National Avenue · Chapter 6 (2/2)

“Why, no,” Harlan said, correcting her lightly, “I don’t think he’s going to be able to do the whole thing at all. He’ll get part way and then of course he’ll have to quit, because his money’ll give out. What he has left may last him a year or even longer, if he keeps on just doing with his little gang of darkies and himself.”

“And in the meantime, he’ll also keep on being a ‘laughing stock?’ That’s what you said, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think it was an exaggeration,” Harlan returned, defending himself, for her tone was sharply accusing. “After all,” he went on, with placative lightness, “isn’t it even rather a triumph in its way? You see, Martha, it isn’t every young man of his age who’d be well enough known to occupy that position.”

“A laughing stock?”

“Why, yes. Don’t you see it means a degree of prominence not at all within the reach of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. For instance, I couldn’t touch it: I don’t know enough people; but Dan’s one of those men of whom it’s said, ‘Oh, everybody in town knows him!’ So, you see, since he’s run wild over this Ornaby Addition, why, he actually has the whole town laughing at him.”

“Since he’s run wild!” she echoed scornfully. “And you say you don’t exaggerate! How has he ‘run wild?’ ”

“Ask your father,” was Harlan’s response, delivered quietly, though with some irritation; and Martha said sharply that she would, indeed; but this was mere retort, signifying no genuine intention on her part, for she knew well enough what her father would say. He had been saying it over and over, every evening of late; and her discussions with him of Dan Oliphant and Ornaby Addition had reached that point of feeble acrimony at which a participant with any remnant of wisdom falls back upon a despairing silence⁠—a silence despairing of the opponent’s sanity. Martha had no mind to release her father from the oppression of this silence of hers, merely to hear him repeat himself.

She knew, moreover, that Harlan had not far overshot the mark when he intimated that Dan had become the laughing stock of the town; nor was it grossly an exaggeration to describe him as “making orations to bankers and business men, especially your father.” The enthusiast for Ornaby Addition had indeed become somewhat oratorical upon his great subject; and the bankers and business men to whom he made speeches not only laughed about him, as did their secretaries and clerks and stenographers, distributing this humour widely, but often they laughed at him and rallied him, interrupting him as he prophesied coming splendours.

“You’ll see!” he would answer, laughing himself, albeit rather plaintively. “You can sit there and make all the fun o’ me you want to, but the day’ll come when you’ll wish you’d had a hand in makin’ this city what it is goin’ to be made! It isn’t only the money you’d get out of it, but the pride you’d take in it, and what you’d be able to tell your grandchildren about it. Why, gentlemen, ten years from now⁠—” Then he would go on painting his air castles for them while they chuckled or sometimes grew noisily hilarious.

But the toughest and most powerful of them all declined to chuckle; there was little good-nature and no hilarity left in dry old Mr. Shelby. He was seventy, and, as he crisply expressed himself, at his age he hated to have his time wasted for him; he didn’t see any pleasure in listening to the goings-on of a fool-boy about two minutes out of school! This viewpoint he went so far as to communicate to Dan directly, as the latter stood before him in the old gentleman’s office. For that matter, Mr. Shelby seldom cared to be anything except direct; it was his declared belief that directness was the only thing that paid, in the long run. “Usin’ a lot of tact and all that stuff to spare touchy people’s vanity, it’s all a waste of energy and they only hate you worse in the long run,” he said. “So I’m not goin’ to trouble to use any tact on you, young Mr. Dan Oliphant!”

He was a formidable old figure as he sat in his mahogany swivel-chair, which every instant threatened to swing him about to face his big, clean desk again with his back to the visitor. Neat with an extremity of precision, this old man had not altered perceptibly in appearance for many years, not even in his clothes; he was now exactly as he was in Dan’s childhood. The gray chin-beard was the same precisely trimmed short oblong, and no whiter; the same incessant slight frown was set between the thin gray eyebrows; the same small black necktie showed a reticent bow beneath the flat white collar that was too large for the emaciated neck; and the same clean white waistcoat was worn under the same black cutaway coat; the same gray-and-black-striped trousers descended to the same patent-leather congress gaiters. Twice a year Mr. Shelby gave an order⁠—always the same order⁠—to his tailor; he never left his house in the evening; had not taken any exercise whatever since his youth; went to bed always at nine o’clock; always ate exactly the same breakfast of oatmeal, an egg, and one cup of coffee; was never even slightly indisposed; and appeared to be everlasting. Compared to such a man, granite or basalt might be imagined as of an amiable plasticity; yet the ardent Dan hopefully persisted in seeking to remodel him.

