In which we Learn Something of Railroads, and Attend Some Remarkable
Christenings.
And so, in due time, it came to pass that, our Aladdin having rubbed the
magic ring with which his Genius had endowed him, there came, out of
some thunderous and smoky realm, peopled with swart kobolds, and lit by
the white fire of gushing cupolas and dazzling billets, a train of
carriages, drawn by a tamed volcanic demon, on a wonderful way of steel,
armed strongly to deliver us from the Castle Perilous in which we were
besieged by the Giants. The way was marvelously prepared by theodolite
and level, by tented camps of men driving, with shouts and cracking
whips, straining teams in circling mazes, about dark pits on grassy
hillsides, and building long, straight banks of earth across swales; by
huge machines with iron fists thrusting trunks of trees into the earth;
by mighty creatures spinning great steel cobwebs over streams.
At last, a short branch of steel shot off from Pendleton's Pacific
Division, grew daily longer and longer, pushed across the level
earth-banks, the rows of driven tree-trunks, and the spun steel cobwebs,
through the dark pits, nearer and nearer to Lattimore, and at last
entered the beleaguered city, amid rejoicings of the populace. Most of
whom knew but vaguely the facts of either siege or deliverance; but who
shouted, and tossed their caps, and blew the horns and beat the drums,
because the _Herald_ in a double-leaded editorial assured them that this
was _the_ event for which Lattimore had waited to be raised to complete
parity with her envious rivals. Furthermore, Captain Tolliver,
magniloquently enthusiastic, took charge of the cheering, artillery, and
band-music, and made a tumultuous success of it.
"He told me," said Giddings, "that when the people of the North can be
brought for a moment into that subjection which is proper for the
masses, 'they make devilish good troops, suh, devilish good troops!'"
And so it also happened that Mr. Elkins found himself the president of a
real railway, with all the perquisites that go therewith. Among these
being the power to establish town-sites and give them names. The former
function was exercised according to the principles usually governing
town-site companies, and with ends purely financial in view. The latter
was elevated to the dignity of a ceremony. The rails were scarcely laid,
when President Elkins invited a choice company to go with him over the
line and attend the christening of the stations. He convinced the rest
of us of the wisdom of this, by showing us that it would awaken local
interest along the line, and prepare the way for the auction sales of
lots the next week.
"It's advertising of the choicest kind," said he. "Giddings will sow it
far and wide in the press dispatches, and it will attract attention; and
attention is what we want. We'll start early, run to the station
Pendleton has called Elkins Junction, at the end of the line, lie over
for a couple of hours, and come home, bestowing names as we come. Help
me select the party, and we'll consider it settled."
As the train was to be a light one, consisting of a buffet-car and a
parlor-car, the party could not be very large. The officers of the road,
Mr. Adams, who was general traffic manager, and selected by the
bondholders, and Mr. Kittrick, the general manager, who was found in
Kansas City by Jim, went down first as a matter of course. Captain
Tolliver and his wife, the Trescotts, the Hinckleys, with Mr. Cornish
and Giddings, were put down by Jim; and to these we added the
influential new people, the Alexanders, who came with the cement-works,
of which Mr. Alexander was president, Mr. Densmore, who controlled the
largest of the elevators, and Mr. Walling, whose mill was the first to
utilize the waters of our power-tunnel, and who was the visible
representative of millions made in the flouring trade. Smith, our
architect, was included, as was Cecil Barr-Smith, sent out by his
brother to be superintendent of the street-railway, and looking upon the
thing in the light of an exile, comforted by the beautiful native
princess Antonia. We left Macdonald out, because he always called the
young man "Smith," and could not be brought to forget an early
impression that he and the architect were brothers; besides, said Jim,
Macdonald was afraid of the cars as he was of the hyphen, being most of
the time on the range with the cattle belonging to himself and Hinckley.
Which, being interpreted, meant that Mr. Macdonald would not care to go.
Mr. Ballard was invited on account of his early connection with the L. &
G. W. project, although he was holding himself more and more aloof from
the new movements, and held forth often upon the value of conservatism.
