CHAPTER XVI.
Some Things which Happened in Our Halcyon Days.
If there was any tension among us just after the house-warming, it was not noticeable. Mr. Cornish and Mr. Elkins seemed unaware of their rivalry. Had either of the two been successful, it might have made mischief; but as it was, neither felt that his rejection was more than temporary. Neither knew much of the other’s suit, and both seemed full of hope and good spirits.
Altogether, these were our halcyon days. It seemed to crew and captain a time for the putting off of armor, and the donning of the garlands of complacent respite from struggle. The work we had undertaken seemed accomplished—our village was a city. The great wheel we had set whirling went spinning on with power. Long ago we had ceased to treat the matter jocularly; and to regard our operations as applied psychology only, or as a piratical reunion, no longer occurred to us. There is such a thing, I believe, as self-hypnotism; but if we knew it, we made no application of our knowledge to our own condition. This great, scattered, ebullient town, grown from the drowsy Lattimore of a few years ago, must surely be, even now, what we had willed it to be: and therefore, could we not pause and take our ease?
There was the General, of course. He, Jim said, “‘knocked’ so constantly as to be sort of ex-officio President of the Boiler-makers’ Union,” and talked of the inevitable collapse. But who ever heard of a city built by people of his way of thinking? And there was Josie Trescott, with her agreement on broad lines with the General, and her deprecation of the giving of fortunes to people who had not earned them; but Josie was only a woman, who, to be sure, knew more of most matters than the rest of us, but could not have any very valuable knowledge of the prospects for commercial prosperity.
That we were in the midst of an era of the most wonderful commercial prosperity none denied. How could they? The streets, so lately bordered with low stores, hotels, and banks, were now craggy with tall office buildings and great hostelries, through which the darting elevators shot hurrying passengers. Those trees which made early twilight in the streets that night when Alice, Jim, and I first rode out to the Trescott farm were now mostly cut down to make room for “improvements.”
Brushy Creek gorge was no longer dark and cool, with its double sky-line of trees drowsing toward one another, like eyelashes, from the friendly cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout. On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs, in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and the fiends of dynamite and nitro-glycerin. Limekilns burned all the time, turning the companionable gray ledges into something offensive and corrosive. One must now board a street-car, and ride away beyond Lynhurst Park before one could find the good and pure little Brushy Creek of yore.
The dwellers in the houses which stood in their lawns of vivid green had gone away into the new “additions,” to be in the fashion, and to escape from the smoke and clang of engine and factory. Their old houses were torn away, or converted, by new and incongruous extensions, into cheap boarding-houses. Only the Lattimore house kept faith with the past, and stood as of old, in its five acres of trees and grass, untouched of the fever for platting and subdivision, its very skirts drawn up from the asphalt by austere retaining-walls. And here went on the preparation for the time when Laura and Clifford were to stand up and declare their purposes and intentions with reference to each other. The first wedding this was to be, in all our close-knit circle.