Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

ing, in one corner of the throng; and thought how un-American a scene it was. At last the anarchist who had first begun stood up again, as if to close the meeting. This time his voice seemed stronger or more sibilant; his speech was but a string of curses, of tales of crime, full of a savage's lust of ruin. Let it end! Let them suffer, too; let them die, as we have died. If they mean to starve us now, let these mills and machines, these tools of wrong, these mines, these gaols of wretchedness, let them all burn or blast-what care we-we who are to be burned or hanged ourselves? Let their towns be gutted, and their homes be razed and their factories be burnedaye, let them burn, burn, burn, as this shall, burn, from now on, day and night, winter and summer, for all time!

And as the orator closed, with a group of men he threw himself upon the structure of the piping of the flaming well. The wooden tower swayed and rocked and fell; and with a roar like the ocean the gas, freed from its casing, flooded the sky with its flare of fire. A great mass of pebbles and timbers rose with the first outburst, and fell flaming on the shouting crowd below; then, igniting close to the earth, and even below its surface, running rapidly around the rock, leaping and tossing in liquid tongues, the red rills seemed to spring

from every crevice in the earth, until the place that had been the rostrum was sunken in a sea of flame.

The Pole had kept his arm extended, as one who invokes a spell, until the shock of the explosion had gone by, and all the flaming timbers fell; then, when the fire was steady, reddening the valley even to the distant mountain-tops, he swept his arm in a gesture not without some dignity toward the silent city. With a hoarse cry the multitude seemed to take his meaning; and the sea of swarthy faces, red-sashed men and olive-cheeked women, with their motley dresses, and their odd diversity of foreign cries, swept downward to the city's rolling mills.

Of all the crowd who spoke that night not one American except James Starbuck; of all the thoughts in those ten thousand heads, scarce one the fathers of the republic could have owned with honor; of all these men indeed, not one who understood the principles which gave his country birth.-Derwent was reflecting. Where were the true Americans? Where were the descendants of the colonies, and Virginia and old New England? What had been Starbuck's training, that he talked like that?

But, you will remember, old uncle Samuel Wolcott had hanged himself, now long years since, to the rafter from the barn in his hillside homestead.

SEAWARD.

By Thomas P. Conant.

THE sight of ships, the rolling sea,
The changing wind to sing for me;
The moon-bound tide, a crimson west,
Wherein the royal sun at rest

Rides like a golden argosy

With mastlike rays in cloud-sails dressed-
A voyager on an endless quest,
Whose farewell fills with majesty
The sight of ships.

Like prisoner struggling to be free,
Out of the mountain land I flee.
Again I see the heaving breast
Of ocean, where the petrel nest,
And there across the sandy lea

The sight of ships.

[graphic]

ONANICUT is a pleasant place to spend a summer. Of late years, indeed, so many people have thought so that its pleasantness has been diminished and, for some shy spirits, destroyed.

But if its favored and advertised localities have been improved to their ruin, there are tracts along the rugged line of shore, among the "Dumplings and the huckleberry bushes, as yet unspoiled. Here the land is broken into steep, sugar-loaf hills whose ribs of rock are covered with wiry grass slippery to unaccustomed feet; and, extending into the water, these hills form a fringe of small conical islands displaying more rock and less grass than they show on shore.

They are the Dumplings seething in the giants' caldron of soup when the storms descend from the ocean.

If this is not a pleasing simile I am not responsible, for such is the local tradition, embodied in the local name. Whatever else they are, they are picturesque in tempests, when the waves are flung upon them in spray; or in calms, when each "floats double," looking down upon its shadow.

To the left is Newport Harbor, its breakwater and Fort Adams: to the right, the slim point of Beaver Tail and the open ocean.

Here blows the salt breath of the Atlantic, untainted by drainage; here break foam-tipped billows, unvexed by bathing-ropes; here, below the tapering hills and bristling, pointed rocks, the gulls still watch for fish, as above them the few, ancient farm-houses, gray, storm-beaten, and lonely, watch their bleak sheep-ranges and the wide sea. Here man may come-though we selfishly hope he will notand close to Newport and its pageants, its social splendor, its naval pomp, its military parade, with all the dash and glitter of a gay world before his eyes, may live the life of a hermit or a savage.

