Landon, spreading over and between low hills, opened upon a bit of a
plain where furnaces were building. Shaggy, higher hills, called by
courtesy mountains, made sides of an amphitheater. In this direction
coal was being mined; in that, iron. Near at hand ran a muddy,
sluggish river crossed by an untriumphant bridge. The woods were
largely pine and small oak, the climate warmer than that I had left.
At this time the population of Landon might number three thousand.
That was two thousand more than had been in presence three years
earlier. The dwelling-houses, big and little, were frame, and there
were many little and very few big, and the big only so by contrast
with the others. The railway station was frame, the hotel, the two
churches. But the offices of the company of which General Warringer
was a director were brick, as were the Landon Bank and the company
stores. Brick, too, was the office of the Landon & Gulf Railway
Company. All these constituted themselves into finger-posts which
proclaimed: "Here is Solidity and Permanence. We point to a Future
in which we shall be larger--much larger--and stone!"
The company into whose service I came owned the mines, a range of
hills stuffed with coal, and a divergent range where iron outcropped.
It owned the furnaces being constructed; in great measure it owned
Landon. Its rival was a company seated eight miles up the river,
with other coal and iron ownings, furiously building a furnace beside
its own wooden town, with its own brick offices.
Ahasuerus and I descended from the train at Landon. About us was a
scrambling crowd, white men and negroes. A slight, blond young man
met me. "Mr. Forth?"
"Yes."
"I am Alec Battle, draftsman in the office here. Your chief asked me
to get you and pilot you about. That darky with you?"
"Yes. Ahasuerus Robertson. I'm responsible for him. He's all
right. He wants to drive a wagon."
"I'll turn him over to William at the office. You'll find a number
of Virginians here."
That proved true. The Landon Coal and Iron Company was built, to an
extent, with Northern capital, as the Landon & Gulf Railway Company
was built to an extent with Northern capital. But the working force
was predominantly Southern and drawn from almost every state below
Mason and Dixon. The president of the Landon Coal and Iron came
indeed from Pennsylvania, and the president of the Landon & Gulf from
Ohio. These gentlemen did not live at Landon. They came there in
private cars, visited for a few days, showed themselves very genial
with the generality, sometimes genial, sometimes the reverse with the
closeted few. Then the private car, at the end of the passenger
express, disappeared around the curve. But superintendent and
manager and down the line lived at Landon. The railway, too, was
building beyond, looking darkly meantime at the probable
construction, just across the river, of a competing feeler from the
Debenham & Atlantic. The sense of a career, of a future, hung
strongly over Landon. Go up the river those few miles to Parisia and
you encountered the like prophetic sense--for Parisia. But Parisia
granted for Landon no other career than one of disaster. And Landon
returned the compliment. They stood opposed like bulls with lowered
heads.... All this, and much besides, came later to my knowledge.
Now, in the moment, I left with Battle and Ahasuerus the dirty
station and stepped into the main street of Landon. There shone the
brightest autumn sunlight, from the bluest sky.
I have come to realize the ills of the world's present economic life,
and I with others strive after a more understandable and
understanding system. The sins and evils are great, and must be seen
and outgrown. Else smash--and smash again and again--and at last,
facing every one, the ugliest monster to be dealt with, and all the
power of dealing enfeebled! But I was in it, there and then, in the
system, not especially protesting, taking it for granted, working in
it with some cheerfulness, some conscience, and some aspiration, and
if with growing longings, growing doubts, yet with no crystalline
vision of direction out of it. And so, by my own experience, I know
that others, too, in the old system, worked with cheerfulness,
conscience, and aspiration. And yet how hedged, frontiered in,
continuously defeated, were the three! And most folk seemed unaware
of anything on the whole to change. Their individual satisfactions
ought to expand. The circumstances of themselves and their immediate
families ought to change. Nothing in the world with all of them was
so certain as that! There they worked toward change quite ardently
and arduously. But they thought of everything as happening in the
system. _I_ go up; then, relatively speaking at least, _you_ go
down. We didn't seem to be able to make good general. It was, they
seemed to think, on the whole God's system and the way the world was
made.... Unhappy world!
There was mistake, I think. But in this universe of power and joy so
much that is not mistake lives within us! So steadily does what
heaven we have gained work at heavenizing our earth! I feel mainly
now the lift in persons and things. I see that from imperfect
systems, syntheses, grow steadily the imperfect yet, but the more
perfect.... At Landon, for all the narrow serving, for all the
low-order social mechanism, for all our dim vision, dim alike with
educated and uneducated, official and laborer, we were not hopeless.
