But he had been a great man.
He had had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl had been the tragedy
of his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.
On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned a
farm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he drove
out there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens,
in the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle for
Sunday afternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those
excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably
through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and
stand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish always,
but a thing of terror in spring freshets. And across was the east side,
already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that killed
the green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and height,
its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the mill laborers.
Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams. He was a sturdy,
dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or flinging stones
over the palisades. Life for Howard was already a thing determined. He
would go to college, and then he would come back and go into the mill
offices. In time, he would take his father's place. He meant to do it
well and honestly. He had but to follow. Anthony had broken the trail,
only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad and easy way.
Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams. Once he
said: “I'll build a house out here some of these days. Good location.
Growth of the city is bound to be in this direction.”
What he did not say was that to be there, on that hill, overlooking his
activities, his very own, the things he had builded with such labor,
gave him a sense of power. “This below,” he felt, with more of pride
than arrogance, “this is mine. I have done it. I, Anthony Cardew.”
He felt, looking down, the pride of an artist in his picture, of a
sculptor who, secure from curious eyes, draws the sheet from the still
moist clay of his modeling, and now from this angle, now from that,
studies, criticizes, and exults.
But Anthony Cardew never built his house on the cliff. Time was to come
when great houses stood there, like vast forts, overlooking, almost
menacing, the valley beneath. For, until the nineties, although the city
distended in all directions, huge, ugly, powerful, infinitely rich, and
while in the direction of Anthony's farm the growth was real and rapid,
it was the plain people who lined its rapidly extending avenues with
their two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tenderness
and quiet, along tree-lined streets, where the children played on the
cobble-stones, and at night the horse cars, and later the cable system,
brought home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens, already
growing dingy from the smoke of the distant mills.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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