Then, Do
You, Feeling Older Than Methuselah And Twice As Important, Go Forth And
Patronise Things In General, While The Manager Tells You Exactly What
Sort Of Millionaire You Would Have Been If You Had 'stayed By The Town.'
Or else - the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new made
is dead - dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning.
Success
was not justified by success. Of ten thousand not three hundred remain,
and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel,
with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys are
cold; the villas have no glass in them, and the fire-weed glows in the
centre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the
empty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the stream
that was to have been defiled by the city sewage. A two-pounder lies
fanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the alders
have crept up to the city wall. You pay your money and, more or less,
you take your choice.
By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that go
with a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies in
the gate. He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inward
kernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished. Here
they lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and
Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look. The
adventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dress
a little and altered their employment to suit the world in which they
move. Clive came down from Lobengula's country a few months ago
protesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few that
believed. Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated iron
hut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since then he has altered the map
considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire
is set on ballot-boxes and small lies. The illustrious Don Quixote
to-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has found the
treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. Now and again he destroys black
fellows who hide under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins, with a still
younger Boscawen for his second, was till last year chasing slave-dhows
round Tajurrah; they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be
grilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been holding the
'Republic' of Mexico by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.
The others, big men all and not very much afraid of responsibility, are
selling horses, breaking trails, drinking sangaree, running railways
beyond the timberline, swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and
making cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters of the
world. Only people will not believe this when you tell them. They are
too near things and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the most
cold-blooded realism: 'This is romance. How interesting!' And of
over-handled, thumb-marked realism: 'This is indeed romance!' It is the
next century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our time
clearly.
Meantime this earth of ours - we hold a fair slice of it so far - is full
of wonders and miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default, it
is good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all.
ON ONE SIDE ONLY
NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., June-July 1892.
'The truth is,' said the man in the train, 'that we live in a tropical
country for three months of the year, only we won't recognise. Look at
this.' He handed over a long list of deaths from heat that enlivened the
newspapers. All the cities where men live at breaking-strain were
sending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselves
apostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching their readers to keep
cool and not to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon them.
The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried pebbles; the logs and
loggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grass
at the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparks
from locomotives. Men - hatless, coatless, and gasping - lay in the shade
of that station where only a few months ago the glass stood at 30 below
zero. Now the readings were 98 degrees in the shade. Main Street - do you
remember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow this
spring?[2] - had given up the business of life, and an American flag
with some politician's name printed across the bottom hung down across
the street as stiff as a board. There were men with fans and alpaca
coats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel - among
them an ex-President of the United States. He completed the impression
that the furniture of the entire country had been turned out of doors
for summer cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants. Nothing looks
so hopelessly 'ex' as a President 'returned to stores,' The stars and
stripes signified that the Presidential Campaign had opened in Main
Street - opened and shut up again. Politics evaporate at summer heat when
all hands are busy with the last of the hay, and, as the formers put it,
'Vermont's bound to go Republican.' The custom of the land is to drag
the scuffle and dust of an election over several months - to the
improvement of business and manners; but the noise of that war comes
faintly up the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the fiddling
of the locusts.
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