Dwelling-Place of Light

Winston Churchill

Description

American novelist Winston Churchill (who bore no known relation to the British statesman of the same name) was regarded as a master of realist literature, and his novels paint a remarkably vivid picture of the daily lives of both the haves and the have-nots in the early-twentieth-century United States. The Dwelling-Place of Light focuses on a bitter struggle between mill workers and factory owners in a Massachusetts town -- and the unforeseeable consequences that arise from the ugly clash.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781775561781
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT
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WINSTON CHURCHILL
 
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The Dwelling-Place of Light First published in 1917 ISBN 978-1-77556-178-1 © 2012 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX Chapter XX Chapter XXI
Chapter I
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In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont toboast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,the helpless—and there are many—are torn from the parent rock,crushed, rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus wasEdward Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firmgranite of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale;surrounded by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen.Thus, at five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathanChippering Mill in the city of Hampton.
That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of anhistoric river should be a part of his native New England seemed attimes to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happenedto him, and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctionsinto which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments.For a long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught tobelieve was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally toabandon it; even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodiedin the edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he hadattended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival inHampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewilderedPuritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, tocompromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley ofrounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. Andthe minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, hearoused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned thestage. Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church,prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal permanence amidst thechaos which had succeeded permanence!
There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpusand his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on hisway to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preservedall the outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed soenduring and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindlingcongregation,—the remains of a social stratum from which he had beenpried loose; and—more irony—this street, called Warren, of archingelms and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of thoseprosperous Irish who had moved thither from the tenements and ruled thecity.
On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Doltonhad Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rootedthere since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen hewould have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history ofa family that by right of priority and service should have been destinedto inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see itdelivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwardshad been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could neverunderstand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable,had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spiteof youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectariancollege on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence mayprosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For morethan twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship ina Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marryingHannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishmentamalgamated with a rival—and Edward's services were no longer required.During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salarieshe had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure hadgradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after twogirls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family....It would bepainful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping intoshale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now forsome dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowningbrick wall bordering the canal,—a position obtained for him by acompassionate but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in lifeand knew the agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus hadvirtue failed to hold its own.
One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gatesstaring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on theopposite bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certaindegree of enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's bewildermentnever cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for ananswer—how had it happened? Job's cry. How had it happened to an honestand virtuous man, the days of whose forebears had been long in the landwhich the Lord their God had given them? Inherently American, thoughlacking the saving quality of push that had been the making of menlike Ditmar, he never ceased to regard with resentment and distrust thehordes of foreigners trooping between the pillars, though he refrainedfrom expressing these sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered,silent man of that unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenthcentury, almost wholly deserted the old England for the new. Theancestral features were there, the lips—covered by a grizzled moustachemoulded for the precise formation that emphasizes such syllables asel, the hooked nose and sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and greyeyes drawn down at the corners. But for all its ancestral strength offeature, it was a face from which will had been extracted, and lackedthe fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it should haveproclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in Mr.St. Gaudens's statue of the Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby,but always neat.
Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called acertain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almostamounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who haveslipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family inAmerica. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, hewrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he boughtat Hartshorne's drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinoisand Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, ofDolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not so the magisterialBumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewisehe had ventured to address,—to the indignation and disgust of his elderdaughter, Janet.
"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.
"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"
"How many generations?"
"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.
Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.
"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors ofEbenezer's time, haven't you?"
Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but hisardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy—his own—hadbecome his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sundaymornings poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, makingcareful notes on the ruled block.
This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that hadsomehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, wasalso a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack ofsympathy of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situationmore grimly: she was a logical projection in a new environment of thereligious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. Shedid not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; lifewas a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and herparticular trap had a treadmill,—a round of household duties she keptwhirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she hadbeen the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one hasan incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,—which Hannah had not. Butshe kept the little flat with its worn furniture,—which had known somany journeys—as clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when itwas scoured and dusted to her satisfaction she would sally forth toBonnaccossi's grocery and provision store on the corner to doher bargaining in competition with the Italian housewives of theneighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to pause outside for a moment, herquick eye encompassing the coloured prints of red and yellow jelliescast in rounded moulds, decked with slices of orange, the gaudy boxesof cereals and buckwheat flour, the "Brookfield" eggs in packages.Significant, this modern package system, of an era of flats withlittle storage space. She took in at a glance the blue lettered placardannouncing the