Some Things which Happened in Our Halcyon Days.
If there was any tension among us just after the house-warming, it was
not noticeable. Mr. Cornish and Mr. Elkins seemed unaware of their
rivalry. Had either of the two been successful, it might have made
mischief; but as it was, neither felt that his rejection was more than
temporary. Neither knew much of the other's suit, and both seemed full
of hope and good spirits.
Altogether, these were our halcyon days. It seemed to crew and captain a
time for the putting off of armor, and the donning of the garlands of
complacent respite from struggle. The work we had undertaken seemed
accomplished--our village was a city. The great wheel we had set
whirling went spinning on with power. Long ago we had ceased to treat
the matter jocularly; and to regard our operations as applied psychology
only, or as a piratical reunion, no longer occurred to us. There is such
a thing, I believe, as self-hypnotism; but if we knew it, we made no
application of our knowledge to our own condition. This great,
scattered, ebullient town, grown from the drowsy Lattimore of a few
years ago, must surely be, even now, what we had willed it to be: and
therefore, could we not pause and take our ease?
There was the General, of course. He, Jim said, "'knocked' so constantly
as to be sort of ex-officio President of the Boiler-makers' Union," and
talked of the inevitable collapse. But who ever heard of a city built by
people of his way of thinking? And there was Josie Trescott, with her
agreement on broad lines with the General, and her deprecation of the
giving of fortunes to people who had not earned them; but Josie was only
a woman, who, to be sure, knew more of most matters than the rest of us,
but could not have any very valuable knowledge of the prospects for
commercial prosperity.
That we were in the midst of an era of the most wonderful commercial
prosperity none denied. How could they? The streets, so lately bordered
with low stores, hotels, and banks, were now craggy with tall office
buildings and great hostelries, through which the darting elevators shot
hurrying passengers. Those trees which made early twilight in the
streets that night when Alice, Jim, and I first rode out to the Trescott
farm were now mostly cut down to make room for "improvements."
Brushy Creek gorge was no longer dark and cool, with its double sky-line
of trees drowsing toward one another, like eyelashes, from the friendly
cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water
from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels,
but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout.
On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such
things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside
ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of
flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs,
in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and the fiends of
dynamite and nitro-glycerin. Limekilns burned all the time, turning the
companionable gray ledges into something offensive and corrosive. One
must now board a street-car, and ride away beyond Lynhurst Park before
one could find the good and pure little Brushy Creek of yore.
The dwellers in the houses which stood in their lawns of vivid green had
gone away into the new "additions," to be in the fashion, and to escape
from the smoke and clang of engine and factory. Their old houses were
torn away, or converted, by new and incongruous extensions, into cheap
boarding-houses. Only the Lattimore house kept faith with the past, and
stood as of old, in its five acres of trees and grass, untouched of the
fever for platting and subdivision, its very skirts drawn up from the
asphalt by austere retaining-walls. And here went on the preparation for
the time when Laura and Clifford were to stand up and declare their
purposes and intentions with reference to each other. The first wedding
this was to be, in all our close-knit circle.
"I am glad," said I, "that they are all so sensible as not to permit
rivalries to breed discord among us. It might be disastrous."
"There is time," said Alice, "for that to develop yet."
Not that everything happened as we wished. Indeed, some things gave us
much anxiety. Bill Trescott, for instance, began at last to show signs
of that going up in the air which Jim had said we must keep him from.
Even Captain Tolliver complained that Bill's habits were getting bad:
and he was the last person in the world to censure excess in the vices
which he deemed gentlemanly. His own idea of morning, for instance, was
that period of the day when the bad taste in the mouth so natural to a
gentleman is removed by a stiff toddy, drunk just before prayers. He
would, no doubt, have conceded to the inventor of the alphabet a higher
place among men than that of the discoverer of the mint julep, had the
matter been presented to him in concrete form; but would have qualified
the admission by adding, with a seriousness incompatible with the
average conception of a joke: "But the question is sutt'nly one not
entiahly free from doubt, suh; not entiahly free from doubt!"
However, the Captain had his standards, and prescribed for himself
limits of time, place, and degree, to which he faithfully conformed. But
he had been for a long time doing business under a sort of partnership
arrangement with Bill, and their affairs had become very much
interwoven. So he came to us, one day, in something like a panic, on
finding that Bill had become a frequenter of one of the local
bucket-shops, and had been making maudlin boasts of the profitable deals
he had made.
