|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 in _The Press_
building. 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 wanted _their_ “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 of _The Press_ building.
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.”