"Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the way. You go along any of the lines in Ma.s.sachusetts, and you will find that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages have been knocked into a c.o.c.ked hat. All the young people have left them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally."
Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression.
"I don"t know much about the business part of the question, of course,"
she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her.
She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."
"Oh, that"s a woman"s way of looking at it," rejoined Greenfield, the greatest struggle of whose life, as Mrs. Sampson was perfectly well aware, was to keep at home his only child, a youth just coming to manhood. "It is easy enough for boys to get away nowadays, and just having a railroad at the door wouldn"t make any great difference."
"It does, though, make a mighty sight of difference," Snaffle said, rolling his head and putting his plump white hands together. "Somehow or other, the having that train scooting by day in and day out unsettles the young fellows. The whistle stirs them up, and keeps reminding them how easy it is to go out West or somewhere or other.
I"ve seen it time and again."
"Well," Greenfield returned, a shadow over his genial face, "I have a youngster that"s got the Western fever pretty bad without any railroads coming to Feltonville. But what you say is only one side of the question. When a railroad comes it always brings business in one way or another. The increase of transportation facilities is sure to build things up."
"Oh, yes, it builds them up," Snaffle chuckled, as if the idea afforded him infinite amus.e.m.e.nt, "but how does it work. There are two or three men in the town who start market gardens and make something out of it.
They sell their produce in the city and they do their trading there; they hire Irish laborers from outside the village; and how much better off is the town, except that it can tax them a trifle more if it can get hold of the valuation of their property." "Which it generally can"t," interpolated Greenfield grimly, with an inward reminder of certain experiences as a.s.sessor.
"Or somebody starts a factory," Snaffle went on, "and then the town is made, ain"t it? Outside capital is invested, outside operatives brought in to turn the place upside down and to bring in all the deviltries that have been invented, and all the town has to show in the long run is a little advance in real estate over the limited area where they want to build houses for the mill-hands. There"s no end of rot talked about improving towns by putting up factories, but I can"t see it myself."
Snaffle sometimes said that he believed in nothing but making money, and there was never any reason to suppose he held an opinion because he expressed it. He said what he felt to be politic, and a long and complicated experience enabled him to defend any view with more or less plausibility upon a moment"s notice. He was clever enough to see that for some reason the widow wished him to pursue the line of talk he had taken, and he was ready enough to oblige her. He never took the trouble to inquire of himself what his opinions were, because that question was of so secondary importance; he merely exerted himself to make the most of any points that presented themselves to his mind in favor of the side it was for his advantage to support.
""Pon my word," Greenfield said, with a laugh, "you talk like an old fogy of the first water. I wouldn"t have suspected you of looking at things that way."
"Mr. Snaffle is always surprising," Mrs. Sampson said, with her most dazzling smile, "but he is generally right."
"Thank you. I can"t help at any rate seeing that there are two sides to this thing, and I am too old a bird to be caught with the common chaff that people talk."
Mr. Greenfield settled himself comfortably in his chair and laughed softly. The discussion was so purely theoretical that he could be amused without looking upon it seriously.
"For my part," he remarked, his big hand playing with a paper-knife on one of the little tables, which, to a practised eye, suggested cards, "I am of the progressive party, thank you. I believe in opening up the country and putting railroads where they will do the most good. A few people get their old prejudices run against, but on the whole it is for the interest of a town to have a railroad, and it is nonsense to talk any other way."
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson leaned forward to lay her fingers upon the speaker"s arm.
"That is just it, Cousin Tom," she said, with a languishing glance.
"You always look at things in so large a way. You never let the matter of personal interest decide, but think of the public good,"
The flattery was somewhat gross, but men will swallow a good deal in the way of praise from women. They are generally slow to suspect the fair s.e.x of sarcasm, and allow themselves the luxury of enjoying the pleasure of indulging their vanity untroubled by unpleasant doubts concerning the sincerity of compliments which from masculine lips would offend them. Greenfield laughed with a perceptible shade of awkwardness, but he was evidently not ill pleased.
