A Certain Rich Man Part 22

"I wonder," he has written in that portion of the McHurdie Biography devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are bedraggled. And out of the inexplicable tangle of the mesh of life come dark threads from G.o.d knows where and colour the woof of it gray and dreary. Ah for the days of the large white plumes--for the days when life's woof was bright!"

CHAPTER XX

If the reader of this tale should feel drawn to visit Sycamore Ridge, he will find a number of interesting things there, and the trip may be made by the transcontinental traveller with the loss of but half a dozen hours from his journey. The Golden Belt Railroad, fifteen years ago, used to print a guide-book called "California and Back," in which were set down the places of interest to the traveller. In that book Sycamore Ridge was described thus:--

"Sycamore Ridge, pop. 22,345, census 1890; large water-power, main industry milling; also manufacturing; five wholesale houses. Seat Ward University, 1300 students; also Garrison County High School, also Business College. Thirty-five churches, two newspapers, the _Daily Banner_ and the _Index_; fifty miles of paved streets; largest stone arch bridge in the West, marking site of Battle of Sycamore Ridge, a border ruffian skirmish; home of Watts McHurdie, famous as writer of war-songs, best known of which is--" etc., etc.

But excepting Watts, who may be gone before you get there,--for he is an old man now, and is alone and probably does not always have the best of care,--the things above annotated will not interest the traveller. At the Thayer House they will tell you that three things in the town give it distinction: the Barclay home, a rambling gray brick structure which the natives call Barclay Castle, with a great sycamore tree held together by iron bands on the terraced lawn before the house--that is number one; the second thing they will advise the traveller to see is Mary Barclay Park, ten acres of transplanted elm trees, most tastefully laid out, between Main Street and the Barclay home; and the third thing that will be pointed out to the traveller is the Schnitzler fountain, in the cemetery gateway, done by St. Gaudens; it represents a soldier pouring water from his canteen into his hand, as he bathes the brow of a dying comrade.

These things, of course,--the house, the park, and the fountain,--represent John Barclay and his money. The town is proud of them, but the reader is advised not to expect too much of them. One of the two things really worth seeing at the Ridge is the view over the wheat fields of the Sycamore Valley from the veranda of the Culpepper home on the hill. There one may see the great fields lying in three townships whereon John Barclay founded his fortune. The second thing worth seeing may be found in the hallway of the public library building, just at the turn of the marble stairway, where the morning light strikes it. Take the night train out of Chicago and get to the Ridge in the morning, to get the light on that picture.

It is a portrait of John Barclay, done when he was forty years old and painted by a Russian during the summer when the Barclays were called home from Europe before their journey was half completed, to straighten out an obstreperous congressman, one Tom Wharton by name, who was threatening to put wheat and flour on the free list in a tariff bill, unless--but that is immaterial, except that Wharton was on Barclay's mind more or less while the painter was at work, and the portrait reflects what Barclay thought of a number of things. It shows a small gray-clad man, with a pearl pin in a black tie, sitting rather on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, so that the head is thrown into the light. The eyes are well opened, and the jaw comes out, a hard mean jaw; but the work of the artist, the real work that reveals the soul of the sitter, is shown in three features, if we except the pugnacious shoulders. In the face are two of these features: the mouth, a hard, coa.r.s.e, furtive mouth,--the mouth of the liar who is not polished,--the peasant liar who has been caught and has brazened it out; the mouth and the forehead, full almost to bulging, so clean and white and naked that it seems shameful to expose it, a poet's forehead, n.o.ble and full of dreams, broad over the eyes, and as delicately modelled at the temples as a woman's where the curly brown hair is brushed away from it. But the wonderful feature about the portrait is the right hand. The artist obviously asked Barclay to a.s.sume a natural att.i.tude, and then seeing him lean forward with his hand stretched out in some gesture of impatience, persuaded him to take that pose. It is the sort of vital human thing that would please Barclay--no sham about it; but he did not realize what the Russian was putting into that hand--a long, hard, hairy, hollow, grasping, relentless hand, full in the foreground and squarely in the light--a horrible thing with artistic fingers, and a thin, greedy palm indicated by the deep hump in the back. It reaches out from the picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the furtive mouth, the bold, shrewd eyes, and then sees that forehead full of visions, one sees in it more than John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, more than America, more than Europe. It is the menace of civilization--the danger to the race from the domination of sheer intellect without moral restraint.

General Ward, who was on the committee that received the picture fifteen years after it was painted, stood looking at it the morning it was hung there on the turn of the stairs. As the light fell mercilessly upon it, the general, white-haired, white-necktied, clean-shaven, and lean-faced, gazed at the portrait for a long time, and then said to his son Neal who stood beside him, "And Samson wist not that the Lord had departed from him."