Miss Addison, who was related to the Lattimore family, was commissioned
to invite the old General, who very unexpectedly consented. His son
Will, as solicitor for the railway company and one of the directors, was
to be one of us if he could. These with their wives and some invited
guests from near-by towns made up the party.
We were well acquainted with each other by this time, so that it was
quite like a family party or a gathering of old friends. Captain
Tolliver was austerely polite to General Lattimore, whose refusal to
concern himself with the question as to whether our city grew to a
hundred thousand or shrunk to five he accounted for on the ground that a
man who had led hired ruffians to trample out the liberty of a brave
people must be morally warped.
The General came, tall and spare as ever, wearing his beautiful white
moustache and imperial as a Frenchman would wear the cross of the Legion
of Honor. He was quite unable to sympathize with our lot-selling, our
plenitude of corporations, or our feverish pushing of "developments."
But the building of the railway attracted him. He looked back at the
new-made track as we flew along; and his eyes flashed under the bushy
white brows. He sat near Josie, and held her in conversation much of the
outward trip; but Jim he failed to appreciate, and treated
indifferently.
"He is History incarnate," said Mrs. Tolliver, "and cannot rejoice in
the passing of so much that is a part of himself."
Giddings said that this was probably true; and under the circumstances
he couldn't blame him. He, Giddings, would feel a little sore to see
things which were a part of _himself_ going out of date. It was a
natural feeling. Whereupon Mrs. Tolliver addressed her remarks very
pointedly elsewhere; and Antonia Hinckley privately admonished Giddings
not to be mean; and Giddings sought the buffet and smoked. Here I joined
him, and over our cigars he confessed to me that life to him was an
increasing burden, rapidly becoming intolerable.
We had noticed, I informed him, an occasional note of gloom in his
editorials. This ought not to be, now that the real danger to our
interests seemed to be over, and we were going forward so wonderfully.
To which he replied that with the gauds of worldly success he had no
concern. The editorials I criticised were joyous and ebulliently
hilarious compared with those which might be expected in the future. If
we could find some blithesome ass to pay him for the _Herald_ enough
money to take him out of our scrambled Bedlam of a town, bring the idiot
on, and he (Giddings) would arrange things so we could have our touting
done as we liked it!
Now the _Herald_ had become a very valuable property, and of all men
Giddings had the least reason to speak despitefully of Lattimore; and
his frame of mind was a mystery to me, until I remembered that there was
supposed to be something amiss between him and Laura Addison. Craftily
leading the conversation to the point where confidences were easy, I was
rewarded by a passionate disclosure on his part, which would have
amounted to an outburst, had it not been restrained by the presence of
Cornish, Hinckley, and Trescott at the other end of the compartment.
"Oh, pshaw!" said I, "you've no cause for despair. On your own showing,
there's every reason for you to hope."
"You don't know the situation, Barslow," he insisted, shaking his head
gloomily, "and there's no use in trying to tell you. She's too exalted
in her ideals ever to accept me. She's told me things about the
qualities she must have in the one who should be nearest to her that
just simply shut me out; and I haven't called since. Oh, I tell you,
Barslow, sometimes I feel as if I could--Yes, sir, it'll be accepted as
the best piece of railroad building for years!"
I was surprised at the sudden transition, until I saw that our fellow
passengers were crowding to our end of the car in response to the
conductor's announcement that we were coming into Elkins Junction. I
made a note of Giddings's state of mind, as the subject of a conference
with Jim. The _Herald_ was of too much importance to us for this to be
neglected. The disciple of Iago must in some way be restored to his
normal view of things. I could not help smiling at the vast difference
between his view of Laura and mine. I, wrongly perhaps, thought her
affectedly pietistic, with ideals likely to be yielding in spirit if the
letter were preserved.
Elkins Junction was a platform, a depot, an eating-house, and a Y; and
it was nothing else.
"We've come up here," said Jim, "to show you probably the smallest town
in the state, and the only one in the world named after me. We wanted to
show you the whole line, and Mr. Schwartz felt as if he'd prefer to turn
his engine around for the return trip. The last two towns we came
through, and hence the first two going back, are old places. The third
station is a new town, and Conductor Corcoran will take us back there,
where we'll unveil the name of the station, and permit the people to
know where they live. While we're doing the sponsorial act, lunch will
be prepared and ready for us to discuss during the next run."
