|PORT ARGENT had not reached such a stage of civic life that its wealthy
citizens went out into the neighbouring country by reason of warm
weather. Besides, the neighbouring country is flat, and the summer heats
seem to lie on it level and undisturbed. There straight roads meet at
right angles, one cornfield is like another, and one stumpy pasture
differs little from the next. It is fertile, and looks democratic, not
to say socialistic, in its monotonous similarity, but it does not look
like a landscape apt to draw out to it the civilian, as the hill country
draws out its civilians, with the thirst of the hill people for
their falling brooks and stormy mountains, the wood thrushes and the
columbine. An “observer of decades” might have remarked that Herbert
Avenue was the pleasantest spot he had seen within a hundred miles of
Port Argent, and that the civic life seemed to be peculiarly victorious
at that point. There was a village air about the Avenue, only on a
statelier scale, but with the same space and greenness and quiet. One of
the largest houses was T. M. Secor's.
Secor sat on his broad verandah in the early twilight. He stirred
heavily in his chair, and stretched out a great hand thick and hard, as
Hennion came up the steps.
“Glad to see you, sonny,” Secor said. “Stick up your feet and have a
drink.”
“Just come from Nevada?”
“One hour and one-half ago, during the which time Billy Macclesfield's
been here, greasy with some new virtues. I take it you had something to
do with greasing him. Next came Ted, who said he's going to get married.
Next came Aidee with a melodious melodrama of his own, and said he
was going to quit town. Why, things are humming here! How you feeling,
sonny?”
A huge, hairy, iron-grey, talkative man, with a voice like an amiable
bison, was T. M. Secor.
He continued: “Hold on! Why, Aidee said you knew about that screed
of his. I gathered you got it by a sort of fortuitous congregation of
atoms? I gathered that there brother of Aidee's was, by the nature of
him, a sort of fortuitous atom.”
“About that.”
“Just so! Well--you ain't got a melodious melodrama too?”
“No,” said Hennion. “I want to take up the conversation you had with
Macclesfield.”
“Oh, you do!”
“I'm not feeling greasy with virtue myself, you know.”
“Oh, you ain't!”--Secor was silent for some moments.
“I guess I'm on to you, sonny,” he said at last. “I'll tell you my mind
about it. I think you handled Macclesfield all right, and that's a very
good job, and you may be solid now with the gang, for aught I know, but
my idea is, it'll be only a question of time before you get bucked off.
I'd give you a year, maybe two.”
“I think so.”
“You figure on two years?”
“Next election. Tait's out with me now, and he'll get a knife in when
he can. Beckett, Freiburger, and Tuttle will probably be on edge before
next spring. That's too soon. Now--if I can get the parks and Boulevard
done, I'm willing to call off without a row. I want the Manual Training
School too. But Tuttle's going to get some rake off out of that. Can't
help it. Anyway Tuttle will see it's a good enough job. I don't mind
Cam, and John Murphy's indecent, but reasonable. But Freiburger's going
to be a holy terror. I don't see that I can run with that crowd, and I
don't see how it can be altered much at present. If I split it they'll
lose the election. Now--I think it'll split of itself, and I'd be of
more use without the responsibility of having split it. I think so.
Anyhow, I'm going to have something to show people for my innings.”
“Just so.”
After another silence Secor said: “What was Wood's idea? D'you know?”
“He thought it would split of itself.”
“Think so? Well, I've a notion he had a soft side to him, and you'd got
on it. Well--I don' know. Seemed to me that way. What then?”
“Oh, I'll go out. I don't want it anyway. I want my father's job. Maybe
I'm a bit of a Puritan, Secor, and maybe not, but when the heelers get
restless to explosion, and the Reformers grimmer around the mouth
because the city isn't rosy and polite, and my general utility's gone, I
expect to thank God, and go back to pile-driving exclusive. But I want
time.”
“Just so. I can keep Beckett and Tuttle from being too soon, maybe. That
what you want of me?”
“Yes.”
“You say 'Wood's machine,'” Hennion went on after a while. “It's a poor
metaphor, 'machine politics,' 'machine organisation.' Why, being an
engineer, I ought to know a machine when I see one. I've analysed Wood's
organisation, and I tell you you can't apply one bottom principle of
dynamics to it to fit. The machinery is full of ghosts.”
