Arthur Colton

“ Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.
He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. ”

“ How noble and lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney!
“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have been a lyric poet.”
He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee.
But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? ”

“ Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the bridge. ”

“ He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but Camilla spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the black shadows of the vines.
“Do you want me, Dick?”
“Yes.”
From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on the wall, little specks on the floor.
“Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.” ”

“ She was slowly identifying them now with the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.
Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. ”

“ Why had Wood chosen an engineer and contractor to make of him a machine politician? Machinery made of men, with the notions of men to drive it—what kind of machinery was that to work with! Aidee, the enthusiast, was a man! Hicks, the mad, was another; Freiburger, the mollusk, another. Wood, with his complicated sympathies and tolerances and hand-to-mouth flexible common sense, was a specially developed type to run that kind of machinery. Wood was dead, and as for his “job,” and what “the boys” wanted, why, they wanted their “jobs,” like everybody else. Hennion wanted his own. ”

“ Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly.
One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil wells.
“Lolly! Lolly!”
Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a clamour and cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” ”

“ But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other.
The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent anthropomorphisms! ”

“ Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that Allen was lurking near him.
Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know. ”

“ How he had lurked in the shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How he had pegged shoes and poured his excitement, in vivid language, into the ears of the east-side loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back and forth over the Maple Street bridge, where the drays and trolley cars jangled, where the Muscadine flowed, muddy and muttering, below!
“You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.”
“Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, Al!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented with his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his forelock for the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father Time, has been given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of his as of a good shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, that curious untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that solution of improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. ”

“ A man could do no more than throw his personality into the welter of things, and leave the worth of it to other decisions than his own. Here his travels were ended, except as one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and timeless.
In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner Republic,” might be called signboards, or statements of condition. ”

“ Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself. “But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.”
“G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. ”

“ The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them.
“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come you bring hope. ”

“ Hennion said coolly. “You can't do anything with that. Sit down.”
“He's the only man alive that dares tell the truth. You're all hounds, cowards, thieves! He's a saint in hell!”
“Likely enough. You're a hot disciple. Still, I'm waiting for an explanation.”
“Don't you call him a liar!”
“Haven't. Sit down.”
Hicks sat down, his thin hands shaking painfully. His eyes were narrowed, glittering and suspicious. Hennion tipped his chair back, put his hands into his pockets, and looked at the weak, flickering gas jet, and the ripples of light and shadow that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? ”

“ Hennion did not find himself liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else.
Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about the place. Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their open window. ”

“ That poor muddy humanity which had no opinions, except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was better than these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And who were the bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men followed him now or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman like the murderer, Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care for him, Aidee. They liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew of no one person in Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked into its black secrecy.
“Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't matter, and besides—I don't know how to ask you—but there's something I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The Inner Republic'!” ”

“ Now he had turned and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion glanced out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric light. Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his slow footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the porch.
“Can I cross it?” Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. “Can I? If love were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this way, as I do in you, dear. ”

“ 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.” ”