"This means, gentlemen," said the Captain, "that influences entiahly
fo'eign to ouah investments hyah ah likely to bring a crash, which will
not only wipe out Mr. Trescott, but, owin' to ouah association in the
additions we have platted, cyah'y me down also! You can see that with
sev'al hundred thousand dolla's of deferred payments on what we have
sold, most of which have been rediscounted in the East by the G. B. T.,
Mr. Trescott's condition becomes something of serious conce'n fo'
you-all, as well as fo' me. Nothing else, I assuah you, gentlemen, could
fo'ce me to call attention to a mattah so puahly pussonal as a diffe'nce
between gentlemen in theiah standahds of inebriety! Nothing else,
believe me!"
By the G. B. T. the Captain meant the Grain Belt Trust Company, and
anything which affected its solvency or welfare was, as he said, a
matter of serious concern for all of us. In fact, at that very moment
there were in Lattimore two officers of New England banks with whom we
had placed a rather heavy line of G. B. T. securities, and who had made
the trip for the purpose of looking us up. Suppose that they found out
that the notes and mortgages of William S. Trescott & Co. really had
back of them only some very desirable suburban additions, and the
personal responsibility of a retired farmer, who was daily handing his
money to board-of-trade gamblers, with whom he was getting an education
in the great strides we are making in the matter of mixed drinks? This
thought occurred to all of us at once.
"Well," said Cornish, stating the point of agreement after the Captain's
trouble had been fully discussed, "unfortunately 'the right to be a
cussed fool is safe from all devices human,' and there doesn't seem to
be any remedy."
It all came, thought I, as Jim and I sat silent after Cornish and the
Captain went out, from the fact that Bill's present condition in life
gave those tendencies to which he had always been prone to yield, a
chance for unrestricted growth. He ought to have staid with his steers.
Cattle and corn were the only things in which he could take an interest
sufficiently keen to keep him from drink. These habits of his were
enacting the old story of the lop-eared rabbits in
Australia--overrunning the country. Bill had been as sober a citizen as
one could desire, as long as his house-building occupied his time; and
he and Josie had worked together as companionably as they used to do in
the hay and wheat. But now he was drifting away from her. Her father
should have staid on the farm.
"Do you know," said I, "that Giddings is making about as great a fool of
himself as Bill?"
"Yes," said Jim, "but that's because he's in a terrible state of mind
about his marriage. If we can keep him from delirium tremens until after
the wedding, he'll be all right. Some Italian brain-sharp has written up
cases like his, and he'll be all right. But with Bill it's different....
Do you remember our old Shep?"
"No," I returned wonderingly, almost impatiently. "What about him?"
"Well," he mused, "I've been picking up knowledge of men for a while
along back; and I've come to prize more highly the personal history of
dogs; and Shep was worth a biography for its own sake, to say nothing of
the value of a typical case. He was a woolly collie, who would
cheerfully have given up his life for the cows and sheep. Anything in
his line, that a dog could grasp, Shep knew, and he was busier than a
cranberry-merchant the year around, and the happiest thing on the farm.
Then our folks moved to Mayville, and took him along. He wasn't fitted
for town life at all. He'd lie on the front piazza, and search the
street for cows and sheep, and when one came along he'd stick his sharp
nose through the fence, and whine as if some one was whipping him. In
less than six weeks he bit a baby; in two months he was the most
depraved dog in Mayville, and in three ... he died."
I had no answer for the apologue--not even for the self-condemnatory
tone in which he told it. Presently he rose to go, and said that he
would not be back.
"Don't forget our date at the club this evening," said he, as he passed
out. "Your style of diplomacy always seems to win with these down-East
bankers. Your experience as rob-ee gives you the right handshake and the
subscribed-and-sworn-to look that does their business for 'em every
time. Good-by until then."
Our club was the terminal bud of our growth, and was housed in a
building of which we were enormously proud. It was managed by a steward
imported from New York, whose salary was made large to harmonize with
his manners--that being the only way in which the majority of our
members felt equal to living up to them. So far as money could make a
club, ours was of high rank. There were meat-cooks and pastry-cooks in
incredible numbers, under the command of a French chef, who ruled the
house committee with a rod of iron. We were all members as a matter of
public duty. I have often wondered what the servants, brought from
Eastern cities, thought of it all. To see Bill Trescott and Aleck
Macdonald going in through the great door, noiselessly swung open for
them by an attendant in livery, was a sight to be remembered. The chief
ornament of the club was Cornish, who lived there.
"I want to see Mr. Cornish," said I to the servant who took my overcoat,
that evening.
"Right this way, sir," said he. "Mr. Giddings is with him. He gave
orders for you to be shown up."
Cornish sat at a little round table on which there were some bottles and
glasses. The tipple was evidently ale, and Mr. Giddings was standing
opposite, lifting a glass in one hand and pointing at it with the other,
in evident imitation of the attitude in which the late Mr. Gough loved
to have himself pictured; but the sentiments of the two speakers were
quite different.
