HARLAN laughed ruefully and told her that time, tide, and travel failed
to alter her. “You don’t change as much as—as much as”—he looked about
him for a comparison, and found one ready to hand in the material of
which the Shelbys’ veranda was made. “You don’t change as much as this
Western limestone does. It’s made of stone, too, but years and weather
take its edges off and give it the look of being not so hard as it used
to be.”
Not defending herself from the criticism, she gazed thoughtfully at
Harlan as he sat fanning himself with his straw hat—he was warm and
flushed after their walk on this hot June morning—then she turned her
eyes again to the wide lawn stretching before her down to the National
Avenue sidewalk. Looking out from the shade of the veranda, her eyes
needed the shelter of the curved fingers of her hand, a protection she
gave them, resting her elbow on the stone railing beside her. The
trimmed grass of the lawn was a blazing green, seen waveringly through
visible pulsations of the heated air; the fountain swan, still diligent
under every discouragement, sprayed forth no skyward rainbow mists, but
ejected a limpid rod of water of so brief an uplift that the bird seemed
to carry in his throat the curved tip of a shepherd’s crook made of
glass. The asphalt street, beyond the shade of its bordering maples, lay
steaming and smelled of tar;—drooping bicyclists rode there, tinkling
their little bells for a right of way. Surreys and phaetons gave them
courteous passage, and frequently a swifter, noisier vehicle went by,
grinding, squawking, and leaving blue oil-smoke on the air.
There were many more automobiles than when she had last gone away,
Martha noticed; yet the outlook from the veranda was the old familiar
one. To her eyes, however, it bore the familiar unfamiliar appearance
that well-known things bear to the traveller at home again, but not yet
quite adjusted after a long absence. For this was not her return from
the little run she had made to England at the time of the baby’s
christening next door, though that excursion was itself a longer
one—much to her taste—than she had planned. The bit of old hickory
serving her as a father resisted stiffly, but finally proved flexible
under great pressure, and she took him even to Russia before she got
through bending him. When his protestive squeakings at last became
unbearable, she brought him home, but did not remain herself. In the
Italian Alps there was a valley town with which she had fallen in
love;—she returned to her native land merely as an escort for Mr.
Shelby, and, having deposited him safely, hurried back to the terraced
vineyards, the whitewashed walls with strings of red peppers dangling
against them, and the frescoed old villa she had rented in the
foreground of this picture.
It was a commonplace, she said, that the new Twentieth Century was the
age of the annihilation of distances; people talked from New York to
Chicago over a wire; the Atlantic was crossed in six days, the American
continent in four; and her father could remember when it took him three
weeks to get to Philadelphia; he “wouldn’t mind being taken care of by
correspondence.”
Old Hickory, well-warranted in his outburst, replied that he didn’t
“need any takin’ care of, thank you”—he was tired of being bossed to
death, and he wanted her to understand she was mighty welcome to go and
stay as long as she had a mind to! If she remained at home, he wouldn’t
know when she might be draggin’ him off again without his exactly
knowin’ how it happened. It was “curious,” he continued; he had sense
enough never to let her interfere with him in his business; but in other
matters he never knew when he mightn’t find himself in some dog-gone
place he didn’t _want_ to be in—at a plague-taken pink tea maybe, or
even right spang in the middle of Europe in some heaven-forsaken garlic
heap, with nothin’ to think about but old dead monks and nothin’ to do
but hate the smell. If Martha liked hangin’ around those old worn-out
nations that never showed a sign o’ life except advertisin’ chocolate
and keepin’ their fertilizer right under their front parlour window for
fear somebody’d steal it, why, she was certainly good and welcome to all
she wanted of ’em! For himself, he had his business to ’tend to; and he
didn’t want any aunt Ella to pester him, either; “aunt Ella” being his
widowed sister, whom Martha had proposed as a housekeeper in substitute
for herself. He was full and able—thank you again!—to get up in the
morning and eat his ham and eggs without somebody’s pinning a bib around
his neck, and he believed he knew how to wash and go to bed at night
without any fussy woman fixin’ up his bureau every other day, so as to
hide his nightshirts from him! Altogether, he was lookin’ forward to a
little rest and liberty, thank you!
So Martha had gone with his earnest consent; for his complaint of her
did not lack reason—she was headstrong and a compelling daughter—and
she stayed until she had her fill of Italy for that while. Meantime, the
abandoned father contentedly lived alone, except for his negro servants,
and declared that at last he was his own man and began to feel as if he
owned his own house; he felt that way for the first time since his
daughter was born, he said. But a different view of his condition was
maintained by a member of the household next door.