“Why, of course, Mr. Shelby,” he assented;⁠—“that’s just the way I want you to feel; I don’t want you to use any tact on me. I don’t need it. When I’m layin’ out a proposition like this before a real business man, all I want is his attention to the facts.”

“What facts?”

“The facts of the future,” the enthusiast replied instantly. “The future⁠—”

“What d’you mean talkin’ about the facts of the future? There ain’t any facts in the future. How you goin’ to have any facts that haven’t happened yet? A fact is something that’s either happened or is happening right now.”

“No, sir!” Dan exclaimed. “The present is only a fraction of a second, if it’s even that much; the past isn’t any time at all⁠—it’s gone; everything that amounts to anything is in the future. The future is all that’s worth anybody’s thinkin’ about. That’s why I want you to think about the future of your car lines, Mr. Shelby.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” the old gentleman said sardonically. “You think I ain’t thinkin’ about it, so you called around for the fourth time to draw my attention to it?”

“Yes, sir,” the undaunted young man replied. “I don’t mean exactly you don’t think about it; I just mean you don’t seem to me to consider all the possibilities.”

“Such as old Ranse Ornaby’s ex-hog-wallow and corn-patch, for instance?”

“That ex-hog-wallow and corn-patch, Mr. Shelby,” Dan said proudly, “consists of five hundred and thirty-one and two-thirds acres. If you’d only drive out there in your carriage as I’ve asked you to⁠—”

“Good heavens!” Mr. Shelby interrupted. “I chopped wood there thirty years before you were born! D’you think I got to hitch up and go buggy-ridin’ to know where Ranse Ornaby’s farm is?”

“It isn’t his, sir,” Dan reminded him. “It belongs to me. I only meant, if you’d come out there I think you’d see some changes since I’ve been layin’ it out in city lots.”

“City lots? What city you talkin’ about? Where’s any city in that part o’ the county? I never knew there was any city up that way.”

“But there is, sir!”

“What’s the name of it?”

“The city of the future!” Dan proclaimed, his eyes brightening as he heard his own phrase. “This city when it begins to reach its growth! Why, in ten years from now⁠—”

“Ten years from now!” the old man echoed, with angry mockery. “What in Constantinople you talkin’ about? D’you know you’re gettin’ to be a regular byword in this town? Old George Rowe told me yesterday at his bank, he says you got a nickname like some Indian. It’s ‘Young Ten-Years-From-Now.’ That’s what they call you: ‘Young Ten-Years-From-Now’! George Rowe asked me: he says, ‘Has Young Ten-Years-From-Now been around your way makin’ any more speeches?’ he says. He says that’s the nickname everybody’s got for you. It’s all over town, he says.”

Dan’s colour heightened, but he laughed and said: “Well, I expect I can stand it. It isn’t a mean nickname, particularly, and I don’t guess they intend any harm by it. I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be good advertisin’ for the Addition, Mr. Shelby.”

“I should,” the old man remarked promptly. “I’d be surprised if anything turned out good for the Addition!”

“No,” said Dan. “That nickname might do a lot o’ good; though the truth is I’m not talkin’ about ten years from now nearly as much as I am about only two or three years from now. Ten years from now this city’ll be way out beyond Ornaby Addition!”

“Oh, lord! Hear him holler!”

“It will,” Dan insisted, his colour glowing the more. “It will! Why, you go down to the East Side in New York and look at the way people are crowded, with millions and millions more every year tryin’ to find footroom. They can’t do it! They’ve got to go somewhere. They’ve got to spread all over the country. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of ’em have got to come here. That’s not all; we’ve got the finest climate in the world, and the babies that get born here practically all of ’em live, and there’s tens of thousands of ’em born every year. Besides that, this city’s not only the natural market of a tremendous agricultural area, but the railroads make it an absolutely ideal manufacturing centre. Why, it’s just naturally impossible to stop the growth that’s comin’, even if anybody wanted to, and the funny thing to me is that so few of you business men see it!”

