Yet she wondered why she wouldn’t dare. How could it ever be “about time” for her to stop standing up for an old friend? And when Harlan was announced to her, as she sat alone at the table, she rose with a little sigh. She did not sigh because she was sorry he had come; it was because she had just realized how much more his brother was still the heart of her thoughts than was this faithful and constant escort.
For she and Harlan had already fallen into a relation not uncommon among those she had spoken of as “left-overs”: a relation that becomes a habit — a habit that in turn becomes a relation. She “went everywhere” with him; and continued to go everywhere with him; and so, after a while, their contemporaries, all married, never sent an invitation to one without including the other. Then, as time went on, and the habit continued and continued, it became common stock in the prattle of more dashing and precipitous younger people. When talk languished and even weather stencils failed to cover a blank, those who felt such covering a necessity could always fall back on this, and wonder why the two didn’t “get married and be done with it.”
In that manner a worn woman-of-the-world, aged twenty, complained to Frederic Oliphant one evening at the Country Club, as he sat with her after unsuccessfully attempting an imported dance he found himself too old to learn. “You aren’t too old to learn it, if you wouldn’t insist on being too polite to hold a girl as tight as these boys do,” the woman-of-the-world informed him with the new frankness then becoming fashionable. “You aren’t as old as your cousin Harlan. Why on earth don’t he and Miss Shelby get married and be done with it? They’ve certainly been just the same as engaged for almost as long as I can remember. Everybody says they must be engaged — by this time! They say she used to be in love with his brother. I don’t see how anybody could be in love with him!”
She glanced through an archway, near by, to where Dan and his wife and Martha and Harlan and a dozen other people were gravely straggling out of the dining-room; all of this party having the air of concluding a festival that had not proved too hilarious. Dan, in particular, appeared to have thought the occasion a solemn one. He had been placed next to Martha; and she remarked cheerfully that it was the first time he had been so near her “in ages.” After that, however, she found little more to say to him, since he seemed to encounter certain definite difficulties in saying anything to her in return.
“I am coming in to — to call, some evening,” he stammered, laughing uncomfortably to express his cordiality. “I’d have been to see you — I’d have been over oftener, except — —” He paused, then concluded his ill-fated excuses hurriedly— “except I’m so busy these days.” And he glanced uneasily across the table to where Lena sat smiling mysteriously at him.
Martha thought it tactful, and the part of a true friend, to talk to Harlan, who sat next to her on the other side.
Chapter XXIII
“HOW IN THE world did that cunning little wife of his ever fall in love with him?” Frederic’s companion inquired, watching the emerging procession of the dining party. “He always looks as if he had something else on his mind when he’s with women — as if he didn’t think they’re worth talkin’ to. She looks about half his age. Of course you can’t tell, though; everybody uses so much makeup nowadays. They say she belongs to awf’ly important people in New York and never liked it here because she couldn’t get enough music. You didn’t answer my question: Aren’t they ever goin’ to get married? I mean your cousin Harlan and that big Miss Shelby. How in the world do they find anything to say to each other? Gosh, if I kept a man hangin’ on that long I’d certainly be talked out! How in the world can two people stand seein’ each other all the time like that?”
“I can comprehend the gentleman’s half of it,” said the gallant Frederic. “I believe Miss Shelby goes abroad for a few months now and then to make her own share of the association more endurable.”
Martha had been at home only a week, in fact, after one of these excursions; though she did not make them for the reason set forth by Frederic Oliphant, who was now much given to the reading of eighteenth-century French memoirs and the polishing of his diction. She went, she airily explained to Harlan, to gather materials that would enable her to defend the Renaissance; but as he drove home with her from the dinner at the Country Club, this evening, he observed that the materials she had gathered impressed him as “about as deep into the twentieth century as mechanics and upholsterers were able to go.” His allusion was to the expensive closed car she had brought from Paris; — her old bit of hickory, impossible to be bent an atom’s width in business, yielded with no more than a faint squeak when his daughter was lavish with herself. “Spend what you plague-taken want to,” he said, “so long as you don’t ask me to ride in the devilish contrapshun!”
