Chapter XVI

Landon, spreading over and between low hills, opened upon a bit of a plain where furnaces were building. Shaggy, higher hills, called by courtesy mountains, made sides of an amphitheater. In this direction coal was being mined; in that, iron. Near at hand ran a muddy, sluggish river crossed by an untriumphant bridge. The woods were largely pine and small oak, the climate warmer than that I had left.

At this time the population of Landon might number three thousand. That was two thousand more than had been in presence three years earlier. The dwelling-houses, big and little, were frame, and there were many little and very few big, and the big only so by contrast with the others. The railway station was frame, the hotel, the two churches. But the offices of the company of which General Warringer was a director were brick, as were the Landon Bank and the company stores. Brick, too, was the office of the Landon & Gulf Railway Company. All these constituted themselves into finger-posts which proclaimed: "Here is Solidity and Permanence. We point to a Future in which we shall be larger--much larger--and stone!"

The company into whose service I came owned the mines, a range of hills stuffed with coal, and a divergent range where iron outcropped. It owned the furnaces being constructed; in great measure it owned Landon. Its rival was a company seated eight miles up the river, with other coal and iron ownings, furiously building a furnace beside its own wooden town, with its own brick offices.

Ahasuerus and I descended from the train at Landon. About us was a scrambling crowd, white men and negroes. A slight, blond young man met me. "Mr. Forth?"

"Yes."

"I am Alec Battle, draftsman in the office here. Your chief asked me to get you and pilot you about. That darky with you?"

"Yes. Ahasuerus Robertson. I'm responsible for him. He's all right. He wants to drive a wagon."

"I'll turn him over to William at the office. You'll find a number of Virginians here."

That proved true. The Landon Coal and Iron Company was built, to an extent, with Northern capital, as the Landon & Gulf Railway Company was built to an extent with Northern capital. But the working force was predominantly Southern and drawn from almost every state below Mason and Dixon. The president of the Landon Coal and Iron came indeed from Pennsylvania, and the president of the Landon & Gulf from Ohio. These gentlemen did not live at Landon. They came there in private cars, visited for a few days, showed themselves very genial with the generality, sometimes genial, sometimes the reverse with the closeted few. Then the private car, at the end of the passenger express, disappeared around the curve. But superintendent and manager and down the line lived at Landon. The railway, too, was building beyond, looking darkly meantime at the probable construction, just across the river, of a competing feeler from the Debenham & Atlantic. The sense of a career, of a future, hung strongly over Landon. Go up the river those few miles to Parisia and you encountered the like prophetic sense--for Parisia. But Parisia granted for Landon no other career than one of disaster. And Landon returned the compliment. They stood opposed like bulls with lowered heads.... All this, and much besides, came later to my knowledge. Now, in the moment, I left with Battle and Ahasuerus the dirty station and stepped into the main street of Landon. There shone the brightest autumn sunlight, from the bluest sky.

I have come to realize the ills of the world's present economic life, and I with others strive after a more understandable and understanding system. The sins and evils are great, and must be seen and outgrown. Else smash--and smash again and again--and at last, facing every one, the ugliest monster to be dealt with, and all the power of dealing enfeebled! But I was in it, there and then, in the system, not especially protesting, taking it for granted, working in it with some cheerfulness, some conscience, and some aspiration, and if with growing longings, growing doubts, yet with no crystalline vision of direction out of it. And so, by my own experience, I know that others, too, in the old system, worked with cheerfulness, conscience, and aspiration. And yet how hedged, frontiered in, continuously defeated, were the three! And most folk seemed unaware of anything on the whole to change. Their individual satisfactions ought to expand. The circumstances of themselves and their immediate families ought to change. Nothing in the world with all of them was so certain as that! There they worked toward change quite ardently and arduously. But they thought of everything as happening in the system. _I_ go up; then, relatively speaking at least, _you_ go down. We didn't seem to be able to make good general. It was, they seemed to think, on the whole God's system and the way the world was made.... Unhappy world!

There was mistake, I think. But in this universe of power and joy so much that is not mistake lives within us! So steadily does what heaven we have gained work at heavenizing our earth! I feel mainly now the lift in persons and things. I see that from imperfect systems, syntheses, grow steadily the imperfect yet, but the more perfect.... At Landon, for all the narrow serving, for all the low-order social mechanism, for all our dim vision, dim alike with educated and uneducated, official and laborer, we were not hopeless. We had industry, pluck, vigor. We could laugh and clap a man upon the back. We could show kindness. I remember now how many good folk were there--in the offices, the bank, the churches, on the road, at the furnaces, in the mines.