"'Turn out more ale; turn up the light!'"
Giddings glanced at the electric light-fixtures, and then looked about
as if for a servant to turn them up.
"'I will not go to bed to-night!
For, of all foes that man should dread,
The first and worst one is a bed!
Friends I have had, both old and young;
Ale have we drunk, and songs we've sung.
Enough you know when this is said,
That, one and all, they died in bed!'"
Here Giddings's voice broke with grief, and he stopped to drink the rest
of the glassful, and went on:
"'In bed they died, and I'll not go
Where all my friends have perished so!
Go, ye who fain would buried be;
But not to-night a bed for me!'"
"Do you often have these Horatian fits?" I inquired.
"Base groveler!" said he, "if you can't rise to the level of the
occasion, don't butt in."
"'For me to-night no bed prepare,
But set me out my oaken chair,
And bid me other guests beside
The ghosts that shall around me glide!'"
"You will, of course," said Cornish, "permit us to withdraw for the
purpose of having our conference with our Eastern friends? If I take
your meaning, you'll not be alone."
"Not by a jugful, I'll not be alone!" said Giddings, tossing off another
glass:
"'In curling smoke-wreaths I shall see
A fair and gentle company.
Though silent all, fair revelers they,
Who leave you not till break of day!
Go, ye who would not daylight see;
But not to-night a bed for me!
For I've been born, and I've been wed,
And all man's troubles come of bed!'"
Here Giddings sank down in his chair and began weeping.
"The divinest attribute of poetry," said he, "is that of bringing tears.
Let me weep awhile, fellows, and then I'll give you the last stanza.
Last stanza's the best--"
And in the midst of his critique he went to sleep, thereby breaking his
rule adopted in "_Dum Vivemus Vigilemus_."
"Is he this way often?" said I to Cornish, as we went down to meet Jim
and the bankers.
"Pretty often," said Cornish. "I don't know how I'd amuse my evenings if
it weren't for Giddings. He's too far gone to-night, though, to be
entertaining. Gets worse, I think, as the wedding-day approaches. Trying
to drown his apprehensions, I suspect. Funny fellow, Giddings. But he's
all right from noon to nine P.M."
"I think we'll have to organize a dipsomaniacs' hospital for our crowd,"
said I, "if things keep going on as they are tending now! I didn't think
Giddings was so many kinds of an ass!"
My complainings were cut short by our entrance into the presence of Mr.
Elkins and the New England bankers. I asked to be excused from partaking
of the refreshments which were served. I had seen and heard enough to
spoil my appetite. I was agreeably surprised to find that their
independent investigations of conditions in Lattimore had convinced them
of the safety of their investments. Really, they said, were it not for
the pleasure of meeting us here at our home, they should feel that the
time and expense of looking us up were wasted. But, handling, as they
did, the moneys of estates and numerous savings accounts, their
customers were of a class in whom timidity and nervousness reach their
maximum, and they were obliged to keep themselves in position to give
assurances as to the safety of their investments from their personal
investigations.
Mr. Hinckley, who was with us, assured them that his life as a banker
enabled him fully to realize the necessity of their carefulness, which
we, for our own parts, were pleased to know existed. We were only too
glad to exhibit our books to them, make a complete showing as to our
condition generally, and even take them to see each individual piece of
property covered by our paper. Mr. Hinckley went with them to their
hotel, having proposed enough work in the way of investigation to keep
them with us for several months. They were to leave on the evening of
the next day.
"But," said Jim, as we put on our overcoats to go home, "it shows our
good will, you see."
At that moment the steward, with an anxious look, asked Mr. Elkins for a
word in private.
"Ask Mr. Barslow if he will kindly step over here," I heard Jim say; and
I joined them at once.
"I was just saying, sir, to Mr. Elkins," said the steward, "that
ordinarily I'd not think of mentioning such a thing as a gentleman's
being indisposed but should see that he was cared for here. But Mr.
Trescott being in such a state, I felt it was a case for his friends or
the hospital. He's been--a--seeing things this afternoon; and while
he's better now in that regard, his--"
"Have a closed carriage brought at once," said Mr. Elkins. "Al, you'd
better go up to the house, and let them know we're coming. I'll take him
home!"
I shrank from the meeting with Mrs. Trescott and Josie, more, I think,
than if it had been Bill's death which I was to announce. As I
approached the house, I got from it, somehow, the impression that it was
a place of night-long watchfulness; and I was not surprised by the fact
that before I had time to ring or knock at the door Mrs. Trescott
herself opened it, with an expression on her face which spoke of long
vigils, and of fear passing on to certainty. She peered past me for an
expected Something on the street. Her leisure and its new habits had
assimilated her in dress and make-up to the women of the wealthier sort
in the city; but there was an immensity of trouble in the agonized eye
and the pitiful droop of her mouth, which I should have rejoiced to see
exchanged again for the ill-groomed exterior and the old fret of the
farm. Her first question ignored all reference to the things leading to
my being there, "in the dead vast and middle of the night," but went
past me to the core of her trouble, as her eye had gone on from me to
the street, in the search for the thing she dreaded.