“He says he’ll stick to his horses and our old carriage until they’re ‘chased off the road,’” Martha told Harlan, on this homeward drive. “It doesn’t seem to me that’s so far ahead. Why hasn’t Dan ever done anything about the motor-car factory he was going to build?”
“He has,” Harlan said, and laughed. “In talk he has, that is! He’s been talking about it for years, almost as much as he has about Ornaby.”
“Then why doesn’t he — —”
“Still dancing on the tight-rope!” Harlan laughed. “He’s got his car line through the Addition — I understand your father explodes completely whenever it’s mentioned to him — but Dan’s spending fortunes on new streets and sewers and what not. He’s actually trying to open a big tract still farther out, north of Ornaby; and I don’t believe he’s able to keep money in his hands long enough to go into building cars. You’d think he’s building them though, if you’d listen to him! He talks about the ‘Ornaby Car’ to everybody; I suppose he believes it’s a lucky name. He has got his Addition booming though — no question. He’s making the countryside more and more horrible every day. It’s much worse than it was last year.”
“How is it horrible?”
“I could tell you, but it’s ten to one that if I merely told you, you’d become Ornaby’s defender — you’re so everlastingly its defender! I’d rather show you, if you’d take me as a passenger in this jewelled palanquin of yours to-morrow.”
Martha assented, and the next afternoon her neat young mechanic drove them northward over the road once travelled on a hot and threatening morning by a “rubber-tired runabout” in which sat a disappointed little bride and a perplexed bridegroom. On that dusty morning, already of the long ago, the way had soon become rustic; the cedar-block paving, itself worn and jolty, had stopped short not much more than a mile from its beginning; then came macadam, but not for long; and then the rough country road, leading north between the great flat fields of corn and wheat to where it became a slough in winter, and tall grass and even ironweed grew between the ruts in summer — for there it reached the soggy and tangled groves of Ornaby.
But on this brisk autumn afternoon, the crystal and enamel of the silent French car went glistening serenely along a level white way of asphalt. The fields, above which the troubled bride and groom had seen rising the clouds of the summer storm, were fields no longer; for here was bungalow-land, acres and acres of bungalows, with brick groceries and drug stores at some of the street corners, and two or three wooden church spires slenderly asserting their right to look down on all the rest. Cross streets gave glimpses of trolley cars on other north-and-south thoroughfares; great brick schoolhouses, unbearably plain, were to be seen, and a few apartment buildings, not made more beautiful by pinchbeck torturing of their façades.
“Of course Dan has no responsibility for this particular awfulness,” Harlan explained. “Without rime or reason the town just decided to grow, and luckily for him it’s grown faster out this northern way than it has in any other direction. Some people seem to think he performed an enchantment to make it do it, but it just happened.”
“It seems to happen faster and faster,” Martha observed. “The last time I drove out thi
s far was in our old carriage with papa, not quite a year ago, I think; and there were dozens of vacant lots; but now there are hardly any. The asphalt wasn’t finished clear into Ornaby then, though Dan had built a fine road through. I suppose now — —”
“Oh, yes; now he’s got asphalt on his cross streets, too; and the southern part of Ornaby is so like this you couldn’t tell when you get into it, if it weren’t for the disasters he calls his signboards. Look at that!”
As they spoke the swift car had brought them into a region where there was more vacant ground; and the little houses, nearly all of wood, were not so closely crowded. On a stretch of weedy land, rising slightly above new cement sidewalks, there smote the eye a painted wooden wall two hundred feet long. With enormous yellow words on a black background the thing not only staggered the vision of a passer-by, but seemed to bellow in his ear: “You Are Now Entering Ornaby Addition! Build a Home in Ornaby the Beautiful! Every Ornaby Buyer is an Ornaby Booster.”