“You listen to me,” the old man said;⁠—“that is, unless you got the habit of talkin’ so much you can’t listen! You been tellin’ the men that run this town quite a few things about our own business lately; it’s time somebody told you something about your own. You’re a good deal like your grandfather Savage used to be before your grandmother sat on him and never let him up. He was always wantin’ to put his money into any fool thing and lose it, until she did that, and I hear she tried to stop you, but you didn’t have the gumption to see she’s right. Now, look here: I’ve been here since there was a population of seven hundred people chillin’ every other day, eatin’ quinine by the handful, and draggin’ one foot after the other out of two-foot mud if they had to get off a horse and walk anywhere. Last census we had a hundred and eighty thousand. I’ve seen it all! D’you expect you can tell me anything about this town?”

“No, sir; not about the history of it or anything that’s past. But about the future⁠—”

“You listen!” Shelby commanded irascibly. “You come around here blowin’ out your chest and tellin’ us old settlers that this town has grown some⁠—”

“No, sir; I know you know all about that a thousand times better’n I do. I only use it to prove the town’s goin’ to keep on growin’. Why, Mr. Shelby, ten years from now⁠—”

“Great Gee-mun-nently!” the old man shouted. “Can’t you listen at all? Of course it’s goin’ to keep on growin’, but not the way you think it is. It’s already reached its land size, or mighty near it, because there’s plenty vacant lots inside the city limits⁠—hunderds and hunderds of ’em⁠—and people want to live near their business; they don’t want to go way out in the country where there ain’t any sewers nor any gas nor city water.”

“But they’ll get all that, Mr. Shelby. They will as soon as there’s enough of ’em to make it pay the water company and the gas company to run their pipes out; and there’d be enough of ’em, if you’d lay even a single track out to⁠—”

“Out to Ranse Ornaby’s frog pond!” the old man interrupted angrily. “You think if I’d throw away a hundred thousand dollars like so much dirt, that’d bring the millennium to the old hog-wallow, do you, young man? Look out that window behind you. What’s the biggest thing you see?”

“The First National Bank Building.”

“Yes, sir. Eleven stories high, and the Sheridan Trust Company’s got plans to put up a block higher’n that. People’ll build up in the air, not only for business, but to live in flats, but they won’t go ’way out to a hog-wallow in the country when there ain’t a reason on earth for ’em to. You seem to think people ride on streetcars for pleasure! Well, I’ve had some experience in the business, and I can tell you they don’t, except in mighty hot weather; they ride on streetcars to get somewhere they want to go; and goodness knows nobody wants to go to Ranse Ornaby’s farm.”

“But, Mr. Shelby, if you’d listen just a minute⁠—”

“I’ve listened all I’m a-goin’ to,” the old man said decisively. “This is the fourth time you been here tellin’ me all about this town that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me and some the other men you been lecturin’ to about it. You go at me as if I’d just put up at the hotel and never saw the place before, and what’s worse you’ve gone and got Martha so she keeps ding-dongin’ at me till I can’t eat my supper in peace! It’s about time for you to understand it’s no use.”

“But, Mr. Shelby, if you’d just let me put the facts before you⁠—”

“Facts about what’s goin’ to happen ten years from now? No, sir!” The swivel-chair began to turn, making it clear that this interview had drawn to a close. “I thank you, but I can make up my own facts, if I so desire!” And the back of the chair and its occupant were offered to the view of the caller.

Dan made a final effort. “Mr. Shelby, I hope you don’t mean this for your last word on the subject, because just as sure as you’re born the day will come when⁠—”

“Will it?” the old man interrupted; and turned his head angrily, so that his neat beard was thrust upward by his shoulder and seemed to bristle. “You go teach your grandma Savage to suck eggs,” he said with fierce mockery, “but don’t come around here any more tellin’ me where I better lay my car tracks!”

“Well, sir, I⁠—”

“That’s all!”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said, a little depressed for the moment.

But in the hall, outside the office, he recovered his cheerfulness, and, after consulting a memorandum book, decided to call on Mr. George Howe, the president of the First National Bank. Since yesterday Dan had thought of several new things that were certain to happen within the next ten years.