On the way back there was a stir of suppressed excitement among the
passengers.
"It's about this name," said Miss Addison to her seat-mate. "The town is
on the shore of Mirror Lake, and they say it will be an important one,
and a summer resort; and no one knows what the name is to be but Mr.
Elkins."
"Really, a very odd affair!" said Miss Allen, of Fairchild, Antonia's
college friend. "It makes a social function of the naming of a town!"
"Yes," said Mr. Elkins, "and it is one of the really enduring things we
can do. Long after the memory of every one here is departed, these
villages will still bear the names we give them to-day. If there's any
truth in the belief that some people have, that names have an influence
for good or evil, the naming of the towns may be important as building
the railroad."
I was sitting with Antonia. Miss Allen and Captain Tolliver were with
us, our faces turned toward one another. General Lattimore, with Josie
and her father, was on the opposite side of the car. Most of the company
were sitting or standing near, and the conversation was quite general.
"Oh, it's like a romance!" half whispered Antonia to us. "I envy you men
who build roads and make towns. Look at Mr. Elkins, Sadie, as he stands
there! He is master of everything; to me he seems as great as Napoleon!"
She neither blushed nor sought to conceal from us her adoration for Jim.
It was the day of his triumph, and a fitting time to acknowledge his
kinghood; and her admission that she thought him the greatest, the most
excellent of men did not surprise me. Yet, because he was older than
she, and had never put himself in a really loverlike attitude toward
her, I thought it was simply an exalted girlish regard, and not at all
what we usually understand by an affair of the heart. Moreover, at that
time such praise as she gave him would not have been thought
extravagant in almost any social gathering in Lattimore. Let me confess
that to me it does not now seem so ... Cecil Barr-Smith walked out and
stood on the platform.
General Lattimore was apparently thinking of the features of the
situation which had struck Antonia as romantic.
"You young men," said he, "are among the last of the city-builders and
road-makers. My generation did these things differently. We went out
with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You
don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift
people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your
coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of
organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People
come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the
first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of standing-room on
the magnet!"
"I nevah hea'd the real merit and strength and safety of ouah
real-estate propositions bettah stated, suh!" said Captain Tolliver
ecstatically.
Jim stood looking at the General with sober regard.
"Go on, General," said he.
"Not only that," went on the General, "but people begin forestalling the
standing-room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the
magnet, and the length of time it will draw. They buy to-day and sell
to-morrow; or cast up what they imagine they might sell for, and call
the increase profit. Then comes the time when the magnet ceases to draw,
or the forestallers, having, in their greed, grasped more than they can
keep, offer too much for the failing market, and all at once the thing
stops, and the dervish-dance ends in coma, in cold forms and still
hands, in misery and extinction!"
There was a pause, during which the old soldier sat looking out of the
widow, no one else finding aught to say. Elkins remained standing, and
once or twice gave that little movement of the head which precedes
speech, but said nothing. Cornish smiled sardonically. Josie looked
anxiously at Jim, apprehensive as to how he would take it. At last it
was Ballard the conservative who broke silence.
"I hope, General," said he, "that our little movement won't develop into
a dervish-dance. Anyhow, you will join in our congratulations upon the
completion of the railroad. You know you once did some railroad-building
yourself, down there in Tennessee--I know, for I was there. And I've
always taken an interest in track-laying ever since."
"So have I," said the General; "that's what brought me out to-day."
"Oh, tell us about it," said Josie, evidently pleased at the change of
subject; "tell us about it, please."
"No, no!" he protested, "you may read it better in the histories,
written by young fellows who know more about it than we who were there.
