National Avenue quotes

Flushed with anger and greatly perplexed, Dan glanced over his shoulder at Master Kohn, who looked on with an inscrutable expression. “Well, what if I can’t?” Dan said desperately, after this glance at his guest and partner. “You got no right to insult him.”

“It isn’t an insult if it’s true, is it?”

“Yes, it is; and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I got a notion—I got a notion—”

“So’m I,” Sam insisted.

“You’re American from English, and I’m American from Jews. He’s got a right to call me a Jew.”

Dan stared at him incredulously. “Don’t you mind it?”

“Well, then, you oughtn’t to mind his callin’ you dirty, Sam.”

“He wouldn’t call you dirty the same way he would me,” Sam returned shrewdly; and then, after a momentary pause, he sighed and turned to go.

But that sigh of his, which had in it the quality of patience, strongly affected Dan’s sympathies, for a reason he could not have explained. “Don’t go, Sammy,” he said. “You don’t have to go just because he—”

But the unfortunate Daniel carried with him a picture that remained tauntingly before his mind’s eye; and he decided to stay in New York a little longer, though he had written his father that he would leave for home the next day.

He had been stricken at first sight.

He could not flatter himself that she had bestowed a thought upon him. On the contrary, he told himself that his impetuosity had made headway backwards;

“Grandma,” he said desperately;—“I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you talk this way about the sweetest, the most perfect, the loveliest—”

“Get rid of her!” she cried.

And as the distressed young man went out into the hall she leaned forward in her chair, shaking at him a piteously bent and emaciated forefinger. “You get rid of her, if you don’t want to die in the gutter! Get rid of her!”

“They—they think he’s just a joke?”

“Not ‘just’ one,” the precise Harlan replied. “They think he’s the biggest one they’ve ever seen.”

Martha uttered a sound of angry protest, though she did not speak at once, but stared frowningly at the fire; then she turned abruptly to Harlan. “Why don’t you help him?”

“Perhaps it’s because you’ve never seemed to think much of anything, yourself,” she said gently.

“Perhaps we’re apt to like people best who do a great deal of liking themselves.”

“I might like to have you like me, Martha,” Harlan ventured, and there was a quiet wistfulness about him then that touched her. “I might like it better than you know.”

had not taken any exercise whatever since his youth; went to bed always at nine o’clock; always ate exactly the same breakfast of oatmeal, an egg, and one cup of coffee; was never even slightly indisposed; and appeared to be everlasting.

Compared to such a man, granite or basalt might be imagined as of an amiable plasticity; yet the ardent Dan hopefully persisted in seeking to remodel him.

“Why, of course, Mr. Shelby,” he assented;—“that’s just the way I want you to feel; I don’t want you to use any tact on me. I don’t need it.

“But, Mr. Shelby, if you’d just let me put the facts before you—”

“Facts about what’s goin’ to happen ten years from now? No, sir!” The swivel-chair began to turn, making it clear that this interview had drawn to a close. “I thank you, but I can make up my own facts, if I so desire!”

And the back of the chair and its occupant were offered to the view of the caller.

That’s the real trouble, I suppose, and there’s a certain future ahead of me—a pleasant one to look forward to!”

“Drunken stockbroker,” George replied with laconic despondency. “That’s me, if I live to forty.”

“I’d rather be one than buried in a mudhole on the prairie,” said Lena. “I’d rather be anything than that; yet it’s precisely what my thoughtful fiancé informs me I have no choice about. I think perhaps he’ll learn whether I have or not, though!”

Then, in a voice not cracked or quavering, though broken a little, she said:

“I thought so! But you’re welcome.”

Lena looked frightened, but Dan laughed and kissed his grandmother’s cheek, talking cheerfully. “Well, this is an honour, grandma! We hardly hoped you’d come out in all this heat.

This was a mystery beyond his experience, and he could only sigh and shake his inadequate head; meanwhile pacing beneath the midnight stars.

But they were neither puzzled nor surprised, those experienced stars, so delicately bright in the warm sky, for they had looked down upon uncounted other young husbands in his plight and pacing as he did.

By and by he stood still, aware of another presence in the dimness of the neighbouring yard.

“No,” she said.

“It only proves I still have a little curiosity. I’d like to live twenty years just to prove I’m right about how this baby’s going to turn out.”

