THE war halted the wrecking of National Avenue, but not for long. Until
the soldiers came home and the country could begin to get back into its
great stride again, groups of the old, thick-walled, big-roomed houses
were permitted to survive; and although it was a survival doomed, and
the dignity of the dignified old things had begun to appear somewhat
ridiculous, since they were smeared with the smoke-fog and begirt with
automobile warehouses and salesbuildings and noisy garages and repair
shops, and every other kind of shop and office, yet here and there was
the semblance—or, at least, the reminder—of a fine, ample, and
mannerly old street that had once been the glory of its town.
But when the great heydays came, following the collapse of the war
“expansion,” and the country took up its dropped trades again, and
renewed with furious and reckless energy its suppressed building, and,
instead of getting back into its old great stride, set forth in a new
stride gigantic beyond all its striding aforetime, then indeed the old
avenue perished utterly, and nothing was left even to hint what it had
been, or to tell its noble story. Old Hickory Shelby’s house was the
last to go;—the stone casing of his tall front doorway was the last of
all the relics. Even when the rest of the house was flat, hauled away
with the fountain swan and the cast-iron fence in dumping wagons and in
the trucks of junk-dealers, the doorway was allowed to remain in place
above the ruins of the veranda; and for several weeks stood forth
against the setting sun like a fragment on the Roman Campagna. But in
time it fell, too, as the Roman fragments will.
When it was gone the old hickory stick was gone, too. He had declined to
the last to be an ornament of his daughter’s fireside; and she never
knew that she owed her husband’s ownership of the “new house” to her
father’s insistence on a “conservative policy” for the bank of which he
was one of the directors. Old Hickory’s thoughts were his own, as his
ways were his own; and what he knew about himself he kept to himself, as
he once or twice with a dry crackling informed his daughter.
The new house was a white house, and it remained almost white; for the
smoke reached it but thinly, and in northern Ornaby, where there were
other large white houses among the groves Dan Oliphant had preserved,
the people struggled successfully to keep the curse under. Shrubberies
lived there, not suffocated; it was a place where faces stayed clean,
children throve, and lilacs bloomed in transparent air.
Martha drove downtown, late one afternoon of a cool day at the end of a
green May, to bring her husband home from a directors’ meeting at the
bank; for Harlan, in her interest, had inherited his father-in-law’s
position; and, as they rolled homeward, checked now and then in the jam
of traffic that filled the whole length of National Avenue, she spoke of
the prevalence of “Sheridans,” those excellently serviceable cars.
“Rather!” Harlan said. “All that old rascal had to do when he got
control of the ‘Ornaby Four’ was to put back the old clutch and change
the name. They’re all over the country. Dan would have made a great
fortune if he’d lived and could have held on.”
“I don’t think he’d mind missing the fortune much,” she said. “I wish he
could know how many people are riding in his cars, though. He’d like to
know about that.”
They passed a “gas-station,” a flamboyantly painted bit of carnival,
with an automobile warehouse and salesroom, and then an apartment house
built round a begrimed courtyard, for its neighbours; and Harlan sighed.
“It’s hard to imagine you and I once lived where these things are, isn’t
it?” he said.
“Yes, some of it’s pretty ugly.”
“It’s all ugly. It’s all hideous!” he said.
“No, not all.” And when they had left the avenue behind them, and
reached the district of the bungalows and small wooden houses, she
showed him gardens that he was forced to admit were “pretty.” But when
they got beyond this, to where had been the broad stretches of woodland
and meadow that Dan had planned for his “restricted residence district,”
she insisted on her husband’s consent to the word “beautiful”; for the
woodland was still there, so that one could hardly see the houses; and
long hedges of bridal-wreath were flowering everywhere, as if snow had
fallen upon the shrubberies.
“Hasn’t beauty come, Harlan?” she said.
“Oh, it’s well enough here,” he grumbled, as they swept into their own
deep-shaded driveway.
Then they descended at white stone steps that led them up and out upon a
terrace, and there they found the other member of their household
sitting placidly—“to enjoy the bridal-wreath,” she said.
“Isn’t it rather chilly for you outdoors, mother?” Harlan asked; for she
was now so fragile that she seemed almost transparent. “Don’t you want
to go in?”
“No, not just yet,” she said. “I was just sitting here thinking how your
father would have enjoyed all this. The town was pleasant when he and I
were young, but of course it was never anything like this.”
“No,” Harlan said, with satire. “I should say it wasn’t!”
“It’s a great change,” the old lady continued. “I don’t suppose my
mother could have believed how beautiful it would come to be.”
“No,” Harlan said, with a short laugh. “I don’t believe she could!”
She overlooked his sarcasm, or was unaware of it, for she went on: “I
don’t suppose _I_ could believe how wonderful everything will be when my
grandson gets to be as old as you are, Harlan.” But this thought made
her wander from the subject. “I wish Lena would let him come home some
day; I do want to see him;—I don’t want to go till I’ve seen him
again.” Her voice became querulous, and then, with a habit she had
formed in her old age, she began to talk more to herself than to her son
and daughter-in-law, but for the most part in indistinct whispers. Her
subject was still Henry, who had done well in the war, had been twice
“decorated,” and now lived in Paris with his mother. The old lady
murmured of him and of Lena for a little time; then fell into a reverie.
Harlan joined his wife at the terrace wall. “Well, you’ve got a
supporter in mother. _She_ seems to think it’s beautiful.” He pointed
upward to where an opening through the foliage of tall beech trees left
a vista of the sky; and there, against the evening blue, the thinning
end of a plume of smoke, miles long, was visible. “Do you, really? Even
that?” he asked.
“Dan must have thought so,” she said. “I think he felt something in it
that neither you nor I can understand.”
“I think maybe he did,” Harlan agreed. “Then why couldn’t he at least
have lived to see the fruition of what he planted, since he loved it and
it was beautiful to him? Why should he be ‘dead and forgotten?’”
“Listen!” Martha said. She was still looking up at the smoke against the
sky, so far above the long masses of flowering bridal-wreath that
bordered the terrace where she and her husband stood. “Listen! That
murmur of the city down yonder—why, it’s almost his voice!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.