Dynasty of Death Read online

  Very few returned, and those who had come for a day lived and died on the new land. But they had placed that curse of impermanence, indifference, of sterility and greed upon it, and though their children and their children’s children had forever turned their faces from a Europe they did not know, not even by tradition, this new land held no love for them, no true idealism, no fervency.

  Eventually, some of the Newtowners, by sheer greed and ingenuity, and the shrewdness and craft of peasants, would loot enough to enable them to buy homes in Oldtown, “across the tracks,” would enable them to marry into tight and haughty families, to swallow in vast gulps the old wine of a delicate tradition. But as they carried the blight of the curse with them, they merely brought to spiritual Oldtowns their innate greed and lack of imagination, their lustful impotence, their ravishing and despoiling hands, becoming the robber barons of finance, the tyrants of vast industries, the corrupters of polities. The diminished ranks of Oldtowners would retreat in silent bitterness to little Southern villages, to small New England towns, to, however, a narrow and steadfast and immortal integrity which would keep alive, even in this maimed land, a soul of dignity and honor and fine living.

  But little Martin Barbour dreamed nothing of this, as he shivered under the depression and sickness that this heat and this ugliness, this noise and this confusion had brought down upon him. He had lost the blessed faculty of forgetting. Events of three months ago, three weeks ago, three days ago, all crowded into his mind with simultaneous sharpness, the oldest as clear and clamorous as the newest, so that one merged its colors and its heat and its noises into the colors, heats and noises of all the others, making a vast confusion and an exhausting uproar. Martin was like a man condemned never to sleep, condemned to keep his eyes fixed eternally on all the things that had been in his life, which had blended in themselves the past and the present and the future. He felt all through him a weariness beyond imagining.

  There was the last day in Reddish, the crowding into the stage for Liverpool, the sun on blazing water, the great steam-and-sail ship like a scarred black monster at the dock, its rigging, bare now, breaking the burning blue sky into rectangles, squares and triangles, the noise of crowds, the delay, alarms, the roar of voices, the pushing of shawled women, the shouting of men mingling with the hoarse singing of sailors, the false starts, the screams of farewell, the lost luggages, the recovery of them, the red-brown of blank-faced warehouses, the scent of sun-heated wood and the odor of fishy salt air. Finally, the depositing of the Barbour family in the dank steerage with scores of other pilgrims to the end of the rainbow, the deafening crying of children, the pale excited faces of mothers and young girls and the nervous nonchalance of men. The odors of sweat and dirt and beer. And then, through a porthole, the broken line of the English shore drifting down and away, until it was a pencil smudge on a horizon turning an unreal peacock-blue. Six weeks of this, because of summer storms of singular fury, heat, illness, children, wretched discomfort, food that rapidly became unfit to eat, crowding of the sweating steerage passengers, the old man and the two children who died and had to be buried at sea, the everlasting sliding of the great tilted ocean, which at times was a hillside of gray steel, and at other times rollicking sharp-pointed little blue hills. There was little joy or pleasure in this for the steerage passenger far below decks, only grim endurance, only hope that became physically sick and green with nausea. Not for the steerage passenger the cool and wind-scrubbed upper decks, nor the beauty, when the engines temporarily failed, of rushing sails against furious skies, of long rolling moons and the delight of strange marine life, of drowsy reclining in warm sunlight, music, sparkling wines and delicate dishes, and delirious waltzing under brilliant stars. The driven crew might see these things at snatched intervals, might have the bitter pleasure of envy. But the steerage passengers did not have even envy. They had only their hope, and this, too, was at last retched up.

  How these things crowded up behind Martin’s tired eyes, which even when closed failed to darken them out. There came a gray and watery dawn, but a hot and steaming dawn, when one could look through the small hole and the water seemed quiet and viscous, as if filled with turgid sediment and oil. The ship did not seem to roll and pitch so sickeningly today, but appeared to idle, its rigging limp, its smells, now that the wind had fallen, pungent and putrid, overwhelming the nose with a thick, immovable fog. Martin would never forget the harbor, lying gray and corrugated in that sunless dawn; and then the sun came up, watery and hot and diffused, and the skyline of New York stood out against a pale and palpitating sky, crowded, thick and low and feverishly busy.