"Where is he, Mr. Barslow?" said she, in a hushing whisper; "where is
he?"
"He is a little sick," said I, "and Mr. Elkins is bringing him home. I
came on to tell you." "Then he is not--" she went on, still in that
hushed voice, and searching me with her gaze.
"No, I assure you!" I answered. "He is in no immediate danger, even."
Josie came quietly forward from the dusk of the room beyond, where I saw
she had been listening, reminding me, in spite of the incongruity of the
idea, of that time when she emerged from the obscurity of her garden,
and stood at the foot of the windmill tower, leaning on her father's
arm, her hands filled with petunias, the night we first visited the
Trescott farm. And then my mind ran back to that other night when she
had thrown herself into his arms and begged him to take her away; and he
had said, "W'y, yes, little gal, of course I'll take yeh away, if yeh
don't like it here!" I think that I, perhaps, was more nearly able than
any one else in the world beside herself to gauge her grief at this long
death in which she was losing him, and he himself.
She took my hand, pressed it silently, and began caressing her mother
and whispering to her things which I could not hear. Mrs. Trescott sat
upon a sort of divan, shaking with terrible, soundless sobs, and
clasping and unclasping her hands, but making no other gesture. I stood
helpless at the hidden abyss of woe so suddenly uncovered before me and
until this very moment screened by the conventions which keep our souls
apart like prisoners in the cells in some great prison. These two women
had been bearing this for a long time, and we, their nearest friends,
had stood aloof from them. As I stood thinking of this, the
carriage-wheels ground upon the pavement in the _porte cochere_; and a
moment later Jim came in, his face graver than I had ever seen it. He
sat down by Mrs. Trescott, and gently took one of her hands.
"Dr. Aylesbury has given him a morphia injection," said he, "and he is
sound asleep. The doctor thinks it best for us to carry him right to his
room. There is a man here from the hospital, who will stay and nurse
him; and the doctor came, too."
Mrs. Trescott started up, saying that she must arrange his room. Soon
the four of us had placed him in bed, where he lay, puffy and purple,
with a sort of pasty pallor overspreading his face. His limbs
occasionally jerked spasmodically; but otherwise he was still under the
spell of the opiate. His wife, now that there was something definite to
do, was self-possessed and efficient, taking the physician's
instructions with ready apprehension. The fact that Bill had now assumed
the character of a patient rather than that of a portent seemed to make
the trouble, somehow, more normal and endurable. The wife and daughter
insisted upon assuming the care of him, but assented to the nurse's
remaining as a help in emergencies. It was nearing dawn when I took my
leave. As I approached the door, I saw Jim and Josie in the hall, and
heard him making some last tenders of aid and comfort before his
departure. He put out his hand, and she clasped it in both of hers.
"I want to thank you," said she, "for what you have done."
"I have done nothing," he replied. "It is what I wish to do that I want
you to think of. I do not know whether I shall ever be able to forgive
myself--"
"No, no!" said she. "You must not talk--you must not allow yourself to
feel in that way. It is unjust--to yourself and to--me--for you to feel
so!"
I advanced to them, but she still stood looking into his face and
holding his hand clasped in hers. There was something of appeal, of an
effort to express more than the words said, in her look and attitude. He
answered her regard by a gaze so pathetically wistful that she averted
her face, pressed his hand, and turned to me.
"Good-night to you both, and thank you both, a thousand times!" said
she.
* * * * *
"I wonder if old Shep's relations and friends," said Jim, as we stood
under the arc light in front of my house, "ever came to forgive the
people who took him away from his flocks and herds."
"After what I've seen in the last few minutes," said I, "I haven't the
least doubt of it."
"Al," said he, "these be troublous times, but if I believed all that
what you say implies, I'd go home happy, if not jolly. And I almost
believe you're right."
"Well," said I, assuming for once the role of the mentor, "I think that
you are foolish to worry about it. We have enough actual, well-defined,
surveyed and platted grief on our hands, without any mooning about
hunting for the speculative variety. Go home, sleep, and bring down a
clear brain for to-morrow's business."
"To-day's," said he gaily. "Tear off yesterday's leaf from the calendar,
Al. For, look! the morn, dressed as usual, 'walks o'er the dew of yon
high eastern hill.'"