Part 17 (2/2)
He raged about the office, and finally wrote the name of Philemon R.
Ward in large letters on the office blacklist hanging above his desk.
This list contained the names which under no circ.u.mstances were to appear in the paper. But it was a flexible list. The next day John Barclay, who desired to have his speech on the laying of the corner-stone printed in full, gave Brownwell twenty dollars, and a most glowing account of the event in question appeared in the _Banner_, and eloquence staggered under the burden of praise which Brownwell's language loaded upon the shoulders of General Ward.
It is now nearly a generation since that corner-stone was laid. Boys and girls who then were children have children in the university, and its alumni include a brigadier in the army, a poet, a preacher of national renown, two college presidents, an authority upon the dynamics of living matter, and two men who died in the American mission at Foo Chow during the uprising in 1900. When General Ward was running for President of the United States on one of the various seceding branches of the prohibition party, while Jeanette Barclay was a little girl, he found the money for it; two maiden great-aunts on his mother's side of the family had half a million dollars to leave to something, and the general got it. They willed it to him to hold in trust during his lifetime, but the day after the check came for it, he had transferred the money to a university fund, and had borrowed fifty dollars of Bob Hendricks to clean up his grocery bills and tide him over until his pension came. But he was a practical old fox. He announced that he would give the money to a college only if the town would give a similar sum, and what with John Barclay's hundred-thousand-dollar donation, and Bob Hendricks' ten thousand, and what with the subscription paper carried around by Colonel Culpepper, who proudly headed it with five thousand dollars, and after the figure wrote in red ink ”in real estate,” much to the town's merriment, and what with public meetings and exhortations in the churches, and what with voting one hundred thousand dollars in bonds by Garrison County for the privilege of sending students to the college without tuition, the amount was raised; and as the procession wheeled out of Main Street to attend the ceremonies incident to laying the corner-stone that beautiful October day, it is doubtful which was the prouder man--Martin Culpepper, the master of ceremonies, in his plumed hat, flas.h.i.+ng sword, and red sash, or General Philemon Ward, who for the first time in a dozen years heard the crowd cheer his name when the governor in his speech pointed at the general's picture--his campaign picture that had been hooted with derision and spattered with filth on so many different occasions in the town. The governor's remarks were of course perfunctory; he devoted five or ten minutes to the praise of General Ward, of Sycamore Ridge, of John Barclay, and of education in general, and then made his regular speech that he used for college commencements, for addresses of welcome to church conferences, synods, and a.s.semblies, and for conclaves of the grand lodge. General Ward spoke poorly, which was to his credit, considering the occasion, and Watts McHurdie's poem got entangled with Juno and Hermes and Minerva and a number of scandalous heathen G.o.ds,--who were no friends of Watts,--and the crowd tired before he finished the second canto. But many discriminating persons think that John Barclay's address, ”The Time of True Romance,” was the best thing he ever wrote. It may be found in his book as Chapter XI. ”The Goths,” he said, ”came out of the woods, pulled the beards of the senators, destroyed the Roman state, murdered and pillaged the Roman people, and left the world the Gothic arch; the Vikings came over the sea, roaring their sagas of rapine and slaughter; the conquerors came to Europe with spear and sword and torch and left the outlines of the map, the boundaries of states. Luther married his nun, and set Christendom to fighting over it for a hundred years, but he left a free conscience. Cromwell thrust his pikes into the n.o.ble heads of England, snapped his fingers at law, and left civil liberty.
Organized murder reached its sublimity in the war that Lincoln waged, and in that murdering and pillage true romance came to mankind in its flower. Murder for the moment in these piping times has become impolite.
But true romance is here. Our heroes rob and plunder, and build cities, and swing gayly around the curves of the railroads they have stolen, and swagger through the cities they have levied upon the people to build. Do we care to-day whether Charlemagne murdered his enemies with a sword or an axe; do we ask if King Arthur used painless a.s.sa.s.sination or burned his foes at the stake? Who cares to know that Caesar was a rake, and that William the Conqueror was a robber? They did their work and did it well, and are snugly sitting on their monuments where no moralist can reach them. So those searching for true romance to-day, who regard the decalogue as mere persiflage, and the moral code as a thing of archaic interest, will get their day's work done and strut into posterity in bronze and marble. They will cheat and rob and oppress and grind the faces off the poor, and do their work and follow their visions, and live the romance in their hearts. To-morrow we will take their work, disinfect it, and dedicate it to G.o.d's uses.”
There was more of it--four thousand words more, to be exact, and when General Ward went home that night he prayed his Unitarian G.o.d to forgive John Barclay for his blasphemy. And for years the general shuddered when his memory brought back the picture of the little man, with his hard tanned face, his glaring green eyes, his brazen voice trumpeting the doctrine of materialism to the people.
”John,” said the general, the next day, as he sat in the mill, going over the plans of the college buildings with Barclay, who was chairman of the board of directors, ”John, why are you so cra.s.s, so gross a materialist? You have enough money--why don't you stop getting it and do something with it worth while?”
”Because, General, I'm not making money--that's only an incident of my day's work. I'm organizing the grain industry of this country as it is organized in no other country on this planet.” Barclay rose as he spoke and began limping the length of the room. It was his habit to walk when he talked, and he knew the general had come to catechize him.
”Yes, but then, John--what then?”
”What then?” repeated Barclay, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. ”Coffee, maybe--perhaps sugar, or tobacco. Or why not the whole food supply of the people--let me have meat and sugar where I will have flour and grain, and in ten years no man in America can open his grocery store in the morning until he has asked John Barclay for the key.” He snapped his eyes good-naturedly at the general, challenging the man's approval.
