Unleavened Bread | Page 6

as the city grew, the drawing
point had been made a little lower where the stream had regained a
portion of its limpidity, and no one but wiseacres and busybodies

questioned its wholesomeness. Benham at that time was too
preoccupied and too proud of its increasing greatness to mistrust its
own judgment in matters hygienic, artistic, and educational. There
came a day later when the river rose against the city, and an epidemic
of typhoid fever convinced a reluctant community that there were some
things which free-born Americans did not know intuitively. Then there
were public meetings and a general indignation movement, and
presently, under the guidance of competent experts, Lake Mohunk,
seven miles to the north, was secured as a reservoir. Just to show how
the temper of the times has changed, and how sophisticated in regard to
hygienic matters some of the good citizens of Benham in these latter
days have become, it is worthy of mention that, though competent
chemists declare Lake Mohunk to be free from contamination, there are
those now who use so-called mineral spring-waters in preference;
notably Miss Flagg, the daughter of old Joel Flagg, once the miller and,
at the date when the Babcocks set up their household gods, one of the
oil magnates of Benham. He drank the bean colored Nye to the day of
his death and died at eighty; but she carries a carboy of spring-water
with her personal baggage wherever she travels, and is perpetually
solicitous in regard to the presence of arsenic in wall-papers into the
bargain.
Verily, the world has wagged apace in Benham since Selma first
looked out at her metal stag and the surrounding landscape. Ten years
later the Benham Home Beautifying Society took in hand the Nye and
those who drained into it, and by means of garbage consumers,
disinfectants, and filters and judiciously arranged shrubbery converted
its channel and banks into quite a respectable citizens' paradise. But
even at that time the industries on either bank of the Nye, which flowed
from east to west, were forcing the retail shops and the residences
further and further away. To illustrate again from the Flagg family, just
before the war Joel Flagg built a modest house less than a quarter of a
mile from the southerly bank of the river, expecting to end his days
there, and was accused by contemporary censors of an intention to
seclude himself in magnificent isolation. About this time he had
yielded to the plea of his family, that every other building in the street
had been given over to trade, and that they were stranded in a social

Sahara of factories. So like the easy going yet soaring soul that he was,
he had moved out two miles to what was known as the River Drive,
where the Nye accomplishes a broad sweep to the south. There an
ambitious imported architect, glad of such an opportunity to speculate
in artistic effects, had built for him a conglomeration of a feudal castle
and an old colonial mansion in all the grisly bulk of signal failure.
Considering our ideals, it is a wonder that no one has provided a law
forbidding the erection of all the architecturally attractive, or
sumptuous houses in one neighborhood. It ought not to be possible in a
republic for such a state of affairs to exist as existed in Benham. That is
to say all the wealth and fashion of the city lay to the west of Central
Avenue, which was so literally the dividing line that if a Benhamite
were referred to as living on that street the conventional inquiry would
be "On which side?" And if the answer were "On the east," the inquirer
would be apt to say "Oh!" with a cold inflection which suggested a ban.
No Benhamite has ever been able to explain precisely why it should be
more creditable to live on one side of the same street than on the other,
but I have been told by clever women, who were good Americans
besides, that this is one of the subtle truths which baffle the Gods and
democracies alike. Central Avenue has long ago been appropriated by
the leading retail dry-goods shops, huge establishments where
everything from a set of drawing-room furniture to a hair-pin can be
bought under a single roof; but at that time it was the social artery.
Everything to the west was new and assertive; then came the shops and
the business centre; and to the east were Tom, Dick, and Harry,
Michael, Isaac and Pietro, the army of citizens who worked in the mills,
oil yards, and pork factories. And to the north, across the river, on the
further side of more manufacturing establishments, was Poland,
so-called -- a settlement of the Poles -- to reach