By which of these names the owners of two or three jaunty little cottages, perched high upon the cliffs, would wish to be described, I do not know, but I do know that when one of the quaintly-fashioned, soft-toned, peaked and gabled structures was offered to Dick Kimball, he felt himself an unexpectedly lucky man. Dick had been for some years chief buyer for a prominent jobbing house and was considered a man of push and energy. These qualities had lately led him to start in business for himself, and he was spoken of as "rising." Now, as one seldom rises with a bound, but advances, like history, along a slow spiral, Dick found, as others have done, that if there is more glory in independent transactions there is more safety in an assured salary.

For a time there seemed to be nothing very certain about his business except its bad debts.

So he and Julia economized, wore their old clothes, and hopefully indulged in more or less expensive experiments in marketing on co-operative principles. During the winter they talked very bravely of staying in the city all summer, and Julia said she could take the children to the Park for air and exercise.

VOL. IV.-22

But when the heats came and the sun on the pavements began to look white, and the breath from the streets was such that no one knew which was worse, the hot, foul air outside, or the close, foul air inside, Julia weakened and declared the baby could never stand it. They must go somewhere to open fields and trees-anywhere-details could be arranged afterward. But details, when they pressed for arrangement, did not prove so manageable and she was still worrying, undecided, when one warm evening Dick came home to dinner with a letter in his pocket.

"There, Julia," he said, throwing it down by her plate. "There's luck. The Browns are going to Europe."

"Yes, if they like it," Julia answered languidly, for the weather was oppressive and her luck had seemed small.

"Well, Brown's as good a fellow as he always was when he was foot of our class and I had to help him scrape through. Success doesn't spoil him a bit. He knows I've been hard up this year. Read the letter. He wants us to take his cottage near Newport for the sum

mer.

[ocr errors]

'A cottage near Newport!" cried Julia, breathless. "Why, Dick, you are dreaming! If we can't afford Bayshore, or the Catskills- -! You know I haven't a dress; and as for the children

"But it isn't that. Nothing of the sort. Flannel dresses and ginghamsor sackcloth and ashes if you choose. I lived in a tennis shirt and knickerbockers when I was there that summer before we were married, don't you remember? Lovely place, lots of sailing and fishing. We both said, when we got rich we would build there. Brown got rich faster than I did, and you see he has done it. He and Sidney-that's his wife's brother, you know-each have cottages. They spend the summers there, painting. But this year, as you see, Brown says he's going abroad."

[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors]

"Not a bit of it. Brown's pictures sell very well, but they never built that cottage. Just wait till you hear him on the grossness of the American public! No, it was more likely wool, for when old Henry Sidney died he stood at the head of the trade. He left a big pile and there were only Mrs. Brown and her brother to share it. They can do what they like. Perhaps," Dick added, with a half-pathetic glance at his own curlyheaded heir, "Bobby can be a painter too, some day, if I stick to wool."

Julia jumped up and ran to his end of the table, regardless of etiquette, or oven of the example she set to Master Bobby.

"I don't care how nice Mr. Brown is, I won't take his cottage. And leave you! Why, Dick, I could not do it."

But she finally did. The offer was really too good to be refused, and of course Dick protested that he longed to be left, and talked jocosely of bachelor freedom, Coney Island, and the peanut galleries. Besides, he would often run up to see them.

A hot wave came on. One of the children fell ill. Georgie packed the trunks with the thermometer at 90°, and after an uncomfortable night on the Newport boat, Mrs. and Miss Kimball, two children, and the very important personage who had been induced to come with them as cook, stood among their bags and bundles on the high cottage balcony and turned their bleached faces seaward to the strong salt air.

They knew at once that they had done wisely and well, and began to put things to rights with enthusiasm. In this task they were much assisted, and their enthusiasm was sustained, by the kindness of their neighbor, Mr. Sidney, who promptly came over from the adjoining cottage, initiated them into the ways of the island

and the islanders-engaged a boy for them, placed his boats and man at their disposal, and introduced his friend Jack Horner, who was spending a vacation with him.