“A fine exhibition of filial duty!” Lena cried, in one of the irritated
moods that returned upon her as the growing Henry Daniel began to be a
little boy instead of a little baby. When he was a noisy little boy
during the day his mother often became reminiscent, not happily, by the
time his father came home in the evening. “You told me once she had a
heart as big as she was,” Lena went on. “It looks like it, doesn’t it?
Leaving that poor old man alone over there, month after month and year
after year!”
Dan listened absently, his mind on a new customer for a lot. “Who you
talkin’ about now?”
“You know! That big girl of yours.”
“Martha?” he said, his tone a weary one instantly. “How often have I
told you she never was any girl of mine, big or little? What’s started
you on _that_ again?”
“I shouldn’t think you’d expect it would take much to start me,” Lena
exclaimed, “when you remember you gave me your sacred promise I should
have a year in Europe——”
“Oh, Lordy! Have we got to go all over that again?”
“—And when you remember you deliberately broke your word to me,” Lena
went on, “and haven’t ever even made the slightest effort to keep it!
You hold me here, suffocating in this place, year after year——”
“Now, see here,” he interrupted; “just think a minute, please! Is that
fair? Haven’t you been back to New York every year for at least two or
three——”
But Lena almost shouted her interruption. “Yes! Two or three _weeks_! To
visit my _fam_ily! Do you think it means happiness for me to be with
_them_?—and all of ’em watching to see how I take care of my baby! Is
that keeping your word to take me abroad? Oh,” she cried, with bitter
laughter, “doesn’t it seem ironical even to you? That big creature next
door was so jealous of me because I had what she wanted she couldn’t
bear to stay where she had to look at it, so she goes away and gets what
_I_ wanted! _Isn’t_ it ironical, Dan? Don’t you see it at all?”
“I see you’ve got your imagination all stirred up again, that’s all.”
“Imagination!” she cried. “Yes; I should think my imagination _would_
get ‘all stirred up!’ Why, it’s funny! She can go and take what I want,
but it can’t be any good to her; she hasn’t culture enough to see it or
to feel it or to hear it. I can see her carrying that accent around
Europe, and asking waiters for ‘ice wat-urr’ and ‘please to pass the
but-urr!’ Yet she can go and I can’t!”
“But _I_ didn’t send her,” Dan explained, since his wife clearly implied
his responsibility. “You talk as if I——”
“No; but you had no right not to send _me_ after giving me your
sacred——”
Dan interrupted her genially; he smiled and patted her pretty little
shoulder, though it twitched away from his touch. “Lena, look here: I’ve
got some big deals on, and I’m just about certain they’re goin’ to work
out the right way. You see up to now the trouble’s been that all the
money comin’ in had to be put right out again almost before I’d get hold
of it. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d had that factory up and running
long ago. But as I look ahead now, everything is mighty good—_mighty_
good! If I can just put these deals through——”
“Yes; it’s always ‘if,’” she reminded him. “When have I ever talked to
you that you weren’t just about to put through some ‘mighty big deals’?
You said exactly the same last year.”
“Well, but this is a better year than last year. Why, I’ve done twice
the business—yes, better’n that; it’s more like four times what I did
last year. If Ornaby keeps on like this, why, a few years from now——”
She stopped him; informing him that she’d long since heard more than
enough about “a few years from now”; whereupon, being full of the
subject, he went down to the library to tell his father and mother what
was inevitable within a few years. No skepticism dampened his library
prophecies now; Harlan was no longer there to listen, staring with dry
incredulity through his glasses.
Harlan had not sold Mrs. Savage’s old house, but had moved into it, and
kept as precise a routine there as she had kept, and with the same
servants. He had two bedrooms upstairs made into a library, but changed
nothing on the lower floor; and often the old lady seemed still to be
there in authority. At twilight, before Nimbus lit the electric table
lamp in the “south front parlour,” the room to which she had always
descended from her afternoon nap, it was not difficult to imagine that
she was sitting in the stiff chair beside the plate-glass window. Of
course Nimbus believed that he saw her there when he came in to light
the lamp; and he often mumbled to her—always upon the same theme. He
was grateful for the one hundred and thirty-five dollars she had left
him, but considered the sum inadequate.
“No’m, indeed,” he said to the figure he saw in the stiff chair. “I
thank you kindly, but didn’ I used you right all my days? How much it
cost you slip down ten hunderd thirty-five on that paper, ’stead of one
hunderd thirty-five? _You_ ain’t got it, are you? Ain’t doin’ _you_ no
good, do it? No’m, indeedy! ’Tain’t no use you bein’ sorry, neither.
