PORT ARGENT

PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, and the city grew.

In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no “press galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills, or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute?

Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social speculators “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile.

Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed of.

There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new generation.

Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of Port Argent.

The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country, after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures, changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness.

The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic heart beat and brain conceive.

One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street.

Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything fitted anything else.

Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the Champney place.

A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked a citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was told: “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.”

“Fixed him?”

“Oh, they're a happy family now.”

The citizens of Port Argent held singular language.

“Who is Marve Wood?”

“He's—there he is over there.”

“Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?”

“Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.”

“And this Wood—is he an engineer and contractor?”

“No—well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us.”

The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club.

The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He produced the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated and consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried to and fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel and bar and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The elderly “Marve Wood,” stood beside him—thick-set, with a grey beard of the cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the faces that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He had a comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat.

Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a huge, black-moustached Irishman.

“Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to work.”

The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy tucked in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The sidewalk grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the statue of a Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. He appeared to be facing his country's enemies with determination, but time and weather had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as if he found no enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. station and the workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street.

Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out there,” he said.

“Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book.

“Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney went on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river, when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed basis, and the difference is important—important to the observer of the signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla.

Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves.

Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted a flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building opposite were open.

“Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion.

“Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh—well—he's all right.”

“He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry banner if he wants to.”

Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that function.

“But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't stand any deadheads.”

“Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.”

Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles.

“Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see him,” he added.

“All right, I'll do that.”

“And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel injured.”

“Well, I'm glad to oblige him——”

“That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but—you'd better make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.”

“That's all right.”

Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and added, “I see.”

“I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,” said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, “except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others. Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He never was really comfortable.”

Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at an upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what appeared dumb-show.

“Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?”

“The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It means, if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's because folks get so tired of the warlike.”

“Oh!”

“Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue——”

“Aidee?”

“Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine man—fine man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks got kind of tired of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. Well—maybe so. Then I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes along with a patent pill, and a new porous plaster, and claims his plaster has the holes arranged in triangles, instead of squares like all previous plasters; he has an air of candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my soul! Your system's out of order.' Sounds interesting once in a while. And then this world gets so tired of him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache eleven thousand years. I wish to God you wouldn't keep giving it new names.' Well,—a couple of years ago the Chronicle was publishing Aidee's speeches on Civic something or other every week. Aidee used to shoot straight but scattering at that time. He'd got too much responsibility for the details of the millennium. Why, when you come right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an opinion of himself as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If I could stand up like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of natural gas on the blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there ain't any real democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any man. Guess likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other gutter-man hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. Aidee's a loose comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for boiling potatoes. Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent Reform and his Assembly—oh, well—he wasn't doing any great harm then. He ain't now, either. I told him one time, like this: “I says, 'Fire away anyhow that suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think you'd like my job?'”

“'What is your job?' says he.

“'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little stumped. 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.'

“'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like it.'

“'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your job?'

“And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact.

“'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says.

“'Complicated?'

“'Yes.'

“'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail last year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a clergyman on the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I can talk it. I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his intellectuals are all right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got the habit of meditation. So he starts in.”

“Bill, you've been a bad lot.”

“Yep.”

“There ain't no hope for you, Bill.”

“No,” says Bill, “there ain't.”

“You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”'

“Aidee laughed,—he did really,—and after that he looked thoughtful. Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. 'Sweeney,' I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline of it. But I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, thinking anybody could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of myself, sure.'

“Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't any of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable since. That's what I wanted to tell you.”

“What for?”

“Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be interested to find out what he's up to.”

After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up.

“All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's got to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then turned into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the residence sections.

CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND

WHEN Hennion reached his rooms the sunlight was slanting through the maples outside.

He sat down after supper by his windows. The twilight was thickening in the foliage, the sparrows holding noisy caucuses there——

Hennion's father had been a contractor and engineer before him, and before the great war had made the face of the nation more thoughtful with the knowledge of what may happen in well-regulated families.