We had industry, pluck, vigor. We could laugh and clap a man upon
the back. We could show kindness. I remember now how many good folk
were there--in the offices, the bank, the churches, on the road, at
the furnaces, in the mines.
Battle and Ahasuerus and I went along Main Street. Under the bright
sunshine there fell a gilding cheerfulness over the shacks and
shanties, the Italian-kept fruit-stand, the colored barber standing
beside his barber-pole, the Chinaman ironing, the gold mortar and
pestle before a drug-store that might have gone into a pocket, the
buzz about a saloon.
"Have a drink?" asked Battle.
I shook my head. "No, I made a promise long ago."
"Well, you're lucky to have kept it!"
He pointed out as we went the more marked features of the town.
Every one whom we met, white and negro, spoke to him and he to them.
He placed many for me. "I've been here two years. Every one's
fastened together like a bead necklace. The company's the
string--the company and the Landon & Gulf. There's the office--but
I'm going to take you first to your boarding-place. You'll want to
get rid of your bags and see where you are. General Warringer's
mother was my father's second cousin. So we're kind of kin. Cousin
Harriet wrote to me to get you a good place to live in. This is the
best here."
We had turned at right angles and were going up a steep and dusty
side-street, or, rather, road. He indicated a large, rambling,
one-story house or considerable cottage behind maples and water-oaks.
It looked neatly kept, with a veranda, vines and flowers in a small
yard. "Mrs. Sayre's," he explained. "Doctor Sayre's legally, but
Mrs. Sayre's colloquially. They belong in this state, but they moved
from a plantation somewhere to Landon because they've got two sons
here with the company. Clerks. Bob and Ferry. The doctor is
crippled by rheumatism. He doesn't practise. Three-fourths of his
time he lies in a hammock and reads. She's a benevolent despot. You
can't help liking her. She's a captain housekeeper. I board here,
too. See that little cottage at the side? They own it. Four rooms
in it--yours, mine, Bob's, and Ferry's."
We mounted the veranda steps. A colored girl was sweeping away
fallen vine leaves. Behind her the house door stood hospitably open,
showing a hall with an old clock and two or three pictures. A large
lady in a pleasant, clean, and thin flowery gown, with a palm-leaf
fan in her hand, came toward us. So I met Mrs. Sayre, before whom my
mind still halts in a kind of half-humorous amazement and regard.
From Mrs. Sayre's--I never heard it called anything but that--I was
conveyed by Battle to the office. Mrs. Sayre capably disposed of
Ahasuerus. She had a cook and a man, Mirandy and Harris, who lived
in the alley. Landon already had alleys. Mirandy and Harris could
put Ahasuerus somewhere. If he was a handy man Mrs. Sayre could give
him work until his proper job appeared. Harris, summoned, took
Ahasuerus in charge. My room in the cottage--the big cottage was
called the house--proved small and furnished with a simplicity. But
it was fresh and clean, and one of its two windows gave a wide view
of eastern sky and of the last roofs of Landon, of plain and building
furnaces, river and hills.
Battle and I went down the street together and on to the office,
half-way between Mrs. Sayre's and the railway station. As we went he
discoursed various economic aspects of Landon. He did not use the
word "economic." It had not come perfectly into general use in the
eighth decade of the nineteenth century. The decade used an older
jargon. Words that are common to-day stayed at that time in learned
print. The labor at Landon was in mass negro, and one mine used
convict labor. The bosses, the foremen, petty heads of kinds, were,
of course, white, and chiefly American, though with a good sprinkling
of Irish and German. There was one gang of Italians. Mechanics,
carpenters, masons, etc., were white and mainly from Yankee-land and
Dixie. The clerical force, paymasters, commissary men, bookkeepers,
clerks, and so forth, appeared to have come from every state east of
the Mississippi. As for other citizens of Landon, here on their own,
there seemed an ethnic ruck of these. Jewish names, Greek, Chinese
emerged.... And there were certain ladies....
Battle looked aside at me. I shook my head. "The same promise. And
I do not want it, anyhow, any longer."
"Lucky man!" said Battle. "Oh, my Lord, it _is_ a net!"
The street was dusty, dirty; the sidewalk narrow, made of board and
fouled with torn paper, fruit peeling, tobacco juice. The east-bound
Landon & Gulf, puffing bituminous-coal smoke and with a loud-clanging
bell, went by out of Landon. Children were crying in a room above
the tintype man's booth. Farther down Mr. Abrahams stood in front of
his clothing-shop. "Goot day, frients!" he said, as we passed.
