The remembrance of that dinner when with my connivance the Scherers made
their social debut is associated in my mind with the coming of the
fulness of that era, mad and brief, when gold rained down like manna from
our sooty skies. Even the church was prosperous; the Rev. Carey Heddon,
our new minister, was well abreast of the times, typical of the new and
efficient Christianity that has finally buried the hatchet with
enlightened self-interest. He looked like a young and prosperous man of
business, and indeed he was one.
The fame of our city spread even across the Atlantic, reaching obscure
hamlets in Europe, where villagers gathered up their lares and penates,
mortgaged their homes, and bought steamship tickets from
philanthropists,--philanthropists in diamonds. Our Huns began to arrive,
their Attilas unrecognized among them: to drive our honest Americans and
Irish and Germans out of the mills by "lowering the standard of living."
Still--according to the learned economists in our universities,
enlightened self-interest triumphed. Had not the honest Americans and
Germans become foremen and even presidents of corporations? What greater
vindication for their philosophy could be desired?
The very aspect of the city changed like magic. New buildings sprang high
in the air; the Reliance Trust (Mr. Grierson's), the Scherer Building,
the Hambleton Building; a stew hotel, the Ashuela, took proper care of
our visitors from the East,--a massive, grey stone, thousand-awninged
affair on Boyne Street, with a grill where it became the fashion to go
for supper after the play, and a head waiter who knew in a few weeks
everyone worth knowing.
To return for a moment to the Huns. Maude had expressed a desire to see a
mill, and we went, one afternoon, in Mr. Scherer's carriage to
Steelville, with Mr. Scherer himself,--a bewildering, educative, almost
terrifying experience amidst fumes and flames, gigantic forces and
titanic weights. It seemed a marvel that we escaped being crushed or
burned alive in those huge steel buildings reverberating with sound. They
appeared a very bedlam of chaos, instead of the triumph of order,
organization and human skill. Mr. Scherer was very proud of it all, and
ours was a sort of triumphal procession, accompanied by superintendents,
managers and other factotums. I thought of my childhood image of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and our progress through the flames
seemed no less remarkable and miraculous.
Maude, with alarm in her eyes, kept very close to me, as I supplemented
the explanations they gave her. I had been there many times before.
"Why, Hugh," she exclaimed, "you seem to know a lot about it!"
Mr. Scherer laughed.
"He's had to talk about it once or twice in court--eh, Hugh? You didn't
realize how clever your husband was did you, Mrs. Paret?"
"But this is so--complicated," she replied. "It is overwhelming."
"When I found out how much trouble he had taken to learn about my
business," added Mr. Scherer, "there was only one thing to do. Make him
my lawyer. Hugh, you have the floor, and explain the open-hearth
process."
I had almost forgotten the Huns. I saw Maude gazing at them with a new
kind of terror. And when we sat at home that evening they still haunted
her.
"Somehow, I can't bear to think about them," she said. "I'm sure we'll
have to pay for it, some day."
"Pay for what?" I asked.
"For making them work that way. And twelve hours! It can't be right,
while we have so much, and are so comfortable."
"Don't be foolish," I exclaimed. "They're used to it. They think
themselves lucky to get the work--and they are. Besides, you give them
credit for a sensitiveness that they don't possess. They wouldn't know
what to do with such a house as this if they had it."
"I never realized before that our happiness and comfort were built on
such foundations;" she said, ignoring my remark.
"You must have seen your father's operatives, in Elkington, many times a
week."
"I suppose I was too young to think about such things," she reflected.
"Besides, I used to be sorry for them, sometimes. But these men at the
steel mills--I can't tell you what I feel about them. The sight of their
great bodies and their red, sullen faces brought home to me the cruelty
of life. Did you notice how some of them stared at us, as though they
were but half awake in the heat, with that glow on their faces? It made
me afraid--afraid that they'll wake up some day, and then they will be
terrible. I thought of the children. It seems not only wicked, but mad to
bring ignorant foreigners over here and make them slaves like that, and
so many of them are hurt and maimed. I can't forget them."
"You're talking Socialism," I said crossly, wondering whether Lucia had
taken it up as her latest fad.
"Oh, no, I'm not," said Maude, "I don't know what Socialism is. I'm
talking about something that anyone who is not dazzled by all this luxury
we are living in might be able to see, about something which, when it
comes, we shan't be able to help."
I ridiculed this. The prophecy itself did not disturb me half as much as
the fact that she had made it, as this new evidence that she was
beginning to think for herself, and along lines so different from my own
development.
While it lasted, before novelists, playwrights, professors and ministers
of the Gospel abandoned their proper sphere to destroy it, that Golden
Age was heaven; the New Jerusalem--in which we had ceased to
believe--would have been in the nature of an anticlimax to any of our
archangels of finance who might have attained it. The streets of our own
city turned out to be gold; gold likewise the acres of unused, scrubby
land on our outskirts, as the incident of the Riverside Franchise--which
I am about to relate--amply proved.
That scheme originated in the alert mind of Mr. Frederick Grierson, and
in spite of the fact that it has since become notorious in the eyes of a
virtue-stricken public, it was entered into with all innocence at the
time: most of the men who were present at the "magnate's" table at the
Boyne Club the day Mr. Grierson broached it will vouch for this. He
casually asked Mr. Dickinson if he had ever noticed a tract lying on the
river about two miles beyond the Heights, opposite what used to be in the
old days a road house.
"This city is growing so fast, Leonard," said Grierson, lighting a
special cigar the Club kept for him, "that it might pay a few of us to
get together and buy that tract, have the city put in streets and sewers
and sell it in building lots. I think I can get most of it at less than
three hundred dollars an acre."
Mr. Dickinson was interested. So were Mr. Ogilvy and Ralph Hambleton, and
Mr. Scherer, who chanced to be there. Anything Fred Grierson had to say
on the question of real estate was always interesting. He went on to
describe the tract, its size and location.
"That's all very well, Fred," Dickinson objected presently, "but how are
your prospective householders going to get out there?"
"Just what I was coming to," cried Grierson, triumphantly, "we'll get a
franchise, and build a street-railroad out Maplewood Avenue, an extension
of the Park Street line. We can get the franchise for next to nothing, if
we work it right." (Mr. Grierson's eye fell on me), "and sell it out to
the public, if you underwrite it, for two million or so."
"Well, you've got your nerve with you, Fred, as usual," said Dickinson.
But he rolled his cigar in his mouth, an indication, to those who knew
him well, that he was considering the matter. When Leonard Dickinson
didn't say "no" at once, there was hope. "What do you think the property
holders on Maplewood Avenue would say? Wasn't it understood, when that
avenue was laid out, that it was to form part of the system of
boulevards?"
"What difference does it make what they say?" Ralph interposed.
Dickinson smiled. He, too, had an exaggerated respect for Ralph. We all
thought the proposal daring, but in no way amazing; the public existed to
be sold things to, and what did it matter if the Maplewood residents, as
Ralph said; and the City Improvement League protested?
Perry Blackwood was the Secretary of the City Improvement League, the
object of which was to beautify the city by laying out a system of
parkways.
The next day some of us gathered in Dickinson's office and decided that
Grierson should go ahead and get the options. This was done; not, of
course, in Grierson's name. The next move, before the formation of the
Riverside Company, was to "see" Mr. Judd Jason. The success or failure of
the enterprise was in his hands. Mahomet must go to the mountain, and I
went to Monahan's saloon, first having made an appointment. It was not
the first time I had been there since I had made that first memorable
visit, but I never quite got over the feeling of a neophyte before
Buddha, though I did not go so far as to analyze the reason,--that in Mr.
Jason I was brought face to face with the concrete embodiment of the
philosophy I had adopted, the logical consequence of enlightened
self-interest. If he had ever heard of it, he would have made no pretence
of being anything else. Greatness, declares some modern philosopher, has
no connection with virtue; it is the continued, strong and logical
expression of some instinct; in Mr. Jason's case, the predatory instinct.
And like a true artist, he loved his career for itself--not for what its
fruits could buy. He might have built a palace on the Heights with the
tolls he took from the disreputable houses of the city; he was contented
with Monahan's saloon: nor did he seek to propitiate a possible God by
endowing churches and hospitals with a portion of his income. Try though
I might, I never could achieve the perfection of this man's contempt for
all other philosophies. The very fact of my going there in secret to that
dark place of his from out of the bright, respectable region in which I
lived was in itself an acknowledgment of this. I thought him a thief--a
necessary thief--and he knew it: he was indifferent to it; and it amused
him, I think, to see clinging to me, when I entered his presence, shreds
of that morality which those of my world who dealt with him thought so
needful for the sake of decency.
He was in bed, reading newspapers, as usual. An empty coffee-cup and a
plate were on the littered table.
"Sit down, sit down, Paret," he said. "What do you hear from the
Senator?"
I sat down, and gave him the news of Mr. Watling. He seemed, as usual,
distrait, betraying no curiosity as to the object of my call, his lean,
brown fingers playing with the newspapers on his lap. Suddenly, he
flashed out at me one of those remarks which produced the uncanny
conviction that, so far as affairs in the city were concerned, he was
omniscient.
"I hear somebody has been getting options on that tract of land beyond
the Heights, on the river."