Part 41 (1/2)
_Item Seven._ In Mr. Fenn's room a collection of receipts:
(a) One from the Midland Railroad Company for bra.s.s as per statement rendered.
(b) One from the Harvey Transfer Co. for one box of cutlery marked Wright & Perry, and
(c) One--the hardest receipt of all to get--from Martha Morton for six chickens as per account rendered. These receipts hang on a spindle in the little room. Under the spindle is
_Item Eight._ A bottle of whisky--full but uncorked. He is in his room but little. Sometimes he comes in late at night, and does not light the lamp to avoid seeing the bottle, but plunges into bed, and covers up his head in fear and trembling. On the day when the Peach Blow Philosopher printed his view on Heaven, Mr. Fenn, by way of personal adornment, had purchased of Wright & Perry
_Item Nine._ One new coat. He hoped and so indicated to the firm, to be able to afford a vest in the spring and perhaps trousers by summer, and because of the cutlery transaction above mentioned, the firm indicated
_Item Ten._ That Mr. Fenn's credit was good for the whole suit. But Mr. Fenn waved a proud hand and said he had
_Item Eleven._ No desire to become involved in the devious ways of high finance, and took only the coat.
But, nevertheless, no small part of his Heaven lies in the serene knowledge that the whole suit is waiting for him, carefully put aside by the head of the house until Mr. Fenn cares to call for it. That is perhaps a material Heaven but it is a part of Mr. Fenn's Heaven, and as he goes about from door to door soliciting for sewing, the knowledge that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous--even on two meals a day and in a three-dollar-a-month room.
And now that we may balance up the Heaven account in these books, we should come to some conclusion as to what Heaven is. Let us call it, for the sake of our hypothesis, the most work one can do for the least self-interest, and let it go at that and get on with the story. For this story has to do with large and real affairs. It must not dally here with the sordid affairs of a lady who certainly was no better than she should be and of a gentleman who was as the hereinbefore mentioned receipts will show, much worse than he might have been.
CHAPTER x.x.xV
THE ODD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE BROTHERTON IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT
Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valley. In May a young gentleman in a high hat and a suit of exquisite gray twill cut with a long frock coat, appeared at the Hotel Sands--and took the bridal suite on the second floor. He brought letters to the Traders' Bank and from the Bank took letters to the smelters, and with a notebook in hand the young man in exquisite gray twill went about for three or four days smiling affably, and asking many questions. Then he left and in due course--that is to say, in a fortnight--Mr. Sands called the managing officials of all the smelters into his back room and read them a letter from a New York firm offering to trade stock in a holding company, taking over smelters of the cla.s.s and kind in the Wahoo Valley for the stocks and bonds of the Harvey Smelters Company. The letterhead was so awe-inspiring and the proposition was so convincing by reason of the terror inherent in the letterhead that the smelters went into the holding company, and thereafter the managing officials who had been men of power and consequence in Harvey became clerks. About the same time the coal properties went the same way, and the cement concerns saw their finish as individual competing concerns. The gla.s.s factories were also gobbled up. So when the Fourth of July came and the youngest Miss Morton, under great protest, but at her father's stern command, wrapped an American flag about her--and sang the ”Star Spangled Banner” to the Veterans of Persifer F. Smith Post of the G.A.R. in Sands'
Park, the land of the free and the home of the brave in Harvey was somewhat abridged.
Daniel Sands felt the abridgement more than any one else. For a generation he had been a spider, weaving his own web for his own nest.
All his webs and filaments and wires and pipes and cables went out and brought back things for him to dispose of. He was the center of the universe for himself and for Harvey. He was the beginning and the end.
His bank was the first and the last word in business and in politics in that great valley. What he spun was his; what he drew into the web was his. When he invited the fly into his parlor, it was for the delectation of the spider, not to be pa.s.sed on to some other larger web and fatter spider. But that day as he sat, a withered, yellow-skinned, red-eyed, rattle-toothed, old man with a palsied head that never stopped wagging, as he sat under his skull cap, blinking out at a fat, little world that always had been his prey, Daniel Sands felt that he had ceased to be an end, and had become a means.
His bank, his mines, his smelters, even his munic.i.p.al utilities, all were slipping from under his control. He could feel the pull of the rope from the outside around his own foot. He could feel that he was not a generator of power. He was merely a pumping station, gathering up all the fat of the little land that once was his, and pa.s.sing it out in pipes that ran he knew not where, to go to some one else--he knew not whom. True, his commissions came back, and his dividends came back, and they were rich and sweet, and worth while. But--he was shocked when he found courage to ask it--if they did not come back, what could he do?
He was part of a great web--a little filament in one obscure corner, and he was spinning a fabric whose faintest plan he could not conceive.
This angered him, and the spider spat in vain rage. The power he loved was gone; he was the mere sh.e.l.l of a spider; he was dead. Some man might come into the bank to-morrow and take even the semblance of his power from him. They might, indeed, shut up every mill, close every mine, lock every factory, douse the fire in every smelter in the Wahoo Valley, and the man who believed he had opened the mills, dug the mines, builded the factories and lighted the smelter fires with all but his own hands, could only rage and fume, or be polite and pretend it was his desire.
The town that he believed that he had made out of suns.h.i.+ne and prairie gra.s.s, for all he could do, might be condemned as a bat roost, and the wires and cables, that ran from his desk all over the Wahoo Valley, might grow rusty and jangle in the prairie winds, while the pipes rotted under the sunflowers and he could only make a wry face. Spiders must have some instinctive constructive imagination to build their marvelous webs; surely this old spider had an imagination that in Elizabeth's day would have made him more than a minor poet. Yet in the beginning of the Twentieth Century he felt himself a bound prisoner in his decaying web.
So he showed his blue mouth, and red eyelids in fury, and was silent lest even his shadow should find how impotent a thing he was.
But he knew that one man knew. ”How about your politics down here?”
asked the affable young man in exquisite gray twill, when he closed the gas-works deal. And Dan'l Sands said that until recently he and Dr.
Nesbit had been cronies, but that some way the Doctor had been getting high notions, and hadn't been around the bank lately. The young man in the exquisite gray twill asked a few questions, catalogued the Doctor, and then said:
”This man Van Dorn, it appears, is local attorney for all the mines and smelters--he hasn't the reform bug, has he?”
The old spider grinned and shook his head.