Once the sun was a pillar of fire and cloud, the land of promise seemed every day attained, and the stars were jubilant. Were ever such broad green plains, strong brown rivers and blue lakes? There was oratory then, and sublime foreheads were smitten against the stars. Such oratory and such a forehead had Henry Champney, in those days. The subject of oratory was the devotion of the forefathers, the promises and attainments of the nation set forth in thrilling statistics. A thousand audiences shuffled and grinned, and went their way to accomplish the more immediate things which the orators had endeavoured to decorate. The admiration of the orator and the public was mutual. There was a difference in type,—and the submerged industrialist, who worked with odd expedients, who jested with his lips, and toiled terribly with brain and hand, admired the difference.

The elder Hennion did not care about “the destinies of the nation.” He dredged the channel of that brown river, the Muscadine, drove the piles that held the docks of Port Argent, and dug the east section of the Interstate Canal. The war came, and someone appointed him to something connected with the transportation of commissary. He could not escape the habit of seeing that things did what they were supposed to do. Hennion's supplies were apt to reach the Army of the Cumberland regularly and on scheduled time, it would be hard to tell why.

He built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, and did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, “wrecked” the Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of it for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and philosophical.

“Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. That's a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told his boys he hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did making it, but they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed him there, only he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and I wish I had your luck. But I've had a good time.” Such was “Rick” Hennion's philosophy.

Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the State, agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and moreover some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw and trowel. He recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, white with the dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, somewhat small at first; men of another class seemed to look to him as naturally for jobs; his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile country. Among the friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's.

Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about the continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, one found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at one time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one of those personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but certainly members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor offices. Such a man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for the growth, a process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a function. If one wished to know anything intimate about the city, what was doing, or about to be done, or how the Council would vote, or any one thread in the tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood appeared to have this information. His opinion was better—at least better informed—than most opinions. For some reason it was difficult not to be on good terms with him.

Port Argent concluded one day that it had a “boss.” It was suggested in a morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said, “We're a humming town.” Real estate at auction went a shade higher that morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted for. The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said:

“Wood, I hear you're a boss.”

“That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the window and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since.”

“Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there it ought to be spelled with a brick.”

“Well—now—I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a shingle mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his shingle on my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, and now every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the shingle, and spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been better. Want anything in particular?”

The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, and when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen indestructible desks.

The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were quiet, because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The issues of their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, many a sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, and in the morning the issues be different, and the victims find their neighbours overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' sins are not interesting forever, let alone their wrongs.

Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick.

The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise than contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to the people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. Hennion was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla ought to sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the spirit of another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped short years before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious worth; the curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams occupied gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads.

Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white head of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat primly with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses.

The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of the flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, or attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except Camilla, seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity.

Camilla said: “You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's important!”

Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, and lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly people recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity and readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction would wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a notion of his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish even the constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not less apart from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their antiquities. She belonged to a set of associations that should not be mixed up with the street. In the street, in the clear light and grey dust, men and ideas were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence was to him a kind of vestal college. At least, it was the only presence that ever suggested to his mind things of that nature, symbols and sacred fires, and half-seen visions through drifting smoke.

He was contented now to wait for the revelation.

“Have you lots of influence really?” she said. “Isn't it fine! I want you to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night.”

The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent ideals lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where chants were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the transparencies, so to speak—it was unpleasant.

“I'd rather not see him here.”

“But he's coming!”

“All right. I shan't run away.”

“And he has asked my father——”

Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination.

“Oh, Camilla!” he broke in, and then laughed. “Did he ask Miss Eunice to come in, too?”

The prospect had its humours—the guilelessness of the solemn preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might turn out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She sometimes did; that is, she sometimes hovered over the comprehension of a joke, as a bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy absurdity jogging along the highway of this world, but she had so many other emotions to take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around her, that her humour could not always be depended on.

The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, as he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired, black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit. Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The five sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead.

Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big white head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; Camilla was breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her gold-rimmed glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not rotund, though his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his feet, pacing the floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that Aidee was a peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. He swept together at first a number of general ideas which did not interest Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned to dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the table.

“Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You put your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand is mixed up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of foundations. Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and here they are bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share—in both of these results?”

Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick!

Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him, so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt that Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of a noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. He felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind of unreal, gaudy emotionalism.

“I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to have a certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain amount of preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, provided they're good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand themselves to be voting for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I contract with them to suit my business interests, but I never canvass. Probably the ward leaders do. I suppose there's a point in all this affair. I'd rather come to it, if you don't mind. You want me to do personal wire-pulling, which I never do and don't like, in order to down certain men I am under obligations to, which doesn't seem honourable, and against my business interests, which doesn't seem reasonable.”

“Wire-pulling? No.”

“Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like it, or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have to.”

Aidee hesitated.

“Miss Champney——”

Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment.

“Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to yours——”

“Why not? Class! I have no class!”

“I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them this way.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon.”

“The apology seems in place,” rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating thorough bass.

“I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me.”

“The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest”—Champney heaved his wide frame out of the chair—“that he be released from his situation.”

“Do you like the situation, sir?”

“I do not, sir,” with rising thunder. “I hope, if this discussion is continued here, or elsewhere,”—appearing to imply a preference for “elsewhere,”—“it will have no reference to my family.”

Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee stood still a moment. Then he said quietly:

“I have made a mistake. Good-night,” and took his leave. He looked tired and weighed down.

Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding.

Camilla wept with her head on the table.

“I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row.”

Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or repentance.

Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them to suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not altogether and solely for business men to do business in, else why such men as Aidee, so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to fill a practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he would not?

“Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do not come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death,” and of these the first four make their reports in the street.

Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more.

CHAPTER III—CAMILLA

SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with

“The fervent love Camillus bore

His native land.”

In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused.

In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either.

At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still makes it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more exhilarating than ever.

Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic beliefs and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to interpret herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive of swarming energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where ran a swift river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She barely remembered when the family lived in the national capital, and Henry Champney was a noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental picture of an invalid mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her memories ran about Port Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, the household rule of Miss Eunice. They included glimpses of her father's friend, the elder Hennion, a broad-shouldered man, who always had with him the slim youth, Dick; which slim youth was marvellously condescending, and once reconstructed her doll with wires, so that when you pulled a wire it would wave arms and legs in the manner in which Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever waved her arms and legs. He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He taught her carpentry and carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer and saw, mallet and chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards of the Champney house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the tops of the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges.

He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge the finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, because they were not true.

Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age of twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, but all hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit.

On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal and brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from ship to car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad bridge; beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long roofs, and black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood tenements of East Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because one knew they were there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the suburbs, a flat, prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, highways, and trestle pyramids of the oil wells.

Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river and factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to reminiscence.

“We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college,” she said.

Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully:

“Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?”

Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a time she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, and began running through the titlepages.

“They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'”

“Mr. Aidee lent you such books!”

“Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' 'The Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!” She had slipped beyond the titlepage of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked in a new impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss Eunice returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle.

It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young have not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to their predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the purport of the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we might live, but were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had her heartbeats and flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or how. No matter what her romance was. It was a story of few events or peculiarities. She had grown somewhat over-rigid with time. That her melancholy—if melancholy it should be called, a certain dry severity—that it gave most people a slight impression of comedy, was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it. As to that long-past phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not remember ever having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled “Socialism and Anarchy,” or “The Civic Disease,” or “The Inner Republic.” She was glad to believe that Camilla was “a type,” because it was easier to condemn a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and flushed cheeks over matters so unsuitable.

In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss Eunice's flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social emphasis on sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the difference, and looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading.

Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair beside him.

“Now! What do you think?”

Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the first.

“I think your books will lose their backs,” Champney rumbled mildly.

The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed in at the tall side windows.

“Think of what, my dear?”

“Listen!”

Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she read from the grey volume, as follows:

“'You have remarked too often “I am as good as you.” It is probable that God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he knows that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked “You are as good as I,” it would have represented a more genial frame of mind. It would have rendered your superiority more probable, since whichever remark you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence that it is not true. But indeed it is probable that neither your life nor your ideas are admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not to become convinced that no one is better than you, but to find someone to whom you can honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not back, nor away among the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am asking you to search for your leader among your contemporaries, not satisfied until you find him, not limited in your devotion when you have found him, taking his cause to be yours. I am asking you to remember that evil is not social, but human; that good is not social, but human. You have heard that an honest man is the noblest work of God. You have heard of no institution which merits that finality of praise. You have heard that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Is it then in shadows or by shadows that we live?'”

Camilla paused.

“I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle,” said Champney.

“Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!”

Champney took the volume, read, “Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master Went,” and turned back to the title page. “H'm—'The Inner Republic, by Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?” he asked. “We discover America every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!”

Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures most capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he replied gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had his happy surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for the efforts Champ-ney had made—not altogether painless—to realise the lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the new,—that his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; so that the two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk friendly and long, without patronage or impatience.

To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete, that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an old story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his shelves had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had connection through himself with the stir of existence.

The Websterian periods had taken on a ghostly echo, and the slow ebbing of the war issues had left him with a sense of being stranded on dry sands. There seemed to be a flatness everywhere,—a silence, except for the noisy rattle of the street.

It is a pleasant saying, that “The evening of life comes bringing its own lamp,” but it seemed to him it was a drearily false one. The great men of a great time, he thought, were gone, or fast going. It was a stagnation period in his life, pictured in his mind afterward as an actual desert, dividing arable lands. Were the new men so small, so unuplifted, or was it only his own mind grown dry and nerveless? He was afraid it was the latter,—afraid life was dying away, or drying up in his still comfortable body.

He would prove to himself that it was not.

This was the beginning of the effort he had made,—a defiant, half-desperate rally. The struggle began at a definite date. One day he put away his old books. He bought new ones, and new periodicals, and determined to find the world still alive,—to find again that old sense of the importance of things that were going on. It was an intimate fight this time, unapplauded—against a shadow, a creeping numbness. He fought on, and at length had almost begun to lose hope.

When Camilla came back from college and Eastern friends she dawned upon him in a series of minute surprises. She brought him his victory, and the lamp for his evening. So it came about. The struggle was over, and the longed-for hope and cheer came back to him.

So it came that the relation between them was peculiar. New books had a meaning when Camilla read them to him, as she read from Alcott Aidee's book to-day, while the noise of the freight-yards, and the rattle of the travelling crane unloading a docked ship, sounded dull and distant. The sunlight came yellow and pleasant through tall windows, and the fire snapped briskly, and Alcott Aidee spoke through the medium of Camilla and the grey volume, making these singular remarks:

“Incarnation of divinity! Surely you have been unfortunate, if in going to and fro in this world you have nowhere observed any measure of divinity incarnated in a man, apparent in ordering or in obedience, in leading or in following, speaking from lips which said, 'Follow me,' as well as from those which said, 'Thy will, not mine be done,' speaking, for aught I know, as largely in one way as the other. I am not measuring divinity. I am showing you where to look for it. I am trying to persuade you that it does not speak from lips which say 'I am as good as you.'”

New books, ran Champney's thoughts, new men, new times, new waves foaming up the old slant shores. But only as they spoke with Camilla's voice, did they seem to him now to make the numbed cords vibrate again, or comfort his wintry age.

“Isn't it interesting, daddy? If you're going to be frivolous, I shan't read.”

Champney was looking at the volume with a grim smile.

“I was thinking that to read only in the middle of the gentleman's book was perhaps not doing him justice. It was perhaps why I did not understand where he began, or where he was going. It seems to be neither old democracy nor new socialism, but more like the divine rights of some kind of aristocracy. Shall we not read the book through in order, my dear? Having become convinced that Mr. Aidee himself contains a measure of this divinity, and having taken him for our leader, shall we not then induce our recalcitrant friend Dick to join us, and in that way induce him to become a politician?”