Beyond came a region of more bungalows: “Homes Beautiful of Ornaby the Beautiful” another bellowing signboard declared them to be; and, not blushing in the very presence of the dwellings and dwellers it thus made proclamation for, went on to insist once more upon the enthusiasm necessarily a consequence in the bosom of any one who became an “Ornaby Buyer.” There was a briskness about the place: children went busily roller-skating over the new sidewalks; clotheslines were flying their Monday white pennants on the breeze; other bungalows were noisily getting themselves built, and farther on were some white cottages;— “quite pretty,” Martha said they were. Beyond them the open spaces were broader, and the little houses more infrequent; but the asphalt street went on, with numbered white posts marking the building lots, paved cross streets running to right and left into thicket-bordered distances, and Dan’s great signboards shouting along the front of untouched acres of old forest.
“You see for yourself,” Harlan said. “This was beautiful before ‘Ornaby the Beautiful’ insulted the landscape. But now, with all these flimsy and dreadful bungalows and the signboards screeching at the trees — —”
“Yes,” she interrupted, “but he’s spared all the trees he could, even back there where the bungalows and little houses were so thick. And I noticed the people were planting shrubberies and trying to make little gardens grow. It might be really very pretty some day. And just here — —”
“Oh, here,” Harlan said, “where he hasn’t touched it yet, it’s well enough, of course. But you’ll find it’s only a question of time till he spoils it, though I understand he intends this to be what he calls a ‘restricted residence district.’”
The paved street ran between tall woods now; the numbered lots were broad, and the car passed a few proudly marked “Sold.” Then Martha noticed one that was several hundred feet wide, and in depth extended indefinitely into a grove of magnificent beech trees. Stone pillars gave entrance upon a partly completed driveway that disappeared round an evergreen thicket, not long planted. “What a pleasant place to live! It’s getting so smoky in town it seems to me people will have to be moving out even this far some day. Whose place is that?”
“Dan’s,” Harlan said, with his dry laugh. “At least he says he plans to build there sometime. I don’t think Lena cares about it much! I heard her speaking of it as ‘out at the end of Nowhere.’ One of the interesting things about my sister-in-law, to me, is the fact that she’s really never wanted a house of her own. She’s never once proposed such a thing in all this time, I believe, but goes on living with father and mother; and year after year passes without altering that air of hers of being only temporarily marooned in what she still calls ‘the West.’”
Martha looked serious, but said nothing, and he spoke to the chauffeur, who turned westward at the next cross street. At the end of a block it ceased to be a street and became a newly gravelled road, a transformation that interested Harlan. “Funny!” he said. “I was out this way a couple of months ago and this was a dirt road with a good deal of grass on it. Now he’s had it gravelled. It leads over to the west side of his land, where he laid out the site for his factory, years ago. I thought you might like to see that.”
But before they approached the site of Dan’s factory, they passed a long line of trucks and wagons bound their way; wagon after wagon laden with bricks, and truck loads of lumber, of drainage tile, of steel girders and of cement, and there were great-wheeled carriers of stone. As they came closer they saw that many two-story double houses for workmen and their families were being built on both sides of the road; and, beyond these, long lines of brick walls were rising, broken into regular open oblongs where the ample glass of a modern factory building was to be set.
“By George!” Harlan exclaimed, surprised almost to the point of dismay. “He is going it! Why, he’s got the thing half up!” And he said, “By George!” again, seeing the figure of his brother on a section of roof and outlined against the sky. “There he is — and in his element!”
“You mean in the sky?” Martha asked, her eyes brightening.
“No; I mean hustling. Keeping everybody on the jump while he defaces the landscape some more! That’s his element, isn’t it?”
Dan was indeed in that element and it was truly his. He could be seen waving his arms at the workmen; shouting to foremen; running along the roof and calling to teamsters, instructing them where to dump their loads. His voice was audible to the occupants of the French car that stopped for a few moments in the road; and they became aware that he addressed the workmen, both white and coloured, by their first names or their nicknames exclusively; his shoutings were all to “Jim” or “Mike” or “Shorty” or “Tony” or “Gumbo.”