Make all the fuss you want to; you too late; nobody ain’t goin’ pay no
’tention to you!”
And in the kitchen he would discuss the apparition with his fourth wife,
the fat cook, Myrtle. “Look to me like she can’t keep away,” he would
say. “Set there same as ever. Set up straight in that stiff chair. See
her plain as I see you, till I git that lamp lit.”
“Landy me, Nimbus, I wouldn’ go in that room unlessen the light bright
as day if you give me trottin’ horse an’ gole harniss! How you keep from
hollerin’?”
At this the tall, thin old fellow would laugh without making a sound;
deep wrinkles in the design of half of a symmetrical cobweb appearing on
each side of his face. Some profoundly interior secret of his might have
been betrayed, it seemed, if he had allowed his merriment to become
vocal; and this noiseless laugh of his awed his wife in much the same
way, no doubt, that the laugh of a jungle witch-doctor ancestor of his
had awed wives not unlike Myrtle. “She ain’t goin’ bother me ner you,”
he explained. “She ain’t settin’ there ’count o’ me ner you. She settin’
there ’cause she so mad.”
“Who? Who she mad at?”
“Mad at somep’m!” Nimbus would say, and, becoming less uncomfortably
mystic might allow a human chuckle to escape him. “Set there mad long as
she want to; ’tain’t goin’ do her no good. She ain’t _fixed_ to make no
changes now!”
The new owner lived in the old house almost as quietly as Mrs. Savage,
in the visions of Nimbus, went on living there. Harlan had several times
thought of going to Italy, but the idea never culminated in action.
“I wanted to come, though,” he told Martha, as they sat on her veranda
that hot morning, the day after her return. “I wanted to more than I
ever wanted to do anything else. You see I’ve almost stopped going to
the office; I just dangle about there sometimes to please father, but I
don’t care to practise law. It’s a silly way of spending one’s life
after all, fighting the sordid disputes of squabbling people. There was
really nothing to keep me here.”
She did not alter her attitude, but still looked out upon the old
familiar unfamiliar scene from beneath her sheltering curved fingers.
“If you wanted to come, why didn’t you?”
“Because I’d only have done it to see you, and I suppose I have a
remnant of pride. If you’d like a better answer, think of what I told
you about yourself. I didn’t come because I know you’re stony. I knew
you hadn’t changed.”
“About what?”
“About me,” he said, and added: “About anything!”
At this she turned her head and looked at him, for he spoke with a sour
significance. “Well, have you changed, Harlan?” she asked gravely.
“About you,” he answered. “I haven’t—unfortunately.”
“But I meant: Have _you_ changed about anything? Aren’t you just what
you were five or six years ago, only a little intensified—and richer?”
“Ah, I knew I’d get that,” he said. “I knew it would come before I could
be with you long. I told my father and mother the very day my
grandmother’s will was read that you’d hate me for it, and mother agreed
quickly enough.”
“Why, no,” Martha said, and her surprise was genuine. “Why should I hate
you because Mrs. Savage——”
“Because she left it to me and not to Dan, and because I didn’t think it
was right or sensible to help him with any of it.”
“But he hasn’t needed any help,” Martha said. “It’s much better for him
to be doing it without any help, and so splendidly.”
“So splendidly?” Harlan repeated, and he stared at her. “But you don’t
take what Dan says seriously, do you? You don’t think that just because
he says——”
“I haven’t seen him, Harlan.”
“But you speak as if you believe he’s actually succeeding in making that
old fantasia of his into a reality.”
“Well,” she said, “isn’t he?”
“What? Why, he’s still just barely keeping his head above water. He
sells vacant lots out there, yes—but to keep on selling them he has to
put all they sell for into developing the land he hasn’t sold. It
amounts precisely to the same thing as giving the property away. His
mortgages used to worry him to death, but he’s got most of the place
mortgaged now for three times what it was five years ago. You see——”
“I see that the land must be worth three times as much as it was five
years ago, since he can borrow three times as much on it.”
“But, my dear Martha——”
“But, my dear Harlan!” she echoed mockingly, and thus disposed of his
argument before he could deliver it. “The truth is, you’ve had the habit
of undervaluing Dan so long that you can’t get over it. You can’t see
that at last he’s begun to make a success of his ‘fantasia.’ Given time
enough, critics who aren’t careful to keep themselves humble-minded
always lose the power to see things as they are.”
