41
ON a gray winter morning early in the year 1912, the Tolliver family stood on the platform of the Town station, a dirty affair covered with soot and shameful in a community so prosperous. There was no new station because none could be built so long as Shane’s Castle stood upon the only site worthy of so grandiose a building as the Town had planned. The old woman was dead but her daughter Lily refused to sell, and Hattie Tolliver, standing now on the platform with the air of a field marshal surrounded by his troops, took satisfaction in this knowledge. Her family was on the retreat now before the onslaught of the Mills and she herself stood in command of the tiny rear guard.
“They’d give a lot for that land,” she remarked to her husband. “I hope Lily will keep it. She doesn’t need the money.”
It was her parting shot at the Town. She stood now, free of it forever, surrounded by her husband, her son Robert and the everlasting Gramp. There was money in her pocket, money which Aunt Julia had left her, and so there were no perils ahead for a little time at least. And in her heart there were no qualms over leaving the place in which she had been born and lived a life filled with petty cares and worries. She regarded it, on the contrary, as a malignant desert from which two of her children had fled as soon as they were able, a pest-hole filled with factories and furnaces which had ruined her husband and forced her into poverty. She left nothing behind her for which she had the faintest affection; for the dog was dead long since of old age. Out of a family whose founder had settled the wilderness on this spot, only one remained ... the hard and pious Eva Barr. They were all gone, the uncles, the brothers, the cousins, the sisters ... all of them ... dead now or gone out into the world.
Of this world, her ideas were still somewhat vague, for she never had been outside the borders of the state: it was perhaps a great, roaring place full of adventure, or again it might be very much like the county. It really made very little difference; she was free now, with money in her pocket, setting out at last in pursuit of her children.
A little way off, wrapped in a shawl and the coonskin coat, Gramp Tolliver sat peering indifferently through the fog that had settled over the Flats. In the depths of his heart, he respected his enemy. She stood there in command of the party, beside her son and her husband, so self-assured, so utterly fearless of the future. She might have been, he thought, a prophetess, a leader in an Old Testament migration....
Only a week earlier there had been a skirmish between them over the matter of his possessions. Hattie had been for leaving them behind altogether with much of the family stuff; she had been for brushing aside carelessly all his shelves of books, his beloved rocking chair and the ponderous, antiquated desk. He would, she told him, be able to find all the books he wanted in the libraries of so great a city as New York. (As if, indeed, books out of libraries were the same as his own in which he had written along the borders such remarks as “excellent,” “penetrating,” or “tosh,” and “rubbish”!)
Gramp had learned long ago the great power which lay in simple inertia; by taking no course of action, one became the possession of other people. He knew that they could not cast him aside like a piece of old furniture. He was a relative, a father; and one could not abandon a father. So he waited, and when Hattie threatened not to send his books and chair and desk along with him, he had refused to go at all and threatened her wickedly with the awful scandal of staying behind and entering the poorhouse. He knew the keeper well, he said (lying) and there at least they would let him keep his books.
In the end he had won. The desk, the rocking chair, and ten cases of books had been shipped ahead. With those things he would be content. He would be able again to raise his sanctum somewhere among the buildings of New York.
“The train is late,” observed Hattie with irritation. “Why is it that it is never on time?”