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The Cost, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 3. And Scarborough |
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_ CHAPTER III. AND SCARBOROUGH His name was Hampden Scarborough and he came from a farm about twenty miles east of Saint X. He was descended from men who had learned to hate kings in Holland in the sixteenth century, had learned to despise them in England in the seventeenth century, had learned to laugh at them in America in the eighteenth century, had learned to exalt themselves into kings--the kings of the new democracy--in the free West in the nineteenth century. When any one asked his father, Bladen Scarborough, who the family ancestors were, Bladen usually did not answer at all. It was his habit thus to treat a question he did not fancy, and, if the question was repeated, to supplement silence with a piercing look from under his aggressive eyebrows. But sometimes he would answer it. Once, for example, he looked coldly at the man who, with a covert sneer, had asked it, said, "You're impudent, sir. You insinuate I'm not enough by myself to command your consideration," and struck him a staggering blow across the mouth. Again--he was in a playful mood that day and the questioner was a woman--he replied, "I'm descended from murderers, ma'am--murderers." And in a sense it was the truth. In 1568 the Scarboroughs were seated obscurely in an east county of England. They were tenant farmers on the estates of the Earl of Ashford and had been strongly infected with "leveling" ideas by the refugees then fleeing to England to escape the fury of continental prince and priest. John Scarborough was trudging along the highway with his sister Kate. On horseback came Aubrey Walton, youngest son of the Earl of Ashford. He admired the rosy, pretty face of Kate Scarborough. He dismounted and, without so much as a glance at her brother, put his arm round her. John snatched her free. Young Walton, all amazement and wrath at the hind who did not appreciate the favor he was condescending to bestow upon a humble maiden, ripped out an insult and drew his sword. John wrenched it from him and ran it through his body. That night, with four gold pieces in his pocket, John Scarborough left England in a smuggler and was presently fighting Philip of Spain in the army of the Dutch people. In 1653 Zachariah Scarborough, great grandson of the preceding, was a soldier in Cromwell's army. On the night of April twentieth he was in an ale-house off Fleet Street with three brother officers. That day Cromwell had driven out Parliament and had dissolved the Council of State. Three of the officers were of Cromwell's party; the fourth, Captain Zachariah Scarborough, was a "leveler"--a hater of kings, a Dutch-bred pioneer of Dutch-bred democracy. The discussion began hot--and they poured ale on it. "He's a tyrant!" shouted Zachariah Scarborough, bringing his huge fist down on the table and upsetting a mug. "He has set up for king. Down with all kings, say I! His head must come off!" At this knives were drawn, and when Zachariah Scarborough staggered into the darkness of filthy Fleet Street with a cut down his cheek from temple to jaw-bone, his knife was dripping the life of a cousin of Ireton's. He fled to the Virginia plantations and drifted thence to North Carolina. His great-grandson, Gaston Scarborough, was one of Marion's men in his boyhood--a fierce spirit made arrogant by isolated freedom, where every man of character owned his land and could conceive of no superior between him and Almighty God. One autumn day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother, John, their father's favorite. Gaston's gun was caught by a creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it, exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell backward into the swamp and disappeared. Gaston plunged into the wilderness--to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Indiana.
"Your turn?" she inquired. "Yes--I'm the great-grandson--the only one. It's always a great-grandson." "You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain. Again, he told her how he had been sent to college--she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories. Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house--from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years--a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler." The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way. He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home. "Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely--but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother. "No, sir." The son's voice was clear. "Is your mother?" "No, sir." "Have you got money put by?" "Four hundred dollars." "Is that enough?" "It'll give me time for a long look around." The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs. He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He held them toward his son. "That'll have to do you," he said. "That's all you'll get." "No, thank you," replied Hampden. "I wish no favors from anybody." "You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father. "It belongs to you." "If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter. But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college. "My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having. And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early. If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?" From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough. "But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start--some men, at least," she suggested. "A start--for what?" he asked. "For fame or fortune or success of any kind." Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them--he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him. "But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And--he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph--and----" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her. But she was evidently interested. "Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful. "Oh--a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things." "But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and--all that?" "It depends----" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition." _ |
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