Harlan winced a little under this sententious assault, and laughed at
himself for wincing; then explained his rather painful laughter. “It’s
almost amusing to me to find myself still cowering away from your
humble-minded criticisms of me—just as I used to, Martha!”
“Yes, I know it,” she admitted. “I hate myself for the way I talk to
you, Harlan;—somehow you always make me smug and superior. I’m the
foolish kind of person who’s always made critical by superior
criticism—critical of the critic, I mean.”
“But I’m not more critical of Dan than other people are. Have you asked
your father what he thinks of Ornaby now, for instance?”
“Yes, I asked him last night.”
“What does he think of it?”
“He thinks the same as I do,” she said. “He’s been compelled to
recognize that it’s going to be a tremendous success.”
“Then he’s changed his mind since last week,” Harlan returned, somewhat
discomfited. “He told me——”
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said. “He didn’t say he thought it would be a
success. He said he thought the Addition idea was just as crazy as he
ever did, and Dan Oliphant was the biggest fool in seven states, and the
noisiest! Those were his words precisely, Harlan.”
“But you just told me——”
“No,” she explained;—“you asked me what he _thought_. Do you suppose
he’d admit to me that he ever made a business mistake? He knows
perfectly well that he did make one when he refused to follow my advice
and buy some of Dan’s stock when the poor boy was trying to finance his
plan at the beginning. Papa confessed it absolutely.”
“He did?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If he’d meant what he said he’d just have
grunted it. Instead, he yelled it at me. With papa, that’s exactly the
same as a perfectly open confession.”
Harlan shook his head, remaining more than doubtful of this
interpretation. “So you believe if Dan tried now to organize a stock
company for Ornaby——”
“They’d gobble it!” she said. “Papa especially! But he and others like
him wouldn’t buy a single share when poor Dan went begging and peddling
all over town; and now I’m glad they didn’t. It’s so much better for him
to have done it alone.”
“But, my dear,” Harlan insisted, not altogether without exasperation,
“he _hasn’t_ done it.”
“My dear,” she returned promptly; “he’s _going_ to!”
“But, Martha——”
“Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you something that you don’t understand,
because you’ve been living here all along. When I went off to college, I
spent the Christmas holidays visiting some Eastern girls, and papa
didn’t see me for a whole year. Then he nearly fainted—I’d grown so!
Yet I’d grown just as much the year before, but he never noticed it
because I was living at home where he saw me every day. It’s the same
way with a city like this, Harlan. I haven’t been here for so long that
I can see the change. Everything is going to happen that Dan
prophesied.”
She had spoken with gravity, but Harlan laughed, not impressed. “Yes,
the boosters brag of the increase in population shown by the last
census,” he said. “We’ve got a few thousand more Italians and Polish
Jews and negroes, I suppose; and some new ugly factories and
dwelling-houses of objectionable architecture. They’re beginning to
build awful little shacks they call ‘bungalows,’ hurrying them up by the
dozen. Is that the glorious cosmopolis of your hero’s prophecies,
Martha? To my mind it’s only an extension of hideousness, and down where
I live, in my grandmother’s old house, it’s getting so smoky in winter
that the air is noxious—the whole town’s dirty, for that matter.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday, as soon as I got here, I noticed that even
in summer the air’s smokier than it used to be. I think the city was a
cleaner place and a better-looking place when I went away. There’s the
smoke, of course, and I’ve already seen how they’re beginning to tear
old buildings down and put up bigger ones, and no building has any
thought of having the slightest relation to the ones on each side of it.
In a way, as you say, it’s getting hideous, though some of these long,
wide streets are pleasant, even to a person who’s stayed in Europe too
long perhaps—and National Avenue is really beautiful. I don’t know
where except in towns like this you’ll find a long street of such big,
solid, comfortable houses with green trees and clean lawns about them.
This part of the town, at least, hasn’t changed; but a change has begun,
and I believe it’s the growth—I think it’s the incredible growth that
Dan predicted, Harlan. I think it’s begun.”
Again she had spoken gravely, though with a glinting look at him which
had in it some hint of triumph, and piqued him.
“Well, if this fabulous growth _has_ begun,” he said incautiously,
“you’re surely not hero-worshipper enough to think it’s going to extend
as far as Ornaby Addition, are you?”
She had hoped for this, had led him into it. “Papa’s going to begin
building an extension of the Tennessee Avenue car line next month,” she
said. “I forced him to admit how far out it would run.”
“Not so far as the Addition?”
“Within an eighth of a mile of it,” said Martha. “That’s what made him
so noisy!”