It will pay one to stop a day in Sycamore Ridge to see that picture--though he does not know John Barclay, and only understands the era that made him, and gave him that refined, savage, cunning, grasping hand.

Barclay stopped a week in Washington on his return from Europe the year that picture was painted, made a draft for fifty thousand dollars on the National Provisions Company to cover "legal expenses," and came straight home to Sycamore Ridge. He was tired of cities, he told Colonel Culpepper, who met Barclay at the post-office the morning he returned, with his arms full of newspapers. "I want to hear the old mill, Colonel," said Barclay, "to smell the grease down in the guts of her, and to get my hair full of flour again." When he had gorged himself for two days, he wired Bemis to come to the Ridge, and Barclay and Bemis sat on the dam one evening until late bedtime, considering many things. As they talked, Barclay found that a plan for the reorganization of the Provisions Company was growing in his mind, and he talked it out as it grew.

"Lige," he said, as he leaned with his elbows on a rock behind him, "the trouble with the company as it now stands is that it's too palpable. There's too much to levy on--too much in sight; too much physical property. How would it do to sell all these mills and elevators, and use the company as a kind of a cream skimmer--a profit shop--to market the products of the mills?" He paused a moment, and Bemis, who knew he was not expected to reply, flipped pebbles into the stream. Barclay changed his position slightly and began to pick stones out of the crevices, and throw the stones into the water. "That's the thing to do--go ahead and sell every dollar's worth of a.s.sets the company's got--I'll take the mill here. I couldn't get along without that. Then we'll buy the products of the mills at cost of the millers, and let them get their profits back as individual holders of our stock. Our company will handle the Door Strip--buy it and sell it--and if any long-nosed reformer gets to snooping around the mills, he'll find they are making only a living profit; and as for us--any state grain commissioner or board of commissioners who wanted to examine us could do so, and what'd he find? Simply that we're buying our products at cost of the millers and selling at the market price--sometimes at a loss, sometimes at a profit; and what if we do handle all the grain and grain products in the United States? They can't show that we are hurting anything. I tell you there's getting to be too much snooping now in the state and federal governments. Have you got any fellow in your office who can fix up a charter that will let us buy and sell grain, and also sell the Barclay Economy Strip?"

Bemis nodded.

"Then, d.a.m.n 'em, let 'em go on with their commissioners and boards and legislative committees; they can't catch us. There's no law against the railroads that ship our stuff buying the Economy Door Strip, is there? You bet there isn't. And we're ent.i.tled to a good round inventor's profit, ain't we? You bet we are. You go ahead and get up that reorganization, and I'll put it through. Say, Lige--" Barclay chuckled as a recollection flashed across his mind--"you know I've made some of our Northwest senators promise to make you a federal judge. That's one of the things I did last week; I thought maybe sometime we'd need a federal judge as one of the--what do you call it--the hereditaments thereunto appertaining of the company." Bemis opened his eyes in astonishment, and Barclay grunted in disgust as he went on: "Of course we can't get you appointed from this state--that's clear--but they think we can work it through in the City--as soon as there is a vacancy--or make a new district. How would you like that? Judge Bemis--say, that sounds all right, doesn't it?"

Barclay rose and stretched his legs and arms. "Well, I must be going--Mrs. Barclay and my mother want to hear the new organ over in the Congregational Church. It's a daisy--Colonel Culpepper, amongst hands, skirmished up three thousand. They let me pick it out, and I had to put up another thousand myself to get the kind I wanted. Are you well taken care of at the hotel?" When Bemis explained that he had the bridal chamber, the two men clambered up the bank of the stream, crossed the bridge, and at his gate Barclay said: "Now, I'll sleep on this to-night,--this reorganization,--and then I'll write you a letter to-morrow, covering all that I've said, and you can fix up a tentative charter and fire it down--and say, Lige, figure out what a modest profit on all the grain and grain produce business of the country would be--say about two and a half per cent, and make the capitalization of the reorganization fit that. We'll get the real profits out of the Door Strip, and can fix that up in the books. We'll show the reformers a trick or two." It was a warm night, and when the organ recital was over, John and Jane Barclay, after the custom of the town, sat on a terrace in front of the house talking of the day's events. Music always made John babble.

"Jane," he asked suddenly, "Jane--when does a man begin to grow old?