"Another artist," Georgie wrote to Dick. "They do thrive surprisingly out here. But I believe Mr. Horner is not rich. He might as well be in wool. He can paint, though. At least Mr. Sidney says so, and that he is truly a genius.

I hope he is, but I know he can swim magnificently, and they are teaching Julia and me to row. We should be perfectly happy if only you could come. We hate to think of you in the hot city while we" etc., etc.

Dick did come, when he could, to spend the Sundays, sometimes adding a Saturday or Monday, when the three men would go out in Sidney's boats and

to put Miss Georgie's shapely head upon it, and after that she sat quite regularly. Horner looked on and criticised. Julia suggested effects of costume and drapery.

It was all very cosey and intimate.

II.

"ANYHOW, I can paint a boat. She's

fish all day, coming back sunburned and as dainty as a shell.

Who'd know her

[graphic]

"By and by Sidney, with some diffidence, set up his easel and begged permission to put Miss Georgie's shapely head upon it."

happy, whether they caught anything or for the old tub we pried off the rocks not. yonder?"

Julia established a small table and an urn upon the balcony and made coffee there in the summer evenings, and Sidney and Horner testified their approval by coming over very regularly to drink it.

Georgie found them delightful companions. She was bright and active, and could play tennis and handle a pair of oars to admiration. On hot mornings when a land breeze made these sports unattractive, the balcony was still the coolest place, and the two men formed a habit of loitering there.

There would be needlework and talk; they even were not above reading aloud. By and by Sidney, with some diffidence, set up his easel and begged permission

A fresh breeze blew briskly from the sea. The crisp waves ran before it, tossing their foamy crests. The wet rocks glistened; the water glanced and sparkled; the radiant sunlight gave the air a metallic glitter like tiny points of diamond dust. White breakers chased each other on Agassiz's Point, and across the bay a few reefed sails were scudding with the swift-winged gulls. One felt the rush of the world through space.

Below the cottages wooden stairs led from ledge to ledge, down the steep sides of a basin-shaped cove where Sidney's various pleasure craft were rocking at their moorings. A tiny sloop was laid up on this sheltered beach, and, paint-pot in hand, Horner wriggled out

[graphic][subsumed]

"She looked brightly up a moment to challenge criticism, but then leaned back against the boat unable to conceal her exhaustion."

from under it.

He stopped half-way and, lying on his back, put some extra touches to the stern, where the name, "Georgiana," shone resplendent in gold on a buff ground.

"You've made those letters big enough," said Sidney.

"Tis to be read afar," retorted Horner. "The meteor of the seas. If you give a month to the lady's portrait, shall I take less pains with her name?"

"She says it is not her name," murmured Sidney, maliciously, but the wind blew his words away. He was crouching, for protection against this wind, behind a big bowlder and was painting a jutting point of rocks over which the waves were dashing. With his pocket box of colors and a handful of fine brushes, he had managed to catch the spirit of the breezy morning, the wide sea and brilliant sky, upon a foot, or so, of paper.

Horner came up and leaned over the bowlder, rubbing his daubed fingers.

"Your perspective tilts a good deal, seems to me," he said, but presently he burst out, "By Jove, I don't see how you do it. It's more wonderful than ge

nius-of which, you know, you haven't a spark Or, no, it is genius, the genius of manipulation."

"Well," said Sidney, serenely, "what is all genius but the power to do?"

"Now if I had been doing that," pursued Horner, still stretching over the rock, "I should have wanted a canvas as big as the side of a church, something huge and inspiring like the ocean out there. But here you have it on an insignificant scrap, as if you had seen it through the small end of a spy-glass. It is positively immoral. You belittle nature."

"My dear fellow," said Sidney, smiling, "what value has size in art?"

"But how can you see in such a light?" Horner grumbled. "This intolerable dazzle would put my eyes out."

"If I waited till everything suited me, how much would I ever do?" asked Sidney, going over his shadows with a careful hand.

The relationship between these two, though close, was peculiar. It dated from their school-days, when Horner, as the more experienced and muscular, had stood Sidney's friend with aggressive

« AnkstesnisTęsti »