You'll find, when you read it, that it was something like this: Grant's
host was over around Chattanooga, starving for want of means for
carrying in provisions. We were marching eastward to join him, when a
message came telling us to stop at Decatur and rebuild the railroad to
Nashville. So, without a thought that there was such a thing as an
impossibility, we stopped--we seven or eight thousand common Americans,
volunteer soldiers, picked at random from the legions of heroes who
saved liberty to the world--and without an engineering corps, without
tools or implements, with nothing except what any like number of our
soldiers had, we stopped and built the road. That is all. The rails had
been heated, and wound about trees and stumps. The cross-ties were
burned to heat the rails. The cars had been destroyed by fire, and their
warped ironwork thrown into ditches. The engines lay in scrap-heaps at
the bottoms of ravines and rivers. The bridges were gone. Out of the
chaos to which the structure had been resolved, there was nothing left
but the road-bed.
"When I think of what we did, I know that with liberty and intelligence
men with their naked hands could, in short space, re-create the
destroyed wealth of the world. We made tools of the scraps of iron and
steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little
sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of
the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive
genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so
well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for
powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the
thrill there is in making things."
"Out of the ranks came millers, and ground the grain the foragers
brought in; came woodmen, and cut the trees; came sawyers, and sawed the
lumber. We asked for blacksmiths; and they stepped from the ranks, and
made their own tools and the tools of the machinists. We called for
machinists; and out of the ranks they stepped, and rebuilt the engines,
and made the cars ready for the carpenters. When we wanted carpenters,
out of the same ranks of common soldiers they walked, and made the cars.
From the ranks came other men, who took the twisted rails, unwound them
from the stumps and unsnarled them from one another, as women unwind
yarn, and laid them down fit to carry our trains. And in forty days our
message went back to Grant that we had 'stopped and built the road,' and
that our engines were even then drawing supplies to his hungry army.
Such was the incomparable army which was commanded by that silent genius
of war; and to have been one of such an army is to have lived!"
The withered old hand trembled, as the great past surged back through
his mind. We all sat in silence; and I looked at Captain Tolliver,
doubtful as to how he would take the old Union general's speech. What
the Captain's history had been none of us knew, except that he was a
Southerner. When the general ceased, Tolliver was sitting still, with no
indication of being conscious of anything special in the conversation,
except that a red spot burned in each dark cheek. As the necessity for
speech grew with the lengthening silence, he rose and faced General
Lattimore.
"Suh," said he, "puhmit a man who was with the victohs of Manasses; who
chahged with mo' sand than sense at Franklin; and who cried like a child
aftah Nashville, and isn't ashamed of it, by gad! to offah his hand, and
to say that he agrees with you, suh, in youah tribute to the soldiers of
the wah, and honahs you, suh, as a fohmah foe, and a worthy one, and he
hopes, a future friend!"
Somehow, the Captain's swelling phrases, his sonorous allusions to
himself in the third person, had for the moment ceased to be ridiculous.
The environment fitted the expression. The general grasped his hand and
shook it. Then Ballard claimed the right, as one of the survivors of
Franklin, to a share in the reunion, and they at once removed the strain
which had fallen upon us with the General's first speech, by relating
stories and fraternizing soldierwise, until Conductor Corcoran called in
at the door, "Mystery Number One! All out for the christening!"
As we gathered on the platform, we saw that the signboard on the
station-building, for the name of the town, had been put up, but was
veiled by a banner draped over it. Tents were pitched near, in which
people lived waiting for the lot-auction, that they might buy sites for
shops and homes. The waters of the lake shone through the trees a few
rods away; and in imagination I could see the village of the future,
sprinkled about over the beautiful shore. The future villagers gathered
near the platform; and when Jim stepped forward to make the speech of
the occasion, he had a considerable audience.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "our visit is for the purpose of
showing the interest which the Lattimore & Great Western takes and will
continue to take in the towns on its line, and to add a name to what, I
notice, has already become a local habitation. In conferring that name,
we are aware that the future citizens of the place have claims upon us.
So one has been selected which, as time passes, will grow more and more
pleasant to your ears; and one which the person bestowing it regards as
an honor to the town as high as could be conferred in a name. No station
on our lines could have greater claims upon our regard than the
possession of this name. And now, gentlemen--"
Mr. Elkins removed his hat, and we all followed his example. Some one
pulled a cord, the banner fell away, and the name was revealed. It was
"JOSEPHINE." The women looked at it, and turned their eyes on Josie, who
blushed rosily, and shrank back behind her father, who burst into a loud
laugh of unalloyed pleasure.