Here I am past forty. I used to think when a man was forty he was middle-aged; every five years I have advanced my idea of what an old man was; when I was fifteen, I thought a man was getting along when he was thirty. When I was twenty-five, I regarded forty as the beginning of the end; when I was thirty, I put the limit of activity at forty-five; five years ago I moved it up to fifty; and to-day I have jumped it to sixty. It seems to me, Jane, that I'm as much of a boy as ever; all this talk about my being a man puzzles me. What's this Provisions Company but a game? And I'm going to play another game; I'm going to get grain and grain produce organized, and then I'm going to tackle meat. In ten years I'll have the packing-houses where I have the mills; but it's just play--and it's a lot of fun."

He was silent a moment. Jane did not disturb his reveries. She understood, without exactly putting her feeling into language, that she was being talked at, not talked to.

"Say, Jane," he exclaimed, "wasn't that 'Marche Triomphante to-night great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it--my--" he cried, hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing--almost good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm getting to like music with go to it--with bang and bra.s.s. Wagner does it; honest, Jane, when I hear his trombones coming into a theme, I get ideas enough to give the whole force in the office nervous prostration for a month. To-night when that thing was swelling up like a great tidal wave of music rolling in, I worked out a big idea; I'm going to sell all the mills and factories back to the millers for our stock, and when I own every dollar of our stock, I'm going to double the price of it to them and sell it back to them; and if they haggle about it, I'll build a new mill across the track from every man-jack who tries to give me any funny business--I'll show 'em. That reorganization ought to clean up millions for us in the next year.

What a lot of fun it all is! I used to think old Jay Gould was some pumpkins; but if we get this reorganization through, I'll go down there and buy the Gould outfit and sell 'em for old iron."

The current of his thoughts struck under language, as a prairie stream sometimes hides from its surface bed. After a time Jane said: "Grandma Barclay thought the 'Marche Funebre' was the best thing the man did. I heard the Wards speaking of it in the vestibule; and Molly, who held my hand through it, nearly squeezed it off--poor girl; but she looks real well these days." Jane paused a moment and added: "Did you notice the colonel? How worn and haggard he looks--he seems broken so. They say he is in trouble. Couldn't we help him?"

Her husband did not reply at once. Finally he recalled his wandering wits and answered: "Oh, I don't know, Jane. He'll pull through, I guess." Then he reverted to the music, which was still in his head.

"He played the Largo well--didn't he? That was made for the organ.

But some way I like the big things. The Largo is like running a little twenty-horse-power steam mill, and selling to the home grocers. But 'The Ride of the Valkyries,' with those screaming discords of bra.s.s, and those magnificent crashes of harmony--Jane, I've got an idea--Wagner's work is the National Provisions Company set to music, and I'm the first trombone." He laughed and reached for his wife's hand and kissed it; then he rose and stood before her, admiring her in the starlight, as he exclaimed: "And you are those clarinets, sweet and clear and delicious, that make a man want to cry for sheer joy.

Come on, my dear--isn't it very late?" And the little man limped across the gra.s.s up the steps and into the house. The two stopped a moment while he listened to the roar of the water and the rumble of the mill, that glowed in the night like a phosph.o.r.escent spectre. He squeezed her hand and cried out in exultation, "It's great, isn't it--the finest mill on this planet, my dear--do you realize that?"

And then they turned into the house.

The next morning he kept two stenographers busy; he was spinning the web of his reorganization, bringing about a condition under which men were compelled to exchange their stock in the National Provisions Company for their former property. He was a crafty little man, and his ways were sometimes devious, even though to outward view his advertised and proclaimed methods were those of a pirate. So when he had dictated a day's work to two girls, he went nosing through the mill, loafing in the engine rooms, looking at the water wheel, or running about rafters in the fifth floor like a great gray rat. As he went he hummed little tunes under his breath or whistled between his teeth, with his lips apart. After luncheon he unlocked a row-boat, and took a cane pole and rowed himself a mile up the mill-pond, and brought home three good-sized ba.s.s. Thus did he spend his idle moments around the Ridge. That night he thumped his piano and longed for a pipe organ. The things he tried to play were noisy, and his mother, sitting in the gloaming near him, sighed and said: "John, play some of the old pieces--the quieter ones; play 'The Long and Weary Day' and some of the old songs. Have you forgotten the 'Bohemian Girl' and those Schubert songs?"

His fingers felt their way back to his boyhood, and when he ceased playing, he stood by his mother a moment, and patted her cheeks as he hummed in German the first two lines of the "Lorelei," and then said, "We have come a long way since then--eh, mother?" She held his hand to her cheek and then to her lips, but she did not reply. He repeated it, "A long, long way from the little home of one room here!" After a pause he added, "Would you like to go back?"