The general smiled and replied: ”No, John, you'll get the social bug and go around in knee-breeches, riding a horse after a scared fox, or keeping a lot of hussies on a yacht. They all get that way sooner or later.”
Barclay leaned over Ward, stuck out his hard jaw and growled: ”Well, I won't. I'm going to be a tourist-sleeper millionaire. I stick to Sycamore Ridge; Jeanette goes to the public schools; Jane buys her clothes at Bob Hendricks' or Dorman's, or at the most of Marshall Field in Chicago; I go fis.h.i.+ng down at Minneola when I want rest.”
Ward started to protest, but Barclay headed him off. ”I made a million last year. What did I do with it? See any yachts on the Sycamore?
Observe any understudies for Jane around the place? Have you heard of any villas for the Barclays in Newport? No--no, you haven't, but you may like to know that I have control of a railroad that handles more wheat than any other hundred miles in the world, and it is the key to the lake situation. And I've put the price of my Economy Door Strip up to ten dollars, and they don't dare refuse it. What's more, I'm going to hire a high-priced New York sculptor to make a monument for old Henry Schnitzler, who fell at Wilson's Creek, and put it in the cemetery. But I am giving none of my hard-earned cash to cooks and florists and chorus ladies. So if I want to steal a mill or so every season, and gut a railroad, I'm going to do it, but no one can rise up and say I am squandering my substance on riotous living.”
Barclay shook his head as he spoke and gesticulated with his hands, and the general, seeing that he could not get the younger man to talk of serious things, brought out the plans for the college buildings, and the men fell to the work in hand with a will.
Barclay's spirit was the spirit of his times--growing out of a condition which, as Barclay said in his speech, was like Emersonian optimism set to Wagnerian music. In Sycamore Ridge factories rose in the bottoms near the creek, and shop hands appeared on the streets at night; new people invaded Lincoln Avenue, and the Culpeppers, to maintain their social supremacy, had to hire a coloured man to open the door for an afternoon party, and for an evening reception it took two, one for the door and one to stand at the top of the stairs.
Those were the palmy days of the colonel's life. Money came easily, and went easily. The Culpepper Mortgage Company employed fifty men, who handled money all over the West, and one of the coloured men who opened the door at the annual social affair at the Culpepper home also took care of the horses, and drove the colonel down to his office in the Barclay block every morning, and drove him home in the evening.
”Well,” said Watts McHurdie to Gabriel Carnine as the two walked down the hill into the business section of the town, a few days after the corner-stone of Ward College was laid, ”old Phil has got his college started and Mart's got his church a-going.”
”You mean the East End Mission? Yes, and I don't know which, of 'em is happier over his work,” replied Carnine.
”Well, Mart certainly is proud; he's been too busy to loaf in the shop for six months,” said McHurdie.
Carnine smiled, and stroked his chestnut beard reflectively before he added: ”Probably that's why he hasn't been in to renew his last two notes. But I guess he does a lot of good to the poor people over there along the river. Though I shouldn't wonder if he was encouraging them to be paupers.” Carnine paused a moment and then added, ”Good old Mart--he's got a heart just like a woman's.”
They were pa.s.sing the court-house square, and Bailiff Jacob Dolan, with a fist full of legal papers, caught step with Carnine and McHurdie. ”We were talking about Mart Culpepper and his Mission Church,” said Carnine. ”Don't you suppose, Jake, that Mart, by circulating down there with his basket so much, encourages the people to be s.h.i.+ftless? We were just wondering.”
”Oh, you were, were you?” snapped Dolan. ”There you go, Gabe Carnine; since you've moved to town and got to be president of a bank, you're mighty d.a.m.n scared about making paupers. When Christ told the young man to sell his goods and give them to the poor, He didn't tell him to be careful about making them paupers. And Mr. Gabriel Carnine, Esquire, having the aroma of one large morning's drink on my breath emboldens me to say, that if you rich men will do your part in giving, the Lord will manage to keep His side of the traces from sc.r.a.ping on the wheel. And if I had one more good nip, I'd say, which Heaven forbid, that you fellows are asking more of the Lord by expecting Him to save your shrivelled selfish little souls from h.e.l.l-fire because of your squeeze-penny charities, than you would be asking by expecting Him to keep the poor from becoming paupers by the dribs you give them.
And if Mart Culpepper can give his time and his money every day helping them poor devils down by the track, n.i.g.g.e.rs and whites, good and bad, male and female, I guess the Lord will put in lick for lick with Mart and see that his helping doesn't hurt them.” Dolan shook his head at the banker, and then smiled at him good-naturedly as he finished, ”Put that in your knapsack, you son of a gun, and chew on it till I see you again.” Whereupon he turned a corner and went his way.
Carnine laughed rather unnaturally and said to McHurdie, ”That's why he's never got on like the other boys. Whiskey's a bad partner.”
McHurdie agreed, and went chuckling to his work, when Carnine turned into the bank. Later in the forenoon Bailiff Dolan came in grinning, and took a seat by the stove in McHurdie's shop and said as he reached into the waste-basket for a sc.r.a.p of harness leather, and began whittling it, ”What did Gabe say when I left you this morning?” and without waiting for a reply, went on, ”I've thought for some time Gabe needed a little something for what ails him, and I gave it to him, out of the goodness of my heart.”
McHurdie looked at Dolan over his gla.s.ses and replied, ”Speech is silver, but silence is golden.”
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