  There was no railroad to Windsor, but only a lumbering stage, which carried them twenty miles to another stage, and another and another. At this point Martin’s memories became nightmare events, none clear, none definite, all rolling together like livid skeins of torture and illness. Rain in the flat valleys, searing sun on the hills, rushing of waters, light too vivid, too unshaded and glaring to bear. Little Dorcas ill and whimpering with fever, and a subdued Hilda, silent and whipped at last, holding the sick child to a trembling breast. Fellow-passengers who had long ago lost the last remnants of common courtesy, who looked on the sufferings of the others with the stupid indifference of personal suffering. Small raucous towns where they changed stages, ugly towns of saloons, boardwalks, fighting men, river traffic, sweat and dust and heat, and that impossible sunlight. Voices with strange twangs to them, faces, English faces, that already seemed to have taken on themselves a thin and foreign patina. Odd bundles of food thrust through the windows of the waiting stages. And that ghastly sense of unreality and untenable strangeness that assails the stranger in a strange land. Later, one or two “Dutch” settlements, with broad-faced stolid women and broad-shouldered squatty men with yellow hair and beards, who, however, seemed kinder than those of their own sort, and often brought fresh milk to the windows of the stage, helped exhausted mothers with babies, chatted encouragingly in guttural voices. “Windsor? Ach, yes, it was but a little more.” And again the stage, lurching, pitching, steaming with the heat of the passengers crowded among their luggage, sweltering in the sunlight that never seemed to fail, but even at midnight seemed to lie threateningly along the horizon.

  And then storms of incredible wildness and rain and wind and thunder and lightning, mud that boiled up about the wheels, of groaning horses, weird trees seen bending almost to their roots in sheets of red light, the faint moans of exhausted women and children, and the shifting of luggage on the roof of the stage. Endless miles of nightmare in which there was no shelter, only deserts of hills and fields and empty plains.

  “I wish,” groaned Joseph Barbour through heat-blistered lips, “that we had never left home.” Only Ernest did not agree; he had gone through all this rigidly, white-faced, eyes immovably looking ahead. Nothing made him moan, nothing sickened him, nothing tried or terrified him.

  More and more confusion revolved in Martin’s mind, so that even while he forgot details, did not see them, their accumulated effect made sound and fury in his memories. Windsor at last, in a hot and rainy twilight, and blurred impressions of river and smoke and huddled shacks, hundreds of them, of muddy streets, noise, flaring of lamps and candles, the jingling of harness, shouts, greetings, strange smells, a sullen-faced woman in bonnet and India shawl who was “Auntie Daisy,” and a sulky man in a flowered waistcoat who was “Uncle George.” And then memories of a springless wagon in which luggage, bursting now at its seams, was thrown carelessly onto a layer of hay on which the children were already deposited, and a long, endless, swimming ride through tunnels of trees arching over a road full of holes and water and mud, and then a falling into a sleep full of sweat and pain, just as a moon, incredibly large and burning and yellow, leapt up behind the low and distant hills.

  Closer memories, but pleasanter ones dimmed only a little by wretchedness, of a squat wide house of wood and stone, of rooms, crowded with mahogany and horsehair and pictures and ru
gs and tables, of hot tea forced through dry lips, of hot soup and boiled beef and bread, of seed-cake and cold pudding, of beds that seemed to swim out to one through a foggy mist, of sinking into feather mattresses like sinking into death. All this, blurred only a little by torment of flesh and mind, accompanied in the distance by the sound of strange children’s voices and pushing, wondering faces that did not seem to belong to bodies.

  It had taken the Barbour family several days to recover from their journey. And then it was with the timidity of unforgotten exhaustion that they looked about them.