Battle and Ahasuerus and I went along Main Street. Under the bright sunshine there fell a gilding cheerfulness over the shacks and shanties, the Italian-kept fruit-stand, the colored barber standing beside his barber-pole, the Chinaman ironing, the gold mortar and pestle before a drug-store that might have gone into a pocket, the buzz about a saloon.

"Have a drink?" asked Battle.

I shook my head. "No, I made a promise long ago."

"Well, you're lucky to have kept it!"

He pointed out as we went the more marked features of the town. Every one whom we met, white and negro, spoke to him and he to them. He placed many for me. "I've been here two years. Every one's fastened together like a bead necklace. The company's the string--the company and the Landon & Gulf. There's the office--but I'm going to take you first to your boarding-place. You'll want to get rid of your bags and see where you are. General Warringer's mother was my father's second cousin. So we're kind of kin. Cousin Harriet wrote to me to get you a good place to live in. This is the best here."

We had turned at right angles and were going up a steep and dusty side-street, or, rather, road. He indicated a large, rambling, one-story house or considerable cottage behind maples and water-oaks. It looked neatly kept, with a veranda, vines and flowers in a small yard. "Mrs. Sayre's," he explained. "Doctor Sayre's legally, but Mrs. Sayre's colloquially. They belong in this state, but they moved from a plantation somewhere to Landon because they've got two sons here with the company. Clerks. Bob and Ferry. The doctor is crippled by rheumatism. He doesn't practise. Three-fourths of his time he lies in a hammock and reads. She's a benevolent despot. You can't help liking her. She's a captain housekeeper. I board here, too. See that little cottage at the side? They own it. Four rooms in it--yours, mine, Bob's, and Ferry's."

We mounted the veranda steps. A colored girl was sweeping away fallen vine leaves. Behind her the house door stood hospitably open, showing a hall with an old clock and two or three pictures. A large lady in a pleasant, clean, and thin flowery gown, with a palm-leaf fan in her hand, came toward us. So I met Mrs. Sayre, before whom my mind still halts in a kind of half-humorous amazement and regard.

From Mrs. Sayre's--I never heard it called anything but that--I was conveyed by Battle to the office. Mrs. Sayre capably disposed of Ahasuerus. She had a cook and a man, Mirandy and Harris, who lived in the alley. Landon already had alleys. Mirandy and Harris could put Ahasuerus somewhere. If he was a handy man Mrs. Sayre could give him work until his proper job appeared. Harris, summoned, took Ahasuerus in charge. My room in the cottage--the big cottage was called the house--proved small and furnished with a simplicity. But it was fresh and clean, and one of its two windows gave a wide view of eastern sky and of the last roofs of Landon, of plain and building furnaces, river and hills.

Battle and I went down the street together and on to the office, half-way between Mrs. Sayre's and the railway station. As we went he discoursed various economic aspects of Landon. He did not use the word "economic." It had not come perfectly into general use in the eighth decade of the nineteenth century. The decade used an older jargon. Words that are common to-day stayed at that time in learned print. The labor at Landon was in mass negro, and one mine used convict labor. The bosses, the foremen, petty heads of kinds, were, of course, white, and chiefly American, though with a good sprinkling of Irish and German. There was one gang of Italians. Mechanics, carpenters, masons, etc., were white and mainly from Yankee-land and Dixie. The clerical force, paymasters, commissary men, bookkeepers, clerks, and so forth, appeared to have come from every state east of the Mississippi. As for other citizens of Landon, here on their own, there seemed an ethnic ruck of these. Jewish names, Greek, Chinese emerged.... And there were certain ladies....

Battle looked aside at me. I shook my head. "The same promise. And I do not want it, anyhow, any longer."

"Lucky man!" said Battle. "Oh, my Lord, it _is_ a net!"

The street was dusty, dirty; the sidewalk narrow, made of board and fouled with torn paper, fruit peeling, tobacco juice. The east-bound Landon & Gulf, puffing bituminous-coal smoke and with a loud-clanging bell, went by out of Landon. Children were crying in a room above the tintype man's booth. Farther down Mr. Abrahams stood in front of his clothing-shop. "Goot day, frients!" he said, as we passed.

