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.