The Project Gutenberg eBook of Port Argent: A Novel
Title: Port Argent: A Novel
Author: Arthur Colton
Illustrator: Eliot Keen
Release date: October 21, 2015 [eBook #50269]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive
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
CONTENTS
CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE
CHAPTER XII—AIDEE AND CAMILLLA
CHAPTER XIII—IN WHICH HICKS IS BUSY
CHAPTER XIV—IN WHICH HICKS COMES TO HIS REST
CHAPTER XVI—CAMILLA GOES TO THE ASSEMBLY HALL
CHAPTER XVII—AIDEE—CAMILLA—HENNION
CHAPTER XVIII—T. M. SECOR—HENNION—CAMILLA
CHAPTER I—PULSES
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.