A moment after the car stopped, a smaller figure climbed up the slope of the low roof and joined the towering and bulky one on the ridge. “He’s got my charming-mannered nephew with him,” Harlan said. “What time he can spare from spoiling the landscape he puts into spoiling Henry!”
“Is that Henry?” Martha asked incredulously; then, as she saw Dan put his right arm about the boy’s shoulder, guarding him carefully from a misstep, she replied to herself. “Yes, it really is. Gracious, how time runs away from us!”
Turning to shout at some one in their direction, Dan saw them, and waved his free arm cordially in greeting; but he made no motion as if to descend, and went on immediately with his shouting to the men. Martha said, “We’ll go now,” to the chauffeur; and the car instantly moved forward.
She leaned back, smiling. “He’s in his glory,” she said. “It all goes on arriving, Harlan. His great days have come!”
Chapter XXIV
SHE WAS RIGHT; the growth was now visibly upon the pleasant and substantial town, where all had once appeared to be so settled and so finished; for, just as with some of man’s disorders that develop slowly, at first merely hinting in mild prophetic symptoms, then becoming more sinister, and attacking one member after another until the whole body writhes and alters, so it is with this disorder that comes racking the midland towns through distortions and turmoil into the vaster likenesses of cities: haphazard and insignificant destructions begin casually, but gradually grow more sweeping and more violent until the victim town becomes aware of great crashings; — and then lies choking in a cloud of dust and smoke wherein huge new excrescences appear.
Cameras of the new age sometimes record upon strips of moving film the slow life of a plant from the seed to the blossoming of its flower; and then there is thrown upon the screen a picture in which time is so quickened that the plant is seen in the very motions of its growth, twisting itself out of the ground and stretching and swelling to its maturity, all within a few minutes. So might a film record be made of the new growth bringing to full life a quiet and elderly midland town; but the picture would be dumfounding. Cyclone, earthquake, and miracle would seem to stalk hand-in-hand upon the screen; thunder and avalanche should play in the orchestra pit.
In such a picture, block after block of heavy old man
sions would be seen to topple; row on row of stout buildings would vanish almost simultaneously; families would be shown in flight, carrying away their goods with them from houses about to crumble; miles of tall trees would be uprooted; the earth would gape, opening in great holes and long chasms; — the very streets would unskin themselves and twist in agony; every landmark would fly dispersed in powder upon the wind, and all old-established things disappear.
Such a picture would be but the truth with time condensed; — that is to say, the truth made like a man’s recollection of events — and yet it would not be like the truth as the truth appeared to Daniel Oliphant and the other men who made the growth, nor like their subsequent memories. For these men saw, not the destruction, but only the city they were building; and they shouted their worship of that vision and were exultant in the uproar. They shouted as each new skyscraper rose swimming through the vast drifts of smoke, and shouted again as the plain, clean, old business streets collapsed and the magnificent and dirty new ones climbed above the ruins. They shouted when business went sweeping outward from its centre, tearing away the houses where people had lived contentedly for so long; and they shouted again as the new factory suburbs marched upon the countryside, far and wide, and the colossal black plumes of new chimneys went undulating off into a perpetual smoke-mist, so that the distant level plain seemed to be a plain surrounding not a city, but an ever-fuming volcano.
Once again, in the interminably cycling repetition of the new displacing the old, then becoming the old and being displaced in turn, an old order was perishing. The “New Materialism” that had begun to grow with the renewed growing of the country after the Civil War, and staggered under the Panic of ‘73, but recovered and went on growing egregiously, had become an old materialism now. It had done great things and little things. Amongst the latter, it had furnished Europe with a caricature type of the American — the “successful American business man.” On the shelf, beside the figure of the loud-tweeded Boxing Briton with his “side whiskers,” Europe set the lank-and-drawling, chin-bearded, palace-buying Boaster of the Almighty Dollar, the Yankee of the great boom period.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 354