mill laborers.
Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams. He was a sturdy,
dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or flinging stones
over the palisades. Life for Howard was already a thing determined. He
would go to college, and then he would come back and go into the mill
offices. In time, he would take his father's place. He meant to do it
well and honestly. He had but to follow. Anthony had broken the trail,
only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad and easy way.
Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams. Once he
said: "I'll build a house out here some of these days. Good location.
Growth of the city is bound to be in this direction."
What he did not say was that to be there, on that hill, overlooking his
activities, his very own, the things he had builded with such labor,
gave him a sense of power. "This below," he felt, with more of pride
than arrogance, "this is mine. I have done it. I, Anthony Cardew."
He felt, looking down, the pride of an artist in his picture, of a
sculptor who, secure from curious eyes, draws the sheet from the still
moist clay of his modeling, and now from this angle, now from that,
studies, criticizes, and exults.
But Anthony Cardew never built his house on the cliff. Time was to come
when great houses stood there, like vast forts, overlooking, almost
menacing, the valley beneath. For, until the nineties, although the city
distended in all directions, huge, ugly, powerful, infinitely rich, and
while in the direction of Anthony's farm the growth was real and rapid,
it was the plain people who lined its rapidly extending avenues with
their two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tenderness
and quiet, along tree-lined streets, where the children played on the
cobble-stones, and at night the horse cars, and later the cable system,
brought home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens, already
growing dingy from the smoke of the distant mills.
Anthony Cardew did not like the plain people. Yet in the end, it was the
plain people, those who neither labored with their hands nor lived
by the labor of others--it was the plain people who vanquished him.
Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man,
hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved others. He had one
fetish, power. And one pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters.
Howard would be an iron master, and Howard's son.
B
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