Kitobni o'qish: «Juggernaut: A Veiled Record»

I

Edgar Braine was never so blithe in all his life as on the morning of his suicide.

Years after, in the swirl and tumult of his extraordinary career, the memory of that June morning, and of the mood in which he greeted it, would rush upon him as a flood, and for the moment drown the eager voices that besought his attention, distracting his mind for the briefest fraction of an instant from the complex problems of affairs with which he wrestled ceaselessly.

In the brief moment during which he allowed the vision of a dead past thus to invade his mind, he would recall every detail of that morning with photographic accuracy, and more than photographic vividness.

In such moments, he saw himself young, but with a mature man's ambition, and more than the strength of a man, as he strode sturdily down the streets of the little Western city, the June sunshine all about him in a golden glory, while the sunshine within exceeded it a hundredfold.

His mood was exultant, and with reason. He had already conquered the only obstacles that barred his way to success and power. He had impressed himself upon the minds of men, in a small way as yet, to be sure, but sufficiently to prove his capacity, and confirm his confidence in his ability to conquer, whithersoever he might direct his march.

Life opened its best portals to him. He was poor, but strong and well equipped. He had won possession of the tools with which to do his work; and the conquest of the tools is the most difficult task set the man who confronts life armed only with his own abilities. That accomplished, if the man be worthy, the rest follows quite as a matter of course, – an effect flowing from an efficient cause.

Edgar Braine had proved to himself that he possessed superior capacities. He had long entertained that opinion of his endowment, but his caution in self-estimate was so great that he had been slower than any of his acquaintances to accept the fact as indisputably proved.

It had been proved, however, and that was cause enough for rejoicing, to a mind which had tortured itself from boyhood with unutterable longings for that power over men which superior intellect gives, – a mind that had dreamed high dreams of the employment of such power for human progress.

His was not an ambition achieved. It was that immeasurably more joyous thing, an ambition in sure process of achievement.

But this was not his only cause of joy. Love, as well as life, had smiled upon him, and the woman who had subdued all that was noblest in him to that which was still nobler in her, was presently to be his wife.

And so Edgar Braine's heart sang merrily within him as he strode through the cottonwood-bordered streets toward his editorial work-shop.

He entered the composing-room in front, and greeted the foreman with even more of cordiality than was his custom, though his custom was a cordial one.

He tried not to observe that Mikey Hagin, the Spartan-souled apprentice of the establishment, was complacently burning a hole in the palm of his hand, in a heroic endeavor to hide the fact that he had been smoking a cigarette in risk of that instant discharge which Braine had threatened as the fore-ordained punishment of that crime, if he should ever catch the precocious youth committing it again.

He saw the cigarette, of course, – it was his habit to see things, – and the blue wreath floating upward from the hand in which a hasty attempt had been made to conceal it, was perfectly apparent. But his humor was much too joyous for him to enforce the penalty, though he had decreed it with a fixed purpose to enforce it. Somehow the grief of Mrs. Hagin, Mikey's mother and Braine's laundress, at the discharge of her not over hopeful son, was much more vividly present to his imagination this morning than when he had promulgated the decree. He was too happy a man to be willing to make any human being needlessly unhappy.

And yet he was too strict a disciplinarian to overlook the offence entirely. He turned to the boy and said:

"It is lucky for you that I didn't catch you smoking the cigarette you have in your hand. As it seems to be smoking you instead, I don't so much mind."

With this, as the lad threw the burning roll into a barrel of waste paper – which he presently extinguished with a bucket of water – Braine took the over-proofs from their hook, and passed on into the back room, which served as the editorial office of the Thebes Daily Enterprise.

The four men sitting there presented but one bodily presence. They were: the Local Editor, the River Editor, the Society Editor, and "Our Reporter," and their name was Moses Harbell, or, if universal usage is authority in nomenclature, "Mose" Harbell.

