The Fruit of the Tree | Page 6

names."
"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
never forget an operative's name or face."
"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
sententiously.
He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"
"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another street,
down which a laden car was descending.
Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
the town.
At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a grey
intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his
volume and sat looking out into the gloom.
The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,

the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes
made him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he
recalled the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused
him to a fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the
sordidness of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled
grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a
crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself
how it was possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded
forever by the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness
that has life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of
the rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of
the suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of
surrounding life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its
banishment from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst
the very negation of hope and life.
"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
wholesome blood left in it."
The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences,"
with porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these,
Hopewood, brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who
had married an earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved.
The pillared "residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses;
but the old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained,
neglected but intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a
dwelling but "held" in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable

growth of Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots.
Whenever Amherst's eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above
the roofs of Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned
country-seat into a park and playground for the mill-hands; but he
knew that the company counted on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a
source of profit. No--the mill-town would not grow beautiful as it grew
larger--rather, in obedience to the grim law of industrial prosperity, it
would soon lose its one lingering grace and spread out in unmitigated
ugliness, devouring green fields and shaded slopes like some
insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions were familiar enough
to