The Quickening | Page 9

It
was a rather appalling mouthful, not nearly so euphonious as the name
of the apostle would have been. But she comforted herself with the
thought that the boy would probably curtail it when he should come to
a realizing sense of ownership; and "Reverend" would fit any of the
curtailments.
So now we see to what high calling Thomas Jefferson's mother
purposed devoting him while yet he was a helpless monad in
pinning-blankets; to what end she had striven with many prayers and
groanings that could not be uttered, from year to year of his childhood.
Does it account in some measure for the self-conscious young Pharisee
kneeling on the top of the high rock under the cedars, and crying out on
the girl scoffer that she was no better than she should be?

IV
THE NEWER EXODUS
One would always remember the first day of a new creation; the day
when God said, Let there be light.
It has been said that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is
merely the overlooked. For weeks Thomas Jefferson had been scenting
the unwonted in the air of sleepy Paradise. Once he had stumbled on
the engineers at work in the "dark woods" across the creek, spying out
a line for the new railroad. Another day he had come home late from a
fishing excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the
sitting-room with three strangers resplendent in town clothes, and the
talk--what he could hear of it from his post of observation on the porch
step--was of iron and coal, of a "New South," whatever that might be,
and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to
help bring about.

But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground
premonitory of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when,
as a reward of merit for having faultlessly recited the eighty-third
Psalm from memory, he was permitted to go to town with his father.
Behold him, then, dangling his feet--uncomfortable because they were
stockinged and shod--from the high buggy seat while the laziest of
horses ambled between the shafts up the white pike and around and
over the hunched shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the
morning of the day of revelations.
In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found
Thomas Jefferson totally unprepared. He had been to town often
enough to have a clear memory picture of South Tredegar--the
prehistoric South Tredegar. There was a single street, hub-deep in mud
in the rains, beginning vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending
rather more definitely in the open square surrounding the venerable
court-house of pale brick and stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the
shops--only Thomas Jefferson and all his kind called them
"stores"--one-storied, these, the wooden ones with lying false fronts to
hide the mean little gables; the brick ones honester in face, but sadly
chipped and crumbling and dingy with age and the weather.
Also, there were houses, some of them built of the pale red brick, with
pillared porticoes running to the second story; hip-roofed, with a square
balustered observatory on top; rather grand looking and impressive till
you came near enough to see that the bricks were shaling, and the
portico floors rotting, and the plaster falling from the pillars to show
the grinning lath-and-frame skeletons behind.
Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace
which, long before the war, had given the town its pretentious name.
And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most
inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the
great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other
building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle,
once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out of it.
Thomas Jefferson had seen it all, time and again; and this he

remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty
dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the freshness
of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful gladness in
his heart.
But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a
dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced,
blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he
should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius of
modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of
delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of the
South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap, with
all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men