Mose was a bushy-haired man of fifty, who had been Local Editor, River Editor, Society Editor, and "Our Reporter" on the newspapers of small river towns from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

He had never once dared aspire to a more independent position as his own master. Perhaps the fact that he had imprudently married early, and now had a family consisting of a mother, a mother-in-law, an imbecile sister, a shrewish wife, nine children in various stages of progress toward grown-up-hood, and four dogs of no recognized breed, had dampened the ardor of his ambition, and inclined him to the conservative view that to draw a salary from somebody else, even though it be not a munificent one, is on the whole safer for a prudent family man, than to take ambitious risks on his own account.

Mose was known all up and down the river by his first name in its abbreviated form, and by no other on any occasion. He was never spoken of in print without the adjective prefix "genial," and he never omitted to call anybody "genial" whom he had occasion to mention in his own paragraphs, from the morose curmudgeon who invited everybody in town to his parties except Mose himself, to the most ill-natured mud clerk who stood in the rain on the levee at midnight to check freight received by the steamboat that employed him in that capacity, at nothing a month and his board.

Life had dealt rather hardly with Mose, but it had not succeeded in curdling any of the milk of human kindness mingled with his blood.

His notion of newspaper editing, apart from calling everybody "genial," was to mention everybody on every possible occasion, to praise everybody without regard to the possibility or impossibility of the occasion, and to chronicle the personal happenings of the town after the following fashion:

"Ned Heffron, the genial ticket dispenser of the Central Railroad, borrowed a boiled shirt yesterday, got his boots blacked on tick, and started on a free pass to Johnsonboro, there to wed the acknowledged belle of that young and thriving city, Miss Blankety Blank, who will henceforth be a chief ornament to the society of Thebes."

Mose was a thorn in the flesh of his young chief, who was a very earnest person, possessed of a conviction that a newspaper owes some sort of duty to the public, and that its province is to discriminate somewhat in the bestowal of praise and blame. But Mose was necessary to the Thebes Daily Enterprise. Braine could not afford to dispense with his "geniality" as a part of the newspaper's equipment; for Mose knew everybody within the Daily Enterprise's bailiwick and everybody knew Mose. Everybody made haste to tell Mose all the news there might be; and, although there was not much of importance in what he gathered, still it was news, and the news seemed to Braine a necessary part of a newspaper. Thus it happened that Mose went on calling everybody "genial" in the news department, even when his chief was excoriating the same persons in the editorial columns for conduct wholly inconsistent with Mose's imputation of unbounded geniality.

On this particular morning, however, – the morning of Edgar Braine's suicide – even Mose's presence, recalling, as it always did, his exasperating methods, could not ruffle the young man's exultant spirits. He was so exuberantly happy that he omitted to remonstrate with Mose about anything, and that tireless manufacturer of praise, observing the omission, immediately wrote and sent to the composing-room an elephantinely playful paragraph in which he said:

"Our genial chief was so much pleased this morning over the impression made yesterday by his apparently severe, but really good-natured leader on the recent defalcation of our genial city clerk, Charley Hymes, that he took the local to his arms and stood treat to a number-one mackerel, and the ever appreciative local picked the bones of the aforesaid saline preserved denizen of the deep, in the bosom of his family at dinner to-day."

That was Mose Harbell's idea of humor. It was not Braine's idea of humor at all, and so Mose was greeted with the harshest reproof he had ever received in his life when he next met his chief. He accepted it "genially."

Having sent out the offending paragraph, Mose went out himself to gather river news, and such gossip as he might, concerning the genial folk of Thebes.

Then Abner Hildreth entered the office, and for two hours was closeted with Braine.

Then Braine committed suicide.

Then he wrote his own obituary, to be printed in that evening's Enterprise.

Then he went supperless to his room over a store, where he paced the floor till dawn.

Then began the man's extraordinary career.

II

When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective, and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.

The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in some prison.

"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some time, and the habit of living here will come handy."

Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he stood before his desk, and added:

"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see – six times five are thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred – almost one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.

The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.

In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man – to be young no more henceforth – recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.

In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see en déshabillé, and not always a pleasing one.

He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college – that mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight, who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years, and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing is admonition after all!

"There is one danger point in your character, my son" – he recalled the very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter paper – "where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by others – you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must take all the blame on your own head.

"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at finding means, or making them when you want them.

"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.

"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how? Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed great, and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading. That time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard choice – harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a purpose that it will seem like death to surrender – or you will commit moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place, I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the foreboding it gives me now."

That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his integrity in all circumstances.

"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever had is this – to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less moment."

"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for me at least. She did not know."

III

As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet, wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.

At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and companions of those that had conscious life.

Then came his father's death to turn his mind into new and darker chambers of inquiry, and for a time he brooded, disposed, in loyalty to that wisdom which age assumes, to accept the conventional dogmas given to him by the ignorance about him, as explanations of the mysteries, but unable to conceal their absurdity from a mind whose instinct it was to stand face to face with Doubt and to compel Truth to lift her mask of seeming.

The loneliness of his life was good for him for a time. It taught him to find a sufficient companionship in his own mind – a lesson which all of us need, but few learn. But the time came when his wise mother saw the necessity of a change, and, scant as her resources were, she took him to the little city of Jefferson, where the schools were good and companionship was to be found.

The city was at that time a beautiful corpse. It had just died, and had not yet become conscious of the fact. Ten or fifteen years before, a railroad running from the State capital had made its terminus at Jefferson, making the river town the one outlet of the interior. A great tide of travel passed through the place, and a large trade centred there. But the course of railroad development which gave the city life, destroyed it later. Other railroads were built through the interior to other river outlets, and Cincinnati and Louisville took to themselves what had been Jefferson's prosperity.

And so when Edgar Braine first knew the town, it had lost its hold upon life, though it had not yet found out what had happened to it. The great rows of warehouses along the levee, with the legends "Forwarding and Commission," "Groceries at Wholesale Only," "Flour, Grain and Provisions," "Carriage Repository," and all the rest of it, staringly inscribed upon their outer walls, were empty now, and closed. In West Street, two only of the once great wholesale houses maintained a show of life. In one, an old man sat alone all day, and contemplated three bags of coffee and two chests of tea, for which no customer made inquiry. In the other there remained unsold half a ton of iron bars, and a few kegs of nails, to justify the assertion of the signboard that the proprietors were dealers in "Iron and Nails." The two partners who owned the place appeared there every morning, as regularly as when their sales were reckoned in six figures. They were always scrupulously neat, always courteously polite to each other, and always as cheerful and contented a pair of business partners as one need desire to see. Why not, seeing that they both liked the game of checkers, and had nothing to do but sit in the doorway and play from the beginning to the end of "business hours" every day?

But the town did not realize its condition yet. Weyer & McKee were putting up a new and imposing building for the better accommodation of their wholesale grocery business, inattentive to the fact that their wholesale grocery business had ceased to be. Polleys & Butler were still issuing their Market Bulletin for the information of their "customers," not having yet realized that their customers had permanently transferred their custom to Cincinnati. In this interesting little sheet they had not yet begun to discuss "The Present Depression in Trade – Its Cause and Cure." That came a little later.

The city was very well satisfied with itself. It had water-works and gas, broad streets, and comfortable houses in such abundance that every family might have had two for the asking. The people did not greatly mind their loss of prosperity. Those who did mind had already gone away; those who remained had succeeded, during the days of activity, in getting out of other people enough to live on comfortably, and were content to enjoy leisure and occupy themselves with church work and the like for the rest of their lives.

