PORT ARGENT
A Novel
By Arthur Colton
With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen
New York
Henry Holt And Company
1904
[Ill 0001]
[Ill 0010]
[Ill 0011]
IN MEMORIAM
C. W. WELLS
DEDICATED
TO
GEORGE COLTON
863714
PORT ARGENT
CHAPTER I--PULSES
|PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it
a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there,
instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and
better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another,
and the city grew.
In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive
Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no
“press galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences
have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on
its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its
sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills,
or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute?
Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres
back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would
grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help
to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to
favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead
into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that
direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small
farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social
speculators “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a
session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile.
Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back
of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge
of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the
bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But
people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed
of.
There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney
with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was
born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning,
late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new
generation.
Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of
Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers
subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the
breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of
Port Argent.
The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt
legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded
house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come
to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to
his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something
living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through
arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow),
with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish
emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across
the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden
throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row
of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a
half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have
slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country,
after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest
streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would
seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or
order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures,
changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness.
The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric
character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its
streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic
heart beat and brain conceive.
One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and
found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street.
Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down
the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything
fitted anything else.
Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty
years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured
Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take
its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but
the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port
Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of
the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately
line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the
Champney place.
A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since
the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the
city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the
city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked
a citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and
freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these
piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was
told: “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to
make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.”
“Fixed him?”
“Oh, they're a happy family now.”
The citizens of Port Argent held singular language.
“Who is Marve Wood?”
“He's--there he is over there.”
“Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?”
“Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.”
“And this Wood--is he an engineer and contractor?”
“No--well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us.”
The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases
of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of
school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club.
The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with
a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired,
grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He
produced the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated
and consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried
to and fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel
and bar and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The
elderly “Marve Wood,” stood beside him--thick-set, with a grey beard of
the cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the
faces that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He
had a comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow
Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat.
Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a
huge, black-moustached Irishman.
“Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to
work.”
The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy
tucked in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The
sidewalk grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the
statue of a Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal.
He appeared to be facing his country's enemies with determination, but
time and weather had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as
if he found no enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N.
station and the workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street.
Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw
Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out
there,” he said.
“Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book.
“Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney
went on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say,
Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's
arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She
did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front
of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but
looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves,
at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the
perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained
with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river,
when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged
with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were
energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats
had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery
energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them
away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry
them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed
basis, and the difference is important--important to the observer of the
signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla.
Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were
more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the
spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny
clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves.
Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted
a flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the
ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and
an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in
the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The
street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building
opposite were open.
“Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion.
“Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his
boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh--well--he's all right.”
“He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry
banner if he wants to.”
Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that
function.
“But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't
stand any deadheads.”
“Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.”
Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the
shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the
man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles.
“Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see
him,” he added.
“All right, I'll do that.”
“And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both
satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel
injured.”
“Well, I'm glad to oblige him----”
“That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but--you'd better
make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country
schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.”
“That's all right.”
Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and
added, “I see.”
“I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,”
said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke,
“except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It
was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started
in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the
landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest
rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all
right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess,
like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same
arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others.
Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while
somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He
never was really comfortable.”
Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke
with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at
an upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what
appeared dumb-show.
“Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?”
“The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It
means, if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's
because folks get so tired of the warlike.”
“Oh!”
“Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue----”
“Aidee?”
“Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine
man--fine man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks
got kind of tired of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now.
Well--maybe so. Then I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes
along with a patent pill, and a new porous plaster, and claims his
plaster has the holes arranged in triangles, instead of squares like all
previous plasters; he has an air of candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my
soul! Your system's out of order.' Sounds interesting once in a while.
And then this world gets so tired of him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache
eleven thousand years. I wish to God you wouldn't keep giving it new
names.' Well,--a couple of years ago the _Chronicle_ was publishing
Aidee's speeches on Civic something or other every week. Aidee used
to shoot straight but scattering at that time. He'd got too much
responsibility for the details of the millennium. Why, when you come
right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an opinion of himself
as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If I could stand up
like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of natural gas on the
blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there ain't any real
democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any man. Guess
likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other gutter-man
hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. Aidee's a loose
comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for boiling potatoes.
Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent Reform and his
Assembly--oh, well--he wasn't doing any great harm then. He ain't now,
either. I told him one time, like this: “I says, 'Fire away anyhow that
suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think you'd like my job?'”
“'What is your job?' says he.
“'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little
stumped. 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.'
“'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like
it.'
“'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your
job?'
“And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact.
“'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says.
“'Complicated?'
“'Yes.'
“'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it
wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail
last year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a
clergyman on the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I
can talk it. I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his
intellectuals are all right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got
the habit of meditation. So he starts in.”
“Bill, you've been a bad lot.”
“Yep.”
“There ain't no hope for you, Bill.”
“No,” says Bill, “there ain't.”
“You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he
allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says
Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”'
“Aidee laughed,--he did really,--and after that he looked thoughtful.
Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. 'Sweeney,'
I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline of it. But
I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, thinking anybody
could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of myself, sure.'
“Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't
any of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable
since. That's what I wanted to tell you.”
“What for?”
“Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be
interested to find out what he's up to.”
After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up.
“All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's
got to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then
turned into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the
residence sections.