This was the Champney manner in the stately vein of irony.

“Oh!” Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, a Champney gesture, “Dick was horrid about that.”

“Recalcitrant, Hum! Horrid, horridus, bristling, Ha! Not inappropriate to the attitude on that occasion of the said Dick. Not usual for him, I should say. He is like his father, Camilla. A quiet man, but striking, the latter. You don't remember him?”

“Oh, yes! But you see, Dick didn't like it, because Mr. Aidee asked me to help him. But it isn't like him to be fussy. Anyway, I liked it, but Dick didn't. So!” Camilla pushed back her hair, another Champney gesture—the defiant one. “Now, what made him act like hornets?”

“I also took the liberty not to like it, Camilla,” with a rumble of thorough bass.

Camilla glanced up, half startled, and put a small warm hand into her father's hand, which was large, bony, and wrinkled. The two hands clasped instinctively hard, as if for assurance that no breach should come between them, no distance over which the old and the young hand could not clasp.

Camilla turned back to Alcott Aidee's book, and read on. Champney found himself now listening in a personal, or what he might have described as a feminine, way; he found himself asking, not what meaning or truth there was in this writer, but asking what meaning it might have toward Camilla, at the Arcadian age when maids are fain of surprises. He thought of Dick Hennion, of the Hennions, father and son. One always wondered at them, their cross-lot logic, their brevities, their instinct as to where the fulcrum of a thing rested. One believed in them without asking reasons—character was a mysterious thing—a certain fibre or quality. Ah! Rick Hennion was dead now, and Henry Champney's fighting days were over. It was good to live, but a weariness to be too old. He thought of Alcott Aidee, of his gifts and temperament, his theory of devotion and divinity—an erratic star, a comet of a man, who had a great church—by the way, it was not a church—a building at least, with a tower full of clamouring bells, and a swarming congregation. It was called “The Seton Avenue Assembly.” So Aidee had written this solid volume on—something or other. One could see he was in earnest, but that Camilla should be over-earnest in the wake of his argument seemed a strong objection to the argument. A new man, an able writer—all very interesting—but—— In fact, he might prove resident divinities, or prove perpetual incarnations of the devil, if he chose, but what did the fellow mean by asking Camilla to—— In fact, it was an unwarranted liberty. Champney felt suddenly indignant. Camilla read on, and Champney disliked the doctrine, whatever it was, in a manner defined even by himself as “feminine.”

“'Not in vain,' she read, 'have men sought in nature the assurance of its large currents, of its calm and self-control, the knitting up of “the ravelled sleave of care,” “the breathing balm of mute insensate things,” “the sleep that is among the lonely hills.” It has been written,

“Into the woods my Master went

Clean foresprent,

and that “the little grey leaves were kind to him.” All these things have I found, and known them. Was it there my Master went? I found the balm, the slumber, and the peace. But I found no inspiration. This, wherever I found it, always spoke with human lips, always looked out of human eyes. The calm of nature is as the calm of the past. Green battlefields lie brooding, because the issue is over; deep woods and secluded valleys, because the issue is elsewhere. The apostle who met a vision of his Master on the Appian Way, and asked, “Whither goest thou?” was answered, “Into the city.” Do you ask again, whither he went? I answer that he went on with the vanguard of the fight; which vanguard is on the front wave and surf of these times; which front wave and surf is in the minds and moods of persons; not in creeds, customs, formulas, churches, governments, or anywhere else at all; for the key to all cramped and rusted locks lies in humanity, not in nature; in cities, not in solitudes; in sympathy, not in science; in men, not in institutions; not in laws, but in persons.'

“Aren't you interested, daddy?”

“Yes, my dear. Why do you ask?”

“You look so absent-minded. But it's a new chapter now, and it's called 'Constitutions.'” Camilla laughed triumphantly.

“Constitutions! Then the gentleman will be political. Go on.”

“'Chapter ninth,'” she read. “'Constitutions.'