The boy did not discover that anything was amiss with Jefferson until two or three years after his arrival there. Having seen no other city he did not observe that there was anything peculiar in the condition of this one, until he saw a "to let" notice on the gorgeously decorated front of Fred Dubachs' "Paintery" and learned that Fred was about to remove to Keokuk. Fred was a notably expert painter, and the front of his shop had always a strong fascination for Edgar. Fred had lavished his best skill and industry upon its ornamentation during the two or three years since he had ceased to have any painting to do for others. Now he had given up and was going away.

The thing set the boy thinking. He reflected that it would be a sad waste of time and labor for Fred to paint any more signs for a town which already had some thousands no longer serving any useful purpose. As he followed out this suggestion it dawned upon him that perhaps Jefferson was a city in decay, and when he had questioned the matter a little further, the evidence all about him left no room for doubt.

Then he went home and said to his mother: "I will not live in Jefferson after I finish at Hanover. This town is done for. I must have opportunities, and there will never be any here."

But Jefferson's condition had been educating him all the time, and shaping his character in ways which affected all his future. He saw this clearly now as he paced his room in Thebes that night after the suicide, and recalled it all.

Among his schoolmates in Jefferson there were some, the sons of vulgar people who had grown rich in the rapid rise of the town. These were mainly stupid and arrogant, and their insolence was unceasing. At first it had stung the sensitive boy to that kind of protest which involves blows and bloody noses.

He was lithe of limb and strong, and he usually managed to get a sufficient revenge in that way to satisfy him. But something occurred at last to spoil the enjoyment he got out of pommelling the young bullies, and to show him that, with all his strength and agility, he was meeting his adversaries on unequal terms. He accidentally saw his mother toiling late at night over the clothes in which he had that day fought Cale Dodge to a finish. Cale, he knew, would simply put on a new suit next day.

"I will have no more fights of that kind," he said to himself. Then, after a period of silent thought, he said aloud:

"I have better weapons. I will show them in class who is master."

From that hour the inattention to books which had given his mother some uneasiness, ceased. He mastered every lesson days before it was assigned to him, and when an opportunity offered he submitted himself to examinations in advance, and passed into the higher grades of the high school, leaving his adversaries behind.

In this process he acquired two unquenchable thirsts – the one for knowledge, the other for power. He searched the town library for books that might supplement the meagre instruction of the schools. In his search for knowledge he found culture. General literature opened its treasures to him, and he read everything, from Shakespeare to Burke's Works, that the library could supply.

But while all this went on, his delight in his superiority to the youths who had been insolent to him, and were so still, crystallized more and more into a great longing for power, and a relentless determination to achieve it. Cost what it might he must be great, and look down upon these his foes. His ambition became a passion, wild and unruly, but he resolutely curbed it as one controls a spirited horse, and for the same reason. He did not mean to let the ambition run away with his life and wreck it before the destination was reached.

In the little college ten miles away, when at last he entered there, he was said to have no ambition, because he lightly put aside the petty prizes and honors for which others struggled so eagerly. His mates did not dream how ambitious he was. He was thinking of larger things. There was a scholarship to be won, and he took that, because it would spare him his tuition fees; but for the class and society "honors" he cared not at all.

He made his own all of value that the college libraries held and when the senior examinations were over he was without a rival near him on that record of achievement which determines who shall be valedictorian. But he placed no value on the empty honor so coveted by others. A month remained before Commencement, and he had no mind to lose a month. He said to the President:

"I am going away to-morrow. If you choose to give me my degree please take care of the diploma for me, if it is not too much trouble. Perhaps I shall send for it some day."

"But you are surely not going to leave before Commencement?"

"Why not? I have got all I can out of college. I can't afford to waste a month for nothing."

"But you are first-honor-man, Braine!"

"Yes, so I hear. Give that to some one who cares for it. I don't."

The next morning Edgar Braine quitted the village on foot, and without returning to Jefferson, passed out of the little world of youth into the great world of manhood. His equipment consisted of his character, his education, and fifty dollars.

He thought the character a good one then. He revised his opinion as he paced the little room in Thebes, and remembered.