“T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its way. Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton Avenue Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port Argent concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid man it found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for rhetorical speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted him a definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it found him rather repellent.
The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one newspaper, The Chronicle, and sometimes elected a few councilmen, sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied to a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They generally do.
Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He walked much about the city, watching faces—dingy and blurred faces, hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no equality among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew to be a kind of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. Personally, he was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about other men by too much direct contact with them, they put him out. He looked at them hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him companionable. His solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his conscience.
Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring bells for a place of residence.
He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall with its platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his wide-windowed study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, scatter his seed, and let the wind and sun take care of it. 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. Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations, showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written “Allen.”
“Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but human,—and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.”
The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen, present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was no jest in that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern.
The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll glittered with malice.
“Say, that man's name was Hicks.”