  George Barbour, who was rapidly becoming prosperous, lived in a section of Newtown that was sheepishly acquiring some of the amenities of life. The houses in this section were larger, cleaner and more comfortable, and while not built for permanency, were still not built for a month or a year. While no trees nor flowers nor grasses grew here, the boardwalks were swept and kept in repair, and some few windows were draped in coarse laces. Many of the men, like George Barbour, had sent to Philadelphia for furniture, and had set the huge ugly mahogany chairs and tables and beds into their lopsided rooms, crowding them together without taste or comfort. And many of these men, like George Barbour, were cautiously beginning to speak of moving over to Oldtown “one of these days,” and speaking less and less of returning “home.” They were already beginning to speak of the “trash” in less prosperous parts of Newtown, were already beginning to curse lazy and greedy and incompetent workmen in their mills and growing factories. They sent to New York for flowered waistcoats and frilled shirts and dark red and bottle-green coats, for gold watches and gold-headed canes, for sleek stove-pipe hats and polished boots, for great-skirted, lace-trimmed dresses for their women, and velvet pelisses and flower-burdened bonnets, for the cheaper wines and delicacies, for rings and muffs. A few of them shamefacedly hired servant girls, and considered themselves, audibly the equal of the “snobs” in Oldtown, who completely ignored them. So many of them worked wistfully and grimly toward the possibility of themselves moving over to Oldtown, not knowing that a more subtle yet stronger barrier than money or locality divided them.

  Martin did not like either his Aunt Daisy or his Uncle George, and Hilda, who had had memories of a kinder, simpler, friendlier Daisy Potts, a second cousin, could not recognize this Daisy in this brutal-faced, grasping, overbearing and patronizing woman with her silk dresses, rings of keys, servant girl and mahogany furniture and four-poster beds and new carpets. Daisy Potts had become fatter and more upright, short and condescending of speech, frowning, preoccupied, haughty, rustling about her household, and showing in every infrequent word and in every attitude of her shawled shoulders that she resented the intrusion of her husband’s family. She had little to say to Hilda; was harsh to Hilda’s children, and did not encourage friendliness between them and her little daughter, Martha, a frail and venomous child with a white face and whining voice, some few months younger than Martin. Martin did not like Martha any more than he liked her parents. She was thin and spindly, with long pointed feet, lace pantalettes, velvet and fine muslin dresses, pale thin hair and protruding blue eyes. Her expression was sly and smug in the presence of her elders, became malicious and mean when with children her own age. It was evident that she despised her cousins, for she stuck out her tongue at the boys, pulled Florabelle’s hair and made her cry, teased the baby into shrieks of infantile hysteria, carried false tales to her already prejudiced mother, who resented Hilda her sons. Though she had been born in England, she had the native’s contempt for aliens, and called her cousins “dirty Englishmen.” She resented the fact that she had to sleep on a pallet in her parents’ chamber, while her Aunt and Uncle, and her four cousins temporarily were crowded into her own room.

  The meals, consisting of strange meats and stranger vegetables, were served in the overcrowded dining room, whose lace-trimmed windows looked down a short muddy slope to the river. The new family, after one day of attempted friendliness and affection, found themselves silently and miserably choking on their meals under the silent pointed eyes of their hostess. George Barbour, who was planning on squeezing his brother dry of his new powder secret, uneasily tried to warm up his wife’s coldness, but her innate stupidity was too strong for her guile. Hilda timidly offered to “help,” was harshly repudiated, pushed into an idle and hateful background, in which she agitatedly nursed her baby and grew a little thinner and paler. Her voice grew sharp and hysterical toward her older children; she was terrified that they might offend their aunt, which they did frequently, without intention. When Daisy, after a bad night with George about her stupidity, gave the poor young woman a grudgingly kind word, Hilda burst into joyful tears, told Joseph that Daisy really had the kindest heart, and grovelled before her sister-in-law. For poor Hilda was desperately homesick, bitterly disillusioned.

  Martin suffered with her. His dislike for his relatives became hatred. He also ached for his father, who had become silent and stubborn and tight-lipped, cautiously and cynically retreating before George’s not-too-adroit questions. But Ernest neither hated nor disliked them. He, in fact, hardly saw them. He was tensely waking, thinking, studying, going down each day to his uncle’s little gunpowder and firearms factory, and watching everything. Within two weeks he had won George’s reluctant admiration and regard. Soon George was explaining everything to him, and complainingly hinting that “somethin’s up with old Joe; why doesn’t he tell me what it’s all about?” Ernest listened to this, and one day went to his father with suggestions and astonishingly mature advice.