A tear fell on the hand against her cheek. He felt her jaw quiver, and then she said, "Oh, yes, John--yes, I believe I would."

He knew she did not care for his wealth, and there were many things about his achievements that he felt she might misunderstand; her att.i.tude often puzzled him. So he sat a moment on her chair arm, and said, "Well, mother, I have done my best." It was a question more than a protest.

"Yes, dear," she replied, "I know you have--you have done your best--your very best. But I think it is in your blood."

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, all this," she answered; "all this money-getting. I am foolish, John, but some way, I want my little boy back--the one who used to sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging cars, and crashing hammers, and the groans of men at toil."

"But this is a new world, mother--a new world that is different,"

protested the son, impatiently.

And the mother answered sadly as she looked up at him: "I know, dear--it is a new world; but the same old G.o.d moves it; and the same faith in G.o.d and love of man move men that always have moved them, and always will move them; there are as many things to live and die for now, as when your father gave up his life, John--just as many." They rocked together in silence--the boy of forty and the mother of sixty.

Finally she said, "Johnnie, play me 'Ever of Thee I'm fondly Thinking,' won't you, before you go?"

He sat with his foot on the soft pedal and played the old love song, and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen, through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he might never hear, even in his dreams. When he finished, she stood beside him and cried with all the pa.s.sion her years could summon: "Oh, John--John--it will come out some way--some day. It's in your soul, and G.o.d in His own way will bring it out." He did not understand her then, and it was many years before he prayed her prayer.

The next day he went to the City and plunged into his work, and the Ridge and its people and the prayers of his mother became to him only as a dream that comes in the night and fades in the day. Even the shabby figure of Colonel Martin Culpepper, with his market basket on his arm, waving a good-by as the Barclay private car pulled out of the Sycamore Ridge depot, disappeared from his mind, though that pathetic image haunted him for nearly a hundred miles as he rode, and he could not shake it off until he immersed himself in the roar of the great City. He could not know that he had any remote relation with the worry in the old man's eyes. Nor did Martin Culpepper try to shift his load to John. He knew where the blame was, and he tried to take it like a man. But in reckoning the colonel's account, may not something be charged off to the account of John Barclay, who to save himself and accomplish the Larger Good--which meant the establishment of his own fortunes--sent Adrian Brownwell in those days in the seventies with the money to the colonel, not so much to help the colonel as to save John Barclay? The Larger Good is a slow, vicious, acc.u.mulative poison, and heaven only knows when it will come out and kill.

It was a week after the pipe-organ recital at the church, when Mary Barclay, doing her day's marketing, ran into Colonel Culpepper standing rather forlornly in front of McHurdie's shop. He bowed to her with elaborate graciousness, and she stopped to speak with him. In a moment he was saying, "So you have not heard, are unaware, entirely ignorant, in point of fact, of my misfortunes?" She a.s.sented, and the colonel went on: "Well, madam, the end has come; I have played out my hand; I have strutted my hour upon the stage, and now I go off. Old Mart Culpepper, my dear, is no longer the leading citizen, nor our distinguished capitalist, not even the hustling real estate agent of former days--just plain old Mart Culpepper, I may say. He who was, is now a has-been,--just an old man without a business." He saw that she did not appreciate what had happened, and he smiled gently and said: "Closed up, my dear madam. A receiver was appointed a few minutes ago for the Culpepper Mortgage Company, and I gave him the key.

Failure--failure--" he repeated the word bitterly--"failure is written over the door of this life."

Mary Barclay grasped his big fat hand and pressed it, and shook her head. Something in her throat choked her, and she could not speak at first. The two stood a moment in silence before the woman said emphatically, "No--no! Martin Culpepper, G.o.d is keeping your books!"

The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes.

"Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so," he said. The smile fell into his countenance as he added, "That is why I have gone so long without a settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too." Then he turned to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk, broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart.

And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his life here, and as for the others,--the colonel and Jake and the general and Watts, and even Molly,--what do these people mean to you, these common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair, sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the court-house, with the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat.

Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through, patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of a little table beside the cot,--a table with Bob Hendricks' picture, framed in plush, sitting on the top,--now Mr. Dolan takes from the drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it at the top is the picture of the new one-hundred-thousand-dollar court-house, and beside the court-house picture are these words: "Office of Jacob Dolan, Custodian of Public Buildings and Grounds of Garrison County." Mr. Dolan will be writing a letter, and so long as it begins with "Dear Sir," and nothing more endearing, surely we may look over his shoulder while he writes,--even though it is bad form. And as Mr. Dolan will be writing to "Robert Hendricks, care of Cook's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt,"--which he spells with an "i," but let that pa.s.s, and let some of his literary style and construction pa.s.s with it,--and as he will be writing to Mr. Hendricks, perhaps Miss Nancy may do well to go sit in the corridor and put her fingers in her ears while we read. For Mr. Dolan is an emotional man, and he is breathing hard, and by the way he grabs his pen and jabs it into the ink one can see that he is angry.