“'Most men govern themselves as monarchies; some as despotisms that topple to anarchies, some as nearly absolute monarchies; but mainly, and on the whole, they govern themselves as partially restricted or constitutional monarchies; which constitutions are made up of customs, precedents, and compromises, British Constitutions of opportunism and common law. Indeed, they claim that the inner life must be a monarchy by its nature, and every man's soul his castle. They are wrong. It must be a republic, and every man's soul an open house.

“'Now, it is nowhere stated in any Declaration or Constitution put forth of this Inner Republic that “all men are by nature free and equal.” If such a declaration occurred to the framers of this Constitution, they would seem to have thought it difficult to reconcile with observation, and not very pertinent either. As a special qualification for citizenship, it appears to be written there that a man must love his neighbour as himself—meaning as nearly as he can, his citizenship graded to his success; and as a general maxim of common law, it is written that he shall treat other men as he would like them to treat him, or words to that effect. However, although to apply and interpret this Constitution there are courts enough, and bewildering litigation, and counsel eager with their expert advice, yet the Supreme Court holds in every man's heart its separate session.”

To all of which Champney's thoughts made one singular comment. “Camilla,” they insisted, “Camilla.”

CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET

WHILE Camilla and Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over Aidee's book, Miss Eunice in the parlour bent a grey head over her knitting, and thought of Camilla, and disapproved of the type of girls who neither knitted nor even embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over such subjects, for instance, as “Richard,” but over such subjects as “Problems of the Poor,” and “Civic Diseases.”

Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and disapproved of what she saw.

There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent. Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so.

Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was over the Maple Street bridge.

The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was unlikely, the sign would read “Muscadine Street.”

Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories; Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one side and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or brick, with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors mainly shops for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun with inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of whom those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever faces generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more than endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's disapproval, and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is singular how many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and neither be the better or worse on that account.

On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that “James Shays, Shoemaker,” was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do so on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first was the shop.

A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a smoky-chimneyed lamp thereon, some newspapers, and half of a book that had been ripped savagely in two. A double shoemaker's bench stood next the window, a cooking stove and a cupboard opposite. Clothes hung on wall-hooks, hides lay on the floor.

Shays sat on one end of the bench, a grey-haired, grey-moustached, watery-eyed man, pegging a shoe vaguely. A black-haired little man with a thin black beard sat on the other end, stitching a shoe fiercely. A redlipped, red-cheeked, thick-nosed, thick-necked man with prominent eyes, sat tilted back in one of the wooden chairs, stating his mind deliberately.

Most of these phases of Muscadine Street might be found so arranged, on most mornings, by any visitor. Shays and the red-cheeked Coglan could not be depended on; but the men on the sidewalk, the women in the windows, the children in the street, the clamour and the smells would be there; also the grocer, the butcher, and Hicks, the stitcher of vehement stitches. If Coglan and Shays were there, Coglan would be found in the process of stating his mind.

Hicks' eyes were black, restless, and intense, his mouth a trifle on one side, his forehead high with a deep line down the middle. It was a painful line; when he smiled it seemed to point downward frowningly to the fact that the smile was onesided.

Coglan was Shays' associate in the pursuit of happiness. His value lay in this: that upon a certain amount of hard liquor purchased by Shays, and divided fairly and orderly between them, Shays became needy of help, and Coglan generally remained in good condition and able to take him home. Hicks was Shays' partner in the shop. His value lay in this: that he did twice as much work as Shays, and was satisfied with half the profits. Both men were valuable to Shays, and the shop supported the three.

The relations between them had grown settled with time. Nearly four years earlier Hicks had entered Shays' shop. There he learned to cobble footwear in some incredibly short time, and took his place in the apprehension of Muscadine Street. Hicks he called himself and nothing more. “Hicks” was a good enough name. It went some distance toward describing the brooding and restless little man, with his shaking, clawlike fingers, smouldering temper, and gift for fluent invective. Some said he was an anarchist. He denied it, and went into fiery definitions, at which the grocer and candy man shook their heads vaguely, and the butcher said, “Says he ain't, an' if he ain't, he ain't,” not as I see which seemed a conclusive piece of logic. At any rate he was Hicks.

