‟HOW in the world did that cunning little wife of his ever fall in love
with him?” Frederic’s companion inquired, watching the emerging
procession of the dining party. “He always looks as if he had something
else on his mind when he’s with women—as if he didn’t think they’re
worth talkin’ to. She looks about half his age. Of course you can’t
tell, though; everybody uses so much makeup nowadays. They say she
belongs to awf’ly important people in New York and never liked it here
because she couldn’t get enough music. You didn’t answer my question:
Aren’t they ever goin’ to get married? I mean your cousin Harlan and
that big Miss Shelby. How in the world do they find anything to _say_ to
each other? Gosh, if I kept a man hangin’ on that long I’d certainly be
talked out! How in the world can two people _stand_ seein’ each other
all the time like that?”
“I can comprehend the gentleman’s half of it,” said the gallant
Frederic. “I believe Miss Shelby goes abroad for a few months now and
then to make her own share of the association more endurable.”
Martha had been at home only a week, in fact, after one of these
excursions; though she did not make them for the reason set forth by
Frederic Oliphant, who was now much given to the reading of
eighteenth-century French memoirs and the polishing of his diction. She
went, she airily explained to Harlan, to gather materials that would
enable her to defend the Renaissance; but as he drove home with her from
the dinner at the Country Club, this evening, he observed that the
materials she had gathered impressed him as “about as deep into the
twentieth century as mechanics and upholsterers were able to go.” His
allusion was to the expensive closed car she had brought from
Paris;—her old bit of hickory, impossible to be bent an atom’s width in
business, yielded with no more than a faint squeak when his daughter was
lavish with herself. “Spend what you plague-taken want to,” he said, “so
long as you don’t ask _me_ to ride in the devilish contrapshun!”
“He says he’ll stick to his horses and our old carriage until they’re
‘chased off the road,’” Martha told Harlan, on this homeward drive. “It
doesn’t seem to me that’s so far ahead. Why hasn’t Dan ever done
anything about the motor-car factory he was going to build?”
“He has,” Harlan said, and laughed. “In talk he has, that is! He’s been
talking about it for years, almost as much as he has about Ornaby.”
“Then why doesn’t he——”
“Still dancing on the tight-rope!” Harlan laughed. “He’s got his car
line through the Addition—I understand your father explodes completely
whenever it’s mentioned to him—but Dan’s spending fortunes on new
streets and sewers and what not. He’s actually trying to open a big
tract still farther out, north of Ornaby; and I don’t believe he’s able
to keep money in his hands long enough to go into building cars. You’d
_think_ he’s building them though, if you’d listen to him! He talks
about the ‘Ornaby Car’ to everybody; I suppose he believes it’s a lucky
name. He _has_ got his Addition booming though—no question. He’s making
the countryside more and more horrible every day. It’s much worse than
it was last year.”
“How is it horrible?”
“I could tell you, but it’s ten to one that if I merely told you, you’d
become Ornaby’s defender—you’re so everlastingly its defender! I’d
rather show you, if you’d take me as a passenger in this jewelled
palanquin of yours to-morrow.”
Martha assented, and the next afternoon her neat young mechanic drove
them northward over the road once travelled on a hot and threatening
morning by a “rubber-tired runabout” in which sat a disappointed little
bride and a perplexed bridegroom. On that dusty morning, already of the
long ago, the way had soon become rustic; the cedar-block paving, itself
worn and jolty, had stopped short not much more than a mile from its
beginning; then came macadam, but not for long; and then the rough
country road, leading north between the great flat fields of corn and
wheat to where it became a slough in winter, and tall grass and even
ironweed grew between the ruts in summer—for there it reached the soggy
and tangled groves of Ornaby.
But on this brisk autumn afternoon, the crystal and enamel of the silent
French car went glistening serenely along a level white way of asphalt.
The fields, above which the troubled bride and groom had seen rising the
clouds of the summer storm, were fields no longer; for here was
bungalow-land, acres and acres of bungalows, with brick groceries and
drug stores at some of the street corners, and two or three wooden
church spires slenderly asserting their right to look down on all the
rest. Cross streets gave glimpses of trolley cars on other
north-and-south thoroughfares; great brick schoolhouses, unbearably
plain, were to be seen, and a few apartment buildings, not made more
beautiful by pinchbeck torturing of their façades.
“Of course Dan has no responsibility for this particular awfulness,”
Harlan explained. “Without rime or reason the town just decided to grow,
and luckily for him it’s grown faster out this northern way than it has
in any other direction. Some people seem to think he performed an
enchantment to make it do it, but it just happened.”
“It seems to happen faster and faster,” Martha observed. “The last time
I drove out this far was in our old carriage with papa, not quite a year
ago, I think; and there were dozens of vacant lots; but now there are
hardly any. The asphalt wasn’t finished clear into Ornaby then, though
Dan had built a fine road through. I suppose now——”
“Oh, yes; now he’s got asphalt on his cross streets, too; and the
southern part of Ornaby is so like this you couldn’t tell when you get
into it, if it weren’t for the disasters he calls his signboards. Look
at that!”
As they spoke the swift car had brought them into a region where there
was more vacant ground; and the little houses, nearly all of wood, were
not so closely crowded. On a stretch of weedy land, rising slightly
above new cement sidewalks, there smote the eye a painted wooden wall
two hundred feet long. With enormous yellow words on a black background
the thing not only staggered the vision of a passer-by, but seemed to
bellow in his ear: “You Are Now Entering Ornaby Addition! Build a Home
in Ornaby the Beautiful! Every Ornaby Buyer is an Ornaby Booster.”
