Humorous stories; Valets -- Fiction; Washington (State) -- Fiction
Our last day of travel arrived. We were now in a roughened and most
untidy welter of mountain and jungle and glen, with violent tarns and
bleak bits of moorland that had all too evidently never known the
calming touch of the landscape gardener; a region, moreover, peopled
by a much more lawless appearing peasantry than I had observed back in
the Chicago counties, people for the most part quite wretchedly gotten
up and distinctly of the lower or working classes.
Late in the afternoon our train wound out of a narrow cutting and into
a valley that broadened away on every hand to distant mountains.
Beyond doubt this prospect could, in a loose way of speaking, be
called scenery, but of too violent a character it was for cultivated
tastes. Then, as my eye caught the vague outlines of a settlement or
village in the midst of this valley, Cousin Egbert, who also looked
from, the coach window, amazed me by crying out:
“There she is--little old Red Gap! The fastest growing town in the
State, if any one should ask you.”
“Yes, sir; I’ll try to remember, sir,” I said, wondering why I should
be asked this.
“Garden spot of the world,” he added in a kind of ecstasy, to which I
made no response, for this was too preposterous. Nearing the place our
train passed an immense hoarding erected by the roadway, a score of
feet high, I should say, and at least a dozen times as long, upon
which was emblazoned in mammoth red letters on a black ground,
“_Keep Your Eye on Red Gap!_” At either end of this lettering was
painted a gigantic staring human eye. Regarding this monstrosity with
startled interest, I heard myself addressed by Belknap-Jackson:
“The sort of vulgarity I’m obliged to contend with,” said he, with a
contemptuous gesture toward the hoarding. Indeed the thing lacked
refinement in its diction, while the painted eyes were not Art in any
true sense of the word. “The work of our precious Chamber of
Commerce,” he added, “though I pleaded with them for days and days.”
“It’s a sort of thing would never do with us, sir,” I said.
“It’s what one has to expect from a commercialized bourgeoise,” he
returned bitterly. “And even our association, ‘The City Beautiful,’ of
which I was president, helped to erect the thing. Of course I resigned
at once.”
“Naturally, sir; the colours are atrocious.”
“And the words a mere blatant boast!” He groaned and left me, for we
were now well into a suburb of detached villas, many of them of a
squalid character, and presently we had halted at the station. About
this bleak affair was the usual gathering of peasantry and the common
people, villagers, agricultural labourers, and the like, and these at
once showed a tremendous interest in our party, many of them hailing
various members of us with a quite offensive familiarity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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