Part 23 (2/2)
When the business of the moment between the two men is done, Barclay, rampant with power, says: ”Myton” (it is always ”Myton,” never ”Senator,” with Barclay; he finds it just as well to let his inferiors know their relation to the universe), ”Myton, I ran across a queer thing last week when I took over that little jerkwater New England coast line. The Yankees are a methodical lot of old maids. I find they had been made agents of a lot of the big fellows--insurance people, packing-houses, and transcontinental railroads--two of my lines were paying them, though I'd forgotten about it until I looked it up--and the good old sewing society had card-indexed the politics of the United States--the whole blessed country, by state and congressional districts. I took over the chap who runs it, and I've got the whole kit in the offices here now. It's great. If a man bobs up for something in Florida or Nebraska, we just run him down on the card index, and there he stands--everything he ever did, every interview he ever gave, every lawsuit he ever had, every stand he ever took in politics--right there in the index, in an envelope ready for use, and all the mean things ever written about him. I simply can't make a mistake now in getting the wrong kind of fellows in. Commend me to a Yankee or a j.a.p for pains. I can tell you in five minutes just what influences are behind every governor, congressman, senator, judge, most of the legislators in every state, the federal courts clear up to the Supreme Court. There was a man appointed on that court less than a dozen years ago who swapped railroad receivers.h.i.+ps like a tin peddler with his senator for his job, when he was on the circuit bench. And he was considerable of a judge in the bean country for a time. Just to verify my index, I asked Bemis about this judge. 'Lige,' I said, 'was Judge So-and-So a pretty honest judge?' 'Oh, h.e.l.l,' says Lige, and that was all I could get out of him. So I guess they had him indexed right.” And Barclay rattles on; he has become vociferous and loquacious, and seems to like to hear the roar of his voice in his head. The habit has been growing on him.
But do not laugh at the blindness of John Barclay, sitting there in his power, admiring himself, boasting in the strength of his card-index to Senator Myton. For the tide of his power was running in, and soon it would be high tide with John Barclay--high tide of his power, high tide of his fame, high tide of his pride. So let us watch the complacent smile crack his features as he sits listening to Senator Myton: ”Mr. Barclay, do you know, I sometimes think that Providence manifests itself in minds like yours, even as in the days of old it was manifest in the hearts of the prophets. In those days it was piety that fitted the heart for higher things; to-day it is business. You and a score of men like you in America are intrusted with the destiny of this republic, as surely as the fate of the children of Israel was in the hands of Moses and Aaron!”
Barclay closed his eyes a moment, in contemplation of the figure, and then broke out in a roaring laugh, ”Hanno is a G.o.d! Hanno is a G.o.d!--get out of here, Henry Myton,--get out of here, I say--this is my busy day,” and he laughed the young senator out of the room. But he sat alone in his office grinning, as over and over in his mind his own words rang, ”Hanno is a G.o.d!” And the foolish parrot of his other self cackled the phrase in his soul for days and days!
It is our high privilege thus to stand close by and watch the wheels of the world go around. In those days of the late nineties Barclay travelled up and down the earth so much in his private car that Jane used to tell Molly Brownwell that living with John was like being a travelling man's wife. But Jane did not seem to appreciate her privilege. She managed to stay at home as much as possible, and sometimes he took the Masons along for company. Mrs. Mason gloried in it, and lived at the great hotels and shopped at the highest-priced antique stores to her heart's delight. Lycurgus' joy was in being interviewed, and the Barclay secretaries got so that they could edit the Mason interviews and keep out the poison, and let the old man swell and swell until the people at home thought he must surely burst with importance at the next town.
One day in the nineties Barclay appropriated a half-million dollars to advertise ”Barclay's Best” and a cracker that he was pus.h.i.+ng. When the man who placed the business in the newspaper had gone, Barclay sat looking out of the window and said to his advertising manager: ”I've got an idea. Why should I pay a million dollars to irresponsible newspapers? I won't do it.”
”But we must advertise, Mr. Barclay--you've proved it pays.”
”Yes,” he returned, ”you bet it pays, and I might just as well get something out of it besides advertising. Take this; make five copies of it; I'll give you the addresses later.” Barclay squared himself to a stenographer to dictate:--
”Dear Sir: I spend a million dollars a year advertising grain products; you and the packers doubtless spend that much advertising your products and by-products; the railroads spend as much more, and the Oil people probably half as much more. Add the steel products and the lumber products, and we have ten million dollars going into the press of this country. In a crisis we cannot tell how these newspapers will treat us. I think we should organize so that we will know exactly where we stand. Therefore it is necessary absolutely to control the trade advertising of this country. A company to take over the five leading advertising agencies could be formed, for half as much as we spend every year, and we could control nine-tenths of the American trade advertising. We could then put an end to any indiscriminate mobbing of corporations by editors. I will be pleased to hear from you further upon this subject.”
A day or two later, when the idea had grown and ramified itself in his mind, he talked it all out to Jane and exclaimed, ”How will old Phil Ward's G.o.d manage to work it out, as he says, against that proposition? Brains,” continued Barclay, ”brains--that's what counts in this world. You can't expect the men who dominate this country--who make its wealth, and are responsible for its prosperity, to be at the mercy of a lot of long-nosed reformers who don't know how to cash their own checks.”
How little this rich man knew of the world about him! How circ.u.mscribed was his vision! With all his goings up and down the earth, with all of his great transactions, with all of his apparent power, how little and sordid was his outlook on life. For he thought he was somebody in this universe, some one of importance, and in his scheme of things he figured out a kind of partners.h.i.+p between himself and Providence--a partners.h.i.+p to run the world in the interests of John Barclay, and of course, wherever possible, with reasonable dividends to Providence.