The two smoked a while, and Hennion said: “How about Aidee?”
“Ho! I don't see why he won't stay in Port Argent.”
“He won't. I asked him.”
“You don't say so! Why, there you are! I had a notion you two might team
it together, come along time enough.”
“It won't work.”
“Ho! Well! I dare say. Maybe you know why.” another silence. Secor said
at last:
“Dick, I got only one real notion in business and philanthropy. I bank
on it in both trades. I keep gunning for men with coal in their engines
and a disposition to burn it, and go on till they bust up into scrap
iron, and when I find one, I give him a show. If I think he's got the
instinct to follow his nose like a setter pup, and not get nervous and
climb telegraph poles, I give him a show. Well--Aidee had the coal and
the disposition, and he burnt it all right, and I gave him his show.
Didn't I? He's got the idea now that he's run himself into the ditch and
turned scrap iron. Humph! Well! He lost his nerve anyway. Why, Hicks is
dead, and Wood's dead, and they can scrap it out in hell between 'em,
can't they? What business he got to lose his nerve? He used to have an
idea God Almighty was in politics, and no quitter, and meant to have a
shy at business. Interesting idea, that. Ho! He never proved it. What
the blazes he want to quit for now? Well! I was going to say, I'm
gambling on you now for a setter pup, sonny, without believing you can
ride Wood's machine. I'll give you a show, when you're good and through
with that. I've been buying Chickering R. R. stock. Want some of it?
Yes, sir, I'm going to own that line inside a year, and give you a job
there that'll make you grunt to reach around it. Ho! Ted says he's going
to take John Keys' girl and go to Nevada. Ain't so foolish as you'd
expect of him. Sounds cheerful. Ted's a drooling damn fool all right,
but he's no quitter. I hear you're going to marry Champney's daughter?”
“I will if I can.”
“You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry
Champney's petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall
in his time, near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better
outfit of brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt
coal all right. Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her
when I got to Port Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my
pocket, and she never understood how it happened--claimed she didn't,
anyhow--and that afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the
Court House steps that sounded like he was President of the Board of
Prophets, and I bet a man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all
right, and lost it, I did. I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half.
Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!' Ho! Well, why can't you?”
The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion
presently took his leave.
He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but
Camilla spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the
black shadows of the vines.
“Do you want me, Dick?”
“Yes.”
From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid
moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and
arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made
little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on
the wall, little specks on the floor.
“Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.”
He bent over till her breath was warm on his face.
“How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you
as a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't
stay still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor
upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't
remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal
expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the
beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought
that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so.”
“I didn't know that.”
“I know. I'm a poor, tongue-tied lover, Milly. I ought to fling myself
loose on the subject, and describe the gorgeous state of my heart, and
lie like a seaman ashore, if I had the gift of my calling. I'm no
poet or dreamer of dreams. I'm after realities. I don't expect to be a
burning and shining light to other people or reform anybody whatever,
but I expect to please one girl, if she'll let me try. Real things! What
do you suppose they are? One time I was born, and now I love you, and
sometime I'll die, and God knows what then. Are those realities? Can you
see the river there, where the moonlight is on it? It runs down to the
lake, and the force that draws it down is as real as the river itself.
Love is a real thing, more real than hands and feet. It pulls like
gravitation and drives like steam. When you came to me there at the
Hall, what was it brought you? An instinct? You asked me to take care
of you. I had an instinct that was what I was made for. I thought it was
all safe then, and I felt like the eleventh commandment and loved mine
enemy for a brother. I can't do anything without you! I've staked my
hopes on you, so far as I can see them. I've come to the end of my rope,
and there's something between us yet, but you must cross it. I can't
cross it.”
From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot
at the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was
deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly
past the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had
turned and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion
glanced out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric
light. Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his
slow footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the
porch.
“Can I cross it?” Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired
and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. “Can I? If love
were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this
way, as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought--but can I come?
If you tell me truly that I can come--I will believe what you tell me.”
Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house,
or were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned
on Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply.
He expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose
meaning was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers
that grew on the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his
shoulders, and her head with its thick hair on the other.
“You have come!” he said.
Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement.
“Yes. I have.”
Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last
on the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware
that there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch
vines, with their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace
and went his way up Bank Street.