappointment at finding his rival in possession. The latter gentleman, however, made little use of the field left open to him. Not long after Harlan had gone Martha noticed that her remaining guest seemed to be rather absent-minded, and she rallied him upon it.
“I’m afraid you thrive upon conflict, Mr. McMillan.”
“Why?”
“Peace doesn’t seem to stimulate you—or elseIdon’t! You’ve hardly spoken since Mr. Oliphant left. I’m afraid you’re——”
“You’re afraid I’m what?” he said, as she paused; and although the dusk had fallen now, it was not too dark for her to see that his preoccupation was serious.
“Are you troubled about anything?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I thought you looked——”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s nothing. Perhaps I am a little bothered,” he admitted. “But it’s only about business.”
“Not about the ‘Ornaby Four?’ ” she said, surprised. “I thought it was established as a tremendous success.”
“Oh, it is,” he assured her promptly. “It is. It’s an extraordinary little car and nothing can stop it—except temporarily. It’s bound to climb over any little temporary difficulties. We may have made mistakes, but they won’t amount to anything in the long run.”
“You say youhavemade mistakes?”
“Not until this year, and even then nothing we can’t remedy. You see Dan’s a great fellow for believing in almost anything that’s new, and an inventor came along last summer with a new type of friction clutch; and we put it in our car. Then I’m afraid we built a fairly enormous number of ‘Fours’ during the winter, but you see we were justified in that, because we knew there’d be a demand for them.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Oh, yes; there was. But——” he paused; then went on: “Well, the people haven’t seemed to like the new clutch, and that gives us rather a black eye for the time being. Of course we’re going to do our best to straighten things out; we’ll put our old clutch back on all the new cars, but——”
He paused uncomfortably again, and she inquired: “But won’t that make everything all right again?”
“Oh, yes—after a time. The trouble is, I’m afraid it’s stopped our sales rather flat—for the time being, that is. You see, there’s a lot of money we expected would be pouring in on us about now—and it doesn’t pour. I’m not really worried, but I’m a little afraid Dan might need it, because his inter-urban ventures appear to have been—well, rather hazardous. You told me once that his brother’s description of him was ‘dancing on the tight-rope’ and in a way that’s not so far wrong. Of course he’ll pull through.” George suddenly struck the stone railing beside him a light blow with his open hand, and jumped up. “Good gracious! What am I doing but talking business to a lady on a spring evening? I knew I was in my dotage!” And he went to the steps.
“Wait,” Martha said hurriedly. “You don’t really think——”
“That Dan Oliphant’s affairs are in any real danger? No; of course not;—I don’t know what made me run on like that. Men go through these little disturbances every day; it’s a part of the game they play, and they don’t think anything about it. You can be sureheisn’t worrying. Did you ever know him to let such things stop him? He’s been through a thousand of ’em and walked over ’em. He’s absolutely all right.”
“You’re sure?” she said, as he went down the steps.
“He’s absolutely all right, and I’d take my oath to it,” George said; but he added: “That is, he is if the banks don’t call him.”
“If the banks don’t what?”
He laughed reassuringly. “If the banks don’t do something they have no reason to do and certainly won’t do. Good-night. I’m going to stop in next door and see my sister a little while before she goes to bed.”
His figure grew dimmer as he went toward the gate, and Martha, staring after him, began to be haunted by that mysterious phrase of his, “if the banks don’t call him.”