But a miracle was coming into the world. In the under-consciousnesses of men, sown G.o.d only knows how and when and where, sown in the weakness of a thousand blind prophets, the seeds of righteous wrath at greed like John Barclay's were growing during all the years of his triumph. Men scarcely knew it themselves. Growth is so simple and natural a process that its work is done before its presence is known.
And so this arrogant man, this miserable, little, limping, bra.s.s-eyed, leather-skinned man, looked out at the world around him, and did not see the change that was quickening the hearts of his neighbours.
And yet change was in everything about him. A thousand years are as but a watch in the night, and tick, tock, tick, tock, went the great clock, and the dresses of little Jeanette Barclay slipped down, down, down to her shoe-tops, and as the skirts slipped down she went up. And before her father knew it her shoe-tops sank out of sight, and she was a miss at the last of her teens. But he still gave her his finger when they walked out together, though she was head and shoulders above him.
One day when she led him to the _Banner_ office to buy some fancy programmes for a party she was giving, he saw her watching young Neal Ward,--youngest son of the general,--who was sitting at a reporter's desk in the office, and the father's quick eyes saw that she regarded the youth as a young man. For she talked so obviously for the Ward boy's benefit that her father, when they went out of the printing-office, took a furtive look at his daughter and sighed and knew what her mother had known for a year.
”Jeanette,” he said that night at dinner, ”where's my shot-gun?” When she told him, he said: ”After dinner you get it, load it with salt, and put it in the corner by the front door.” Then he added to the a.s.sembled family: ”For boys--dirty-faced, good-for-nothing, long-legged boys! I'm going to have a law pa.s.sed making an open season for boys in this place from January first until Christmas.”
Jeanette dimpled and blushed, the family smiled, and her mother said: ”Well, John, there'll be a flock of them at Jeanette's party next week for you to practise on. All the boys and girls in town are coming.”
And after dessert was served the father sat chuckling and grinning and grunting, ”Boys--boys,” and at intervals, ”Measly little milk-eyed kids,” and again ”Boys--boys,” while the family nibbled at its cheese.
Those years when the nineteenth century was nearing its close and when the tide of his fortunes was running in, bringing him power and making him mad with it, were years of change in Sycamore Ridge--in the old as well as in the young. In those years the lilacs bloomed on in the Culpepper yard; and John Barclay did not know it, though forty years before Ellen Culpepper had guarded the first blossoms from those bushes for him. Miss Lucy, his first ideal, went to rest in those years while the booming tide was running in, and he scarcely knew it.
Mrs. Culpepper was laid beside Ellen out on the Hill; and he hardly realized it, though no one in all the town had watched him growing into worldly success with so kindly an eye as she. But the tide was roaring in, and John Barclay's whole consciousness was turned toward it; the real things of life about him, he did not see and could not feel. And so as the century is old the booming tide is full, and John Barclay in his power--a bubble in the Divine consciousness, a mere vision in the real world--stands stark mad before his phantasm, dreaming that it is all real, and chattering to his soul, ”Hanno is a G.o.d.”
And now we must leave John Barclay for the moment, to explain why Neal Dow Ward, son of General Philemon Ward, made his first formal call at the Barclays'. It cannot be gainsaid that young Mr. Ward, aged twenty-one, a senior at Ward University, felt a tingle in his blood that day when he met Miss Jeanette Barclay, aged eighteen, and home for the spring vacation from the state university; and seeing her for the first time with her eyes and her hair and her pretty, strong, wide forehead poking through the coc.o.o.n of gawky girlhood, created a distinct impression on young Mr. Ward.
But in all good faith it should be stated that he did not make his first formal call at the Barclays' of his own accord; for his sister, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward, took him. She came home from the Culpeppers' just before supper, laughing until she was red in the face. And what she heard at the Culpeppers', let her tell in her own way to the man of her heart. For Lizzie was her father's child; the four other Ward girls, Mary Livermore, Frances Willard, Belva Lockwood, and Helen Gougar, had climbed to the College Heights and had gone to Ward University, and from that seat of learning had gone forth in the world to teach school. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward had remained in the home, after her mother's death filling her mother's vacant place as well as a daughter may.
”Well, father,” said the daughter, as she was putting the evening meal on the table, addressing the general, who sat reading by the window in the dining room, ”you should have been at the Culpeppers' when the colonel came home and told us his troubles. It seems that Nellie McHurdie is going to make Watts run for sheriff--for sheriff, father.
Imagine Watts heading a posse, or locking any one up! And Watts has pa.s.sed the word to the colonel, and he has pa.s.sed it to Molly and me, and I am to see Mrs. Barclay, and she is to see Mrs. Carnine to-morrow morning, and they are all to set to work on Nellie and get her to see that it won't do. Poor Watts--the colonel says he is terribly wrought up at the prospect.”
The general folded his paper and smiled as he said: ”Well, I don't know; Watts was a brave soldier. He would make a good enough sheriff; but I suppose he doesn't really care for it.”
”Why, no, of course not, father--why should he?” asked the daughter.
”Anyhow, I want you to make Neal go down to Barclays' with me to-night to talk it over with Jane. Neal,” she called to the young man who was sitting on the porch with his book on his knee, ”Neal, I want you to go to Barclays' with me to-night. Come in now, supper's ready.”
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