"DEAR SIR (begins Mr. Dolan): I take my pen in hand to answer yours of this date from New York and would have written you anyhow, as there is much on my mind and I would cable you, but I can't, being for the moment short of funds. I write to say, Robert, that we have Mart Culpepper in jail--right across the hall. He came in at nine o'clock to-night, and the d.a.m.n Pop judge put his bail at $15,999 to cover his alleged shortage, and the stinker won't accept us old boys on the bond--Phil and Watts and Os and the Company 'C' boys I could get before the judge went to bed, and Gabe Carnine, the gut, would not sign--would not sign old Mart's bond, sir, and I hope to be in h.e.l.l with a fishpole some day poking him down every time his slimy fingers get on the rim of the kettle. But we'll have him out in the morning, if every man in Garrison County has to go on the bond. They say Mart received money to pay four or five mortgages due to a Vermont Bank, and they sent a detective here about a month ago and worked up the case, and closed his business to-day and waited until to-night to arrest him. I've just come from Mart. It's h.e.l.l. Hoping this will find you enjoying the same I beg my dear sir to sign myself

"Your ob't s'r'v't J. DOLAN."

When Jacob Dolan finished his letter, he addressed the envelope and hurried away to mail it. And so long as we are here in the court-house, and the custodian is gone, would you like to step in and see Martin Culpepper across the hall? It is still in the bas.e.m.e.nt now, and if you are quiet, so quiet that the slipping patter of a rat's foot on the floor comes to you, a sound as of a faint whining will come to you also. There--now it comes again. No, it is not a dog; it is a man--a man in his agony. Shall we open the great iron door, and go into the cell room? Why, not even you, Miss Nancy--not even you, who love tears so? You would not see much--only a man, with his coat and vest off, an old man with a rather s.h.a.ggy, ill-kept chin whisker and not the cleanest shirt in the world--though it is plaited, and once was a considerable garment. And the man wearing it, who lies prostrate upon his face, once was a considerable man. But he is old now, old and broken, and if he should look up, as you stepped in the corridor before him, you would see a great face ripped and scarred by fear and guilt, and eyes that look so piteously at you--eyes of a man who cannot understand why the blow has fallen, surprised eyes with a horror in them; and if he should speak, you will find a voice rough and mushy with asthma. The heart that has throbbed so many nights in fear and the breath that has been held for so many footsteps, at last have turned their straining into disease. No--let's not go in. He bade his daughter go, and would not see his wife, and they have sent to the City for his son,--so let us not bother him, for to-morrow he will be out on bail. But did you hear that fine, trembling, animal whine--that cry that wrenched itself out of set teeth like a living thing? Come on--let us go and find Jake, and if he is taking a drink, don't blame him too much, Miss Nancy--how would you like to sleep in that room across the corridor?

At nine o'clock the next morning two hundred men had signed the bond the judge required, and Martin Culpepper shambled home with averted eyes. They tried to carry him on their shoulders, thinking it would cheer him up; and from the river wards of the town scores came to give him their hands. But he shook himself away from them, like a great whipped dog, and walked slowly up the hill, and turned into Lincoln Avenue alone.

John Barclay heard the news of the colonel's trouble as he stepped from his private car in the Sycamore Ridge yards that morning, and Jane went to the Culpepper home without stopping at her own. That afternoon, Molly Brownwell knocked at Barclay's office door in the mill, and went in without waiting for him to open it. She was pale and haggard, and she sat down before he could speak to her.

"John," she said in a dead voice that smote his heart, "I have come for my reward now. I never thought I'd ask it, John, but last night I thought it all out, and I don't believe it's begging."

"No," he replied quietly, "it's not. I am sure--"

But she did not let him finish. She broke in with: "Oh, I don't want any of your money; I want my own money--money that you got when you sold me into bondage, John Barclay--do you remember when?" She cried the last words in a tremulous little voice, and then caught herself, and went on before he could put into words the daze in his face. "Let me tell you; do you remember the day you called me up into your office and asked me to hold Adrian in town to save the wheat company? Yes, you do--you know you do! And you remember that you played on my love for Bob, and my duty to father. Well, I saved you, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did, Molly," Barclay replied.