"I propose three cheers for the town of Josephine," went on Mr. Elkins,
"and for the lady for whom it is named!"
They were real cheers--good hearty ones; followed by an address, in the
name of the town, by a bright young man who pushed forward and with
surprising volubility thanked President Elkins for his selection of the
name, and closed with flowery compliments to the blushing Miss Trescott,
whose identity Jim had disclosed by a bow. He was afterwards a thorn in
our flesh in his practice as a personal-injury lawyer. At the time,
however, we warmed to him, as under his leadership the dwellers in the
tents and round about the waters of Mirror Lake all shook hands with Jim
and Josie.
Cornish stood with a saturnine smile on his face, and glared at some of
the more pointed hits of the young lawyer. Cecil Barr-Smith beamed
radiant pleasure, as he saw the evident linking in this public way of
Jim's name and Josie's. Antonia stood close to Cecil's side, and chatted
vivaciously to him--not with him; for her words seemed to have no
correlation with his.
"Quite like the going away of a bridal party!" said she with exaggerated
gayety, and with a little spitefulness, I thought. "Has any one any
rice?"
"All aboard!" said Corcoran; and the joyful and triumphant party, with
their outward intimacy and their inward warfare of passions and desires,
rolled on toward "Mystery Number Two," which was duly christened
"Cornish," and celebrated in champagne furnished by its godfather.
"Don't you ever drink champagne?" said Cornish, as Josie declined to
partake.
"Never," said she.
"What, _never_?" he went on, Pinaforically.
"My God!" thought I, "the assurance of the man!" And the palm-encircled
alcove at Auriccio's, as it was wont so often to do, came across my
vision, and shut out everything but the Psyche face in its ruddy halo,
speeding by me into the street, and the vexed young man in the faultless
attire slowly following.
Mystery Number Three was "Antonia," a lovely little place in embryo;
"Barslow" came next, followed by "Giddings" and "Tolliver." We were
tired of it when we reached "Hinckley," platted on a farm owned by
Antonia's father, and where we ceased to perform the ceremony of
unveiling. It was a memorable trip, ending with sunset and home. Captain
Tolliver assisted General Lattimore to alight from the train, and they
went arm in arm up to the old General's home.
That night, according to his wont, Jim came to smoke with me in the late
evening. "Let's take a car," said he, "and go up and have a look at the
houses."
These were our new mansions up in Lynhurst Park Addition, now in process
of erection. In the moonlight we could see them dimly, and at a little
distance they looked like masses of ruins--the second childhood of
houses. A stranger could have seen, from the polished columns and the
piles of carved stone, that they were to be expensive and probably
beautiful structures.
"What do you think of the General in the role of Cassandra?" asked Jim,
as we sat in the skeleton room which was to be his library.
"It struck me," said I, "as a particularly artistic bit of croaking!"
"The Captain says frequently," said Jim, his cigar glowing like a
variable star, "that opportunity knocks once. The General, I'm afraid,
knocks all the time. But if it should turn out that he's right about
the--the--dervish-dance ... it would be ... to put it mildly ... a
horse on us, Al, wouldn't it?"
I had no answer to this fanciful speech, and made none. Instead, I told
him of Giddings's love-sickness.
"The philosophy of Iago has broken down," said he, "and the boy is sort
of short-circuited. Antonia can take him in hand, and turn him out full
of confidence; and with that, I'll answer for the lady. That can be
fixed easy, and ought to be. Let's walk back."
"What was it he said?" he asked, as we parted. "'Coma, cold forms, still
hands, and extinction.' Well, if the dervish-dance does wind up in that
sort of thing, it's only a short-cut to the inevitable. Those are pretty
houses up there; we'd have been astounded over them when we used to fish
together on Beaver Creek;--but suppose they are?
"'They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram, that great hunter--the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep!'
Good-night, Al!"