The implication of her tone was grim with conviction—clearly she spoke of a baby who could not turn out well—and Harlan was amused by his own perception of a little drama:

“Yes; that’s always a sign a stock’s petered out.

When people put a lot on what their folks used to do, it always means they haven’t got gimp enough left to do anything themselves.

The minute I laid eyes on her picture I knew she came from a no-account stock; and when your mother gave her that reception everybody in town could tell right off what she was. Painted! That tells the story!”

True giants were never less than nine feet tall and this one was “a pretty poor specimen,” he declared, becoming so superior in the matter that Dan fell back upon personalities. “Well, anyhow, he’s taller than you are, Harlan.”

“I’m not in the business of being a giant, thank you,”

Harlan said; and Dan, helplessly baffled by the retort, because he was unable to analyze it, missed the chance to understand a fundamental part of his brother’s character.

He could not give credit to a struggling giant of seven feet and a half, and admire him for the difficulties overcome in getting to be at least that tall;

Harlan really looked down upon such a giant from a height of nine feet.

Yet he was able, at times, to perceive his superiority as an unendearing characteristic and even to look upon it with some philosophic detachment; he did not resent his grandmother’s remarks upon that subject.

Oliphant came in noiselessly. She was smiling, and he was able to construct a smile in return, telling her she looked “mighty pretty” in her rose-coloured negligee—a compliment not exaggerated.

Serenity, a good faith, and a cheerful disposition bring beauty in time even where it has not been; and, where beauty has always been, as it had with Mrs. Oliphant, white hair is only that crowning prettiness so knowingly sought by the ladies of the eighteenth-century when they powdered their blonde or brunette ringlets.

“I just thought I’d slip in for a minute,” she said apologetically. “I was afraid you might forget you had to be up so early tomorrow morning, and get to thinking about something and not go to bed at all.”

But at his own door he was abruptly enlightened upon Nimbus’s meaning about a “big” one. Harlan met him there and told him that the nurse had just telephoned.

Mrs. Savage would never explain what she had asked him to remember; she would never explain anything⁠—never, forever.

The effect was of the dame blind, but dancing; and sometimes the course of events in the life of a human creature will warrant the conception, yet it has usually been observed that Fortune seldom dances to one who has not diligently begged the favour.

It would seem the blinded lady has a little bit of her kerchief up.

The man who had built a picnic shack at Ornaby for his large family found his wife and children so reluctant to come home from the picnics that he enlarged the shack, put a cooking-stove and cots in it, and began to stay there from …

Thereafter no one could go northward of the city for an afternoon drive and fail to find the gentle landscape wrecked. On every road the earl blazoned his great defacements:

“Every Ornaby Buyer is an Ornaby Booster!”

At home he had two subjects, both subdivided. One was Henry Daniel, his growth, his wit, and his precocity; and the other was Ornaby Addition, its present magnificence and prospective splendour.

and this noiseless laugh of his awed his wife in much the same way, no doubt, that the laugh of a jungle witch-doctor ancestor of his had awed wives not unlike Myrtle. “She ain’t goin’ bother me ner you,” he explained.

“She ain’t settin’ there ’count o’ me ner you. She settin’ there ’cause she so mad.”

“Who? Who she mad at?”

“The truth is, you’ve had the habit of undervaluing Dan so long that you can’t get over it. You can’t see that at last he’s begun to make a success of his ‘fantasia.’

Given time enough, critics who aren’t careful to keep themselves humble-minded always lose the power to see things as they are.

”

Nevertheless, even in this view of his back, Martha found something irritating, something consciously aristocratic, over-fastidious, skeptical, and precise. “That’s just what you are!” she said half-aloud, before she turned to go into the house.

“You can be rather fascinating, but you’re really only an admirable bookworm in a nice, clean white collar!”

The admirable bookworm, unconscious that the definition of him had been enlarged, walked down National Avenue, keeping within the continuous shade of the big maple trees and perplexing himself with introspections as he went.

He was dry and cold, as he knew, yet far from incapable of ardour, and he had never entirely lost the ardour he felt for Martha; but what surprised him was the renewed liveliness of that ancient pain she evoked within him.

He had thought it dead, but evidently it had only fallen into a doze in her absence.

Of course he asked himself why he should ache because she had at once resumed with him her old critical attitude, and why, moreover, he should care about her at all.

she was too downright and plain-minded to possess much of either. She was not masculine yet, as her father said with the plaintive irascibility of a man who knows because he has suffered, she was imperious.