I looked about me. The exhilaration of the morning, arrival, novelty, the sunshine, faded a little. "What's going to be here, after all?"

Battle grew animated. "A big town! The biggest kind of big town. There's enough coal and iron and limestone in these mountains to run the United States! Presently there'll be blast-furnaces and blast-furnaces. I can imagine it any night, with the sky all lit up. The old Landon & Gulf won't be the only railroad, either, though it would like to be! Parisia--" He gave the word with quite indescribable scorn. "Parisia will take a back seat. She hasn't got the capital or the brains. Landon's got both. We've grown a thousand since last year." He took on an exalted look. "It's coming.... Street-cars--electric light--ice-cream parlors--theaters--bigger salaries--"

I saw in Battle, and was to see in many at Landon, the overflowing of the personality over something growing. There collected a pool of triumphing affection when the growing thing was esteemed friendly to the self, but for the held-to-be-unfriendly a boding dislike amounting at times to hatred. Fear of the growing thing always chose contempt for disguise. Towns, industries, institutions, parties, systems--points of view. The pale earth seedling bent the way it was inclined, then proclaimed at once papal infallibility. "This, that, with mathematical certitude, I know to favor me, is saved; this, that, with like certainty, I am sure opposes me, is damned! And not at all relatively so, but in the eternal Absolute. So, acclaiming this growth, so, fighting and despising yonder growth, I with pride become fanatic before the temple door!"

Well.... There is the joy of the fanatic!

We arrived before the office of the Landon Coal and Iron Company. The building was brick, three-storied, quite well and widely paved in front, with a big door, with rows of moderately clean windows, behind which might be dimly seen much activity. Men stood in the doorway, men went in and came out. The passageway which we entered felt most gratefully cool after the midday sun. Battle turned toward a large room to the right. "I'll introduce you to Colonel Ringgold. Then we'll go up-stairs."

It was the general superintendent's office. Colonel Ringgold turned in his swivel-chair. Large, saturnine, with a scar acquired at Chickamauga running from brow to chin, he looked at me with intent gray eyes. "Well, Mr. Forth! General Warringer says we must look after you. Do you believe in reciprocity?"

"I do, sir."

"Very good! We don't want to dig and dig only to find that the seam has switched off or petered out, or wasn't at its thickest very thick. We want to make a drift into power, not into the reverse. How do you find Mrs. Sayre's? I understand you're boarding there."

I said that I was very well pleased. He nodded and ever so slightly turned the swivel-chair. Battle said that we wouldn't trespass longer. "All right!" answered Colonel Ringgold. "Rather a busy day. My good wishes, Mr. Forth!"

In the passage Battle remarked, in a lowered voice: "Mrs. Sayre and the doctor are cousins of his. He's very good stuff, but he'll drive you like the devil!"

But for me I liked Colonel Ringgold, though I have seen him drive the weak like the devil.

We mounted the stairs. There was a room with clerks. Battle grinned at the collectivity, then took me across to a gentle, elderly man, Mr. Allen, the bookkeeper, sitting in a kind of cage. From this room we went down a narrow passage to my especial purview: "Mr. Maxwell may be at the mine, or gone riding somewhere. But his clerk, Jim Standard, is here."

It turned out that Mr. Maxwell had just come in. Looking out of window, one might see his horse, a strong, gaunt sorrel, in charge of a black Flibbertigibbet.

My chief stood, tall, raw-boned, sandy, blue-eyed. He wore a gray flannel shirt and corduroy breeches tucked into dusty riding-boots. His slouch-hat hung on a nail above a shelf whereon was ranged specimens of ore. In his hand he held a piece of red hematite, and he was dictating in a clipped, raucous voice to Jim Standard, who took his words down in shorthand. It was somewhat before the day of women clerks, and only one letter in so many appeared typewritten. Maxwell swung around at our entrance. He was lithe, thirty-five about, trained, I afterward found, in Edinburgh and Germany; still a British subject, drawn to America through that old hunger for experience. After greeting me in a dry, casual manner he finished his letter. Then he said: "I am going to ride ten miles to-morrow. I suppose that you ride?"

I answered that I did. "I'll expect you here, then, at eight o'clock. Get a horse. Country's rough. We'll be gone all day." His look added: "Try you out to-morrow. If I don't like you the company may keep you--but not as my assistant!"