So while he was dreaming in matter–forming the first vague nebulæ of coming events, the infinite intelligence washing around us all, floating this earth, and holding the stars in their courses, sent a long, thin fleck of a wave into the mind of this man who stood working and dreaming in the twilight while the old century was passing. And while he saw his vision, other minds in other parts of the earth saw their visions. Some of these myriad visions formed part of his, and his formed part of theirs, and all were part of the great vision that was brooding upon the bourne of time and space. And other visions, parts of the great vision of the Creator, were moving with quickening life in other minds and hearts. The disturbed vision of justice that flashed 349through the Doctor’s mind was a part of the vast cycle of visions that were hovering about this earth. It was not his alone, millions held part of it; millions aspired, they knew not why, and staked their lives upon their faith that there is a power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness. And as the waves of infinite, resistless, all-encompassing love laved the world that New Year’s night that cast the new Century upon the strange shores of time, let us hope that the dreams of strong men stirred them deeply that they might move wisely upon that mysterious tide that is drawing humanity to its unknown goal.
350CHAPTER XXXII
WHEREIN VIOLET HOGAN TAKES UP AN OLD TRADE AND MARGARET VAN DORN SEEKS A HIGHER PLANE
The new Century brought to Harvey such plenitude that all night and all day the smelter fires painted the sky up and down the Wahoo Valley; all night long and all day long the miners worked in the mines, and all through the night and the long day the great cement factory and the glass factories belched forth their lurid fumes. The trolley cars went creaking and moaning around the curves through the mean, dirty, squalid, little streets of the mining and manufacturing towns. They whined impatiently as they sailed across the prairie grass under the befogged sunshine between the settlements, but always they brought up with their loads at Harvey. So Harvey grew to be a prosperous inland city, and the Palace Hotel with its onyx and marble office, once the town’s pride, found itself with all its striving but a third-class hostelry, while the three-story building of the Traders’ Bank looked low and squatty beside its six and seven storied neighbors. The tin cornices of Market Street were wiped away, and yellow brick and terra cotta and marble took the place of the old ornaments of which the young town had been so proud. The thread of wires and pipes that made the web of the spider behind the brass sign, multiplied and the pipes and the rails and the cables that carried his power grew taut and strong. New people by thousands had come into the town and gradually the big house, the Temple of Love on Hill Crest, that had been deserted during the first years of its occupancy, filled up. Judge Thomas Van Dorn and his handsome wife were seen in the great hotels of New York and Boston, and in Europe more or less, though the acquaintances they made in Europe and in the East were no longer needed to fill their home. But the old settlers of Harvey maintained their 351siege. It was at a Twelfth Night festivity when young people from all over the Valley and from all over the West were masqueing in the great house, that Judge Van Dorn, to please a pretty girl from Baltimore whom the Van Dorns had met in Italy, shaved his mustache and appeared before the guests with a naked lip. The pursed, shrunken, sensuous lips of the cruel mouth showed him so mercilessly that Mrs. Van Dorn could not keep back a little scream of horror the first time he stood before her with his shaved lip. But she changed her scream to a baby giggle, and he did not know how he was revealed. So he went about ever after, preening himself that his smooth face gave him youth, and strutting inordinately because some of the women he knew told him he looked like a boy of twenty-five–instead of a man in his forties. He was always suave, always creakingly debonaire, always, even in his meannesses, punctilious and airy.
So the old settlers sometimes were fooled by his attitude toward Margaret, his wife. He bore toward her in public that shallow polish of attention, which puzzled those who knew that they were never together by themselves when he could help it, that he spent his evenings at the City Club, and that often at the theater they sat almost back to back unconsciously during the whole performance. But after the curtain was down, the polite husband was the soul of attendance upon the beautiful wife–her coat, her opera glasses, her trappings of various sorts flew in and out of his eager hands as though he were a conjurer playing with them for an audience. For he was a proud man, and she was a vain woman, and they were striving to prove to a disapproving world that the bargain they had made was a good one.
Yet the old settlers of Harvey felt instinctively that the price of their Judge’s bargain was not so trifling a matter as at first the happy couple had esteemed it. The older people saw the big house glow with light as the town spread over the hill and prosperity blackened the Valley. The older people played their quiet games of bridge, by night, and said little. Judge Van Dorn polished the periods of his orations, kept himself like a race horse, strutted like a gobbler, showed his naked mouth, held himself always tightly in hand, kept his eye out for a pretty face, wherever it might be found, 352drank a little too much at night at the City Club; not much too much but a very little too much–so much that he needed something to brighten his eyes in the morning.
But whatever the Judge’s views were on the chess game of the cosmos, Margaret, his wife, had no desire to beat God at his own game. She was a seeker, who always was looking for a new God. God after God had passed in weary review before her. She was always ready to tune up with the infinite, and to ignore the past–a most comfortable thing to do under the circumstances.
As she turned into Market Street one February morning of the New Year in the New Century, leading her dachshund, she was revolving a deep problem in her head. She was trying to get enough faith to believe that her complexion did not need a renovation. She knew that the skin-thought she kept holding was earth-bound and she had tried to shake it, but it wouldn’t shake. She had progressed far enough in the moment’s cult to overcome a food-thought when her stomach hurt her, by playing a stiff game of bridge for a little stake. But the skin-thought was with her, and she was nervous and irritable and upon the verge of tears for nothing at all. Moreover, her dog kept pulling at his leash, so altogether her cup was running over and she went into Mr. Brotherton’s store to ask him to try to find an English translation of a highly improper German book with a pious title about which she had heard from a woman from Chicago who had been visiting her.
Now Mr. Brotherton had felt the impulse of the town’s prosperity in his business. The cigar stand was gone. In its place was a handsome plain glass case containing expensive books–books bound in vellum, books in hand-tooled leather, books with wide, ragged margins of heavy linen paper around deep black types with illuminated initials at the chapter heads; books filled with extravagant illustrations, books so beautiful that Mr. Brotherton licked his chops with joy when he considered the difference between the cost mark and the price mark. The Amen Corner was gone–the legend that had come down from the pool room, “Better go to bed lonesome than wake up in debt,” had been carted to the alley. While the corner formerly occupied by the old walnut bench 353still held a corner seat, it was a corner seat with sharp angles, with black stain upon it, and upholstered in rich red leather, and red leather pillows lounged luxuriously in the corners of the seat; a black, angular table and a red, angular shade over a green angular lamp sat where the sawdust box had been. True–a green angular smoker’s set also was upon the table–the only masculine appurtenance in the corner; but it was clearly a sop thrown out to offended and exiled mankind–a mere mockery of the solid comfort of the sawdust box, filled with cigar stubs and ashes that had made the corner a haven for weary man for nearly a score of years. Above the black-stained seat ran a red dado and upon that in fine old English script, where once the old sign of the Corner had been nailed, there ran this legend:
“‘The sweet serenity of Books’ and Wallpaper,
Stationery and Office Supplies.”