The elderly Shays was a peaceful soul, a dusty mind, a ruined body. He was travelling through his life now at a pace that would be apt to bring him to the end of it at no distant date, enjoying himself, as he understood enjoyment, or as enjoyment was interpreted to him by the wise Coglan. Coglan maintained a solidly planted dislike of Hicks, whose attacks threatened his dominance, whose acrid contempt and unlimited vocabulary sometimes even threatened his complacence. Coglan's wisdom saw that the situation was preferable to searching for jobs, and that the situation depended on Hicks' acceptance of it. Hicks was a mystery to him, as well as to Shays, and something of a fear, but Coglan was not disturbed by the mystery. He could leave that alone and do very well. But Hicks was a poisoned needle. Hicks knew where to find Coglan's sensitive point and jab it. Coglan hated him solidly, but balancing his dislike against his interest and ease, Coglan wisely found that the latter were more solid still—beyond comparison solid.

All this could be learned by any visitor inquiring in Muscadine Street. The grocer underneath would add tersely that Shays was a soak, but good-hearted; that Hicks was a fool, and ought to set up shop for himself; that Coglan was a loafer, and had his bread buttered now about to suit him. Disapproval of each other was current in Muscadine Street. It was a part of their interest in life.

The same morning sunlight that slanted through Henry Champney's tall library and parlour widows was slanting through the small streaked window of Shays, the shoe-mender. Coglan was stating his mind.

“Jimmy Shays, yer a good man,” he was saying slowly; “an', Hicksy, yer an' industhrious man; but nayther of ye is a wise man; but Jimmy is the wisest man of ye two. For why? Ask that, an' I says this. For when Jimmy wants a bit of thinkin' done for him, he gets a sensible man to do it, an' a poor man, an' a workin' man like himself, an' a man that's a friend, and that stands by him in throuble. But what does ye do, Hicksy? Ye goes over the river. Ye goes up to Seton Avenue. Ye listens to a chin-waggin' preacher. An' what's his name? Aidee! He ain't a workin' man himself, but wears the clothes of the rich, an' ates his dinner wid the rich, an' says hard words of the friends of the poor. An' yer desaved, Hicksy.”

Hicks stopped work and shook a thin fist at Coglan. “If you're talkin' of him, you keep your manners.”

“Oi, the Preacher! Oi, he might be meanin' well, Hicksy. I ain't sayin' not.”

“What are you saying then?” jabbing viciously with his needle. “Damn! You're an Irishman, ain't you? Chin-wagging institution yourself. What! Who's the working man? You! Ain't you got a description of you that's vivider'n that?” breaking into a cackling laugh. “Then I'll ask you, what friends of the poor you're talking about so glib, like a greased wheel?”

“Oi! Yer askin' what I mean by a friend, Hicksy? Ye are! An' yer right, an' I'll show ye the point. I'll speak to ye of John Murphy, now, what I've had many a drink on him, an' a helpin' hand. A friend is a friend in need. That's him. Now, thin, Murphy's a friend of Wood's, for he says so. Now, thin, I'll show you Dick Hennion. For if I wants a job, I says the word to Murphy, an' he speaks the word maybe to Hennion an' he gets me a job, for he done it onct, an' I know, don't I? if so be it happen I wants a job. An' Hennion's a friend of Wood's, too, as anywan knows. Now! A friend of me, I says, is a man that acts friendly to me. That's him. So would ye say, Hicksy, if ye was a wise man an' a man of sense, instead of chasin' afther a chin-waggin' preacher, like a schnare-drum afther a thrombone. Haw, haw, haw! a brass throm-bone! But Wood's a friend of the poor, an' I've proved it. For why? For I say it's the rich that he bleeds, but the poor man he's friendly to. Now, thin! What does Aidee do but say the bad word of Wood. In consequence, in consequence, I says,”—and Coglan smote his knee,—“he ain't no friend of the poor.”