Beyond came a region of more bungalows: “Homes Beautiful of Ornaby the
Beautiful” another bellowing signboard declared them to be; and, not
blushing in the very presence of the dwellings and dwellers it thus made
proclamation for, went on to insist once more upon the enthusiasm
necessarily a consequence in the bosom of any one who became an “Ornaby
Buyer.” There was a briskness about the place: children went busily
roller-skating over the new sidewalks; clotheslines were flying their
Monday white pennants on the breeze; other bungalows were noisily
getting themselves built, and farther on were some white
cottages;—“quite pretty,” Martha said they were. Beyond them the open
spaces were broader, and the little houses more infrequent; but the
asphalt street went on, with numbered white posts marking the building
lots, paved cross streets running to right and left into
thicket-bordered distances, and Dan’s great signboards shouting along
the front of untouched acres of old forest.
“You see for yourself,” Harlan said. “This _was_ beautiful before
‘Ornaby the Beautiful’ insulted the landscape. But now, with all these
flimsy and dreadful bungalows and the signboards screeching at the
trees——”
“Yes,” she interrupted, “but he’s spared all the trees he could, even
back there where the bungalows and little houses were so thick. And I
noticed the people were planting shrubberies and trying to make little
gardens grow. It might be really very pretty some day. And just
here——”
“Oh, here,” Harlan said, “where he hasn’t touched it yet, it’s well
enough, of course. But you’ll find it’s only a question of time till he
spoils it, though I understand he intends this to be what he calls a
’restricted residence district.’”
The paved street ran between tall woods now; the numbered lots were
broad, and the car passed a few proudly marked “Sold.” Then Martha
noticed one that was several hundred feet wide, and in depth extended
indefinitely into a grove of magnificent beech trees. Stone pillars gave
entrance upon a partly completed driveway that disappeared round an
evergreen thicket, not long planted. “What a pleasant place to live!
It’s getting so smoky in town it seems to me people will have to be
moving out even this far some day. Whose place is that?”
“Dan’s,” Harlan said, with his dry laugh. “At least he says he plans to
build there sometime. I don’t think Lena cares about it much! I heard
her speaking of it as ‘out at the end of Nowhere.’ One of the
interesting things about my sister-in-law, to me, is the fact that she’s
really never wanted a house of her own. She’s never once proposed such a
thing in all this time, I believe, but goes on living with father and
mother; and year after year passes without altering that air of hers of
being only temporarily marooned in what she still calls ‘the West.’”
Martha looked serious, but said nothing, and he spoke to the chauffeur,
who turned westward at the next cross street. At the end of a block it
ceased to be a street and became a newly gravelled road, a
transformation that interested Harlan. “Funny!” he said. “I was out this
way a couple of months ago and this was a dirt road with a good deal of
grass on it. Now he’s had it gravelled. It leads over to the west side
of his land, where he laid out the site for his factory, years ago. I
thought you might like to see that.”
But before they approached the site of Dan’s factory, they passed a long
line of trucks and wagons bound their way; wagon after wagon laden with
bricks, and truck loads of lumber, of drainage tile, of steel girders
and of cement, and there were great-wheeled carriers of stone. As they
came closer they saw that many two-story double houses for workmen and
their families were being built on both sides of the road; and, beyond
these, long lines of brick walls were rising, broken into regular open
oblongs where the ample glass of a modern factory building was to be
set.
“By George!” Harlan exclaimed, surprised almost to the point of dismay.
“He _is_ going it! Why, he’s got the thing half up!” And he said, “By
George!” again, seeing the figure of his brother on a section of roof
and outlined against the sky. “There he is—and in his element!”
“You mean in the sky?” Martha asked, her eyes brightening.
“No; I mean hustling. Keeping everybody on the jump while he defaces the
landscape some more! That’s his element, isn’t it?”
Dan was indeed in that element and it was truly his. He could be seen
waving his arms at the workmen; shouting to foremen; running along the
roof and calling to teamsters, instructing them where to dump their
loads. His voice was audible to the occupants of the French car that
stopped for a few moments in the road; and they became aware that he
addressed the workmen, both white and coloured, by their first names or
their nicknames exclusively; his shoutings were all to “Jim” or “Mike”
or “Shorty” or “Tony” or “Gumbo.”
A moment after the car stopped, a smaller figure climbed up the slope of
the low roof and joined the towering and bulky one on the ridge. “He’s
got my charming-mannered nephew with him,” Harlan said. “What time he
can spare from spoiling the landscape he puts into spoiling Henry!”
“Is that Henry?” Martha asked incredulously; then, as she saw Dan put
his right arm about the boy’s shoulder, guarding him carefully from a
misstep, she replied to herself. “Yes, it really is. Gracious, how time
runs away from us!”
Turning to shout at some one in their direction, Dan saw them, and waved
his free arm cordially in greeting; but he made no motion as if to
descend, and went on immediately with his shouting to the men. Martha
said, “We’ll go now,” to the chauffeur; and the car instantly moved
forward.
She leaned back, smiling. “He’s in his glory,” she said. “It all goes on
arriving, Harlan. His great days have come!”