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PORT ARGENT

A Novel

By Arthur Colton

With a Frontispiece by Eliot Keen

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1904

[Ill 0001]

[Ill 0010]

[Ill 0011]


IN MEMORIAM

C. W. WELLS


DEDICATED

TO

GEORGE COLTON

863714

PORT ARGENT




CHAPTER I--PULSES


|PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it
a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there,
instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and
better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another,
and the city grew.

In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive
Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no
“press galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences
have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on
its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its
sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills,
or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute?

Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres
back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would
grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help
to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to
favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead
into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that
direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small
farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social
speculators “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a
session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile.

Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back
of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge
of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the
bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But
people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed
of.

There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney
with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was
born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning,
late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new
generation.

Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of
Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers
subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the
breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of
Port Argent.

The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt
legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded
house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come
to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to
his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something
living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through
arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow),
with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish
emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across
the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden
throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row
of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a
half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have
slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country,
after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest
streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would
seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or
order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures,
changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness.

The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric
character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its
streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic
heart beat and brain conceive.

One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and
found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street.

Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down
the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything
fitted anything else.

Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty
years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured
Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take
its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but
the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port
Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of
the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately
line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the
Champney place.

A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since
the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the
city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the
city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked
a citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and
freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these
piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was
told: “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to
make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.”

“Fixed him?”

“Oh, they're a happy family now.”

The citizens of Port Argent held singular language.

“Who is Marve Wood?”

“He's--there he is over there.”

“Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?”

“Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.”

“And this Wood--is he an engineer and contractor?”

“No--well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us.”

The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases
of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of
school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club.

The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with
a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired,
grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He
produced the effect