I looked about me. The exhilaration of the morning, arrival,
novelty, the sunshine, faded a little. "What's going to be here,
after all?"
Battle grew animated. "A big town! The biggest kind of big town.
There's enough coal and iron and limestone in these mountains to run
the United States! Presently there'll be blast-furnaces and
blast-furnaces. I can imagine it any night, with the sky all lit up.
The old Landon & Gulf won't be the only railroad, either, though it
would like to be! Parisia--" He gave the word with quite
indescribable scorn. "Parisia will take a back seat. She hasn't got
the capital or the brains. Landon's got both. We've grown a
thousand since last year." He took on an exalted look. "It's
coming.... Street-cars--electric light--ice-cream
parlors--theaters--bigger salaries--"
I saw in Battle, and was to see in many at Landon, the overflowing of
the personality over something growing. There collected a pool of
triumphing affection when the growing thing was esteemed friendly to
the self, but for the held-to-be-unfriendly a boding dislike
amounting at times to hatred. Fear of the growing thing always chose
contempt for disguise. Towns, industries, institutions, parties,
systems--points of view. The pale earth seedling bent the way it was
inclined, then proclaimed at once papal infallibility. "This, that,
with mathematical certitude, I know to favor me, is saved; this,
that, with like certainty, I am sure opposes me, is damned! And not
at all relatively so, but in the eternal Absolute. So, acclaiming
this growth, so, fighting and despising yonder growth, I with pride
become fanatic before the temple door!"
Well.... There is the joy of the fanatic!
We arrived before the office of the Landon Coal and Iron Company.
The building was brick, three-storied, quite well and widely paved in
front, with a big door, with rows of moderately clean windows, behind
which might be dimly seen much activity. Men stood in the doorway,
men went in and came out. The passageway which we entered felt most
gratefully cool after the midday sun. Battle turned toward a large
room to the right. "I'll introduce you to Colonel Ringgold. Then
we'll go up-stairs."
It was the general superintendent's office. Colonel Ringgold turned
in his swivel-chair. Large, saturnine, with a scar acquired at
Chickamauga running from brow to chin, he looked at me with intent
gray eyes. "Well, Mr. Forth! General Warringer says we must look
after you. Do you believe in reciprocity?"
"I do, sir."
"Very good! We don't want to dig and dig only to find that the seam
has switched off or petered out, or wasn't at its thickest very
thick. We want to make a drift into power, not into the reverse.
How do you find Mrs. Sayre's? I understand you're boarding there."
I said that I was very well pleased. He nodded and ever so slightly
turned the swivel-chair. Battle said that we wouldn't trespass
longer. "All right!" answered Colonel Ringgold. "Rather a busy day.
My good wishes, Mr. Forth!"
In the passage Battle remarked, in a lowered voice: "Mrs. Sayre and
the doctor are cousins of his. He's very good stuff, but he'll drive
you like the devil!"
But for me I liked Colonel Ringgold, though I have seen him drive the
weak like the devil.
We mounted the stairs. There was a room with clerks. Battle grinned
at the collectivity, then took me across to a gentle, elderly man,
Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper, sitting in a kind of cage. From this room
we went down a narrow passage to my especial purview: "Mr. Maxwell
may be at the mine, or gone riding somewhere. But his clerk, Jim
Standard, is here."
It turned out that Mr. Maxwell had just come in. Looking out of
window, one might see his horse, a strong, gaunt sorrel, in charge of
a black Flibbertigibbet.
My chief stood, tall, raw-boned, sandy, blue-eyed. He wore a gray
flannel shirt and corduroy breeches tucked into dusty riding-boots.
His slouch-hat hung on a nail above a shelf whereon was ranged
specimens of ore. In his hand he held a piece of red hematite, and
he was dictating in a clipped, raucous voice to Jim Standard, who
took his words down in shorthand. It was somewhat before the day of
women clerks, and only one letter in so many appeared typewritten.
Maxwell swung around at our entrance. He was lithe, thirty-five
about, trained, I afterward found, in Edinburgh and Germany; still a
British subject, drawn to America through that old hunger for
experience. After greeting me in a dry, casual manner he finished
his letter. Then he said: "I am going to ride ten miles to-morrow.
I suppose that you ride?"
I answered that I did. "I'll expect you here, then, at eight
o'clock. Get a horse. Country's rough. We'll be gone all day."
His look added: "Try you out to-morrow. If I don't like you the
company may keep you--but not as my assistant!"