Hicks' black eyes glittered and focussed themselves, a concentrated stare at a minutely small spot between Coglan's eyes. His teeth clicked. Coglan's laugh died away. He turned his eyes aside and rubbed his red face uneasily.

“Coglan,” said Hicks, “I warned you before. You shake your mouth at the Preacher again and I'll stick a knife into your dirty throat. You hear that!”

Coglan's redness showed purple spots.

“Think I'm afraid of ye!”

“Yep, I think you are.”

“I'll break your little chick bones!”

“Yep. You're afraid, and you better stay so.”

“Hicksy!” broke in Shays with quavering voice. “Tom! we're all friends, ain't we? Now, then, Tom, Hicksy makes a point you leave out the Preacher, don't he? He'll argue peaceful. Jus' leave out the Preacher. Won't you, Hicksy? Hey? You'll argue peaceful.”

“I said I would.”

“Leave out the Preacher,” said Shays. “All friens'. Hey?”

Coglan wiped his perspiring face. “I'm a sensible man,” he said. “When Jimmy Shays asks a favour, I say, sure! I'm a sensible man.” He looked resentfully and uneasily at Hicks, but seemed relieved to withdraw from his aggressive position without losing his dominance.

“Oi! I told ye what I meant by a friend. I said Marve Wood was a friend of the poor, an' I proved it. I'll be fair an' square. I'll ask ye, what's your meanin'?”

Hicks dropped his eyes, and fell to his jabbing needlework.

“Friend!” he said. “You mean a man that's useful to you. You say so! You say so! That's your meaning. Good's what's good for me. Sense is what agrees with me. Nothing's got any value that ain't valuable to that God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked 'me,' named Coglan, that's got no more value than to fertilise a patch of potatoes. Friend! You get another word. I got nothing to say to you. But I'll tell you this. I'll tell you what I think of Wood. He's got a reckoning coming. What is Wood? I'll tell you that he's the meeting point of two enemies—the corporations and the people, the rich and the poor. His job's to keep in with both. That's what his friendliness amounts to. His job's to sell the corporations what belongs to the people. And he'll grin at the people on one side, so! And he'll wink at the corporations on the other, so! And he'll say: 'How do, Johnny, and Billy, and Sammy?' So! And he'll say to the corporations, 'What'll you give for Johnny's hat?' So! Then he gives Johnny half what he gets for the hat, so! Then he's got Sammy and Billy to back the deal, so! Well, what's Wood! I've told you what he is. Friend of the poor! What do you know about it?” He dropped the shoe, shook his loose fingers in the air, and cried. “He's a cancer! Cut him out! He's an obstruction! Blow him up! What, then? Then I say this, Tom Coglan, and I say it's a good thing when damn rascals are afraid!”

“Quotin' the Preacher?” said Coglan complacently.

Hicks narrowed his black eyes again, and focussed them on Coglan, who turned away uneasily. Hicks went on:

“What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether Wood ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in his life, nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against him, then, or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm talking about?”

“Oi!” said Coglan. “Yer right. I'll ask ye that.”

“And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine”—tapping his narrow chest—“ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going to mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan.”

“Oi! Quotin' the Preacher.”

“Yes, I am, some of it.”

He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each other and then stealthily at Hicks.

“I hear no talk against the Preacher,” Hicks went on, after a time; “I won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor the like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,—neither him, nor his talk, nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent but me that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my thinking for me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about him, or me? What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, and then if you said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to go crazy, and always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting you on fire and then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; and if you talked like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk to you. I'd talk so, too, for his way ain't my way.”

He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table.

“See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of it's not. That's my way.”

His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and savage that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a startled way, as if he expected to see something ghastly.

Port Argent: A Novel

PORT ARGENT

A Novel

By Arthur Colton

With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1904

[Original]

[Original]

[Original]

IN MEMORIAM

C. W. WELLS

DEDICATED

TO

GEORGE COLTON

CHAPTER I—PULSES

CHAPTER II—RICHARD THE SECOND

CHAPTER III—CAMILLA

CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET