Under Providence, a man may achieve the making of many things--ships,
books, fortunes, himself even, quite often enough to encourage
others; but let him beware of creating a town. Towns mostly happen. No
real-estate operator decided that Rome should be. Sharon was an intended
town; a one man's piece of deliberate manufacture; his whim, his pet,
his monument, his device for immortally continuing above ground. He
planned its avenues, gave it his middle name, fed it with his railroad.
But he had reckoned without the inhabitants (to say nothing of nature),
and one day they displeased him. Whenever you wish, you can see Sharon
and what it has come to as I saw it when, as a visitor without local
prejudices, they asked me to serve with the telegraph-operator and the
ticket-agent and the hotel-manager on the literary committee of
judges at the school festival. There would be a stage, and flags,
and elocution, and parents assembled, and afterwards ice-cream with
strawberries from El Paso.
“Have you ever awarded prizes for school speaking?” inquired the
telegraph-operator, Stuart.
“Yes,” I told him. “At Concord in New Hampshire.”
“Ever have a chat afterwards with a mother whose girl did not get the
prize?”
“It was boys,” I replied. “And parents had no say in it.”
“It's boys and girls in Sharon,” said he. “Parents have no say in it
here, either. But that don't seem to occur to them at the moment. We'll
all stick together, of course.”
“I think I had best resign.” said I. “You would find me no hand at
pacifying a mother.”
“There are fathers also,” said Stuart. “But individual parents are small
trouble compared with a big split in public opinion. We've missed that
so far, though.”
“Then why have judges? Why not a popular vote?” I inquired.
“Don't go back on us,” said Stuart. “We are so few here. And you know
education can't be democratic or where will good taste find itself?
Eastman knows that much, at least.” And Stuart explained that Eastman
was the head of the school and chairman of our committee. “He is from
Massachusetts, and his taste is good, but he is total abstinence. Won't
allow any literature with the least smell of a drink in it, not even
in the singing-class. Would not have 'Here's a health to King Charles'
inside the door. Narrowing, that; as many of the finest classics speak
of wine freely. Eastman is useful, but a crank. Now take 'Lochinvar.'
We are to have it on strawberry night; but say! Eastman kicked about it.
Told the kid to speak something else. Kid came to me, and I--”
A smile lurked for one instant in the corner of Stuart's eye, and
disappeared again. Then he drew his arm through mine as we walked.
“You have never seen anything in your days like Sharon,” said he. “You
could not sit down by yourself and make such a thing up. Shakespeare
might have, but he would have strained himself doing it. Well, Eastman
says 'Lochinvar' will go in my expurgated version. Too bad Sir Walter
cannot know. Ever read his Familiar Letters, Great grief! but he was a
good man. Eastman stuck about that mention of wine. Remember?
'So now am I come with this lost love of mine
To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.'
'Well,' thought I, 'Eastman would agree to water. Water and daughter
would go, but is frequently used, and spoils the meter.' So I fiddled
with my pencil down in the telegraph office, and I fixed the thing up.
How's this?
'So now am I come with this beautiful maid
To lead but one measure, drink one lemonade.'
Eastman accepts that. Says it's purer. Oh, it's not all sadness here!”
“How did you come to be in Sharon?” I asked my exotic acquaintance.
“Ah, how did I? How did all our crowd at the railroad? Somebody has got
to sell tickets, somebody has got to run that hotel, and telegraphs have
got to exist here. That's how we foreigners came. Many travellers change
cars here, and one train usually misses the other, because the two
companies do not love each other. You hear lots of language, especially
in December. Eastern consumptives bound for southern California get left
here, and drummers are also thick. Remarks range from 'How provoking!'
to things I would not even say myself. So that big hotel and depot has
to be kept running, and we fellows get a laugh now and then. Our lot is
better than these people's.” He made a general gesture at Sharon.
“I should have thought it was worse,” said I. “No, for we'll be
transferred some day. These poor folks are shipwrecked. Though it is
their own foolishness, all this.”
Again my eye followed as he indicated the town with a sweep of his hand;
and from the town I looked to the four quarters of heaven. I may have
seen across into Old Mexico. No sign labels the boundary; the vacuum
of continent goes on, you might think, to Patagonia. Symptoms of
neighboring Mexico basked on the sand heaps along Sharon's spacious
avenues--little torpid, indecent gnomes in sashes and open rags, with
crowning-steeple straw hats, and murder dozing in their small black
eyes. They might have crawled from holes in the sand, or hatched out
of brown cracked pods on some weeds that trailed through the broken
bottles, the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts
began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year
the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only
rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the
shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the
void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet
mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to
Sharon, misses the town, and emerges thirty miles south across the
sunlight in a shallow, futile lake, a cienaga, called Las Palomas. Then
it evaporates into the ceaseless blue sky.
The water you get in Sharon is dragged by a herd of wind-wheels from
the bowels of the sand. Over the town they turn and turn--Sharon's upper
story--a filmy colony of slats. In some of the homes beneath them you
may go up-stairs--in the American homes, not in the adobe Mexican
caves of song, woman, and knives; and brick and stone edifices occur.
Monuments of perished trade, these rise among their flatter neighbors
cubical and stark; under-shirts, fire-arms, and groceries for sale
in the ground-floor, blind dust-windows above. Most of the mansions,
however, squat ephemerally upon the soil, no cellar to them, and no
staircase, the total fragile box ready to bounce and caracole should the
wind drive hard enough. Inside them, eating, mending, the newspaper, and
more babies, eke out the twelvemonth; outside, the citizens loiter to
their errands along the brief wide avenues of Sharon that empty into
space. Men, women, and children move about in the town, sparse and
casual, and over their heads in a white tribe the wind-wheels on their
rudders veer to the breeze and indolently revolve above the gaping
obsoleteness. Through the dumb town the locomotive bell tolls
pervadingly when a train of freight or passengers trundles in from the
horizon or out along the dwindling fence of telegraph poles. No matter
where you are, you can hear it come and go, leaving Sharon behind, an
airy carcass, bleached and ventilated, sitting on the sand, with the sun
and the hot wind pouring through its bones.
This town was the magnate's child, the thing that was to keep his memory
green; and as I took it in on that first walk of discovery, Stuart told
me its story: how the magnate had decreed the railroad shops should be
here; how, at that, corner lots grew in a night; how horsemen galloped
the streets, shooting for joy, and the hasty tents rose while the
houses were hammered together; how they had song, dance, cards, whiskey,
license, murder, marriage, opera--the whole usual thing--regular as the
clock in our West, in Australia, in Africa, in every virgin corner
of the world where the Anglo-Saxon rushes to spend his animal
spirits--regular as the clock, and in Sharon's case about fifteen
minutes long. For they became greedy, the corner-lot people. They ran
up prices for land which the railroad, the breath of their nostrils,
wanted. They grew ugly, forgetting they were dealing with a magnate, and
that a railroad from ocean to ocean can take its shops somewhere else
with appalling ease. Thus did the corner lots become sand again in a
night. “And in the words of the poet,” concluded Stuart, “Sharon has an
immense future behind it.”
Our talk was changed by the sight of a lady leaning and calling over a
fence.
“Mrs. Jeffries,” said she. “Oh, Mrs. Jeffries!”
“Well?” called a voice next door.
“I want to send Leola and Arvasita into your yard.”
“Well?” the voice repeated.
“Our tool-house blew over into your yard last night. It's jammed behind
your tank.”
“Oh, indeed!”
A window in the next house was opened, a head put out, and this
occasioned my presentation to both ladies. They were Mrs. Mattern
and Mrs. Jeffries, and they fell instantly into a stiff caution of
deportment; but they speedily found I was not worth being cautious
over. Stuart whispered to me that they were widows of high standing, and
mothers of competing favorites for the elocution prize; and I hastened
to court their esteem. Mrs. Mattern was in body more ample, standing
high and yellow and fluffy; but Mrs. Jeffries was smooth and small, and
behind her spectacles she had an eye.
“You must not let us interrupt you, ladies,” said I, after some
civilities. “Did I understand that something was to be carried
somewhere?”
“You did,” said Mrs. Jeffries (she had come out of her house); “and I am
pleased to notice no damage has been done to our fence--this time.”
“It would have been fixed right up at my expense, as always, Mrs.
Jeffries,” retorted her neighbor, and started to keep abreast of Mrs.
Jeffries as that lady walked and inspected the fence. Thus the two
marched parallel along the frontier to the rear of their respective
territories.
“You'll not resign?” said Stuart to me. “It is 'yours till death,' ain't
it?”