  The result of this advice was that Joseph approached his brother one day, after they had sent the women and children from the dining room and had lit their pipes and moved to the empty fireplace. A summer storm was brewing, and through the silent, suspended heat of the air one could hear the rush and hurry of the river. And what Joseph said to his brother was this: He had come all these thousands of miles, and he had not come for nothing. They were brothers, weren’t they? They must work together. Joseph must know at once just what he was to expect, and get. He had something that would make both their fortunes, but he had no intention of letting it make George’s fortune alone. As he said this, quietly and frankly, he looked full at his brother with his brilliant gray eyes. George said nothing; his flabby ruddy face tightened a little, his protruding blue eyes veiled themselves behind pink lids, and he smoked stolidly. When he came from the factory at night he “dressed” for the evening meal in tight fawn pantaloons, dark red coat and ruffled shirt and polished boots. He had crossed his legs, and when Joseph paused in what he was saying he swung his crossed leg idly back and forth apparently engrossed in watching his boot glitter in the candlelight. Joseph waited; he had all the cards and he could afford to wait. But while waiting for George to speak he glanced idly and indifferently about the ugly room, watching the flickering pools of candlelight on the ceiling, glancing through the window at the lightning.

  “What else?” asked George at length, in a sullen voice.

  Joseph smiled pleasantly. He must have a little house of his own, nearby, of course. George must lend him money to buy household supplies and furnishings, a very modest sum. George glowered, an angry glare settling in the eyes that fixed themselves with enmity on his brother. But he let Joseph continue. Under Joseph’s voice could be heard the children’s voices in the next room, the timid laughter of Hilda, the shouts of neighbors as they walked on the boardwalks.

  And then, said Joseph, he must become a partner, oh, a very small partner, but a partner. It must all be settled before a notary. Signed and sealed. A share in everything. You didn’t think of all that yourself, said George furiously. Joseph, reddening but still smiling, admitted that Ernest had done most of that thinking, and George stared, slack-jawed, unbelieving. Then he remembered that Daisy had called Ernest foxy and underhanded and he blurted this out to Joseph. But on his lips the words became grudging and admiring, and George found himself prophesying that Ernest would go a long way. Immediately his a
nger flared up again at Joseph. It was unendurable that his brother should have such a son, and he none at all.

  He began to bluster. It was all nonsense. This was a hellish way to treat a brother, who had sent tickets home, and was providing shelter. Besides, what did Joe want? Wasn’t he getting ten dollars a week and a home, for just puttering around in the shop and getting on to things? What more did he want? Besides, there was George’s partner to reckon with, that Frenchy, that Armand Bouchard. He, George, doubted very much that Armand would listen to taking in another partner, who had no money but only an idea that probably was no good, anyway. He paused, watching Joseph furtively.

  Joseph smiled still. Oh, he said carelessly, he was certain Bouchard would not object. He had hinted something to him about the new gunpowder, and Bouchard had seemed eager about it, had himself suggested that Joseph get to work upon it immediately. Speaking of him, Joseph remembered the tiny, avid, furiously active little Frenchman with his oaken face carved and wrinkled, his small kindly eyes so intelligent and amused, his large gestures, his pointed black beard, his courteous friendliness. Joseph had known almost at once that Bouchard despised and inwardly laughed at George even while he respected his ability as an organizer and contriver of ways and means. “You Englishmen!” he had said with an amiable shrug. “You find all the nine ways to skin a cat, and then invent another. No conscience, no delicacy, no intelligence. But successful, yes. And what virtue!” He and Joseph had conceived an immense affection for each other immediately, and Armand had listened with grave and kindly interest to Joseph’s story of a French ancestor. He found Joseph more than a little pathetic, and told his wife, a buxom and gigantic woman, that that George was a pig, a bad-smelling cabbage.