“A man might as well be dead as bossed to death,”

he often complained. And although she was a handsome creature and graceful, Harlan saw a dozen prettier girls at the new Country Club every day that he played golf there.

The little boy shouted louder and louder, since attention was still denied him;—he tugged at his father’s coat, wailing shrilly,

“Look at me, papa! Oh, my goodness, can’t you watch me?”

Meanwhile Martha, beaming down upon Mrs. Oliphant, nevertheless sent an impersonal glance over that amiable lady’s head to where the child thus besieged his father, who seemed to be in a temporary stupor. Dan looked much older, Martha thought, than when she had gone away;

“Quarrel? No; we mustn’t, indeed!” she said.

“What else is there left for leftovers to do but to make the best of each other?”

“And I’d hoped,” he went on a little nervously;—“I’d hoped maybe you’d let me see you a good deal—that you’d let me take you places and—”

So might a film record be made of the new growth bringing to full life a quiet and elderly midland town; but the picture would be dumbfounding.

Cyclone, earthquake, and miracle would seem to stalk hand-in-hand upon the screen; thunder and avalanche should play in the orchestra pit.

In such a picture, block after block of heavy old mansions would be seen to topple; row on row of stout buildings would vanish almost simultaneously; families would be shown in flight, carrying away their goods with them from houses about to crumble;

And although all of his fellow-hustlers used the phrase, none could say “my city” with a greater right than he. When he began one of his boostings with, “I believe first of all in my own city,” the voice of a religion was heard.

He was his city; he was its spirit, and more than any other he was its guide, and yet its slave and worshipper.

He could not speak of it except with reverence, nor go on speaking of it long unless he made the eagle scream.

It may reach even here to our old house and the Shelbys’; and already you’ve made the peaceful neighbourhood around my house horrible. I’d like to know what grandma Savage would have said about the things you people have done to this town!

Why, you’ve made National Avenue begin to look like an old pipe-smoking hag’s mouth with every other tooth missing and the rest sticking up all black in the smoke.

”

she knew this, and her homecoming mood was lively—but when Dan within the hour of her arrival wished to drive her out to Ornaby to see the new house, which he had at last begun to build, after years of planting and landscaping, she declined.

Her look of gayety vanished into the faraway expression that had always come upon her face when the new house was mentioned.

“Not today,” she said. “I’m not so sure we ought to go ahead with it at all. I don’t think we ought to leave your mother; she’d be too lonely in the old house now—living here all alone.”

This was the explanation she still found it necessary to make to his brother about once a year—usually on New Year’s Day; for it was Harlan’s habit to select that hopeful anniversary as a good time to dwell a little upon his patience.

“You call it your patience, but it became only your habit long ago,” she told him.

“It would really unsettle you badly if I ever said I’d marry you, Harlan; and it would unsettle you even more if I not only said I would, but went ahead and did it. You’d find you’d never forgive me for upsetting your routine.

“Isn’t that only a question of your definition?” McMillan inquired.

“For one reason, because everything’s a question of definitions.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harlan returned somewhat brusquely; and Martha sat in silence, amused to perceive that her two callers had straightway resumed a tilting not infrequent when they met. A lady’s part was only to preside at the joust.

The king told him to devise a plan for getting rid of it, and Evelyn set about it quite hopefully. That was in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Evelyn is dead, but the smoke’s still there.”

“And yet,” George McMillan said coolly, “I’m told they’ve made quite a place of London, in spite of that!”

Martha laughed aloud, and Harlan was so unfortunate as to be annoyed. “It seems rather a childish argument in view of the fact that we sit here in the atmosphere of what might well be a freight yard,” he said;

“I’ve always wanted to see one of those splendid, big, statuesque opera or concert people at home,” Martha whispered to her escort. “I’ve never been near them except when they moved on the grand scale, like this.

It would be an experience to see a man like that eat an egg⁠—I can’t imagine it at all.

Do you suppose he could?”

He did all the talking, an unusual thing for Dan to allow a companion to do.

Always before, when misfortune had threatened, he had been jauntily voluble.

He did not come home until one o’clock, but there was a light in the library, and, going in, he found his mother reading “In Memoriam.” She had begun to stoop after her husband’s death, and her hair had lost its last touch of gray;