"Oh, well," he returned, "that is because thus far it has happened that my personal interests and my convictions have worked together so well.
You might see a difference if they didn"t pull in the same line."
Mrs. Sampson considered a moment, and then rose, bringing out a decanter of sherry with a supply of gla.s.ses and of biscuit from a convenient closet in the bottom of a secretary.
"That"s business," Snaffle said, joyously. "Sherry ain"t much for a man of my size, but it"s better than nothing."
"It is a hint though," the hostess said, filling his gla.s.s.
"A hint!" he repeated.
"Yes; a hint that it is getting late, and that I am tired, and you must go home."
"Oh, ho!" he laughed uproariously; "now I won"t let you in for that good thing on the Princeton Platinum stock. You"ll wish you hadn"t turned me out of the house when you see that stock quoted at fifty per cent above par."
"Ah, I know all about Princeton Platinum," she responded, showing her white teeth rather more than was absolutely demanded by the occasion; "besides, I"ve no money to put into anything."
"What about Princeton Platinum?" Greenfield asked, turning toward the other a shrewd glance. "I"ve heard a good deal of talk about it lately, but I didn"t pay much attention to it."
"Princeton Platinum," the hostess put in before Snaffle could speak, "is Mr. Snaffle"s latest fairy story. It is a dream that people buy pieces of for good hard samoleons, and"--
"Good _what?_" interrupted the country member.
"Shekels, dollars, for cash under whatever name you choose to give it; and then some fine morning they all wake up."
"Well?" demanded Snaffle, to whom the jest seemed not in the least distasteful. "And what then?"
"Oh, what is usually left of dreams when one wakes up in the morning?"
The fat person of the speculator shook with appreciation of the wit of this sally, which did not seem to Greenfield so funny as from the laughter of the others he supposed it must really be. The latter rose when Snaffle did and prepared to say good-night, but Mrs. Sampson detained him. "I want to speak with you a moment," she said.
"Good-night, Mr. Snaffle. Bear us in mind when Princeton Platinum has made your fortune, and don"t look down on us."
"No fear," he returned. "When that happens, I shall come to you for advice how to spend it."
There was too much covetousness in her voice as she answered jocosely that she could tell him. The struggle of life made even a jesting supposition of wealth excite her cupidity. She sighed as she turned back into the parlor and motioned Greenfield to a seat. Placing herself in a low, velvet-covered chair, she stretched out her feet before her, displaying the black silk stocking upon a neat instep as she crossed them upon a low stool.
"I am sure I don"t know how to say what I want to," she began, knitting her brows in a perplexity that was only part a.s.sumed. "Something has come to me in the strangest way, and I think I ought to tell you, although I haven"t any interest in it, and it certainly isn"t any of my business."
Her companion was too blunt to be likely to help her much. He simply asked, in the most straightforward manner,--
"What is it?"
"It"s about public business," she said. "Why!" she added, as if a sudden light had broken upon her. "I really believe I was going to be a lobbyist. Fancy me lobbying! What does a lobbyist do?"
"Nothing that you"d be likely to have any hand in," returned Greenfield, smiling at the absurdity of the proposition. "What is all this about?"
"I suppose I should not have thought of it but for the turn the talk took to-night," she returned with feminine indirectness. "It was odd, wasn"t it, that we should get to talking of the harm railroads do, when it was about a railroad that I was going to talk."
"There"s only one railroad scheme on foot this spring that I know anything about, and that"s for a branch of the Ma.s.sachusetts Outside Railroad through Wachusett. That isn"t in the Legislature either."
"That"s the one. It"s going to be in the Legislature. There"s going to be an attempt to change the route."
"Change the route?"
"Yes, so it will go through--but will you promise not to tell this to a living mortal?"
"Of course."
"I suppose," she said, regarding her slipper intently, "that I really ought not to tell you; but I can"t help it somehow. Your name is to be used."
"My name?"