RICHES OR RAGS
Captain Carew and John Brown--big John Brown in Betty's parlance--sat at
dinner together.
Although not an elegant dinner table it was very far removed from being
a poor one. The linen, silver and glass were all of the best, the very
best; the man-servant was decorous and swift of eye, foot and hand, and
the menu was beyond any that had entered into John Brown's knowledge,
before he came to Dene Hall. Yet he was out of love with it all.
Captain Carew had his glass of clear saffron-coloured wine at his right
hand. His silver fork was making easy journeyings from a slice of cold
turkey on his plate, to his mouth, and his eyes were now and again
running over a long type-written letter that lay before him.
He was well pleased, well fed, and interested, and he had no reason to
suppose John Brown was in any other humour than himself.
He had heard that the thoughts of youth were of vast length, and perhaps
he believed it. But he did not think John's had reached quite as far as
wishing to be a cobbler in a country village.
And it must be confessed that few, seeing the appetite the boy brought
to his plate of cold turkey and "snowed" potato, would have suspected
him of longing for a "crust of bread and a drink of cold water."
The truth was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library
and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign
lands and pirates and deep sea treasure--what interested him more than
all, a volume of biographies of self-made men.
He had lingered longingly over their boyhoods; their brief school times
(when such times were lacking altogether he liked both man and story
better); their privations, struggles, self-reliance and success. The
success interested him the least. That came, of course, he decided, to
all who tried hard enough. But the privations! The struggle! The
self-reliance! How his eyes shone and his heart beat at it!
There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. _He_
was never at school in his life--never forced to do ridiculous sums, to
spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that
the only education he ever received he gave himself--that he was fifty
years of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve his
hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such
things. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when he
set up in business for himself he occupied an underground cellar and put
up his sign--"Come to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny."
This caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber's
prices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered his sign to "A clean
shave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, and
from that to machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filled
with patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at last _Success_!
"Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose to
such estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the
county, and shortly afterwards George III conferred upon him the honour
of knighthood." So said the book.
Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; Sir
Cloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a cobbler's son; Stephenson was an
engine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.
Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranks
and gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came to
regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate
success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were
all brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past every
obstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the
_best of that sphere of life into which they were born_.
He had quite decided to be a self-made man. That was simple enough. The
question that troubled him was what sort of a self-made man to be! A
Newton? A Shakespeare? A Stephenson? A Turner? An Arkwright?
The wide choice worried and perplexed him. It was pitiful to his
thinking that he could, try and strive as he might, only be _one_.
He had put himself through several examinations. He had lain under a
pear tree and watched the leaves fall; he felt another man had the
monopoly of apple trees. And he had decided that the leaves fell because
they had become unfastened from the branches, and that they did not fall
straight because the wind blew them sideways. And there was an end of
the leaves.
He had studied kitchen furnishings and their ways, avoiding only the
kettle, since some one else had risen on its steam.
He had tried himself with a pencil and paper, but he had composed
nothing even reminiscent of Shakespeare. In fact, he had composed
nothing at all.
And at last he became convinced it was the circumstances of his life
that were at fault, not he himself. _If_ he had only been a cobbler's
son, a tailor's, a barber's!
But alas! he was well-dressed, well-fed, well-housed; sent to a good
school. He had a pony of his own and a man to groom him; a bicycle; a
watch; every equipment for cricket and football; a dog; pigeons and most
of the possessions dear to the heart of a boy.
He had almost finished his dinner to-day when he put a question to the
Captain sitting there smiling over his letter.
"Grandfather," he asked, "are you rich?"
His grandfather sat straight immediately, which is to speak of his
features as well as his figure.
"Well, what do you think, lad?" he asked.
John shook his head dolefully.
"_I_ think you are," he said, "but _are_ you?"
"That depends on how riches are counted," said the old man cautiously,
"and who does the counting. King Solomon, now, might consider me but an
old pauper."
John went on with his dinner thoughtfully.
"Are you wondering what I am going to do with my money?" asked the old
man, watching him closely.
John looked him straight in the face.
"I expect you're going to leave it to me," he said.
"Ah!" said his grandfather. "And who has been talking to you now? Who
told you that?"
"Oh, Johnson and Roberts and Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. Wilkins says you'll give
it me in a will," said John carelessly.
"Who the dickens is Mrs. Wilkins?"
John opened his eyes widely. Not to know Mrs. Wilkins was indeed to
argue oneself unknown.
"Why the lady at the store next our school," he said. "She sells
pea-nuts and chewing gum and everything."
"And she says I'll leave all my money to you, eh? Hum. Well, how'd you
like it if I do?"
"I don't want it," said John with blunt force. He went on sturdily with
his blanc-mange, arranging his strawberry jam carefully, that he should
have an excess of that for the last spoonful.
Captain Carew stared surprisedly at him.
"Eh? What's that?" he asked.
"When you were as old as me," said John, lifting his carefully trimmed
spoon to his mouth, "were you as rich as now?"
The question stirred the old man immediately. His eyes brightened, he
put down his letter, pushed his glasses up high on his forehead and
struck the table with one hand.
"I should think not," he said excitedly, "I should rather think not. As
rich as now--God bless my life!"
"I thought you weren't," said John calmly.
"I can't remember my father and mother," said Captain Carew, speaking a
little more quietly as his thoughts began to run backwards. "I lived
with my uncle in London; he kept a ham and beef shop, and had thirteen
or fourteen youngsters of his own to bring up. He was going to put me to
the butchering, but I settled all that myself. I ran away."
"You ran away?" asked John breathlessly, and regarding the old man with
more interest than he had ever given him yet.
"Ay! When I was no older than you. Half a crown I had in my pocket, I
remember. It was all the start in life _I_ ever got."
John put down his spoon and stared at his grandfather earnestly,
eagerly, admiringly.
"You're a self-made man!" he said. And old as the Captain was, and young
as was his admirer, he warmed pleasantly at the words.
"Ay!" he said exultingly, "I'm a self-made man right enough. Every bit
of me! I started life as an errand boy in the London slums, and it
seemed for a time as if I was going to die an errand boy in the London
slums. At least, it might have seemed so to most people. _I'd_ made up
my mind how it was to be, how it had got to be."
"What did you do?" asked John eagerly.
"Do--well, I had about a year at errand running and then I got a chance
to go to sea, and I took it. I went first to China. By gad, how well I
remember that trip!"
And forthwith he launched into a sea-story more enthralling by far to
the boy than any in that library so stocked with sea-stories.
At dinner again, at night, the talk was the same. The usually silent
ruminative old man was positively loquacious, and John gave him a rapt
attention.
When nine o'clock struck a dim remembrance come to the boy that he was
still a pupil of Wygate School and had home tasks to prepare for the
morrow.
But he had slipped too far out of his groove to go back again that
night.
He began to wander in and out of the lower floor rooms; out of the front
door, round the verandah, and in by the French windows to the
dining-room.
"I'll chuck school," he said. "Catch any of those self-made men going to
school when they were thirteen. I'll have to struggle and screw and put
myself to a night-school. That's what they did. A self-made man is good
enough for me."